CRIMES

Guys, I am stuck at Larceny. I can do them with tons of success, but when I go to armed robberies, I am not having any success, even with the balaclava. I hardly ever make it. Is there something else I need to be doing to grant a higher level of success?

1. What's your NNB, would be helpful to know. For all I know you could be at base NNB or have like a 40 NNB. This is very important to know.

2. Don't do larceny, steal jackets, it's better. If you have done like 1k jackets then go to thorough robberies. Once you do a decent chunk of those either go straight for warehouse arson or go to stealth viruses.

3. Which robbery are you doing, through robbery is the best because you can't fail or has a very low fail rate which means you don't lose crime xp from failing crimes.

4. If you can't do them t all just stick to jackets for a while. You could put stuff into merits and make sure your faction has good perks.

EDIT: https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=61&t=16120850 crime guide, probably should follow this

You may be able to do Larcerny, but you still multiple count of jails and at a fairly high number at 60 days old.. Each time you get jailed, your CE hurts every single time..

You should instead go to a safe crime (Steal Jackets), until your CE has been increased enough before doing armed Robbery.. Furthermore, it should only be Thorough Robbery..

Thorough robbery is not a safe crime and you can still fail it even at 60nnb. Fails may be rare, but I personally see no real reason to continue with it given the changes to the CE system a while back.

I just have a hunch that it's not worth it anymore. I'd personally just spam jackets, then get into arsons as early as possible, and basically ride those all the way to 60 NNB. Then it's more appropriate to start doing unsafe crimes (i.e. drug crimes), because you can rattle through them very quickly (with refills and a pub job etc) with minimal risk, and at an accelerated pace.

Drug crimes merits can be gathered very quickly this way. If you're gonna want to make cash through hacking, then do those whenever, I guess, but get yourself into a 3 star meat warehouse in order to safeguard your CE gains.

The changes to crimes made all unsafe crimes much safer, why would it not be worth it anymore?

Hopefully I can articulate this in a way that makes sense :-)

If you look at Ched's announcement about the crime changes:

Now, upon going to jail, the maximum crime experience you can lose is a static value of around 20x what you would have gained upon success. If this loss is more than 1% of your total crime experience, then 1% will be removed instead. The idea here is to open things up, reducing the risk of jail at a high level so people no longer feel forced into the limited 'safe crimes'.

The part that leaps out at me there is: "reducing the risk of jail at a high level." So the percentage loss has now been replaced with either a percetange loss or 20x the CE gain of a succesful attempt, meaning people can do drug crimes at 60NNB without worrying about losing years worth of CE, and falling back to 35-40NNB.

Thorough robbery was popular because jails were rare, and - early on in their development - players did not have a huge amount of CE for the old-style percetange loss to impact upon. How about now though? If thorough robbery gives good CE - which we believe it does - then it stands to reason that losing 20 times the amount of a successful attempt would be a decent chunk. Perhaps players would be far enough in that they would lose the 1% of their total instead - well, is that a worthwhile risk? Was it ever? (Would love to hear some thoughts from the more maths-inclined, here.)

As phenomenal as Alexstrasza's work is, the sheer number of amendments Owen has now had to make to her crime guide aptly illustrate how much more we have learned as a community since it was first published. I don't think it's neccesarily the optimal way to do things; for instance, I remember pointing out to Owen and Baldr that the suggested NNB for stealth hacking must be wrong, and then it eventually transpired that work stats were a factor in this crime. So I was just wasting nerve, based on outdated information.

You're going to want to spam a lot of jackets at some point anyway, as it's the most nerve-efficent way of getting the 10k thefts done, so why not do those instead of thorough robbery? If I'm doing an unsafe crime, I want to know it's worth it, because hindering my NNB progression ultimately means less time spent using nerve to generate cash or CE.

On a wider point, I've seen too many people become blase about unsafe crimes since the CE changes, and their nerve bar inevitably regresses, and/or they start falling down the OC rankings.

TL;DR: I still don't take jails all that lightly, and consider them a risk that should be properly evaulated.

You would need around 660 effective arsons in order to lose a flat 20 thorough robbery worth of CE, putting you in the 30-35 NNB range, at which point you should be doing arsons anyway, at 20nnb where they are recommended, you are losing 1~ effective arson per jailing meaning you only need 3 successes to cover your losses

As far as merit effeciency goes, taking the highest CE route to 60 before completing merits will be the most effecient route, doing jackets for merits early on will slow that down

That's interesting, thanks. I checked the recent TCT article for the thorough robbery CE to no avail, but forgot about the Tornstats calculator, or indeed Alextstrasza's initial research, which it's based on 😆

Maths is bloody hard work for me, so I'll defer to your figures here. One query I'd have is if spamming jackets would be that much slower? See, if I was going through it again, I would be starting arsons at 25 NNB rather than 30 as suggested; I know people who have done that without issue by having good fac perks, enhancer and merits in CE.

So I figure a relatively short amount of time doing jackets would get you a headstart on the theft merits, and get you straight into arsons, balancing out or overtaking any lost CE from the robberies. Interested to hear more of your thoughts and analysis. I guess you would maintain that the 1/9 of an arson jacket CE wouldn't be worth it.

(Actually I just noticed that Fatbears makes a similar argument to mine here, so I'd be intrigued to know if he ever trialed this approach against thorough robberies.)

They probably aren't all that much faster relative to how long things take in Torn, the main point I wanted to get across is that they are still pretty valid, that dusty old crimes guide is mostly right, outside of the Stealth virus crime.

I've also seen people have success with starting arsons at 20nnb, I don't have any personal experice with that though, you might need a little help from Rngesus

Seen the same thing with arsons at 20! I think people really underestimate how powerful the CE merits are, particularly when paired with good fac perks.

And I'll go along with what you said regarding Alextstrasza's guide, sure. My main thing really is we need to keep challenging orthodoxy and dogma, but her work has stood the test of time for a reason. Thanks again for the intersting analysis, and for pushing me to finally try and articulate my reservations about thorough robbery.

I want you to do this and this order so you can get past the hump:


Mug the Bum x 40, Mug the old lady x 60, mug the businessman x 150, and lastly mug the lawyer 500 times. that should also give you 2 merits. Once you accomplish those successfully you'll be able to move on to Swift Robberies after 200+ successes go to Thorough Robberies until you get 25-30 NNB. From there spam Arsons Warehouse until 60. It is as simple as that my friend.

Sorry guys - spamming jackets? What crime is that?

4 Nerve Crime, shoplift, store, jackets

noted ...

The guide below has worked wonders for me and greatly assisted me in NNB. However once you reach 30, it’s pretty much spamming Arsons until you are 60. I chased few other merits in between but obtained the 600 NNB in under 2 years. Wish you luck and patience.


This is an older guide but it got me to 60 NNB quickly.