Following the announcement today, I decided I'd toss out the idea to help utilize the closed cities. I suggest lowering the Max HQ Size from 50 to 30. It would allow for 18+ crews of 30 and make use of the other cities. Manifest Destiny and all that.

Yeah I like this idea. It makes more sense to have crews with less people. Although we did go from 200 down to 50. If we are gunna have districts etc... I think making crews a little smaller again would be cool.

One issue so far with this, is that it would slow down growth of the crews. 

However, I do want to try to figure out a way to try to utilize other cities. 

It does however look like they added Boston in so maybe that should ease concerns a bit.

If Boston stays...

Idk, I like this, I think. It would slow down crews a bit, but I think if I had only 30 spots to fill instead of 50, I'd want to fill them with the best people possible.

I'm a little on the fence about this one. I think its a great idea, but at the same time, people complain all the time about there being too many families, too many CL's, too many upperstructures.... This would increase those numbers even more.

People will always complain. It is the nature, Especially if they are the F brand.  OH OH I'm going to get it now. But it is true. There is only positive I see in this suggestion. 

I agree with Cassiopeia. It was originally 200 spots in a HQ. This went down to 125 (I believe anyway) and then was further reduced to 50. The further you decrease the number, as Cassi said, the more CL's and upper structures you are going to come across.

In my own personal opinion, I absolutely hate smaller crews, and so many CL's being around. I believe it completely devalues what is supposed to be the highest honour, bar Godfather, that can be bestowed on you. It will turn auth from "Hey man you've put your neck out for this city and I think you should get your shot at becomming a crew leader" to "Yo I wasn't really gonna pick you but we need CL's so wanna be one?"

That's completely the wrong reason to be authing someone, it should be to reward them for hard work, not because you need to auth.

Cities will be populated as the game grows, the more people that come to the game, the more families fill up in the current cities, the family per city cap is hit, and new cities are opened up.

I do agree in both side having small amount of capacity will bring more CL to see and we will meet non capable leaders that will just lead to war in the future, though if we have high capacity lets be a little realistic, not all people can look for their members and teach them well. we see many players around that really dont understand how the game use to be. to think it more, there are let say 70% of the population dont really know how to use their gun properly, 80% more of us didn't know what really is to be a leader and a respected person in here, and lets say 80% more really dont know what is happening around them, am not saying our leaders are incompitent or they have less time to check on many members. why we do find people that are inactive in our families simply because we lack of giving attention to them. we lack of giving trainings to this people. lesser people in a family means a lot of time to give and train this people. we give people jobs inside our family though does we give attention to what they can really do. reality we could only give chance to people we know and less oppurtunity to people who have no guts to ask what should we do. how about we think how to maximize the capacity a person can do rather than thinking if we need to reduce or give more capacity to the family.

I can see the merit behind the idea, not so sure it would have the desired effect though.

Making crews smaller doesn't mean that cities will be filled, it may simply mean more crews in each city. Right now most people are aware that the GF's tend to stick with a certain amount of auths in each city to keep things on a level playing field, I would expect lower HQ sizes would simply mean that they would increase this playing field to counter the fact that their crews are smaller, thus we may have more auths but they are still situated in the same cities.

Eh, since Boston is back, I don't see any reason to lower the crew size at this moment. However, in the future, it might be something worth considering when trying to figure out the district system. 

Hmm. I have to say I largely agree with Pratster on this one. I can see some merits, yes, but the idea of filling the game with smaller crews, ergo more crews and CLs puts me off quite a lot.

Although I'm a new-ish player, I do feel that a lot of relevant Mafia essence, so to speak, has been lost from the game. Certain values have all but vanished; the same values that attracted me to join up in the first place. I genuinely believe that more honour needs to be restored to both promotion and auth. As I see it, allowing more people to set up within each city counteracts this. I know some might say, 'Well if I only have 30 places, I'll be selective with them', but really - crew leaders ought to be selective in the first place and not just because of a reduction in max capacity.

I'll perch on this one for the time being until we see how the new district system rolls out - but as of this moment in time, I don't think I'll be going for this.

My opinion is wait.  let the effect of districts happen and then take it from there.  

What would happen if the number of crews working at any given time was limited? Or only per city.

The number of crews per city is already limited.

Apologies, I wasn't aware of that fact.

Its not hard coded for limiting, its limited by a mutual agreement amongst the upper structures. At least as far as I know its not been hard coded.

No it isn't hard coded in, just as you said, it's been a mutually established agreement amongst the players.

Just throwing this out there but you need a Minimum of 30 members to obtain Godfather which would then equate to a Don having to have a full crew to become Godfather.

And as has been previously lead smaller crews will simply mean more leaders per city, when we had 100 man crews we would see 1 or 2 crew's per city sometimes 3 with one being a Godfather crew.

I would have to second

My opinion is wait. let the effect of districts happen and then take it from there.

The sys works atm. Lets see what the new hard codes are then we can tweak structures.