This is a good idea - from a users perspective, but let me explain why I will have to respectfully decline from a coder perspective.

Achievements are supposed to be work. Many of them are geared so that you do not complete them in the natural course of game play - you have to go out of your way to do it. Like in all honesty, who finishes all the low level drug achievements by playing normally? No one... You'll finish the barbs/coke/heroin one though without even trying... For the small drugs, we give extra XP to people who go out of their way to complete the task.

Highlighting the family members in jail kind of makes that task a little too easy. You would no longer really be "doing extra work to get the extra reward".


There was a movie trailer for The Breakup that came out a while ago, and in its trailer it had a memorable seen that struck me as funny. Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn were arguing over dishes. She says, "I want you to WANT to do the dishes," and he says, "why would I want to do the dishes?"

Its kind of funny, but I'll let you in on an admin secret. This entire game is a social experiment dealing with how people interact. You make a little change, and see how the users react to it. When things sway an incorrect direction, you make another little change and hope users correct their course. Its trying to create a whole society with as little input from admins as possible, while still every so often giving it a little nudge into the right direction.

The ultimate goal is to get family members to work together more, and help each other out. But at the same time, I don't want to force it, or automate it.

I want a user to WANT to bust out a family member. I want a user to be conditioned to load up a jail, see there is someone in it, and glance at the name and recognize their own family. Somehow deep in my mind, I think rewarding someone to search out family to help will lead to a little more family interaction.

By painting the family in a different color, I think that will just result in a people skipping the recognition step, and just mentally automating the "if its blue, click it" process.