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Read our report into how the recent changes to the mug protection system will affect both muggers and their victims.
After four polls and over a month of debate, Chedburn has finally come to an agreement with the community on how Torn's mugging system should be updated. His announcement on Tuesday indicated that the new mugging mechanics consisted of a simplified system whereby between 5% and 10% of the victim's wallet will be stolen when mugged. This value is no longer affected by how much money the victim has on-hand, but it can be increased by up to 50% with use of the Masterful Looting merit upgrade - a free merit reset will be available as compensation.
Furthermore, the mug protection system will also be changed, as it will now only protect the money in your wallet which has not been interacted with. After being mugged, your leftover cash will be protected to an extent, but said protection will degrade at a linear rate over twelve hours. These changes will be implemented on Tuesday the 29th of October. And ahead of this major update to Torn's mugging system, we've taken a more in-depth look at how the new system works in comparison to the old one.
Thank you to Proxima, Chain Reaction and various regulars in General Chat for providing me with some historical perspectives on mugging and mug protection.
The Wild West of Mugging
First, let's take a look back at the "Wild West" days of Torn, a time when mug protection did not exist. In this era, it was common for an offline merchant to be chain buy-mugged for hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars until they had nothing left. Lottery profits were also at risk since these were paid directly into the winner's wallet and often mugged soon after. Due to these and a variety of other unpleasant situations, the players felt that some form of protection should be implemented - the only way you could defend your wallet while offline was through self-hospitalizing with revives turned off. In response to this issue, Ched created the mug protection we are all most familiar with, Mug Protection 1.0.
Mug Protection 1.0 - Cash on Hand
Mug Protection was a two-part system. The first part determined the amount that could be mugged, and it was calculated based on how much cash the victim had on-hand at the time. Under this system, players with just $10 on-hand could lose a maximum of 20.7% of it, or $2.07, from any single mug. This percentage drops lower for players with higher amounts of cash, meaning that a player with $100 on hand loses just 18.39%, a player with $1,000 loses 16.09% etc.
Basically, the more cash you had on you, the lower a percentage you could lose. The limit of this system came at $10,000,000,000 on-hand cash, where players who were foolish to carry this much money around could lose a maximum of 1% of it, or $100,000,000. The only way you could increase this percentage is if you had all of the mugging merits available, as this would double your amount to 2% at this level, and also double all of the other percentages throughout the system.
Now, while these figures are based on those quoted on the Torn wiki, the actual specifics of the mugging system are a little more complicated. I've included a copy of Proxima's chart below, and the finer details of the mugging equations can be found in his forum post here. The important take away is that the amount that can be mugged is fluid, meaning that two mugs from people with the same cash on hand could result in different amounts mugged.
Pictured: This chart is courtesy of Proxima and Chain Reaction
Mug Protection 1.0 - Protection
Mug Protection was a fairly convoluted system too. Every time a player was mugged, you would be protected or partially protected from losing more of your on-hand cash for a period of one hour plus 50,000 seconds - approximately 14 hours and 53 minutes in total. The amount of your on-hand cash that was protected would then deteriorate over time until it dwindled to nothing, and you could be mugged as normal once more.
For the first hour after a mug, you would be protected in full for the amount of cash you had on you when you were shaken down. So if you had $100,000,000 on you at the time of the mug, you could safely hold $100,000,000 on hand for one hour and not lose any of it through mugging. Once your hour was up, this protection would deteriorate toward zero over the following 50,000 seconds at a rate of 0.002% per second, or 7.2% per hour.
For example, if you have $100,000,000 protected, after two hours you would now only have $92,800,000 protected because your first hour was entirely protected, but you then lost 7.2% of your protection after one further hour. If you were mugged at this point, the mugging system would therefore treat you as if you only had $7.2 million on hand, and according to the base system, this means you could stand to lose $519,120.
However, complications tended to arise when multiple levels of protection worked in tandem after players were mugged for a second time while under the protection gained from an initial mug. Basically, if you were mugged a second time while mug protection was in place, whatever amount of money you had on hand that was unprotected would then receive its own level of protection for 14 hours and 53 minutes, working alongside any previous protection you still had left.
A second mug would not fully reset mug protection to the level of money on hand, which was a point that most users got lost on.
Let's return to the previous example, where the user was carrying $100,000,000, of which $92,800,000 was protected two hours after the initial mug. If they were mugged again at this point, a new set of mug protection would be applied only to the $7,200,000 that was available to be mugged at the time. But this new protection would be added to the $92,800,000 in protection achieved from the first mug - it would neither run concurrently or replace it.
To show you how that works, let's fast forward another two hours from the previous example. At this time, the user would have $78,400,000 protection left from the first mug, since their initial $100,000,000 had degraded by another 7.2% on two occasions after each of the two hours had passed. However, on top of this protected amount, a further $6,681,600 of protection would be applied to your wallet from the second mug, since your initial $7,200,000 had lost its first hour of full protection, and then lost 7.2% during the second. In total, you now have $85,081,600 in total mug protection.
The confusion around the mug protection and how it stacked resulted in numerous bug reports and a lot of confused players. For the details on mug protection 1.0, and a bit more math, check out Proxima's post here.
Mug Protection 2.0 - Cash on Hand
If any of that confused you, then don't worry, because the new system is much simpler to understand. The percentage you can earn from one single mug is no longer determined by how much cash someone has on them at the time. Instead, all mugs now result in a flat rate payout of between 5% - 10% of whatever cash someone is holding. Mug someone with $100 in their wallet and you will get between $5-10. Mug someone with $1B on hand and you'll get between $50-100 million. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
There will no longer be any scaling based on the amount of cash on hand or at risk whatsoever. There is a weighted RNG (random number generator) system for the percentage mugged that will result in the higher rates being less common, though. The only way these percentages can be increased is by using merits. However, whereas the full set of ten mugging merits used to double your mug percentages, they now only increase them by 50%, meaning you could earn between 7.5% and 15% from any one mug if you have them maxed out.
Mug Protection 2.0 - Protection
Mug protection has also been overhauled for the better. The system will now only have one protection buff in place at a time. When a mug occurs, the amount of money left after the mug will be marked, like the money stolen from a bank. This protection will degrade over 12 hours at a linear rate, meaning your protected cash will reduce by 0.00231% per second, and 8.33% per hour. Thanks to Proxima for doing the math on this one. Basically, mug protection now dwindles a little faster than it used to.
However, in a new development, this protection can also be lost entirely by interacting with the cash that is protected. Any cash that leaves the player's wallet will be "cleaned" and will no longer have any protection. This includes placing money in trades, banks, poker tables and even auction bids. Any money withdrawn to your wallet on top of the protected amount will not hurt the player's protection when it is put away.
For example, if a player has $1,000,000 on them and they are mugged for $50,000 (5%), the remaining $950,000 is protected for 12 hours. If that player added $1,000,000 to their cash on hand, they would still receive $950,000 protection, because the original $950,000 hadn't been touched. However, if a recently mugged player puts $500,000 of their protected on-hand cash away somewhere, reducing their wallet to $450,000, their mug protection would be reduced to $450,000 too, since the $500,000 has had its protection wiped. This occurs even if they then add $1,000,000 to their on-hand cash afterwards.
If said player who had $500,000 of their protected cash wiped is then hit by another 5% mug, they will lose $50,000, because while their total on-hand cash would be $1,450,000, the mug protection of $450,000 would mean only $1,000,000 was unprotected. However, their mug protection would then be set at $1,400,000, since this is the total amount leftover in their wallet after the $50,000 was mugged. This system results in a single mug protection buff, degrading at a fixed amount, instead of multiple buffs interacting in a complex fashion.
CONCLUSION
These changes to mug protection have polarized many players, with the battle stat big shots, glorified through their strength, fully embracing this modification as a correction to the unintended abuse of mug protection 1.0. Conversely, the money-grubbing trading community, focused on their wallets above all else, sees this change as the destruction of trading and the heralding of the end of a free economy.
It is expected that the new system of mug protection will have a profound impact on many areas of Torn, and all citizens will likely need to adapt to them over the coming days and weeks. But before they do, Proxima says that those who enjoy pilfering the pockets of others will enjoy themselves like never before.
"Muggers will have an absolute field day next Tuesday, and it'll probably last a week or three while super casual sellers/traders catch up. Prices will almost certainly rise on popular items, although I doubt as much as some might think. After the initial shock, the game will return to an equilibrium where you'll probably need to have more of a "good reputation" to actually trade, at least with the ones who know what they're doing. This update would have gone well with the changes to bazaar/item market actually."
Furthermore, the mug protection system will also be changed, as it will now only protect the money in your wallet which has not been interacted with. After being mugged, your leftover cash will be protected to an extent, but said protection will degrade at a linear rate over twelve hours. These changes will be implemented on Tuesday the 29th of October. And ahead of this major update to Torn's mugging system, we've taken a more in-depth look at how the new system works in comparison to the old one.
Thank you to Proxima, Chain Reaction and various regulars in General Chat for providing me with some historical perspectives on mugging and mug protection.
The Wild West of Mugging
First, let's take a look back at the "Wild West" days of Torn, a time when mug protection did not exist. In this era, it was common for an offline merchant to be chain buy-mugged for hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars until they had nothing left. Lottery profits were also at risk since these were paid directly into the winner's wallet and often mugged soon after. Due to these and a variety of other unpleasant situations, the players felt that some form of protection should be implemented - the only way you could defend your wallet while offline was through self-hospitalizing with revives turned off. In response to this issue, Ched created the mug protection we are all most familiar with, Mug Protection 1.0.
Mug Protection 1.0 - Cash on Hand
Mug Protection was a two-part system. The first part determined the amount that could be mugged, and it was calculated based on how much cash the victim had on-hand at the time. Under this system, players with just $10 on-hand could lose a maximum of 20.7% of it, or $2.07, from any single mug. This percentage drops lower for players with higher amounts of cash, meaning that a player with $100 on hand loses just 18.39%, a player with $1,000 loses 16.09% etc.
Basically, the more cash you had on you, the lower a percentage you could lose. The limit of this system came at $10,000,000,000 on-hand cash, where players who were foolish to carry this much money around could lose a maximum of 1% of it, or $100,000,000. The only way you could increase this percentage is if you had all of the mugging merits available, as this would double your amount to 2% at this level, and also double all of the other percentages throughout the system.
Now, while these figures are based on those quoted on the Torn wiki, the actual specifics of the mugging system are a little more complicated. I've included a copy of Proxima's chart below, and the finer details of the mugging equations can be found in his forum post here. The important take away is that the amount that can be mugged is fluid, meaning that two mugs from people with the same cash on hand could result in different amounts mugged.
Pictured: This chart is courtesy of Proxima and Chain Reaction
Mug Protection 1.0 - Protection
Mug Protection was a fairly convoluted system too. Every time a player was mugged, you would be protected or partially protected from losing more of your on-hand cash for a period of one hour plus 50,000 seconds - approximately 14 hours and 53 minutes in total. The amount of your on-hand cash that was protected would then deteriorate over time until it dwindled to nothing, and you could be mugged as normal once more.
For the first hour after a mug, you would be protected in full for the amount of cash you had on you when you were shaken down. So if you had $100,000,000 on you at the time of the mug, you could safely hold $100,000,000 on hand for one hour and not lose any of it through mugging. Once your hour was up, this protection would deteriorate toward zero over the following 50,000 seconds at a rate of 0.002% per second, or 7.2% per hour.
For example, if you have $100,000,000 protected, after two hours you would now only have $92,800,000 protected because your first hour was entirely protected, but you then lost 7.2% of your protection after one further hour. If you were mugged at this point, the mugging system would therefore treat you as if you only had $7.2 million on hand, and according to the base system, this means you could stand to lose $519,120.
However, complications tended to arise when multiple levels of protection worked in tandem after players were mugged for a second time while under the protection gained from an initial mug. Basically, if you were mugged a second time while mug protection was in place, whatever amount of money you had on hand that was unprotected would then receive its own level of protection for 14 hours and 53 minutes, working alongside any previous protection you still had left.
A second mug would not fully reset mug protection to the level of money on hand, which was a point that most users got lost on.
Let's return to the previous example, where the user was carrying $100,000,000, of which $92,800,000 was protected two hours after the initial mug. If they were mugged again at this point, a new set of mug protection would be applied only to the $7,200,000 that was available to be mugged at the time. But this new protection would be added to the $92,800,000 in protection achieved from the first mug - it would neither run concurrently or replace it.
To show you how that works, let's fast forward another two hours from the previous example. At this time, the user would have $78,400,000 protection left from the first mug, since their initial $100,000,000 had degraded by another 7.2% on two occasions after each of the two hours had passed. However, on top of this protected amount, a further $6,681,600 of protection would be applied to your wallet from the second mug, since your initial $7,200,000 had lost its first hour of full protection, and then lost 7.2% during the second. In total, you now have $85,081,600 in total mug protection.
The confusion around the mug protection and how it stacked resulted in numerous bug reports and a lot of confused players. For the details on mug protection 1.0, and a bit more math, check out Proxima's post here.
Mug Protection 2.0 - Cash on Hand
If any of that confused you, then don't worry, because the new system is much simpler to understand. The percentage you can earn from one single mug is no longer determined by how much cash someone has on them at the time. Instead, all mugs now result in a flat rate payout of between 5% - 10% of whatever cash someone is holding. Mug someone with $100 in their wallet and you will get between $5-10. Mug someone with $1B on hand and you'll get between $50-100 million. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
There will no longer be any scaling based on the amount of cash on hand or at risk whatsoever. There is a weighted RNG (random number generator) system for the percentage mugged that will result in the higher rates being less common, though. The only way these percentages can be increased is by using merits. However, whereas the full set of ten mugging merits used to double your mug percentages, they now only increase them by 50%, meaning you could earn between 7.5% and 15% from any one mug if you have them maxed out.
Mug Protection 2.0 - Protection
Mug protection has also been overhauled for the better. The system will now only have one protection buff in place at a time. When a mug occurs, the amount of money left after the mug will be marked, like the money stolen from a bank. This protection will degrade over 12 hours at a linear rate, meaning your protected cash will reduce by 0.00231% per second, and 8.33% per hour. Thanks to Proxima for doing the math on this one. Basically, mug protection now dwindles a little faster than it used to.
However, in a new development, this protection can also be lost entirely by interacting with the cash that is protected. Any cash that leaves the player's wallet will be "cleaned" and will no longer have any protection. This includes placing money in trades, banks, poker tables and even auction bids. Any money withdrawn to your wallet on top of the protected amount will not hurt the player's protection when it is put away.
For example, if a player has $1,000,000 on them and they are mugged for $50,000 (5%), the remaining $950,000 is protected for 12 hours. If that player added $1,000,000 to their cash on hand, they would still receive $950,000 protection, because the original $950,000 hadn't been touched. However, if a recently mugged player puts $500,000 of their protected on-hand cash away somewhere, reducing their wallet to $450,000, their mug protection would be reduced to $450,000 too, since the $500,000 has had its protection wiped. This occurs even if they then add $1,000,000 to their on-hand cash afterwards.
If said player who had $500,000 of their protected cash wiped is then hit by another 5% mug, they will lose $50,000, because while their total on-hand cash would be $1,450,000, the mug protection of $450,000 would mean only $1,000,000 was unprotected. However, their mug protection would then be set at $1,400,000, since this is the total amount leftover in their wallet after the $50,000 was mugged. This system results in a single mug protection buff, degrading at a fixed amount, instead of multiple buffs interacting in a complex fashion.
CONCLUSION
These changes to mug protection have polarized many players, with the battle stat big shots, glorified through their strength, fully embracing this modification as a correction to the unintended abuse of mug protection 1.0. Conversely, the money-grubbing trading community, focused on their wallets above all else, sees this change as the destruction of trading and the heralding of the end of a free economy.
It is expected that the new system of mug protection will have a profound impact on many areas of Torn, and all citizens will likely need to adapt to them over the coming days and weeks. But before they do, Proxima says that those who enjoy pilfering the pockets of others will enjoy themselves like never before.
"Muggers will have an absolute field day next Tuesday, and it'll probably last a week or three while super casual sellers/traders catch up. Prices will almost certainly rise on popular items, although I doubt as much as some might think. After the initial shock, the game will return to an equilibrium where you'll probably need to have more of a "good reputation" to actually trade, at least with the ones who know what they're doing. This update would have gone well with the changes to bazaar/item market actually."
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