Sleuth Home - Message Boards - Sleuth Talk

Mar-29-2004 12:35

Detective Agencies are now live, meaning you can now go to the Real Estate office, rent headquarters, and form an agency with other players. I will continue working on this through the week, but there is a lot there already, so I would like people to start testing it.

NOTES:

1) If you want to join an agency make sure you have your popup blocker disabled. You need to be able to communicate with other members via private message. That can only happen if you aren't blocking popups.

2) Until all the features (including treasure hunts) are live, the game will not charge daily rent for headquarters. This is to encourage people to start testing now, even though not all the benefits of belonging to an agency are live.


THINGS THAT CURRENTLY WORK:
* Renting Property / Creating Agencyies
* Inviting new members
* resigning from agencies
* promoting/demoting members
* agency message boards
* depositing/withdrawing from office safe
* equipment locker

THINGS THAT DON'T WORK YET:
* Crime lab
* Case Files
* Moving/Upgrading Headquarters
* Treasure Hunts


- Have Fun

Mar-31-2004 06:06

How big a decision is joining an agency? What I mean is, how much is there to lose - if you purchase one jointly, do you get anything back if you later want to leave? Or if you buy one on your own and later want to sell it?

Mar-31-2004 09:20

Joining an existing agency isn't that big of a deal, although your new teammates may ask you to make a contribution once you've joined (there are several ways to share money inside an agency).

Creating your own, either as the sole director or as a contributor is a big investment. If you quit, you won't get any of the downpayment money back. If an agency decides to upgrade their headquarters, part of their old downpayment will be applied to their new one.

Mar-31-2004 11:31

All properties now come with a message board. To balance this out, properties that already had boards now have additional case files per detective.

One of the main points of agencies is to foster smaller communities within the game, and it seems like having a private message board is a pretty important part of that.

Mar-31-2004 11:44

one question Sleuth admin is there something that will keep track of who paid rent in regards the the team or is that something we have to do by ourselves, by taking turns cause we would not want someone on the team who doesn't help in those aspects. just courious.

Mar-31-2004 12:51

Well, I can see that the director's can demote the people if they don't help out with rent, but this leads to my question...

What are the differences in positions (i.e. rookie, director). When is a good time to promote someone?

Also, can you tell us a little bit about what the situation with the case files is going to be?

Mar-31-2004 12:55

Oops. Nevermind, I see the differences between ranks under "Agency Help".

But still wondering about case files.

Thanks.

Mar-31-2004 17:46

Kay-

Daily rent will come directly out of your office safe. If you want to keep track of who is putting money in there, I'd suggest naming one of your detectives treasurer, and have them keep track of all safe transactions.

Mar-31-2004 20:43

Tell me some more about agencies...namely, do they allow you to team up with other detectives on cases? And if so, are there any associated penalties?

Mar-31-2004 21:46

Case Files are now live for detectives who belong to Agencies.

Case files allow you to do two things:

1) If you are stuck on a case, but want to revisit it when you have more skills, contacts or money, you can store the case and comeback to work on it later.

2) If you think one of your teammates would be better equiped to finish a case, you can file it as "Public". Doing so allows any detective who belongs to the same agency as you to open up the case file and take up the mystery where you left off.

When Crime Labs are live, they will allow you to further help your teammates by analysing physical evidence on any mystery store in a case file...

Apr-1-2004 04:26

I think there's a bug with the case files (for agencies). When I "re-open" a stored case, and then click on the MAP, I can't see the suspects' names. And when I click on SUITCASE, I get the error code message.