Thanks to Deadly Sins effectively ending the last suggestion thread on the issue I don't know if my response and revisions got out to everyone and so feel it requisite to post it here in a new thread. 

Okay so I didn't even think about the implications of non "business" mail being intercepted so we can forget that idea... along with the bribe the post man thing. New Plan. Something like INFORMANTS could be implemented. You could hire informants to keep tabs on certain people... they could keep you up to speed on someones location, report if they are shooting, BG counts, number of gun trains, amount of cash on hand/in the bank, etc etc. You could also have an option to take out someones snitches that are following you, find out whose snitch it is etc etc. This kind of information on a rival could be amazing. I don't know if I should go as far as to say you could plan "Bank Robberies" and steel money from actual players banks instead of just pp ing.. it could make it interesting though..

i like the idea, especially with the bank robberies, but something like this would have to have quite the hefty price

Bank robbing has been discussed previously on more than one occasion;

I am always down for adding any interactive features into the game - however - we have to think what the long term consequences will be. If we put in bank robbing, people will be caught and end up dead. The end result is that the feature wont really be used. The one thing I could *sort* of see working is something like this:



You buy a long term investment (week?)

It generates interest on a daily basis that goes into an interest bank account.

That interest account is what is robbed - so no one really *loses* any of their real original money, all they can lose is a percentage of their interest.

Make the feature 99% anonymous so that it doesnt turn into a "instant death if caught - lets ban the feature" type feature.

The other 1% where its not anonymous - the bank covers the loss to the depositor - hopefully this will result in no death or penalties since everyone got their money - but it can generate a little interplayer friction.

Reply by: Squishy at Sep 17, '10 16:27

(See threads http://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/111650 and http://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/83820)



I will address each point of the informant idea separately.

they could keep you up to speed on someones location

Would this not completely negate the use of Stealth/Vision? Let's face it, if you needed people to keep tabs on others, you can just ask a group of specific people in a city to do that job, you do not need an automated NPC to do this for you, it just seems lazy.

report if they are shooting

Isn't this what witness statement collectors are for? To know who is actively training their guns and who has potentially the biggest gun? Again, it's something that's already done on a daily basis by actual people.

BG counts

The BG counts already are given a rough number in their profiles. If the admins thought it was a good idea for people to know exact bodyguard counts, wouldn't they just put the exact numbers in peoples profiles?

number of gun trains

I'm not even sure of the point of this one. Other than giving away waaaayyyyy too much information about a person to whoever hired the Informant with little to no effort.

amount of cash on hand/in the bank

Again, this is something that's already done in people's profiles with tiered descriptions - if admins wanted us to know exact money, wouldn't they have just put that in there?


I can understand you wanting to see something like this in game, but honestly it just sounds like it would make this would game a clickfest with no interaction with actual people required to get any information. That's not really the way this game works :)

Keep coming up with ideas though, and if you want to check if yours has been suggested already just scan through the titles of the threads as they usually give you enough information to know what the suggestion is about.

Well broke down there DeadlySin. Baron, like DS said keep thinking of ideas, don't let it discourage you if some don't seem feasible to others.