I know people don't like reading long suggestions, so I'll start with the suggestion in its briefest form:

• Witness Statements no longer use *s or scrambled name. Witness Statements will contain the whole name of the shooter.
• Witness Statements are not always sent out for every shot. When a shot is taken, the "district awareness" is measured by the number of active people in the district and their collective info skill. If the stealth of the shooter exceeds this measurement, no WS is sent out.
• Stealth is now trained. The stealth answer set grants an enormous boost in this process. Stealthed PPs and BG wacks on non-NPC out-of-district targets would grant stealth skill. Non-NPC kills would grant stealth skill.
• Stealth training tapers at higher levels so that as it becomes easier to stealth your targets, the reward for your stealth skill decreases.
• The changes to Witness Statements are the logical conclusion of the changes we made to locals. If you're stealthy enough your name isn't listed on the locals list, not scrambled with *s. I think the scrambling and use of *s make it so stealth unequally benefits those with 6-8 letter-names using common letters, whereas this means of determining WSs wouldn't hinge on the name of the shooter.

The option to make stealth a trainable skill also seems to be an intuitive way to play into the stealth vs. vision dynamic. Presently, that dynamic is absolutely dominated by vision, and stealth provides almost no unique play style options. I'm not saying stealth should dominate the dynamic, I just think that since stealth is static it will forever be eclipsed by mediocre vision.

I think stealth needs reworked in some way to make it an actual play style. I think there should be a discussion about such a rework, and I think this is the place to do it. So rather than try to provide all of my arguments for this suggestion, I'd rather people just ask questions and voice their concerns and I'll respond to them.

I don't think it would integrate very nicely with existing stealth and info skills. One, because stealth cannot currently be trained. Therefore, there's no difference in stealth skills between when users signed up and now. Two, the way that stealth is trained in the suggestion would integrate pretty well into the existing system: those who favored stealth in their answer set have a boost in training it but after a certain point the skill is tapered, those who favored other stats in their roll or answer set will not have that boost but can still train stealth if they chose to do so. This integrates better and more immediately than the defense answer set changes because those changes provided a feature that was only available to defense-answers users, whereas this change doesn't grant anything that isn't already be available to every player (as in, everyone can train stealth but not everyone can get the bonuses of defense answers). Third, I see this both as a way of making features unique to vision and stealth while also making vision more valuable on a community level. Presently, I think vision dominates the existing system, and stealth could use some love.

Sorry to get so wordy, but I think it integrates very well with the existing system. I think it encourages diverse play style, it encourages a base level of training for vision to protect your people from stealth attacks, and it provides new tools for the players to accomplish their objectives. Plus, I think this could actually bring the hitlist back as a real way of targeting someone. Though that's an entirely indirect consequence of this change.

Did that answer your question? I fear I may have rambled a bit. If you're looking for exact figures on how we derive district awareness and stealth boosts, I can get into that. But I think I answered what you were asking.