Citizens,
We've made some changes to the awareness (City finds) system in order to make it more logical and more intuitive.
- The previous system provided a chance of spawning a single item per hour, and only when visiting the city page. The new system instead will spawn a quantity of items (or none) once per day. Any activity on any page on Torn will trigger this spawn, so simply being active on Torn every day will provide you with optimal city finds.
- The Awareness system is now a much simpler algorithm so will increase the rate of items that appear in the city by expected percentages. For example, Awareness starts at 100%, merit upgrades increase this by 20% each, company specials increase it by 50% or 70%, the 'Attention and Awareness' course increases it by 10% and the 'Finders Keepers' book increases it by 1000%. So with 10 merit upgrades, the course and a 50% company special, you'd have 360% awareness.
- The drugs LSD and Ecstasy no longer increase awareness. Since city finds will be generated once per day (after midnight), and you have to actually be under the effect of the drugs, this gives too much advantage to people in certain time zones.
- Generally these changes will have substantially increased the amount of items spawning in the city. We'll be watching this closely and monitoring the values of these items over time to ensure the rate is agreeable. We'll also be altering the rates of decent / rare items vs trash items over time.
- The dump searching system has been greatly simplified also, and no longer uses awareness. The old system that utilised awareness actually created a blind spot which meant the same items would appear frequently (especially for those with high awareness). With this system removed, an item will instead be chosen based on how many different item types are currently in the dump. So currently there are 333 different types of items sitting in the dump, if someone was to drop say... A donator pack, or some other high value item in there, you would have a 1 in 334 chance of finding it.
So for the short term at least, searching the dump may be highly lucrative (all of those items that were in the old system's blind spot are now available!) and city finds should be more common for everybody.
Of course, as usual, we may make changes to this system over time.
Thanks.