From MafiaMatrix to Made Men

Introduction

We're all here because we love this game and community, and while I'm sad that Moberater is stepping down, I am also excited and enthusiastic about the prospect of reviving the game and raising it to its former glory.

Now that I've said the sappy stuff, lets get down to business! The reason I am writing this, is so that I can better express to the community regarding what Roger and myself are trying to achieve with this "MMv2" undertaking. Below you will find an explanation of what we perceive as the fundamental faults in MafiaMatrix, and how we plan to rectify them.

Please note, that everything described here is up for discussion. This is your community as much as it is mine, and all we hope to do is provide the best service possible to you guys. I hope many of you will take the time to read this fully, and join our discussions either on IRC or in-game.

Now without further ado; let us begin.

The problem with MafiaMatrix

Without getting too nostalgic, I want to talk about Injustice – I will assume you have prior knowledge of Injustice for the purpose of this section. Since MM was built off the IJ platform, we inherited the game mechanics as well as the platform. What I mean by this is simple; we inherited a game revolving around earns, aggs, GBHs and whacks. However, we also inherited a game that was initially designed to be legit vs. crime.

As many of you have noticed, the legit careers have never really had a chance to match the firepower of the criminal path. In MM, we tried to resolve this by implementing things like respect, newb pro, and more recently, reduced damage to legits. All of these changes are made, because the game tries to throw legit players against gangsters.

Let me give you an example to elaborate what I mean. Consider the law and police careers; these two careers which you could call the core of the legit world, and they are pointed towards convicting gangsters. Naturally the crew leaders don't want to go to jail for a few hours for each of the mugs they do, so they adopt a 'sentence = death' stance. At the end of the day, the game is forcing these situations, and it's happening all over the place in little areas. These are ultimately the areas we want to address.

What's going to change

I want there to be no mistake here. This is not a 'patch' or a few new features that we are adding. We are starting this entire thing from scratch, every single system is going back to the drawing board, and anything that isn't necessary and enjoyable is going to be removed!

This means our initial release is going to be a lot smaller than MafiaMatrix is now. We're going to start from the bare minimum and work our way up from there according to what you as a community want. Here are a few things we've decided to change, understand that they're not final and we're definitely open to amending what we've concepted thus far.

Making legitimate careers important

We're looking at ways to create a symbiotic relationship between gangsters and legits. This way gangsters won't be killing legits, because they benefit from them surviving. Our emphasis is on creating a gangster vs. gangster world where legits are only a supporting cast. This will mean that a lot of the systems that are currently in place will be reworked, below is a list of a few of the items we have discussed:

General legit changes

• You have one chance to be legit, there is no going back once you have become a gangster.
• All legitimate players will create a death sentence case if they are murdered.
• Doing aggs or whacks as a legit will have a chance of getting you fired. Once fired you will be forced into gangster. It may happen on your first agg, or it may never happen - but the risk is there.
• Only legitimate players will be able to own businesses.

Example: The law career

This is going to have a huge overhaul. Currently Judges are pressured into not sentencing cases. This is the type of conflict we want to remove from the game, so we decided to remove the 'sentencing' aspect of the law career and simply give lawyers more specialisation. Here's a simple breakdown:

• Every agg/whack in MM will create a case, however the handling of this case will be done by the game - not a player.
• Lawyers will be able to get players off a case the same as before, however their success rate will specialise on the type of specialisation they choose.
  i.e. they can specialise in robbery, theft, murder, etc.
• Every case will be defendable, even death sentences. So even if you kill a legit, you will have a chance to survive the death sentence - how good of a chance depends on your lawyer.

Gangster changes

In our opinion, the big gangster wars have been the best thing in MM, except when they come down to a single unstoppable tank killing everyone on their own. We've put in changes over the years to make it as team based as possible (MHS, Maxhp, respect), however none of those systems worked the way we wanted.

Here is a list of the things we're considering for our new gangster career.

• Each character gains a strength and a weakness depending on their overall balance of stats; strength/defence/intelligence. Whichever stat they have the most of becomes thier character 'type'.
  • Think of scissors, paper, rock. Where strength > intelligence > defence > strength. Each type has a type it is both strong against and weak against.
  • This type of system will mean that you will need to plan your wars better, and while one of your crew may be stronger in total, that person may not be the ideal individual for all hits.
• We have not determined if character 'types' will be visible to everyone, or only visible to crew members, or completely hidden.
• Crew fronts will provide passive bonuses to crew members, such as skills or passive bonuses. By damaging or destroying the crew front a rival crew will gain a massive advantage in a conflict and cripple your rivals while you're at it. Your choice in a war will be whether you wish to play aggressively and try to hurt your enemies or passively and try to protect yourself.
• Just as you have a character type, you will also have a crew type which will give greater bonuses against another type of crew. The choice of crew type will be available to your crew leader, and can be changed but at great expense.
• Crew diplomacy is something we're looking at as well. So you could create a formal alliance with another family that would have nasty penalties for breaking the truce. Naturally we will create ways to circumvent these treaties, so backstabbing will still be around ;)
• The drug trade and black market will be reworked. More details on this later.