I've been thinking lately about how boringly clickmonkeyish training a gun can be, and how little individual effort it can take.

I'm not just talking about MIAs, either, although they're certainly one element of it.

Both MIAs and RIAs basically involve you being handed a name and a location for an inac. I know that you have to race for it and win the race for an RIA, but unless you're the person, or one of the people, compiling the IA list, you basically don't need to do any work or hone any skills other than sitting and tapping the spacebar over and over in order to get the kill. 

What I'd quite like to see, and would like to suggest here, would be that kills relied more on your own vision than allowing you to piggyback off other peoples or have locations handed to you.

In the case of MIAs, I think a nice counterbalance to the now increased number of contracts we can complete would be to remove the location from the contract info when you buy it. Maybe have the MIA still spawn in the city the purchaser is in, but make it spawn in a random district, so that that person has to use their vision to find it in the locals, or else have people active who can help them before it becomes a free kill to anybody who does find it - bearing in mind that the stealth of MIAs decreases the longer they live, by the time most people can see it, the purchaser can to. So it becomes a matter of strategy: if you don't have the vision yourself, then you have to have somebody you can trust in the same city who does (which allows active crews with well balance skill sets a slight advantage in training) or you have to leave it until you can see it and chance being beaten to the kill, or travel and hope you guess right. You start off in one district, so in a 3 district city, you still have a 2/3 chance of picking right. 

In the case of RIAs, I'd personally like to see an end to sitting refreshing for kills. Some people will shout me down about this one, because for whatever reason, be it they have the fastest connection or they just click right, this system is hugely beneficial to them, but I'd still like to see this rely more on an in character skill than RL factors. 

I'd suggest rather than an RIA spawning 7 days ahead of it's killtime and aging up, gangsters spawn as instantly killable targets, visible only in locals to those with well trained vision. This again gives the incentive to people to train up their vision or start on vision answers/rolls.

I genuinely believe that making these changes would benefit the game in a number of ways.

Firstly, it changes gun training up in an interesting way: it makes it far less formulaic and more reliant on the in character actions of players.

Secondly, in my opinion, it could go some way to justifying using a vision start up roll, or else encourage people to use our streets and business districts more as a means to improve their vision manually. 

Thirdly, it breaks up the monopoly of power that tends to favour heavy hitters: hear me out on this one. 

There are far more things required to make any crew, any district or any city tick, than hitters. As it is though, the hitters can sit quietly and train guns with not a word to anybody, without developing much else barring the units about their account and character, and run the game by simply having people to earn for them. They don't need to worry about vision, because realistically a district only needs one person on vision answers in order for hitters to have all the targets they need.

Making these changes would go some way to changing that. More people on vision would be required, at the least, if these hitters wanted to continue to be fed targets. It would prevent building a gun being a contest for who can merely spend the most credits or have the fastest net. It would cause those who truly want to run the game to need to immerse themselves more into their characters and bring more to social side of the game, or else be heavily reliant on others, which then increases the value of those who choose not to be hitters.

Maybe this isn't a great idea, but it does sound to me like it'd be a positive change in the game. I'd like to hear some more opinions though.

I'm pretty sure MIAs used to spawn in a totally random city, Clayton, so I honestly don't think this is such a huge deal.
You also do get first refusal... if you've invested either your start up roll or time into your vision. So I don't think it's particularly robbing you of the first refusal of the kill, it's just asking you to put in a little more work for it.

back when the spawned in different cities the flight timers were considerably less to even it out so it evened it out, its a decent idea im just not sure how it would affect the balance of the game as such any one on defense or stealth etc would be penalized from the off if they wanted to hit  

You could always take MIA's out of the game completely and since 1 credit virtually = 1 kill, you could replace MIA's with an advanced gun training only available after your weapon is maxed, costing the same as an MIA and instantly giving +1 to your weapon, and resetting your wack timer for an hour.

Then this one con wouldn't hurt this suggestion in the least. People are continually talking about things being too easy. Take the realtime skill out of the equation and make it more character skill based. 

Sentinel, actually, vision is a trainable skill. Quite easily too tbh. This wouldn't penalise anybody, as anybody would have the ability to train that skill. Yes, those starting on vision would have an advantage in this area, however, those on Stealth have a HUGE advantage over any other answers, because Stealth is about the only stat that can be in no way improved or gained upon except via admin competitions.

Sal, we might as well have that kind of system already with MIAs... but I'm really not a fan of a credit meaning an auto kill, barring rare cases of wackback. I honestly do feel like some kind of effort should have to go into it still. Yes, you're buying yourself the extra chance, but you still have to put in some character based effort to benefit from that chance. And those who HAVE put that effort in, should you have failed to do so, will be rewarded. (Lets not forget, people will still, barring GFC policy change, benefit from the 5 minute rule)

that is true indeed maria im just concerned it will encourage spam, a lot of people will start inputting useless shit everywhere, it may ruin the streets or business, atleast with the streets being a tad bear we can build it  instead of flooding it with spammers

Well, that was just a suggestion off the top of My head, but I do think this idea warrants some thought. I'm quite sure things could be tweaked so that training your weapon became a little less mundane, and successful kills worked more off your character stats, and less from how fast your internet connection is.

Sentinel, the streets have guidelines about what constitutes spam, and lets not forget that things posted on the streets that are of poor quality reflect back on that person, their leader and their district, so it will still be in the interests of those in charge to encourage quality posting. Perhaps if this is your main concern with this idea, the admins could consider, should they decide to put this in place, some tighter anti-spam guidelines?

People tend not to come to the streets, unless they have a rare love for that type of thing, unless they either have to, or there is a real benefit to.

Give people a real benefit to, and I think it'll increase uptake more.

This also can't work in the way that VIP does, where one or two people can pretty much hold it for an entire district a lot of the time. It's an individual benefit rather than a group one, which I think is the main weakness of the VIP mapping system.

yeah your 100% right im just looking at ways in killing 2 birds with 1 stone but doing it efficiently just dont want to leave any gaps in it that can be exploited by the lazy you know?

I get what you mean exactly, and I appreciate it, but I think this can kill two birds with one stone without leaving those kind of loopholes, if it's implamented properly.

Maria, doesnt a Durden spawn do essentially the same job you're suggesting? Those with high vision get first dibs on the Durden kills that they can see in their local listing without any effort (beyond the effort put into increasing said vision, of course). I know it's frustrating to lose races, but I still enjoy the thrill of racing for it.

Not really. 

Now that we have VIP mapping acting as another group perk allowing large amounts of people to get the benefit from the work of a small group, plus so many mapping creds going around that there is always mapping threads for big spawns, that's pretty much gone. Plus, durdens are irregular events that only appear every few days, and clustered, so if you miss it for something like sleep or work... it's no good to you either. 

I can see what you mean, but I imagine we'd wind up having a few district or crew spotters if your proposition is passed, which would basically serve the same purpose. Personally, as I've already said - I like racing, so I hope it's not changed, but I am interested in how the discussion goes. It's certainly an interesting idea nonetheless.

It would change things, but it wouldn't improve them. This would only serve to imprint a bad definition of "RP" on users. It's bad enough that have the userbase has no idea what it is, but these changes would turn RPing into "that thing we have to do in order to get kills."

The vision startup roll is already tremendously powerful. The only reason we downplay vision is because so many vision people are willing to lend their services for the construction of IA lists. Without that organization, vision is immensely powerful.

There is no monopoly on hitters. What little "skill" you think existed back when they got rid of hitlisting, then added AJAX, then added a way of paying for kills, then changed it so you are essentially guaranteed that purchased kill, is gone. There is no skill in hitting, and there are no hitting elites. There are people will more motivation, time, or money, but there is no glass ceiling for any user to pick up hitting, especially with the prevalence of IA lists.

I personally think the RIA/MIA system needs reworked because it is flat out OOC in every way. I think that kills should go to the most organized and most prepared crews, not simply the person who lands the hit in an IA race. I suggested a system months ago that involved integrating the Business District into a feature that would essentially spawn a certain number of IAs based on the activity of businesses. This spawn system could be manipulated by credits in a way that would bring more targets to that city, but it would have a limit. Additionally, it was only available to Made+s.

Anyways, I'm 100% with you that we need to revamp the IA system and I would love to sit down and hash out ideas about how to do just that, but I'm 100% against you in forcing people to train vision in order to train their gun. I think it would only serve to make people hate it.

I don't think this would make training a gun any less boring. I think it would shoehorn people into playing a certain way which they obviously don't want to do, just for the sake of getting kills. I don't think that will make it enjoyable for them and it probably won't be very enjoyable to read either. We should be encouraging greater diversity in playing styles, not making them homogeneous as that would be boring.

I'm all for doing something different with the wacking/IAs system, but I don't think adopting these changes would be beneficial for the majority of users.