Investing in gangs

[Russell]

Hi all -

There's something we've been playing with that we'd like to solicit your ideas and opinions about: gang zones.

On Las Venturas Playground, we've got gangs—groups of players working together, and we've got houses—the ability for players to permanently establish themselves on the map. This gives us enough information to determine zoning: any area in which the active members of gang are dominant will become their territory.

So, what does that look like in practice? In steps:

• A gang is considered eligible for a zone when they have at least five active members on the server.
  
• A gang member is considered active when they've visited the server in the past six months, with extensions based on online time.
  
• A gang area is any area in which more than 50% of the gang's active members own a house. They have to be reasonably close together.
  
• Gang dominance is granted when most of the houses in a gang area are owned by a gang's members, when they're active or not.
  

This is all a bit technical. You can read even more details in this GitHub description if you're interested. Let's talk about what it means:

• Any group of five or more active players is eligible to get a zone.
  
• This isn't limited to one zone: they could have one in Las Venturas, one in San Fierro, and one underwater for all I care. Up to eight. This does depend on the number of houses their members can own. (VIPs can have up to three.)
  
• Such zones will be permanently displayed on the map, in their colour.
  

That brings me to the purpose of this topic. What can you actually do with a gang zone?

We're undecided about this, and in the first release (likely LVP 44) we'll only display the zones. We'd love to hear your ideas here!

Some of mine:

• We could allow gangs to buy health regeneration for their zone, making it appealing to have local fights.
  
• Gangs could be allowed to purchase barriers, watch towers, barrels and other things to develop their own area and defences.
  
• Vehicles local to area could become configurable by the gang, for example to always be black, or a particular sort of vehicle.
  
• Maybe we'll want to allow gangs to be able to play a certain music stream in their zone?
  

Let us hear your ideas! I've attached a map showing you where the first three zones would be based on the current gangs and houses. Who they belong to is left as an exercise to the reader, and this will change over time as gangs change their mobilisation.

Thanks,
Russell