Advanced Jail Bust Guide

Advanced Jail Bust Guide

I remember a few years ago when I was looking to understand how busting works and couldn’t find any guide about it. I have seen pieces of advice here and there but they were mostly hearsay or very approximative (maybe I didn’t know where to look). I forgot about it until a little over a year ago when I started busting people more actively and started wondering how I could maximize my daily bust count. In the meantime I joined a law firm which has a perk that let’s you see your success chance before attempting a bust. This perk let me experiment a few ideas and get a better understanding of the mechanics at play. Most of this was done earlier this year and now I've decided it's time to share it with all of you who might be interested.


This guide might not yet be helpful to everyone since everything could only be tested on 10* law firm employees. Actually its place is somewhere between guide/discussion. Nevertheless, everyone can get a better understanding of the trends. It is important to note that some things are still speculations, I simply propose a model and theory that I could test with the help of other law firm employees. I’ll gladly accept any feedback as it will probably be positive for our future and better understanding of how the jail works.


If you are already very familiar with busting and are only interested in some graphs and slightly more in-depth explanation of the findings, you can skip ahead.

Note: Appart from busts there are other ways to get out of jail. The lawyer business card (instantly get out of jail when using it, no questions asked), a perk from the law city job (get anyone out of jail for 15 job points), bails or self busts. None of these options count towards the total bust stat (thanks to Politics [2250481] for testing the federal judge perk).

The basics

What is the point of spending all this nerve on busting? Some say it is a waste. Some say it will gives you some crime experience, but the gains are probably very little. To me, the best thing about these is there are bunch of merits to collect! (4 awards and 7 medals. awards at 250, 1000, 2500 and 10000 busts and medals at 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 6000 and 8000). A lot of player overlook them because they require a long term commitment. It is up to you to decide if you want to add busting to your daily torn routine and if you do, this guide is here to help you. With the recent changes related to crime experience loss for failing crimes, the jail will likely get packed and it would be the perfect time to get started!

The outcomes

Everytime you perform a bust, there are three possible outcomes. You will either succeed (yay!), fail without penalty or fail, get caught and sent to jail yourself. Please note that getting jailed for a failed bust will not damage your crime experience or nerve bar. There is probably no loss, and if there is one it is so little that it’s negligible (I tested that unintentionally by being reckless and getting jailed a lot doing this research, however not only did I remain part of a PA team but my crime experience kept increasing).


After you click the bust button, the outcome is dependant on a few things:

• The bust's difficulty (target level and time they're in for)
• Your skill (your level, your perks)
• The penalty from previous busts (those you did in the past 72 hours)

The perks

Education

• LAW2920: Gain a 5% bonus to your skill in busting
• LAW2970: Gain a 10% bonus to your skill in busting
• LAW3102: Gain two bonuses: Busting is 50% easier and buying is 50% cheaper

Company (Law Firm)

• Closing argument(5*): Easier to bust more people at once.
• Educated decision(10*): View success chance of potential busts.

Faction (criminality branch)

• Bust skill I-X: Increases bust success chance by 5% (so up to 50% with all ten upgrades)
• Bust nerve I-III: Decreases bust nerve cost by 1 (so busts will only cost 2 nerve with all three upgrades)

The Book Shawshank Sure Ain’t For me!

• Large jail bust & escape boost for 31 days

Of these perks,“Bust nerve” is the only one that will not influence your success chance, but it will significantly reduce the nerve you have to spend, especially if you want all the merits.


The wording for the education and faction perks are similar but different, it is unclear if they act the same way. If they’re the same, that would be a bonus of up to 147.5% in busting skill (to be tested). How the 5* law firm perk works is still unknown and a mystery. I suspect it isn’t like the other ones due to the very different phrasing. However,both the faction and education perk allow you to "bust more people at once" so maybe they’re the same in the end. The problem is it cannot be tested yet as we would still need the 10* perk to study its effect…
The effect of the book hasn’t been thoroughly tested either. As a reference, anecdotal evidence showed daily count about tripled for an active buster. The bonus is huge and it is highly recommended that you join a law firm and a faction with the perks while reading this book.

Level and sentence duration -> difficulty:

The higher your level, the easier it will be to bust someone out of jail. Inversely, the higher their level, the harder it will become. Also, the longer their sentence, the harder it will be. Without considering the perks and recent busts, the difficulty of a bust is proportional to your level, inversely proportional to your target’s level and proportional to their sentence duration arbitrarily increased by 3hours. This means it gets twice as easy if you double your level, and it also means that for short durations, the time is less important than the targets level.

As an example, imagine a level 20 jailed for 1h and a level 10 jailed for 3h. 20*(1+3) =80, 10*(3+3)=60. In this case it would actually be easier to bust the level 10 even though he’s in jail for much longer. But a level 15 that is in for 1 hour is exactly as difficult to bust as the level 10 we just mentioned. 15*(1+3)=60

Obviously you won’t do this every time but it can help you recognize more favourable potential busts. These optimal targets never stay in jail for long so you’ll have to be quick.

If you want to know more about the formula, it will be explained in more details later.
It won't tell you your success chance but it can help you decide which target is best.


Note: The reason why a person is in jail has no influence on the difficulty of the bust. In bold because I have read that it is supposed to be easier to bust someone if "They were sentenced for a failed bust or self-bust" on the wiki. During our research we noticed no significant difference between failed busts and any other reason. In fact, if you failed to a bust with a lowere difficulty than yours (formula above), don't attempt to self-bust because you will inevitably fail. Maybe they meant they’re easier to bust because the sentence is shorter, in which case it is true but misleading.
It is also stated that "There needs to be a ten-minute break between each bust chain.".
Again, nothing in our results supports a “bust chain” theory. Actually it was something we were trying to find but didn’t. My hypothesis is that they only experienced the recovery that is initially very quick just after each bust. And if you just did a bunch of them, it adds up and you can do one more soon after.

Penalty

All the busts you did recently have a negative impact on your ability to successfully bust more people out of jail. The penalty will be the same no matter who you busted, their level, the reason they got caught or the time they're in for. These penalties can add up to the point where you need to take a break and wait a while before attempting any more busts. That means it will get harder as you bust more people but counter-intuitively, you will maximize your daily count by flirting with the limit (the greater your penalty, the greater the recovery). “Recently” is relative and might not be the best word as it takes 72 hours (3 days) to completely recover from a single bust. however the recovery is highly non-linear in time and you will have recovered from half the penalty in only 10 hours. Taking a break after a large amount of busts is actually a good piece advice.
It is worth mentioning that each bust incurs an individual penalty, and your total penalty is simply the sum of the contribution from each bust.

One more thing, the higher your level, the smaller the penalty for each bust. Think about it if you are level holding but want to increase your bust potential.

How to know your limit?

If you want to reach your maximum daily bust count, bust aggressively for a few days, focus on low level/time targets and you’ll get a rough idea of how many you can do. If you fail too many, take a break and try again later. How long you have to wait is what you’re trying to find out (note that it depends largely on your level and perks). Once you know your limit approximately, you will be able to achieve it daily without wasting too much nerve on failed attempts. A good indication of whether you should take a break is the outcome of a failed busts.The lower your success chance is, the more likely you will get jail time instead of simply failing without consequence. Also, if you fail but don’t get jailed, you know with certainty that your success chance was greater than 0%. (This was actually stated in a bug report sadly I can’t find the post anymore).
The difference between taking a break and waiting for a while before next attempt or spending all your nerve on busts might only change your daily count by a few more busts and it is probably not worth it. What matters most is picking the right target, but in the end, you will also be limited by what the jail has to offer.


I’ll try to keep thepost updated as our understanding improves. Because of the 3 daysbust penalty it can get tedious to run some test and validate an hypothesis.


That’s it for the basics. I hope this will help you towards your 10k busts merit and possibly even the top 250 HoF.


Self busts:
A quick test of the self bust option revealed that it doesn't follow the same rules as "regular" busts. The nerve cost is much higher, a portion of your total nerve instead of 5 (or less with the right faction perks). It costs half your maximum nerve to attempt a self bust, this ammount can be reduced to a third of max nerve after completion of the education class LAW2990: International Human Rights. I am unsure about the cost without reduction, maybe someone that hasn't completed the education can confirm.
Successfully busting yourself out of jail doesn't affect your success chance for regular busts, and it doesn't seem like regular bust affect self busting either. So far we don't know how success or failure is decided for this specific case, maybe a fixed rate of success. Considering the extreme nerve cost, difficulty to test this feature and the fact it doesn't count as a bust in the stats, it won't be investigated in further detail for now.

Graphs - formulas - remarks - validation

Bust difficulty and skill

A bust’s difficulty is proportional to the inmate's level and to their sentence duration arbitrarily increased by 3 hours.

[image: i.imgur.com]

Your skill is proportional to your own level and increased at least by the faction perk.


How the perks are applied is still uncertain but early testing on the faction perk suggests they simply amplify the buster’s level. It will be hard to find testers without the education perks and simply impossible to test the law firm perk for now.


Remark: it has been anounced (by Ched) that the total amount of busts has aninfluence but we couldn’t find any meaningful difference at all from our testing (busters ranging from 1k to 4k busts)… This post is 6 years old so it is very likely outdated as it is the case for this statement: "For failing a bust and being sent to jail, like before you'll receive double the amount of jail time your target had." .(The total amount of busts you've made will allow you to bust people more often)
Correction: it seems the total amount of busts does increase your success chance. By how much is still unknown, most probably more noticeable when you get started and have done very few busts.. There still is a cap on your success chance (determined by level and perks) and that cap won't increase with more busts.

Here is a representation of the relation between success chance, level (skill) and bust difficulty. All the testers had all the perks (education,faction and law firm). Those that do not have the "no penalty" mention had performed one or more busts within the previous 72 hours.


[image: i.imgur.com]

First thing to notice is that all the points gathered without penalty describe the same line. In that "no penalty" state, buster level, in-mate level and jail time are enough to predict success chance accurately (this will be helpful later). The second thing is that all the lines are parallel, previous busts shift the line to the left, effectively reducing success chance for subsequent busts.

Upon request here is a comparison between DocTorn's time*level and the new metric for difficulty applied to a single set of in-mates. The data

[image: i.imgur.com]

Penalty

Now, penalty was a pain… It really was a pain. Initially we had no idea that there was a 3 days recovery period, some things are still unclear. For instance we could observe that the first bust after a long break (how long?) always has a reduced penalty but the recovery rate for that bust is the same as for any other. It seems that there is a cap on your maximum success chance and that you will regenerate your ability beyond it, giving the impression of a “reduced penalty”. We can see it as some sort of discount if you haven’t done any in a while. It could explain the phenomenon but it’s still too recent to be categoric. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find a simpler explanation later…
Another thing is, the recovery is gradual and there is a noticeable and sudden “jump” at the end of the 72 hours recovery. That is in fact what led us to notice this specific duration for the penalty.


Enough writing, now here’s what the evolution of a bust’s penalty looks like for a level 61 with all the perks. The initial penalty P0 is inversely proportional to the buster’s level.


[image: i.imgur.com]
[image: i.imgur.com] [image: i.imgur.com]

c = 0.1 [-/h]

This formula tells us half the penalty for a bust is gone after exactly 10 hours.

Success chance

With the previous definitions, success chance for any bust can be evaluated with this formula:

[image: i.imgur.com]

The two constants a and b are supposedly shared by all players, a was the same for all three testers (level 28-61) and is not influenced by the faction perk. The faction perk factors both the skill and penalty terms. I will rewrite the formula once known we know more about the other perks.

a = 266.6 [-] , b = 0.427 [- / minute]

Application of the model for testing

The model has been tested on two players so far, one short test (level 53, 8 busts over a 30h period) and a long test (level 61, 81 busts over about 100h).
The aim was to verify that, knowing when previous busts occurred, the model could predict success chance of subsequent busts accurately. In this case we will compare two values, the penalty measured in jail at some given points in time and the prediction of the model.

Penalty(measured)
Our reference will be the penalty (measured). It was obtained by gathering measures from the jail (time of measure, level of in-mate and duration of their stay) and substracting it to the success chance without penalty (That we can get from the equation of the line on the first graph). The measure is actually an average over as many players as possible at a given time. The idea of taking the average was to reduce the error but in some cases (heavy penalty or almost empty jail) the penalty was computed based on a single measure.
Each blue dot represents a measure in jail.

Penalty(estimated)
Keeping track of all the busts, the estimation is computed according to the success chance formula presented above.
Basically, it's as simple as keeping track of when you busted someone out of jail, applying the penalty formula and add their individual contributions.
The red line is purely analytical.

[image: i.imgur.com][image: i.imgur.com]
Considering there is an intrinsic error in the measure of the success chance, the results are very promising. 1% off from the actual success chance is surprisingly close and I am therefore confident in the model even though its applications are still limited.

Possible improvements

At this point there is a lot that can be improved, but mainly two points.

• The perks require more attention so that the formula can be generalized for every player
• It would be good to get better estimates of the various constants (a, b, P0)

I’d say with time, a busting tool (similar to the law firm perk) could possibly be developed from this, or we could at least get an easy formula that lets you know what maximum daily bust count to aim for based on your level/perks.

On this matter, can an API Master tell me whether the log can be accessed via API (to get busts timestamps)?


Thank you for reading, I hope this was helpful and/or interesting. If some of you are interested in doing some testing on the subject just send me a mail. I can also set up a google sheet with some examples if that would help make all this more clear, let me know!


Thanks to those who contributed to this project.

TRex, ThtAstronautGuy and panieri for gathering data.
CloudJumper for providing usefull links and information.
Special thanks to sacham for testing and providing a crucial data gathering tool.
and all of them again for sharing their insight and discussing ideas.

ShadowRazers and RazerLaw for the perks.

Extra credit to Nobody, a pioneer in busting -> His guide


tl;dr: To maximize your daily bust count, focus on low level targets with short sentences. after a long break you can start with players around your level and gradually aim lower.
You will then be limited by your perks and your own level (a higher level makes it easier).

Wow, good guide!

It's also very simple to understand, though that could just be me idk.

Can any tldr or ELI5 this?

Sorely needed guide, that I was hoping someone able to explore via Law Firm would provide. Thank you!

Thanks, upvote and bump!

Excellent guide! Would like to see some more research on the busting difficulty part, since your formula is significantly different from the currently accepted Level*Time score used by DoctorN.

As for the "busting becomes easier with more busts done" argument, I remember reading (can't remember where) that your busting skill increases with number of busts done, but only up to a total of 1k busts, and remains more or less the same after that. Since your testers had between 1k and 5k busts done, maybe that is why you didn't find a correlation?

I knew I forgot something important, I will add that shortly....

Thank you for your input. A cap on the effect of number of bust was something we considered. That can be tested if we find someone willing to help.

I just did a quick scan of the jail. Here's a spreadsheet with what the numbers I gathered (level time and success chance) and a comparison of the two measures -> Bust difficulty spreadsheet. This can be verified by any law firm employee, and I encourage them to try it as it will not be only my word. If you want to test it and have done busts in the last 3 days, you should click the bust buttons in quick succession, especially if you have done any busts lately (otherwise you'll get some interference from the penalty that could be changing rapidly).

Thank you Nosy! :D

On the first point, the graph of percentage chance versus their axis has such a clear and consistent linear relationship with their chosen form of the busting difficulty.

And if you're right about the second point, then there is indeed no way their testing would have shown it.

I don't know about Nosy's formula yet, but DoctoN's estimation is wildly incorrect. Everybody who's done any busting knows that level plays a much bigger role than time, at least in the range of 0h-6h.

Your observation on DoctorN estimation makes a lot of sense if the new one is correct.
In the example I added earlier, (assuming the new formula is correct) you can see that it's not too far off for a level 26 in for 22h17 (14% difference) but it will highly underestimate the difficulty of the level 90 in for 3h37 (83% difference). Here's the quick example I set up which can easily be reproduced by any 10* law firm member (the example).
The correlation is almost perfect, it can't get much better considering success chance only has two decimals. Based on hundreds of measures for success chance, the parameter was 180.34. It was rounded to 180 minutes because of the simplicity of the formula and I think it makes more sense.

If higher level means increased busting success rate does that mean level-holding results in lost busting potential?

That's right: higher level = higher bust potential. I'm not sure if the potential is exactly proportionnal to the buster's level but very close at least (gotta do the math). That's something I could observe while leveling up. The penalty for a bust is inversly proportional to your level but the recovery rate is proportional to it. Since a lower level means a higher recovery rate it is a bit counter intuitive... My theory is that the loss of potential is mainly due to the penalty "jump" at the end of the 3 days recovery, the jump is proportional to your level and the potential will be lost for the whole duration, this will result in a lower bust count. I just thought about that so I'm not 100% confident yet... I will update the post about that matter once I have some numbers to back it up.

A very high level also means you will possibly spend more time in jail when you fail a bust since it will be harder for others to bust you out, maybe a high level buster can confirm/deny this.

Great work. It was obvious to me that someone with a Law Firm job needed to just sit down and do the data collection and analysis, and you've done exactly that!

sounds and looks great

this is awesome. are you using R or python?

Thank you. A simple spreadsheet and python. The only part in which python has been essential was for the multivariate regression (bust difficulty formula).

We did some more testing recently, something about the computation of success chance (success vs difficulty clearly appears not to be a continuous function). Though our formula is pretty close already. There'll be a large update once we figure it out and it will lead us closer to the goal of a busting tool for non law firm employees.