So, as you guys have noticed, credit prices have become ridiculous. While credit sales are what funds MafiaReturns, I feel we should remove some of the uses of credits in an attempt to lower costs. In my opinion, a good place to start would be the purchasable WB save. As the title suggests, this idea would be a replacement, rather than just a removal. What, might you ask, do I suggest we replace it with?

The streets. Over the last five years or so, the streets have dwindled down to nearly nothing. If you see a post, it's usually a roleplay by the same five people or an auth notice. Why don't we attempt to bolster the streets whilst putting them to use elsewhere? The suggestion, I believe, is quite simple. Give the users a WB save similar to the credit WB save based on their activity in the streets. If you make good posts, post often, you get a good WB save. Maybe 70% chance. If you don't post often or your posts are more often than not lacking in substance, you get a lower save, or none at all. Something like: 0%, 15% 30% 45% 70%, based on your activity.

I feel this will bring more life to our streets with the chance of reducing credit prices and possibly, the need for NPMs. The only con I can think of for this suggestion would be that someone spams the streets for the WB save and we have admins to wack them if they attempt to do so.

Thoughts?

I think it's a good idea. 

The spamming thing can be resolved with making only good posts count. I know they have like a word counter and even word length counter or something similar.

But I disagree that credit prices are too high. I think it's great that RL money has some value in here.

With the credit prices being as high as they are, people that pay RL money have an unfair advantage, in my opinion. In fact, it's to the point that many people have started buying credits with real money because they are so expensive in game.

A rather large problem, what constitutes a "good post"?

Word count? Anyone here who's graduated has learned the skill of writing 5+ pages of utter crap based on some stupid idea. I can write a 500 word account of how I brought my boss coffee this morning. Exciting, no? That'll surely prevent boredom. Auth Notices, Protection orders and the like will also become truly obscene if they'll help you stave off death.

Moderator rates the post? That opens you up to challenges of favoritism and abuse.

User votes? Who's going to vote positively for the post of someone who may become an enemy? If you're lucky you'll get crews and families voting for each others posts just to bump it up. Or worse, having a leader mandate it to protect himself/herself. After all Detroit's last two or three GodFathers all died to WackBack. Why wouldn't they make it a general order if they can stave off death by doing so?

Or, you could just reduce the credit cost of certain items.  The WB save would then be, say, .50 cents.  Resetting train time would be .50 cents.  Jail cost could be dependent on the level of population density in a city.  MIAs would remain the same.  

It'd lead to more people being able to access the features they need with less credits - and, less money out of their pocket.

The street idea is a little sketchy, but I suppose it could work if implemented carefully, though I have my doubts, as I have a pretty firm belief that it'll simply be abused.

Are you fucking kidding me....I just wrote that long ass post and it killed it. :x (This one will be shorter)

To answer the question about abuse, the MR user has been trusted for many things in the past. For instance, a few days ago, tiggy and Izzy trusted the user to tell them truthfully if they spawned and MIA and it was killed by someone else. People could have spawned them and passed the MIA to a family member, then asked for money back on them. Thus, trust would be needed in this regard as well. For the actual formula, it could be based off of the current setup Info has. It could take word count, word length, formatting (paragraph setup, etc), whether they roleplayed (used italics for some paragraphs) or just approached the speech/story straight out, and it could use target phrases/words. For instance, if you write a speech about respect and you use the same old phrases other people have used throughout the history of MR, you get less points. If you don't use them and stray from the beaten path, you are rewarded for attempting to approach the topic differently than those before you. This suggestion would take some trial and error and the admins would likely need to adjust it over a legnth of time.