I am suggestins a new city. There are too few postions to lead in the citys at the moment and wars are getting to scarce because of alliances been made.

A new city would make more options for regular players who have died to change the usual leaders.

I think if there was to be a new city no leader or Gdfather could opoint one of theres because of alliance.

Maybe a admin to set up until he can find a person to take over the crew to prevent alliances.

Please post and let me hear your opinions.

I can't believe that you are advocating a new city because "wars are getting to (sic) scarce."

A new city of St. Louis was announced months ago and is being held up due to some forum coding issues. Hopefully we will see it soon!

Soon could mean days, months, years.

You got a timeline of some sort on you Rourke?

Not a clue. Here was the original announcement thread for the city: http://mafiareturns.com/comm/thread/49457

I know the administrative staff is always busy coding various things for the game, but I cannot personally give you a timeline for this.

Whilst I agree that we have deceptively few positions of actual leadership, the introduction of a new city would do nothing to aid this and the suggestion of an admin to become this embroiled in player matters, again, would be a terrible move. 

I will offer you some logic I've gleaned over a number of ill spent years. Wars used to involve several crews across the cities. Numerous crews would stay neutral in the conflict, for a variety of reasons, usually self preservation but occasionally something more intelligent. What you will discover is that people are hypocritical and only really think something is bad when it happens to them. I'm not excluding myself from that, I tend to care a lot more when it is my head being chopped than when I am egging people on from the crowd baying for blood.

So anyway, a war very rarely involved more than probably 50% of the game at any one time. This was acceptable as I imagine the balance of amount of dead players return + new players + return of old players at exciting events + increased activity > amount of players leaving as a result of the conflict. This equation, which I'm sure someone can formulate better than I just did, is foremost in the minds of the MafiaReturns "community" i.e. those concerned with the non-playing element of the game.

In the current climate where we have relationships of several months (often through real life and this game) between the foremost decision makers in our world, we reach a stage where only something completely out of character is going to cause friction. Like Odd shooting one of New York's bosses for example. This is something unplanned and usually would not occur. To the parties involved this was likely an inevitable impasse and resulted in a surprising turn of events. These things are not common between allies of this calibre and unlikely to be repeated very often, which is why this is the only real war between anyone the entire duration of my account.

Add into this mix of real life relationships the fact that some of these people have genuine responsibilities to MafiaReturns that they have to consider and balance against playing the game, you soon realize that any global conflict, that could be detrimental to the betterment of MafiaReturns rather than individual characters should be avoided. This altruistic concern for the betterment of the site should really be commended.

It does have the counterbalance of causing stagnancy and a lack of wars and turnover. Everyone gets a really nice ranked account and spends lots of money/credits in order to earn them. This in turn is better for the owners of the game.

This is because in order to rank at any pace you need X amount of Jail busts. Jails cost X amount of money. In order to get your busts to rank highly you are going to have to spend X amount of money. The more people spending this money = more money for MafiaReturns.

I would imagine a full scale conflict that involved every city would cause new players who have been likely hustled into their crews to have no real clue what was going on and thus die. They would then likely become disillusioned and leave. The duration of the engagement likely caused more players to leave and not bother chancing it again. The prospect of investing the time into another account after losing one of several months probably resulted in more people leaving. The loss of players was probably greater than the influx of new accounts. This in turn leads to a downturn in activity and spending. This is not good for MafiaReturns as a whole. More money is then needed to be spent on advertising to bring new players in to replace those lost.

Any war that would happen now would likely have to be from someone outside of the group of Godfathers who know each other in real life and have commitments to the game beyond their playing accounts. This therefore means that anyone intending to cause this war would be pitting themselves up against this group of Godfathers. Put in simpler terms, this means they are going to die.

Keep in mind as well that some people would rather just play the game. These are not good people to have in charge of the game as they do not consider the implications of their actions in a non-player capacity. Therefore the current group who do are far better for 'MafiaReturns' than a maverick with no concern beyond playing their account.

Therefore the introduction of a new city would result in an auth who would also not bring about a war, unless it was their intention to die immediately, which I doubt it would be. Even if it was they would then be replaced by someone who understood their position in the hierarchy - some power but you aren't top of the pyramid. Bringing an admin into this mix would eliminate the player aspect altogether as they would obviously just appoint someone who is better for the game and new players.

I can see your thinking behind this suggestion, to pretend that wars aren't the most interesting aspect of this game to players would be naive. However, that isn't necessarily what is better for MafiaReturns, which is why Rourke (someone with a greater interest in 'MafiaReturns' rather than his personal account) could not believe you suggested a new city for something as potentially detrimental to the game as a war. Even though for the reasons stated previously the introduction of a new city would be extremely unlikely to cause this.

Hopefully some of that made sense.

~T~

(I would like a timeline from you personally, Rourke. Not from someone who may actually know the answer, just your own guess.)