We have introduced Lock Picking, a new style felony available at level 15 and higher.

To lock pick you need bobby pins, which can be obtained by robbing purses. (We have given you all some starter ones for now)

Bobby pins if over stressed will break.  You stress them every time you check a lock while being really far away from the proper answer.  Low level locks are easier and more forgiving, high level locks are much more difficult.

Like with safe cracking, every time you do one, your skill goes up and gets you closer to being able to just force the lock with one click. 

(Normally as you rank up you will start with the easiest ones and work your way up, however, since many of you are ranked up enough to have more than one type of lock picking level available, you will notice that if you are starting out with a harder one it will keep adding the % to force the lock to the lower level ones until they are full)

Good luck, have fun!

(PS, custom achievements will be coming soon for safe and lock picking, all work is being logged so that when we go live, it will backfill it with your completed work)

Also, a big shout out to Kittie for the graphics!

Yup.  Just since this is hard to get proper wording, heres an example:

Tier 1 Safe/Lock - 85% Force Chance

Tier 2 Safe/Lock - 0% Force Chance

Tier 3 Safe/Lock - 0% Force Chance

Lets say you are already a high ranker when this was introduced, so you didn't bother with tier 1 or 2.  When you do a Tier 3 success, it will add 1 to your original skill of 85 making it 86.  Once you max out tier 1, it starts moving your skill into tier 2.  Max out tier 2, it moves into tier 3 and so on.

Nello, there are quite a few reasons why it cant be done yet. When our new servers are setup in the datacenter, then we we will be able to start the chat overhaul process.

It may seem like a trivial thing, but let me try to explain the major differences between the two.  Take safe cracking as an example.  Its one page load, then 20 seconds of... no page loads, then a page load when its done.  This is very easy on our currently overloaded and slow server.

Now lets look at chat.  Chat has to be responsive right?  This means that its slamming the server, constantly, every second, for every page you have open.  Got 1 page open?  Its currently using 20x the resources as safe cracking.  Got 10 pages open in the background? Its currently using 200x the resources as safe cracking.  We all have access to IRC, (Some claim they don't, but if you can play the game, then you have access to one of the many ways of connecting that we provide), which, for all intents and purposes is a better chat method than in game chat.  We can not justify slowing down our current server to a crawl, so that those that want to hide their identities can chat effectively hidden.

Soon we will be putting new servers in the datacenter, which will then open up a lot of room for things that we have had to put off for a very long time.  One of the major ones waiting to be addresses is a full featured in game chat client.  But this depends on getting the new servers in first - the game simply isnt fun if every page load is painfully slow. 

It takes a lot to break the bobbpins.  We set it pretty conservatively since we introduced this feature mid game - meaning people were already ranked up enough to do the hard ones, we didn't want it to become a frustrating experience if you were breaking bobbypins all the time.  We may go back and make it a hair more difficult down the road.

You cant really "fail" a lock pick, you just keep trying until you run out of bobby pins.  However, you can fail if you choose to force it and didnt have enough skill to pull it off.

If you never broke a pin before, just attempt a bunch of times without moving it, eventually it will break - and fly accross the screen :)

If you run out of pins, you need to abandon your felony, and go steal some purses to get new pins.