Scousepole, I apologise if what you’re referring to by “comments made about where I live in a detrimental fashion” was me calling you a scouser. This was a joke at the stereotypical ‘scouser’. I thought this would be taken as a joke by yourself due to your name literally being ‘Scousepole’ but if this is not the case I apologise for any offence caused by this.

When im apart fo the joke, you can call me what you like. I have thick skin, after all i am a "socuser" but when its bandwagon jumping and it really going out of hand; there is litterally hours of logs on main of it. It becomes something different alltogether. 

"he cant spell" ive got dyslexia. 

#main is the biggest form of toxicity in the whole game. Everyone is given free reign. Its not an environment that is condusive to keeping new players around 

Before I wade into this debate, let me clarify, I am trying to do this from an objective standpoint, with no malice nor self gain intended. I am looking at helping provide an answer to how we can improve the game for all and offer some clarification in what transpired.

That being said, I think all of this has gotten a bit out of hand. From all sides.

This fundamentally is a game that is meant to be enjoyed by all.

Looking at this pragmatically, the issues of the past few days have arisen from an escalation of events that may have led to some misinterpretation of the communications, for which I will hold my hands up and openly admit I was part of & it was probably my poor phrasing of a question that has added to the confusion.

Therefore, I would like to clarify the intent with which it was asked. You can read that here:

https://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/1571994/tpass/55ce746535018a0127627dda9dd9ab90

So onto solving the issue, for me, I think we start by addressing the original issue, before this escalated.

If we consider that this is meant to be a mafia based MMORPG game, then there has to be some accounting for people acting like the perceived 1930's mafia would do. So, if someone is seen as a threat, inside or outside of the organisation, then they could be killed without question. 

Currently, no matter if this is the case, the term “Purge” has been banded around,

So much so, that it no longer applies to what real “purging” would be. 

Therefore, I would define “Purging” as the systemic reduction of your own & your fellow crew leaders ranks, whether by your own hand or by instruction, with the intent of removal of power to ensure you retain leadership.

Although not a breach of the rules or game mechanics, We all agree that this is not in the spirit of the game or in the interest of the community as a whole.

The problem with this, is what if you have a user who is a threat, or threatening your allies.

You can no-longer deal with this, without accusations, likewise, how can you police this?

It’s very similar to the old argument of the removal of people because of their bloodline. But should you kill someone who has repeatedly shot at you and then they return to the streets spouting their hatred for you and their intent to try and kill you, then you should be allowed to protect yourself. 

So how do we solve the problem & allow for positive growth? For me, I think we have to look at what is enabling the same users to rank to power and repeat the process that is being accused.

Is it because the same users can get a significant amount of credits amassed over a short period of time and start as IWP?

Now this would mean looking at the impact credits have on the game and their value/utilisation. The impact BG’s have and a question of how Dice plays a roll in this.

Although such consideration should be undertaken, it also is significantly impractical, and we don’t want to impact the game financially.

Therefore, perhaps we shift our view to “what enables such activity to continue?” Put simply, Shot Reports. These are the continued tool utilised to excuse killings. Although there is significant value in this information, perhaps it should be banned.

Removing the root cause obviates the problem.

I think in its nature, a game about the mafia will always have regimes, so we will never get this 100% right, but what I have witnessed over the past 24 hours is just complete toxicity, which is a shame, as in its essence this is a game and we should all be here to have some fun. 

Before we start looking for solutions, we should really look to see what "good" looks like. By focusing on the desired (and quite specific) outcome, we can then look at game mechanisms to solution.

For example, do we want a more egalitarian system - where how many kills you have doesn't equate to power.

Do we want to reward the time spent active on the game?

Do we want a transparent disciplinary process?

Do we want to increase cash flow - and reward those who spend

We can then look at mechanisms like increasing the perks associated with the loyalty feature. We can look at holding disciplinary matters off IRC and in the streets. We can look at decreasing wack perks after 500 hits etc etc.

What do people want the game to be? We may all have different visions in place, so maybe cementing that vision statement, and then reviewing at semi regular intervals would help?

In my opinion the game only works if everyone new or old has the sense they can make it to the top if they play smart enough. Whatever people may say, you only need to talk to a big portion of the current user base to understand this isn't the case right now. 

A mixture of game rules, OOC friendships, and game history has created an 'untouchable' group in the game which sucks the fun out of it for a lot of people. 

1. I personally think the auth to whack feature being turned off is for the best, as it's been said recently a person with a gun is a person with a gun. There shouldn't be an invisible barrier to someone shooting wether its wise or not. 

2. The credit marketplace has created an untouchable elite. Being able to start a new character with millions of dollars and essentially buy your way to the top with bgs and influence has slowly broken the game. I understand it's probably too essential to the current finance of the game but just because something has always been doesn't mean it shouldn't be at least considered and alternatives put in place. 

3. I don't need to elaborate on this point because it's been done to death (no pun intended) but purging deters players and is decreasing the user base

4. BGs should mean less, I don't remember seeing or hearing about a single mobster who ran around with 180 bodyguards. Defence should be based on the strength and loyalty of your crew members which would be more realistic. 

Just to expand a litte on my first point and in response to a those raising the point about what to do when faced with a rising potential threat. 

I would say that's par for the course with a mafia themed game and from the real life world this is based on. Yound up and comers were constantly looking for their shot and their chance to make the big time. The main difference is the heads of the day wouldnt then all band together to eliminate one crew who was becoming a threat to another, no it would be left to the one who is threatened to deal with it. Survival of the fittest so to speak.

Having a conjoined uppers across the whole game completely nullifies the idea of any player outside of that elite being able to rise to challenge it. This is the biggest issue to newcomers, why stick around somewhere beyond the point when you realise you're never going to make it past a certain rank and certainly not for any extended period of time. Jesus you cant even set up a crew without being given the nod to do so by someone, which is not how it worked IRL, crews would form constantly and war with each other to establish themselves before then working out their place in the family heirarchy, it was not until far later that more organisation was brought into this thing of ours. 

We 100% need to go to independant cities (families) with one GF out for themselves and not part of a bigger upper structure, it defeats the very point of the game.

firstly, return the associates money to the sponsors, and not the Crew Leader directly, this makes zero sense, when has an associate ever walked up to a Don and said, here's you cut boss? I reward my sponsors based on their associates income, but I am certainly in the minority, I have never been in another crew that does this, therefore there is no reward to being a sponsor.

Secondly, apart from for the first couple of days or say the first 3 invites, the CL and Hands can't invite anyone, it has to be done through a sponsor. This makes Sponsors intrinsic to running a crew as you can no longer just load your crew with your mates. It also makes them really valuable during wars when it comes to hoovering up survivors.

Thirdly, if you kill or HQ the sponsor, you lose the associates. These are guys who work for the Sponsor, not the boss, so why would they hang around people that they don't have a connection with? If you want them back, get another Sponsor to recruit them.

Fourthly cut the shit out of BGs. Base defence based on Loyalty modified by distance from your HQ. I disagree that you can't take down a powerful enemy with pea shooters, the current regime came to power exactly that way, waiting until their enemy was offline and waved his BGs until he could be hit. Problem is this takes huge numbers to achieve, we're talking 20-30 minimum plus back ups for pros.

Fifthly, do away with Auth, but don't. Any one can fire at anyone, but you get more heat and its harder if you don't have it. You can still get Auth, but it isn't necessary. 

Sixthly, allow people to ask who a new associate is, but make it illegal to demand proof (screen shots etc). This allows those who want to fly under the radar to do so, but will also give CLs back a bit of a sense of security and control.

Seventh point. Make Stealth and Intel more city centric. The more you do and post in a particular city the less it affects you, but if you aren't active in a city outside your own then its big penalties. Also, make the bonuses for posting in a current thread greater than for those in a dead thread. This will encourage more of a community spirit with people having to interact with actual living breathing players. Remove the bonuses for vision for posting in the streets, leaving it just as credits. Remove the credits from the BD posts. This way if you want both, you have to do both. If you just want credits you can limit yourself to the streets. Make the Streets purely for in game announcements and discussions, moving all roleplay to the BD.

Whilst not complete, I think these changes would go a long way to rebuilding the 'community' and making it harder for people to game the system. Also, you need to redress the balance with regards to credits. This is now a play to win game, with those with unlimited wealth more or less guaranteed to constantly rise to the top, and there is no way to stop that, killing someone does not take credits away. This is entirely your fault Squishy. I'm not saying don't hand out credits for free, but the issue as has already been stated is I can invest in the game, get thousands of credits, and gamble them to thousands more. You should not be able to gamble credits, they are an in-game monetised currency and regardless of the laws in Philadelphia, I think you will find that making them able to be gambled with is illegal in quite a few states and countries where your game is available. Look at the recent lawsuits involving EA and Rare for examples of this.

There is nothing you can do in this game to stop outside friendships from dominating the game, its this social aspect that made the game so addictive, the friendships that you can make that last 15 years plus. Unless you literally make each city an island, there is no way that you can stop this from happening, and I can think of no game mechanic that you can create that would stop it.

There are a few things that I believe would make an improvement to the game and its mechanics from a practical level.  I'd like to see a more intuitive job board such as the one I suggested a while back.  As someone who recently brought a new player into the game -- explaining what the game actually is and the point of it is surprisingly difficult and it isn't very intuitive. For a fresh player, I think it is imperative that the game be designed to nudge both the new player and their prospective employer into communication.  

Perhaps, too, we should consider changing the traditional 48 hour grace period that the game gives and instead replace it with a week (perhaps gun training restrictions could be put on during this period, and a toggle could perhaps be inserted for returning players who want to quickly get back on the horse), to both allow the user to get a feel for the game while also shopping for the right employer.

A few other things that I think would allow for a more positive environment --

Bring back witness statements in a limited capacity.  

A big issue that continues to come up is that concrete information collection is incredibly diffficult if not impossible to do currently, and witness statement collection is something that I think strikes at the heart of it.  I would like to see the resumption of some form of information collection in this space - my initial suggestion would be to turn WS's back on for just Tyler/public NPC's (minus Rogue) - logic being, they're public/free kills for the site, so there shouldn't be an expectation that these are private.  MIAs and ranges (which I believe should be reduced from 8 hours to 6 or 4, with an increase in cost) would continue to be private for those who would like to continue to train their guns in anonymity.

Putting this tool back in the mix would allow the powers that be to resume engaging in actual deduction as to who is training their gun instead of pure speculation, and would likely have the effect of reducing the frequently common arbitrary killings based on age that we've now been saddled with for the past couple of years.  

Significantly boost the effect of loyalty, raise the BG cap, expand distance ranges, or nerf wack

I sympathize with people who aren't very keen on spending a few hundred dollars on an account to see it wiped away by someone who is now playing in an environment where they can feasibly be killed by a 50 or 60 day account.  The difference between now and 3, 5, or 10 years ago is utterly insane, and long lived regimes that don't purge are the exception rather than the rule now.  The level of gun building available to us has made lifespans much, much shorter on average - so this needs to be looked at very closely.    A few solutions that I can think of that may go to addressing the problem are mentioned in this line - with loyalty being one of the most obvious that I can think of that specifically relates to the upper structure.  In my opinion, good crews occupied by happy and loyal members should be really much harder to kill than shitty crews with unhappy members.  In warring, I've honestly never seen an incident where loyalty is taken into consideration when planning a shot.  Changing this dynamic would throw more mystery into war planning, which is something that absolutely needs to go back into the game.

Expanding the distance effect to avoid foreign influence and considering limited raises to the BG cap, or the speed of gun training, are all things that we can also taper around the edges to lessen the constant turnover that the game sees.  But diving into these would require much more input.

The last thing I'd mention is that regardless of what we decide on, these features should be meeting the fundamental question that this discussion asks - how can we be less paranoid?  The game needs to be structured in a way that reduces rather than encourages paranoia to unhealthy levels.

After a certain point when you've reached the pinnacle of your power, the game becomes reductive and from a mechanical standpoint rewards zero sum strategies to maintain power.  You stop looking forward and begin looking back, sawing off the ladder that others hope to climb.  Some of this is just part of the game and normal churn - wars happen, people die, the cycle goes on. But at a certain point, the dynamic becomes quite ugly.  From a gameplay mechanic perspective, crewleaders and Godfathers who are at the top need to be able to continue to do something else other than BGing up their members - something that allows them to look forward instead of continuing an endless game of King of the Hill.  At its best, you're labeled stagnant because you've managed the feat of actually working with people to ensure security and keeping wars to a bare minimum.  At its worst, you're killing anything and anyone that could be remotely considered a threat.  It sucks, and it isn't fun.  When Godfather runs end and a significantly healthy portion of the sentiments are "well thank fuck it's over now", that seems to tell me that a few things should change for a person's (mechanical) endgame.

Some of the short term concepts I've thought about include improvements to your city that work in the same way as collective crew petties replenish armory guns - perhaps crewleaders can choose and set goals and steer crew work that allow them and their crew members certain improvements in their stat abilities, money making abilities, a new DFP in the district, or so on. 

 ,,,turn WS's back on for just Tyler/public NPC's (minus Rogue) - logic being, they're public/free kills for the site, so there shouldn't be an expectation that these are private.

Doesn't Tyler and his both hands already drop witness statements?
By public NPC do you mean the RIAs and other game generated targets such as Tyler's entire crew? If so, weren't those very witness statements used by certain group to calculate who is building a gun and casued those people to be killed off?

Da415un witness statements also existed for MIAs at the same time.  This simple change would make it specific to Tyler's crew should someone want to take advantage of a spawn to allow some resumption of the previous iteration of "normal" - I'm not really referring to the alleged use of some half baked algorithm that spat out inaccurate information, just a resumption of some normal information collection to replace what is now pure speculation/conjecture based on nothing but age and perceived activity.

The CL's should only be as strong as the crew they lead.

I like the idea that the stronger your crew, the stronger the leader.  When a leader is authorized, he gives up all of his bg's and his protection comes from the players in the crew.  The stronger the players defenses, the stronger the leader's defences become.  This would force the CL's to push money back down into the crews and take a more active involvement in developing relationships and helping their subordinates to gain in strength.  This goes hand in hand with the new loyalty rankings.  If you don't earn the respect of your crew, they won't give you all of their protection and you're an easy target.  And in instances, if the crew wants to over throw the leadership, they simply need to turn off their loyalty in revolt and then the leader could easily be killed.

This also fixes the rogue problem.  A rogue can leave the crew, but would lose all of his/her bg's if he sets up a new HQ.  And his/her protection would be limited as he would only have his bg's if he didn't set up a HQ.  Would make it alot easier to gun down a rogue.

This would also make you rethink putting new players into the hands position at a young level as it could be weighted such that the hands provide a significant amount of protection that would not be available for a new character.

How would that information collection help the game? Making the purges more surgical?

You build, we don't know whether you build or not but you are old enough and we assume that you build = you die

Bring back WS:
You build, you dropped a WS so no we know you are building, you are old enough to cause a damage = you die
 

 so now* we know

There will always be people removed for being a possible threat. There will always be rogues.  I would prefer that there be some information that people can base their decisions on, based in reality, over carte blanche executions based simply on speculation, perceived activity and age alone. 

Exactly "There will always be rogues."

So let's bring back the WS system so that we preemptively can kill anyone we don't know anything about but is building, because that individual could be a potential rogue.

What did those people in charge base their decisions on when all those who were killed off during the WS system? 
It just convinced them that the deaths of those they killed were justified. How many innocent and loyal members were killed off back then simply for building? 

The WS system was a measurement to scare people into avoiding a feature of the game, because it would get them killed. 
 

Izzy has said it himself, he has a backlog of stuff from like 2008. I don't know how anyone expects him to implement any major changes that would be beneficial to the game.

I think part of this issue is that the power distribution of the last 3 (ish) generations of leaders, perhaps regimes, have been the result of admin intervention. This admin intervention in my opinion has been beneficial to the point of holding people accountable to the rules, but have resulted in an even larger consolidation of power for those who carry on. 

One point to alleviate current and potentially future situations would be to implement some way to create a more even power distribution in this world. This must not revolve solely around age and the corresponding gun one can make in said time.  

1 ) One idea for this is to implement "territories"- there are a number of territories in each city up for grabs. Leaders of each crew vie for them, and ownership of these territories provides cost and benefits. 

Benefits: increased membership capacity, passive income, etc.

Costs: management and administrative costs of territory ownership scale heavily with the amount one can own. Therefore, it reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns when it does not make sense for a crew to expand territories solely for the point of income. (Where total passive income is less than total passive cost). 

This means a working relationship must be established within cities to manage ownership, money, income, etc. Lower ranking players can be hired to patrol the territory and get people to kick up protection money (heck, keep the petty system for now if it's easier--> only for lower ranks and scale higher with age/activity!). Crew leaders and city leaders still make more money than the rest (yay capitalism), but are reliant on the work of their subordinates. 

2) Another idea, a bit more extreme: remove locals listings for crew leaders. Crew leaders are no longer able to view locals and have a vastly decreased % to be seen in them. Their bodyguards are now listed as unknown, as per the Durden Uppers. This forces leaders to rely more on their hands, shooters, spotters, etc. Similarly, a larger need develops for those of spotter expertise (vision stats, ... roleplayers?) making a larger incentive for leaders to encourage RP and street engagement. Perhaps even add some sort of method for bodyguard-checking people, or just emphasize pick-pocketing for strategic reasons. 

The locals listing on crew leader pages are now replaced by the territory page.

Benefits: increased cooperation required on a team scale (for crews/rogues)

Costs: CL PPing drops--> would have to tweak hustle

Different... not yet good or bad: More serious PPing (scary!), CL use of wack is changed--> keeps wackstat from before but locals dropping may discourage some from building/use in war

3) This is me just working off the top of my head right now, but what if we changed wack timers to 2 hours? We scale down BGs, wackstat required per BG but keep rank wackstat required scaling about the same. 

Benefits: money required for BGs goes... elsewhere, people with less intensive time to spend can keep up more with others, but there is still discipline required

Costs: Wouldn't work with the current set-up and would require a looooot of tweaks, outwardly appears to value people who have older accounts (not sure if good or bad)

Commentary: I've seen a recurring theme of complaint toward individuals who perennially hold leadership positions. Maybe this shift in intensive time required helps to open up others interested in playing the game at a higher level. Other features hold similar, units, xp, etc. But I think it might seem the gun can be gate-keeping for access to newer players. 

Conclusions (ish, thanks for your time): I've tried to focus on making the game have more involvement on all ends. Accessibility for newer players, people with less time on their hands, and more agency for those on the lower rungs of society. Structures of power dictate how the rules of the game develop (best practices, not necessarily town hall). A devolution of power is necessary to bring back less Gestapo regimes and more German feudal regimes. Thank you for coming to my Tedxtalk.