Because of some issues, the original timeline was pushed back a week. Anyone who already has a pre-select, or can win one from a BAM from a sale prior to Saturday November 8th at 16:00 can preselect at https://mafiareturns.com/manage/property_picker.php at any time during the next week.

This allows you to pick properties in advance so you do not have to be around to pick it when your time slot is open.

I have a little more testing to do on the back end, but once that is completed, it will look through to see if the next person in line has preselected, if they have, it will check to see if that property has been chosen by anyone with a lower number, if not, it will mark it as offer accepted, and you will notified that you were awarded the property.

If you do not want to pick in advance, an updated timeline will be posted sometime soon when your time slot is, so that you can select at that time.  (And like preselecting, it will process it the next minute and let you know the results).

I chose to prioritize getting it up in a faster manner, so there are still some known visual oddness and performance issues on slower devices.  This will slowly improve over the week and I hope to have them all worked out before we close all the left over properties, and re-drip them in to the general public in random randomly.

A quick summary of property selection:

Population/Traffic = important.

The game has pre-existing population from the NPCs, which is reflected on the map. The higher the NPC population, the more 'business/traffic' an area does, this acts as a multiplier. However, this is then merged with actual player movement data to create a hybrid model of 'foot traffic'.

The more foot traffic, the more business, the 'more XXX' a property is.

In the text version of the game, lets say you fly into Philly, you land at the Philly airport, you pick a drug dealer and sell drugs.  Behind the scenes, your player physically lands on the spot of the airport, and then travels to the location of the dealer in the shortest way possible (either block by block walking, or walk to transportation hub, to transportation hub, then walks again), more or less +1'ing all blocks that it passes along the way, which triggers a response from NPCs which mimic these paths which creates more foot traffic.

For some businesses, the more foot traffic the better. (Some, it doesn't matter at all).

We know where the airports are, we know where the starter transportation hubs are, but the player data and dealer locations are fluid and the NPCs adapt to player movements, so nothing is set in stone. 

Use this information to guestimate good places to plop down roots.  it can be your city, or a different city, there are no loyalties because this persists after you die into your next character.

There are no limits to the number of properties you can purchase in the preselect stage, but the number will be limited after this stage is done to 1 a day per player.

I will be around on lounge if anyone has any questions.  

On a side note, this gives off very heavy uncanny valley vibes.  I had to PANGEA a city into a nice neat box, and then rotate it on its side, this makes for a lot of interesting 'assumptions' when you merge odd shaped objects like cities into a square box (like how Boston touches... Morocco?!?).  So please forgive the very liberal artistic license used to fit all this into 100x100 boxes.