That was a pretty classy response MoeLester, hope that helps you sleep at night buddy. Personally I prefer to lift people up rather then put them down, the happiness it brings me isn't shallow that way. Whatever floats your boat though bud, it's not my job to tell you how to live your life. :)

Thanks for your input EmanueleCaruso, and for keeping on topic with your response.

 In this example drivers not paying attention.

Yeah.. bit like someone setting up as a CL but not paying attention to the obvious warning that the act they are committing will lose work they did? Hmmmm. 

Ah, it seems Moe had already pointed out the obviousness behind that. My bad.

I did not jump you for making a real world example BobbyMunson, I jumped you for focusing on "Who is at fault in my original example." That is a question that is not up for debate, I have admitted over and over that I made a mistake, the goal of this thread is a look at changing the system. If I was mad about what happened to me I would have posted this in a different forum. I am not mad, I just want change because I believe the current setup does not offer fun, nor do I feel it is fair or right to negative impact a player for taking a step up. Games impair your progress with time, with experience requirements, and with money. They do not impair your progress by going "Hey have a new rank, oh and we're taking your experience away." That is my issue with the system. Surely there is a better way to handle making sure people "earn there bones" as you guys like to say without negatively impacting a players progress within the game as measure by the experience metric. This is the way most people feel accomplishment in games, so to do this for anything but the death of the player is incredibly extreme and should be done in my opinion as an alternative form of admin punishment for bad behavior. 

"Hey have a new rank, oh and we're taking your experience away."

Its not saying have a new rank. It's saying takea new rank but do so at the expense of experience. The choice is yours.

Surely there is a better way to handle making sure people "earn there bones" as you guys like to say without negatively impacting a players progress

Yes, receive a promotion from your Crewleader as is intended in the roles of this Role Play Game. Why else do you think Civilian to Wise Guy are automatic and Made+ are awarded by another User. Because that is the intention of the game, to earn the promotion and as you quite rightly said, make your bones. The alternative is to take that rank yourself by means of self promotion and as such it is deemed that any extra experience earned over and above Made Man is sacrficied as a consequence of you choosing to take that promotion instead of being awarded it in the conventional method.

As I said - I personally don't feel a WG should be able to set up. Slash has said it better than most in this thread, as far as I'm concerned:

You cannot in the Mafia be a Self Made Man.

I think that is succinct a sentence as needs be spoken here. I couldn't agree with it more. Like I said previously - I'm all for removal of the entire WG setting up nonsense as Moe (perhaps flippantly) suggested. I don't think it's right for an associated civilian to be able to set up on any mafia turf then promote himself to whatever rank he deems fit, because the title of Made Man is sacrosanct - something you appear to not fully appreciate.

That being said, you were quite critical of that suggestion, so having wracked my brain, the only other suggestion I can think of that would make any sense in the mafia world would be for a WG to be allowed to set up, but not allowed to proceed down the ranking route until a GF is in place to bestow the honour that said WG has circumvented by setting up his own HQ prior to being made.

Keep your units, sure, but you'll be held at WG until you've proven to a superior that you're worthy of the prestigious rank and title of Made Man. If that means you gotta wait 120 days until someone else meets the GF requirements, so be it, because as a family head - a GF is then your only superior. However, that would also mean you wouldn't be able to promote your subordinates to MM, which I would say is perfectly reasonable considering the circumstances. Would that discourage recruitment? Almost certainly, but is setting up at WG something we want to encourage?

Just got wet listening to Pan.

Your suggestions, both of them are very well Pan, I appreciate your thoughtful input on the topic at hand. My only concern with the later would be in the event the game was completely wiped. At that point without outside interference from the admins your later suggestion would be a dead stall at WG for the entire community. Otherwise I could definitely jump on board with it as a much better solution to the issue then the current implementation.

I've been here since the game was created Otiag, we are yet to have a situation where there are No leaders.

As it should be for realism, I do like to design for all encounters, not just the expected. However I would be perfectly fine with the implementation Pan just suggested. It does gate the user a bit, but it does not do so in a way that makes them feel like they wasted time. That is my main issue with the current setup.

I can't tell (mostly out of memory) how many years I've played this game, and in that entire time there has never been a 'true' server wipe. I'm not sure if you mean where all CLs kill all others, and I guess the last one commits seppuku, or where Squishy goes in and just deletes every single player's character and we all start from square one. Frankly I just don't see either case happening.

In the ten years I've been playing there has only been one time when there have been no leaders and that's when there was a reset, it has never happened due to a war and I doubt it ever will.

I think that there has been three times that there were no leaders (Unless mario did a reset or two before the .org invasion which was soon after it went live.) and none of them were because of a war.

The first time was when the gave first went live. The second was right before the Anita era I believe, I could be wrong on this one though. The third was right after the "cycles" (A period of time where there were short cycles with automatic resets after two or so weeks.) when we started fresh and new. I'm pretty sure we've had two resets since it went live though.

We've had near site clearing wars where there is one or two leaders left standing, but never a war that killed every leader. I've been around a LONG time, since the day I heard of MR's existence (Before the domain had been bought or the name of the game decided on.) from my dear friend Evsie.