progression

Does anyone know how you advance in this game? i feel like i'm sort of just stuck, making progress incredibly slowly. I do races and gain basically nothing. I do crimes every day but i've been stuck shoplifting for like a year even using my merits to increase my success rate. I train in the gym every day but each stat is just over 1000 now and i get destroyed by people. I've done quite a few education courses with little to show for it. I find the missions incredibly boring and energy intensive for rewards of little value. I earn 50,000 a day with my job at the florist and get rare flowers to increase that but the money is soon stolen from me by much higher level people or it doesn't go very far.

Then i see people with characters much younger than me that own big businesses, have their own private islands and are much higher levels. Is there something i'm missing? Some secret to the game? Please enlighten me

You'd have to define progress first

Do you want to progress in terms of wealth? Crime experience? Battlestats? More friends? Merits?

Once you've chosen the topic you want to progress on, check the guides section. There's an abundance of advice around. Just pick one topic at a time and read all the guides you can find.

And some newbie accounts may have bought their progress with RL cash (buying DPs, selling them ingame) or have been given a lot of wealth by friends who've been playing much longer.

The key to success in this game is activity. It is very competitive.

Your energy bar should only fill up when you are sleeping, if this isnt the case then you probably arent active enough to do well in this game.

Addendum

Logging in once a day is not the key to success. Looking at your crimes clicked total i think you login once a day or less.

There are thousands of players who log into this game 4 times a day.

Activity is the most important. Torn is a marathon, not a sprint, but you will always be falling behind because some people are able to sprint more throughout the entire marathon. There will also always be someone ahead of you.

2 tangible things in this game really matter, money and stats. Money allows greater stats. But money needs to be managed. You can spend everything you have on stats today youll get the most you can today, but financially youll suffer or stagnate. So it helps to budget amd balance. What expenses do you need? How much can you make your money grow?

Outside of stats and money there are plenty of awards to pursue. Maybe some of them arent worth it when you consider the importance of money and stats, but the pursuit of different challenges adds a lot of flavor to this game.

ABDS. Always be doing something. With the right goals or plans you can always be moving forward in some direction, even if you make mistakes or suffer setbacks in others.

While I tend to agree from the perspective of my own style of play, this isn't true entirely. It all depends on what type of player you want to be. You cannot compete with those who've been around forever, but you can chose your peers and compete with those.

Or you can chose another route, for instance running a company, or racing or... whatever. Playing for combat and faction wars isn't the only thing you can do. Some play poker most of the time. Some just want to run a company. Others just want to troll the forums, like that dude of whom I forgot the name.

You are 394 days old, and you are level 12. That's holding you back.

Level 15 is very important. It lets you travel. The ability to travel is very important, because it lets you make a lot more money, and it lets you travel to rehab. The job you are in lets you carry an extra 5 flowers back from overseas, but that ability doesn't help if you can't travel at all.

Compare your logins to mine. In 2 or 3 weeks I'll overtake your logins. I leveled up to 15 under 14 days. Granted I got some help. But the help I got only is just the pi I'm living in plus a few items. Complete Facebook torn to level 5 to get you 15 days of donator status and a goodie bag which is about 25 million. With your stats I could be level 15 in under 72 hours with me being able to sleep about 6 hours a day. I've got a target I know could get you there that fast since I best on him from level 12 on to level 15. Currently I'm even holding level. But all your "progress" could have been achieved in 2 weeks of activity.

Thank you everyone for all the great replies. I know i should be a much higher level by now but i simply didn't know how to get there. I spent my first few months in a shack for gods sake. All the information on this thread and private messages should get me there!

You should be able to beat https://www.torn.com/profiles.php?XID=325378 and if not https://www.torn.com/profiles.php?XID=603201

Hit Level 15 as soon as you can. Game possibilities open up then - ie travelling to different countries and doing plushie/flower runs for profit.

To lvl up - Find someone around your level you can take out, then 'Leave'' for max. experience gains towards leveling. Don't mug or hospitalize.