WaltDisney brings up a good point that I have thought about as well. To be considered "average" you need to have 20-30 play hours a week and that is active play hours, not just having the screen open but actually clicking on jails, drugs, shooting, messaging, etc....that's literally a part-time job. On this character I have been sitting mainly between 10-20 hours per week and I work for myself from a home office so have it open all the time. I can't imagine the average person that works a day job (or even a night job I guess), has a family, etc. could hit 20-30 hours a week of active play time, and even if they could I'm not even sure they would want to just for a game. 

How is the "average" determined? Is that a historical average or something was maybe set years ago when there was more activity in the game and has not been updated? 

I think if we want to bring more people to the game we not only need to think of ways to make things more mobile friendly (as I mentioned earlier although it sounds like discord won't work) because playing MR on mobile is honestly terrible and we need to be realistic about what it takes to actually play the game. I mean a minimum of 750 credits to max your BGs without accounting for upkeep. Trying to view this from the perspective of a new player...they see an "average" player puts in 20-30 hours a week, they need to either spend tons of hours grinding away for cash, get lucky with rich crew, or spend $750 to max out their protection and then they find out that yeah at any moment if people don't like your CL for some reason you did all that for nothing and have to start over again...it doesn't seem very appealing to be honest. 

I've played since 2013 and it's mostly been scorched earth approach, certainly for anyone Made Man or above with a couple of exceptions here or there - would have been good to have experienced a time when it wasn't!! 

Nice to see that Detroit and New York have opened up the opportunity for anyone to set up shop in their cities. Especially keen to see those super active players not in leadership positions currently do things different and get recruiting and building good families! 

You can max your BGs for free on lounge.

What? Who is making 750 credits during one character in lounge?  The user with the most lounge credits is Matt with under 400 and his charter is almost a year old. You’re definitely not making enough for 300-400 additional credits from RAT drugs, can you give me a walkthrough of how a player is supposed to make 750 creds worth of cash to max BGs from lounge? Numbers don’t add up to me. 
 

Also, what I’m getting from your F1 response is that if you don’t have money or unlimited time to play the game then the best you can hope for is to essentially be useless. Never max your BGs, maybe be an OK hitter but you’ll get first or second waved and probably get one shot off on a mediocre target, unless you get CAs probably won’t earn enough cash to be all that helpful to your crew so again I ask what’s the point to a new person?

Let’s use your F1 example some more. That $500 car you’re building, are you going to run that up against F1 cars and hope to at least run with the pack? Nope you’d be left in the dust so what fun is that? Are amateur stock car racers putting themselves up against F1? Nope. So what you’re saying here is that if you wanna have a second job playing MR or spend a bunch of money then you can be competitive, if you don’t wanna do that then well make it fun to flounder around. 

I think there’s far greater issues than people not recruiting. Are we really worried that new players can’t find their way into a crew? It seems like a pointless feature to me. Maybe that’s because my interest in this game is at a real low point though.

This place seems to be really fizzling out in terms of a lot of things, being a CL is about jumping through so many hoops, and then to remain there it’s difficult too. It’s just not enticing to be a CL anymore for casual players, the pressures can be too great before you even put that CL suit on, hence a lack of leadership and lack of recruitment, which means rebuild mode.

The player base is far too small, I haven’t played hard in a long time but I can imagine the same faces are still rolling with the same faces, it’s so repetitive, you’re almost forced to play with the same group because the other group wouldn’t trust a “newbie” or someone who’s crossed over. It’s just painfully boring tbh. 

The game itself isn’t very fun anymore, the gap between people farming hustle and stacking/purchasing credits is too great compared to the more casual players and then there’s the whole “purging” shit that we’ve had for years too. 
I think hold off on punishing people any more and maybe think about speaking to the leaders/regular players and coming up with ideas to counter the real issues. 
Or, just allow new accounts (not characters) to pick a crew on signup so that it removes the need for people to recruit a newbie and the newbie can pick a crew based on their details page. Doesn’t seem too difficult to resolve to me. Anyone who isn’t new, knows to approach leaders to find a crew or they’re fucked.

Or, just allow new accounts (not characters) to pick a crew on signup so that it removes the need for people to recruit a newbie and the newbie can pick a crew based on their details page. Doesn’t seem too difficult to resolve to me. Anyone who isn’t new, knows to approach leaders to find a crew or they’re fucked.               -MongrolMoe

I don't know how hard this would be to code, but it seems like it would be a pretty effective solution for the new player issue.

In the case no one from the crew they decide to join is online when they sign up, maybe have something that leads them to their crew's HQ forum where they can read the rules and maybe find a first steps guide (we don't have it in ours, but I know there exists a really good one that I've seen reused by multiple crews over the years). Then once a sponsor from the crew does come online, they will see they have a new recruit and can reach out. 

Then allow other crews to setup and take the responsibility off of their hands. :/

Then stop making leadership such a horrible experience and maybe more people will want to do it? 
Right now no one wants it because of the ridiculous number of hoops you make them jump through. It’s no wonder so few will touch it. 

lets face it, you are not going to turn advertising back on, you,ve been flirting with this "issue" for a very long time. Im all for a change, 1000% support that. Butr how does allowing the current cls even more breathing room in the form of a better tiered  rebuild % before authed is removed to be needed to take a shot at them? i dont understand how thats balanced or leads back to advertising. 

im not pushing back on rebuild. lets face it, we are in a bi-daily rebuild state, its pretty laughable tbh. 

I support the crew change you suggest 100%. 

The frustration comes from rebuild only happening because as a collective various sponsors with room in their crew are ACTIVELY refusing to toggle themselves on. It only takes one person to toggle on to stop rebuild from happening. Rebuild happening every other day is because of this and nothing more.

#associates yells at sponsors when nobody is toggled on for a short period. #main yells at everyone when nobody is toggled on for a slightly longer period and rebuild is imminent (from my understanding).

Rebuild itself holds the game down because now all lounge and VIP related rewards are cut off until the time threshold is met to restore it back to 95%. That in turn makes putting in effort harder since now you’re bottlenecked for however many hours until rebuild is disabled again.

If you are not in the mood for sponsoring at a current moment, that is fine, but at least delegate such the opportunity to someone else. Perhaps expand who has sponsoring abilities to people who actually want to get new associates.
 

There is absolutely zero excuse we should be in rebuild at ANY hour due to inactive sponsors or sponsors refusing to toggle themselves on. One click is all it takes. There is no excuse for “it’s off hours” or people being asleep or anything that is viable either. #associates logs everything.

03:32 <MRBot> There are 0 of 10 sponsors currently online that are toggled on for the last 5 minutes.

This was yesterday as rebuild took hold for that morning.

I am in the United States, so this is 3:32 AM at my time. At 3:32 AM in the USA, there were 10 fucking people not toggling on. At midnight 3 hours earlier, there were 4. At 1 AM, there were 5. At 2 AM, someone eventually toggled on, and stopped all the warnings. But then they presumably went to sleep, and an hour later, it warned again.

The 10 at 3:32 eventually fizzled out to 4 about 5 minutes later, and someone did eventually toggle on but their crew was full. Still, that’s four people who actively chose not to toggle on.

This is simply just active refusal to toggle. Here’s one from December 13th. 
02:37 <MRBot> Of the 14 sponsors currently online, there are 0 toggled on. However, 0 crews have jobs up on the job board. Possible rebuild mode pending.

Seriously people? FOURTEEN?
 

Recent auths have now fixed this rebuild problem so far. There’s now 100% sponsorship for the last full 24 hours. I’m just annoyed to see it now when it otherwise did not have to be necessary to begin with.

The current leaders are not one group of people hell bent on doing whatever they can to stay in power. It is probably as diverse a leadership as the game has witnessed in many years with no real agenda except trying to do better than the last people.

I doubt anyone was motivated by the proposed changes, more likely they, like me, saw you concerned about it in Main and acted upon that. But, whatever the motivator, the problem has been, for now at least, remedied, which is what everyone wanted, right? Rebuild is off. Jobs are available. Auth can taken in Detroit and (if not already very shortly) New York to anyone who wants to. There is free movement of associates if they do not hold a hand position.

So well done, Leadership Group. Looks like we've taken some positive steps in the right direction and things are on the up. Probably too early for a round of applause, but maybe soon. 

If it’s maintained, then great. Seeing the 24h at 100% is very nice and a much better improvement so now everything should hopefully be remedied. If it lasts then all the better.

I won’t dip my hand into the regime matters but I will say that you only need around $350 million to max out your bodyguards. $400 million with how upkeep goes. Not counting dice, it is more than feasible to earn this $350 million in about a month or two’s time when you combine the rewards from lounge, drugs, voting, and achievements assuming you’re maxing out your gains. Dice can just help you get there quicker or screw you over if you aren’t careful.

Consistency in jailbreaks = higher units = more drugs to move at once = more profits. Lots of jailbreaking means more achievements. Plentiful Durden spawns and RATs also lets people go for achievements. There’s over $6 billion dollars in the game, I’m sure people are looking for ways to get rid of it. The marketplace is extremely expensive now, you can sell credits for the full $500K!

Izzy does his best to have events as well which let you make up for any time you might not otherwise have. Property and dealer testing gave out  lots of insta petties and felonies, the Halloween event was basically free money and achievements, and people give out free credits constantly in lounge.

For those who don’t have the hours available to put in like others, it just takes slightly longer. Since everyone isn’t being popped every month, I would assume more people have such an opportunity.