I understand that what I’m about to suggest would include a major overhaul to a big part of the game, however I feel it’s worth mentioning and maybe some parts of it can be implemented.

Also thanks in advance to anyone who gives their comment on this; I’m sure there are lots things that could be reviewed.

Any statement marked with * will be explained further down in the post.

Body guards

In most areas, the game tries its best to be as realistic as possible then for some reason, when it comes to BGs you can have more than 700! That just doesn’t make sense to me. Let alone that someone with a good enough gun can come by and shoot through all your 700+ BGs and kill you.

My suggestion is to limit the numbers, bring them down to around 10 or even less. In exchange increase the usefulness of each of them. Also BGs need to eat too, let’s pay them salary.

Another thing that doesn’t make sense is how the BGs gain ‘Health’ every time you train them. Health points, really? Instead of only one skill (health points), I suggest that there be two skills for BGs, Marksmanship and Loyalty.

BG marksmanship:  This skill will determine how well your BG can do in a shoot-out*, their chance of landing a fatal hit on their target and how they fare against other BGs*. This skill can be increased either by training the BG or sending them out to shoot other BGs*. It will however decay with time.

BG Loyalty: this skill will determine the vigilance of the BG, how good they will react to a shooter, their chance of whack-back and how well they can protect you. It will also affect the BGs action if you are killed in a shootout*. This skill will improve with time and by giving them their salary on time. If they can save you from an attempt on your life, it will greatly boost their Loyalty. This skill will decay if they receive their salary with delay and also witnessing the death of fellow BGs will adversely affect their Loyalty.

Gun training

Why should there be an Attack timer? Cause it takes a gangster  one hour to pull the trigger again? Of course not. To prevent someone with a big gun to take down the entire MR? Probably.

The current method of gun training leads to an unbalanced sharing of this very important skill. So here is my suggestion on how it could be changed for better. And let’s get rid of timer attack timer as a first move.

Shooting Range

Currently shooting range becomes unusable when a limit is reached which again has no realistic value and is placed to balance the game play. Also unrealistic is that the amount of money you need to pay goes up with your rank, so a wiseguy who can’t shoot at all must pay more than a thug who is much better trained. Here is my proposal.

Once you start you will be slightly trained, meaning somewhere between 0% and 100% in the startup roll. Anyone who is slightly trained would pay 50,000 and will have to wait 1 hour for using shooting range again. Then once you reach 100% (or alternatively by rolling 100 on startup), you become Trained and have to pay 100,000 and wait for 2 hours. Then this continues as is mentioned in the table bellow

Training BGs will be limited to once per 12 hours, each costing 50,000. Their skill will degrade by one per day.

MIA

This proposal is similar to the one about the shooting range. The price will however stay at 1 credit as it is now. The number of MIAs you can spawn will however lessen as your gun gets better. Don’t forget that there is no attack timer so theoretically you can spawn the maximum amount one after another.

Further changes and explanation

Each time you train in shooting range, or kill an MIA you will gain +1. Your gun will however decay by -1 per day and anyone who is insanely well trained will lose -2 per day. So, someone like this will have to spend at least a million per day not to let his gun degrade. If he wants to raise his gun into higher greatness, he needs to look out to IAs and Durdens.

You may say that without the timers, you can now go through Durdens like popcorn and get a whole bunch of +1s, so what’s stopping you? Well, the answer is simple, the same thing that is stopping you now; other people. Lets imagine 200 durdens are spawned, if there is timer, it will take hours till they are all dead and each person can kill 3 or 4 durdens. Without attack timer the whole thing will last a couple of minutes, but again on average each person would kill 3 or 4. This will actually make the entire thing much more fun as everyone is hurrying to the spot. There is one matter though, what about the times that around 2000 durdens are spawned? In this case people who are online at that time can get much more than they would have with timers. So I suggest that if the admins want to spawn 2000 durdens, they should do it 100 per hour or so. This will again make the entire thing much more fun because after a few hours most people will stay online waiting for the next spawn and then you have more than hundred people rushing over 100 durdens, that’ll be awesomely fun.

Attacking

There are currently two types, WACK and BG WACK. These two will keep their names, but their mechanics would change greatly. I will explain in detail.

WACK

Once you decide to WACK someone either of three things will happen

1.   Assassination: when you are offline it would be as though your character is sleeping, so his guard is down and he cannot wack-back. The BGs also aren’t on full alert so you are susceptible to harm. In this case the shooter will attempt Assassination instead of WACK; he will take one shot at you. If the bullet hits, it is the end of the story. If not, depending on the loyalty of your BGs they may or may not be vigilant enough to detect him and return fire (if they do detect him, you will receive witness report from them when you come back online) and if their marksmanship is high enough they can end up hurting or killing the assassin.

2.  WACK: when you are online you are alert and can wack-back the shooter. Your BGs are also on full alert and are very likely to see the shooter and return fire. The shooter however will not be alone either and his BGs will help him by taking shots at your BGs. Once wack is initiated the shooter and his BGs will hit you and your BGs and you and your BGs can detect him and return fire. If you are killed, your BGs will do one of the following depending on their loyalty. If their loyalty is less than a set amount, they will drop their guns and surrender and if it’s really low they would even offer the shooter to join him without a hiring price. If their loyalty is high they will continue shooting till either they are dead or all of the shooter’s BGs are dead, in which case they will now escape. If their loyalty is very high, they wouldn’t escape and instead commit suicide, disallowing the others from killing them and gaining +1.

3.  Shoot-out: if WACK is initiated and the victim survives, the shooter can initiate a Shoot-out by pressing the wack button again (since there is no attack timer). The victim will get a pop-up to run to another district if he wants, but that window closes within 5 seconds. If the victim decides not to run away or the 5 seconds pass, the shoot-out starts. The victim will now be fully aware who the shooter was (in case he didn’t get a proper look at the shooter the first time) and will now actively take shots at the shooter. The shoot-out will end when either of the two is dead, until then they continue taking shots at each other. The BGs of the losing side will then react as was mentioned in the above depending on their loyalty.

BG WACK

This also falls into two categories:

1.  The shooter hunts for BGs: this will remain as it is now.

2.   Sending your BGs to kill others BGs: doing so will increase their marksmanship, if they succeed. The victim who gets his BGs shot will have no way of knowing who that was ordered the shots. Unless if the shooter and the victim are from the same city in which case you will receive a notification like this “those BGs looked familiar to you, perhaps someone in your own district”. If the shooter and victim from in the same district the victim will get a scrambled name. If they are from the same crew, he will be sure who they were and who they work for.

Conclusion

All these brought together will change the game in many ways, and I believe for the better. However, there surely are some suggestions inside the entire post that on their own can be nice additions as well.

The aim is that killing other characters will become a more difficult and riskier business and that it would require more team-work instead of shoot first and win.

The bodyguard cap is somewhere in the 280ish range I believe. Not 700. Even if the number is 300, I concur that we have too many bodyguards. The cap is said to lower when everyone with the max cap dies and the admins can lower it without effecting those that are active. Lowering the BG cap means we must lower the number of free kills/durden spawns that we see so often too. It all must be balanced.

To the rest of your suggestion, I'll read that part now.

The 300 BGs could be role playing guards at the compound or where ever that person is staying like a private military. The one shot could be from a sniper rifle.

Taking another look at the number of BGs, you guys are right it was more like 300, and has been reduced after the recent wars. but the statement remains pretty much the same and I'd argue for it, but my more important points are further down. I know this is a very long post, but I organised as neatly as I could to make it less daunting. And I'm sure there at least a few things further down that you may wanna comment on.

"My suggestion is to limit the numbers, bring them down to around 10 or even less. In exchange increase the usefulness of each of them. Also BGs need to eat too, let’s pay them salary."

if you bring this amount down you have to make them harder to kill because otherwise all ppl die to easy. if you do that tho then it will be hard for every1 to help out in a war so it will suck for some with nothing to do so even tho the numbers are silly it lets us small ppl help out so it is good really. most of these ideas seem like really big changes that will change a lot about the game to make it not this game anymore and i dont like that.

I think that the continued training once your gun is maxed could be a nice alternative, but I don't know if I would necessarily want it to be the main source.

Also, in regards to how your BGs would work, I definitely would not want something that further encourages offline whacking. As it is, (I assume) shooting online versus offline is essentially the same other than the quicker backlash if people survive. However, your system seems to incentivize it.