With the Upcoming feature Realty - supply and demand, I feel it's necessary to give a small reward for people who do choose to forgo the additional cost of putting up a Crew in the same District or city as someone else. My ideas for how to bolster that side of the whether to expand into a new district or not coin is to improve a feature currently getting little use. Some examples I've thought of are:

• Boosting the LHM position. Currently it's just for show and mass mails, maybe a small gun/defense boost based on the number of crews in your city that tops out at half what the RHM gets would encourage people to keep together a little without making it overpowered enough that they'd avoid leaving the city altogether.
• Boosting the strength of Forts. From a role play perspective these HQs will know where the others are and should be able to plan where an attacker would be coming from. There could be a small increase per Crew in your district and a smaller one per crew in your city, again something with a maximum amount of defense that goes down as Crew Leaders die, but not instantly. Maybe the trigger for removal would be the removal of the forts seeing as they already stick around after a Leader's passing.
• Providing an in house position capable of mass mailing anonymously and receiving mass mails anonymously after X number of districts have been achieved. It would be an added perk for keeping the HSL secret because some crews would very much like the ability to keep their HSL secret but most people wouldn't follow a random member who hadn't been in some type of leadership role or specified to give orders by the CL. It could add a new element to the game for hiding someone who is usually one of your best hitters giving anonymity as a tool for both rogues and loyal members.
• Finally, I'd like to bring up the automatic retire feature again. I'm not sure how it would make sense to include this, but I thought it would be worth mentioning seeing as both players and admins tend to agree that Inactive Members in mass numbers are a very bad thing. For people who just keep accounts to be pros, the CLs usually have a phone number and can see the total number of days since last active and it shouldn't be that hard to log on once a month or once every two months.

I apologize for not taking these further in depth, but I thought I'd try just bringing a few forward for reactions before really delving into the role play/game play aspects like rogues, wars, etc... that would be affected by this. I feel like none of these would hinder or boost an individual/group very much and would bring a cost vs risk aspect into where to expand rather than the current cost only

Sorry for such a late respond, lron. I know we talked a little about in private about this and I must say: I really like this.

• Right now the lhm position I guess is "What you make it". It has mass mail powers and its italics on the online list. I personally have used the lhm position to train new people up into positions or attempt to trust my members with a higher position within the family.
• With the addition to further harm forts via the pickpocket timer: I think boosting the strength of forts would be viable and wouldn't be a bad idea to look into.
• I like the idea tbh of having an anonymous mass mail for members within the family. I was a hitsquad leader once at 20 days old. Very few knew me, so why would they trust me as there hsl when I was willing to tell so little of myself? Obviously my CL put the trust in me but even then. I think it could have worked better if they hadn't known whom I was.
• Agreed. I've got friends that don't play much but I have the contact information for. They go IA (Jobs, real life etc) but if they were needed; I could contact them to log on and do whatever. I like the auto retire feature though but I think it could maybe go by x days per rank?

• Finally, I'd like to bring up the automatic retire feature again. I'm not sure how it would make sense to include this, but I thought it would be worth mentioning seeing as both players and admins tend to agree that Inactive Members in mass numbers are a very bad thing. For people who just keep accounts to be pros, the CLs usually have a phone number and can see the total number of days since last active and it shouldn't be that hard to log on once a month or once every two months.

Sorry if this is viewed as going off on a tangent but why are IA members a very bad thing? I have never understood this.

The reason IAs are bad is because one of the many aspects that make MR attractive as a game is the social aspect. Each spot filled by an IA is one less spot filled by a possibly interactive fellow player. Not all players are looking to be socially interactive but none of the people who don't ever log in will be. Believe it or not, most new players look to communicate in house with other players in their family before looking elsewhere. Now imagine a scenario where the majority of a family is Inactive. They start asking questions in the crew chat or looking for places to interact with their fellow family members and they're met with a mostly unresponsive reaction or just one or two responses. When I first joined this thing of ours I was greeted by about 5-10 different people when I joined a family of people I didn't know. It gave me the opportunity to get to know the ones I seemed to have the most in common with, it gave me options. 

Inactives help fake larger population numbers for both players looking to expand and admins trying to advertise the game, but they cut into the social aspect that keeps a lot of people playing, which can often cause a newer bloodline to go inactive. There's a lot more in what causes people to leave the game, but diminishing the role of social aspects away from IRC is part of the problem that can be at least partially solved by reducing the number of people guaranteed to be unresponsive in the families.

The LHM position has long been redundant. Anything that makes it less so is worth exploring.

I don't really understand your argument behind making fortifications stronger or the need for the "HSL" to be anonymous.

As for the automatic retire option, I might be wrong, but didn't the Admins recently say IAs add nothing to your crew? If that is the case, wouldn't you have to be an idiot to retain a useless corpse rather than someone who's actually alive?

Thank you for the input Kyubey and Hamface, sorry for waiting Kyubey I was hoping to get more than one opinion on the subjects before responding and two should be plenty.

The LHM boost is probably going to be the most well received and I thank you both for supporting that.

As for the HSL position, every time I'm a HSL for a family the opponents seem to know instantly. People always have and always will leak info so I'd like to see something implemented to allow someone other than the CL or hands to do the job without giving away that they're pretty much guaranteed to be a hitter/pro worth targeting in a first wave.

The additional health to forts is because they very rarely play a heavy role in wars, so people don't even bother shooting at the forts most wars. A small boost after the increased ability to damage forts using the PP timer would be a nice boost to balance out the additional costs associated with buying an HQ in a city that has a good number of HQs and might make them a bit more relevant in future wars.

Finally I completely agree with any rank associated features Kyubey so if it's implemented I'd greatly appreciate seeing that. Mr. Hamface, they might not count towards anything for the HQ boost but they can still be used to convince other people your district is full enough to move out and expand, and I haven't read into whether or not they count towards becoming a Godfather but I believe they still do so for some people keeping an IA still gives a bonus that we'd be better off not offering to people who would look to abuse game mechanics. I've always thought anyone who keeps IAs in a crew was an idiot once you got to higher numbers... but a decent number of crews were keeping a rather large number of them to justify expansion not that long ago and that's something both admins and players have stated they're against.

I can see why some people think it's overkill, but honestly if you can't be bothered to log in once in 30-60 days do you really care about the account? I get that there might be special exceptions, like for soldiers, but the admins and the CL could probably work together if that's the case to make sure that if a member has special circumstances and is really attached to the account that an admin could log in on the account just long enough to drop the inactive tag shortly before the auto-retire would kick in if the circumstances make it impossible for them to log on for a long period of time.