When you become a crewleader, you are afforded a few bonuses that are exclusive to leaders. One of these bonuses goes on the assumption that "You have an entire family of loyal soldiers ready to defend you at any time, but we realize its a game and not everyone can be on 24/7, therefor we will give you the stat increases as if they were".

We found in a recent war, that members can be disgruntled with their leaders, and when push comes to shove, choose not to back their leaders. However, when they are offline, the game inadvertently gives the crewleader the bonus anyway.

This new feature addresses this issue. A member will be able to pick Loyal, Undecided, and Disloyal to represent their feelings towards their crewleader. This feature is 100% anonymous, no one other than the member themselves can see it, no other member, no other upper structure, not even the crewleaders can see the "intentions" of the members. To avoid forcing users to show their cards, the crewleaders will not even have a tally of the numbers (thus forcing users to uncheck, then recheck loyal so they can see their numbers change).

How the math works from a crewleaders eyes is as follows:

There are multiple bonuses received when you are a crewleader, only one of which will be altered by this loyalty feature. If you maintain an 80% or above loyalty, you still get the full bonus. (Everyone crew has some jokers in the crew who just are using it as a temporary place of residence until they get their chance to burn everything to the ground, we understand that and therefor think 80% threshold is a safe number to avoid that scenario)

Being "Undecided" at wiseguy and below does not count towards the math. This will be the default value for everyone entering your crew while they learn the ropes, so we see no reason to penalize a CL for this. Being marked as "Disloyal"

Being marked as Disloyal for wiseguy- gives a fraction of an impact compared to mademan+

Being marked as Loyal for wiseguys- gives a fraction of an impact compared to mademan+

Being undecided as a mademan- gives even lesser of a fraction.

We also take into account the last active time of members, those who are inactive are basically factored out of the math.

This feature will be coded into the game shortly, we hope it gives members the ability to let their intentions be factored into the code of crew bonuses. Likewise, this also steps up the upper structures role in keeping their family happy enough that they don't want to stab you in the back.

"I love this idea, but I wish you'd fix the banking problems before coding more stuff :(
Reply by: PimpHand at Nov 07, '11 00:54"

The loyalty code is being done by a separate coder, and will most likely not be fully completed until the laundry edits are coded in and is in its testing phase. The laundry is my top priority, and will continue to be at my #1 spot on my to-do list before I personally jump to any other code.

"I love it. I'd suggest taking it one step further: Crew leaders should have the same control panel with respect to their Godfather, if there is one. That might also cut down on the recent practice of "Oh, a war, guess I'll snag godfather from a random city!"

We are still working out the finer points of the new godfather promotion and the actual task to do it. The godfather of this should be a little different, and thus, we need to think it over carefully before we put it in. I think we will launch the code for that about the same time as the new godfather test is launched (for taking a city who does not have a current GF).