"While the new crimes system will increase the nerve cap by huge amounts (120+), I'm not against increasing the nerve cap for the current crimes system beforehand."
To the people wasting nerve in emptying the jail by busting... remember that since the busting nerf Ched has said that crimes give more experience than busting...
I've worked for years to build my NB, I've lost my 45nb a dozen times over. And here I am, still at 45. It makes no sense on how people can maintain a 45 and when the update comes out, they automatically get the increase. There is really something wrong with the crime exp system if some who's got only 25k crimes has more crime exp than someone with 50k crimes. No way should anyone loss that much exp over 25k crimes.
I am in the same boat. I have 50 though with the faction special. The reason some folks automatically got their nerve bars increased is due to they probably had enough CE to attain the higher nerve bars. I would say, keep working at it for now. And remember, those red results do hurt your CE.
You still not figuring how nerve bars work... You could have 500k crimes and other user ONLY 10k and his nerve bar would be bigger then yours. If you want, i can explain you by mail...:)
My nerve is now 73. Its upgraded 10 times with merits of course. I dont sleep much at night so i can go to sleep and it never fills up during work nights :P
How many hard crime failures do you have though? I know I got a big increase on mine, but I've only had a handful of hard reds and that was over 4 years ago.