Original idea: An option that allows you to turn on and off Organized Crime invites.

Motivation: It allows users to avoid being detected via the OC invite which is a 100% identification with no cost to the account doing the identifying.
It allows stealthier accounts to avoid a 100% way to be found if in their home city. With the recent addition of fortified HQ's being in your home city during war is a huge advantage.

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The idea has got some positive feedback, including opinions such as:

Removes another option to circumvent vision.

It closes a loophole

There was also an objection:

I feel stealth has a far too much of an advantage as it is

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I sponsored the idea because I believe OC invitations should not be used for detecting active people in your city. While earners and above may avoid detection by keeping their felony timers closed, lower ranked members have no way of hiding from the OC screen, even if their stealth skills are extraordinary.

I wonder if we could link OC's and info so you can only invite people you can see, and if people accept the people who they can see.

That would be a terrible idea El_Nino stealth people would never get invited to OC's.

Well they will have a better chance than if the oc is switched off :)

Considering that this idea will mostly benefit people on stealth and also being a firm believer that stealth answers already have easy enough, I would only support a toggle for OC's if it came together with payout of sorts.

To me the different between info and stealth accounts form a huge disavantage for those on info. if you compare the two you will see that on stealth answers you pratically don't need to do anything to reach your max level of stealthiness, while on Info, you only reach a certain level of info withouth much work. To completelly max your info skills you need to constantly be putting work and even when you reach maxed level, stealth still beats info.

To me those two skills need to be at a more equal ground of work needed, it ain't logic to me that someone who is constantly working on their info skills, can't beat someone who is not working for their stealth.

Since we are not exactly talking about fixing this skills, I will only be in favor of this idea if its done as an exchange. Majority of people who will actually benefit from this feature are those on stealth, I don't think that they should just be able to hide when wanted and when not needed benefit 100% from OC's.

So my suggestion is that if someone choose to toggle off OC's, the OC's will turned off for a certain period of time, 3 to 5 days.

While I agree with Flash-fire that if we did OC's based on vision, no one on stealth would be able to do OC's, Nino's idea shows the logic that game follows. Per say, you shouldn't be able to OC with someone you don't see. Since we cannot implement that reality into the game, considering that stealth people won't be able to do OC's, we could try to implement a bit of reality by making them opt out of OC's, but having to stay in hide mode for a few days before they get the benefit from OC's again.

Or perhaps someone in hide mode cannot travel, kinda hard to hide if you are travelling all over the place isn't it? It's kinda like training ranges, you choose to take a safe route of training but it comes with a price, can't shoot or fly for a period of time, here would use the same logic.

{As I understand it, the advantage Stealth has over Info is that pure Stealth answers are widely known while pure Info answers remain a mystery. Should we base our decisions on what is publicly known or on how the game is constructed? When you're on pure Info answers, you don't need to train your info at all as it's already perfect. Unless you want to go over 100%.}

{That's not true Tosca, when you sign on info, you do not have perfect info. The max info the answers can give you is much less then 100%, even when ranked. To achieve 100% info takes a lot of work, and even then you still can't see some of the people on stealth}

{I know this because I have personally tested the answers and worked it to get to 100%, and even then I still couldn't see some stealthy people. This information is right on the money.}

I'm not quite sure why the conversation has shifted to whether or not this will benefit certain accounts over others - at the end of the day, this is arguably a serious loophole (as I'm pretty sure coders didn't intend for OC's to become a tool for enemy location gathering) that undermines all of the other previous efforts coders have taken to avoid users from discovering people during wartime. (specifically, the litany of language that one could decipher to figure out whether or not an unprotected person was in their city, even if that person was a thug, etc) Users who are under Made Man are stuck in a situation where there's a surefire way to discover them, and to add on top of that there's hardly an RP scenario where this kind of situation could feasibly happen - (you're in hiding, but you're able to be invited to a crime?) which pretty much leads to the core point of why this feature is suggested - if people don't want to appear available for OC's, let them have an option for it.

{Izzy told in #DL a year ago or so that there is a perfect set for each skill, info included. He also confirmed that 14534353 is not the perfect info answers set. But as you said, tita, we shouldn't turn this thread into a discussion on info and stealth. And as you had an occasion to test perfect info answers yourself, you surely know best how perfect vision works and its shortages. For the sake of this thread I think we can just say that Stealth does have an advantage over Info and base our further discussion off of this statement.}

I agree that Stealth has an advantage over Info and there is no denying this idea in the form it was suggested will only benefit those on Stealth answers.
However, we should take into consideration that those are not the only two sets of answers in the game.

As it is now, OC screen allows any person, even with very low vision, to see other people in their city regardless of their stealth skill. Low rankers have almost no way of avoiding this as they can't do felonies. In my opinion, this is a loophole, a clear abuse of the OC screen and should be changed.

I like El_Nino's suggestion to be able to invite only those you can see.
However, I would like to have an option of telling abother player "Here I am! Invite me, please!".

I also second tita's opinion that being able to hide from the OC screen should not come free of consequences.
But turning OCs off for a few days or being unable to travel sounds a bit too harsh to me.

Molding these two ideas together, this is what I would suggest:
1. OC screen should only allow you to invite those you can actually see in your locals, thus closing the loophole. This would stop people with no vision from being able to see people on stealth.
2. Any person should be able to 'come out of hiding', decreasing their stealth for a set amount of time (or until they travel to another city). This way those on poor vision would be able to see them in their locals and invite them to OCs. And the decreased stealth would be a trade-off.

Basing OC's on vision will make it so you cannot invite random people to OC's, I think a better solution is to have to toggle on/off for OC's but if you do toggle it off then you can't do an OC for 3 days.

To avoid the "people with poor vision" issue, you could have a 100% boost to your vision for family members.

I always found it odd that you can't see people from the same family as you in a city. I found it even odder that when you are a CL or hand that you can't see everyone in your family in a city on the locals page, yet a quick look on the crew page and you know they are there!!!!

Flash-Fire, I think it wouldn't be a bad thing if you couldn't invite random people to OCs. After all, that's what they are - Organized Crimes - so putting some effort into organizing them, perhaps including sending out a few messages, sounds right to me. What's more, by communicating with other participants you might avoid waiting 20 minutes for them to come back online and accept the invitation, which often happens when sending out random invites.

El_Nino, that would be a huge boost which I think would make the vision skill a little bit less useful. And then you can have a rat in your family, who's able to see every member of the family in their locals, regardless of their vision skill.
Also: {correct me if I'm wrong, but you do get a slight boost to info on your family members and this boost is even higher for CL/RHM.}

100% was an arbritary amount, however it seems rather silly that you wouldn't know your own family members active in a city.

Tosca is right here, people on the same family already get a vision boost to see family members.

I'm not sure what percentage it is, but you can see almost everyone who is in your family, unless this was changed recently, which i dont think it was.

If the sole purpose of this is to close loopholes in vision Vs stealth then stealth people shouldn't be able to be jailed by crackdowns either. Which would make sense as if other mobster's can't find them then how can the law.

Surely the purpose of preventing the exploitation of loopholes to compensate for lack of vision was in order to do just that, stop people compensating for a lack of vision.

Having a simple toggle option would prevent this exploitation. I don't think closing a loophole should have any consequences or really merit any sort of discussion as to the benefits of stealth or the weaknesses of vision, nor are we considering the balance between vision or stealth. This is a glitch in the system, not an intentional option and is purely used to find stealthy people by means other than you are meant to be able to find them.

Therefore, I'm all for this being closed by having the option to be invited to OCs or not.

It's barely a loop hole anyway, it's rare to find a target by using an OC as you are required to be in that person's home city & you have to be refreshing the screen for up to 12 minutes to catch them between felonies.

This is still an exploitation to circumvent the need for vision.

A simple toggle option would solve it.

Flash-Fire, I'm sure you, of all people, would know that the smallest of details can be useful to someone who knows how to exploit them. "Barely a loophole anyway" is still a loophole, and it could easily cost someone dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of work through no fault of their own other than the fact that someone was clever enough to exploit this feature to their own advantage.

I'm in agreement with Grin - let's switch this discussion back to the simple addition of a toggle feature, and not twist this into some other hobbled form of it.