Biggles [1665757] —
Original article
Which crimes are worth committing? Read this guide on how best to accumulate Crime Experience as calculated by PT-Calculated. Wave of conventional bombings expected in response.
Water is wet. Fire is hot. Nova is a buffoon. There are certain truths that are universally accepted, one of which is the fact that Torn's crime rate is high, has always been high, and forever will be. As a result, Torn's criminals are some of the very best in the world. And the reason for this is that they know which crimes make them into better criminals.
While burning down warehouses led to criminals becoming harder to catch, those who focused solely on drug deals were, like Nova, buffoons, buffoons who spent vast amounts of time in jail. How could this be? Why would dealing more drugs make you a worse criminal? Why is it that giving someone coke on a street corner makes you incapable of performing crimes that require a degree of skill, such as the assassinating of political leaders?
Pictured: If Lee Harvey Oswald had been a dealer, maybe he'd have shot Jackie instead?
That is a question for others to answer. What I and I suspect most people are interested in, is which crimes make you a better criminal. To put it another way, what should I be doing with my nerve in order to gain the highest amount of Crime Experience?
What Is Crime Experience?
Crime Experience, also referred to as CE, is a hidden stat that affects how successful you are at crimes or organized crimes. Whereas some crimes require little CE for you to perform them successfully, others have higher requirements and can lead to you being jailed or hospitalized if you fail them.
Your hidden CE score is raised by completing crimes, with more difficult crimes supposedly providing more CE. For a long time, anyone who attempted a crime that was beyond their CE level was at risk of losing huge amounts of Crime Experience, with months, potentially years of work all undone thanks to one red result.
However, in October 2020, Chedburn announced that the amount of CE you could lose had been capped at a more reasonable amount. Now, if you are jailed after attempting a crime you were not experienced enough to perform, your maximum penalty is either 20x the Crime Experience you would've gained or 1% of your total CE, whichever is smaller. These may still seem like harsh penalties, but they're nothing on what the old system used to do to you.
The idea behind this change was to open things up, reducing the risk of jail at a high (CE) level so people no longer felt forced into the limited 'safe crimes'. Where previously, drug crimes and hackings used to be avoided at all costs by those with a 60 Natural Nerve Bar, these crimes have now become fair game. But there was another unforeseen side effect of this reduction in CE penalties - it was now much safer to study Crime Experience without a hugely detrimental effect on your own CE.
Which Are The Best Crimes?
And so to the main focus of this article: which crimes are the best crimes? Is the received wisdom of warehouse arsons being best really true? What about busting, is it genuinely nerfed as badly as Ched made out?
For a long time, these questions were essentially unanswerable, but the CE penalty nerf coupled with another change – the ordering of players available for an OC by their actual CE – meant that these questions could now be researched. All that was required was for two players with identical CE to do some controlled testing. Oh yeah, and if they could be really quite strong as well so that success rate was maxed out, and they could perform difficult busts that would also be great.
Enter Biggles (myself) and Destroys, two of the leadership team in PT-Calculated. The idea of testing began in late 2020 when an interesting observation was made. We noticed that when a Presidential Assassination was set up, Biggles was the lead, and Destroys was the #2. Okay, that's fine, it simply means that Biggles had more CE at the time. No big deal!
However, eight days later when the crime was initiated, Destroys was the lead and Biggles was the #2. This meant that both of us must have been very close in CE. We realized there was great potential to be found in both the new crime experience system and our statistical proximity, so Destroys brought all organized crimes to a halt until Biggles was able to pass him with a single crime. And then it was time to begin our investigation.
The Method
To determine which crimes provided the most CE, we decided that Destroys would perform only warehouse arsons to give a consistent benchmark (and because he’s bloody OCD) and Biggles would perform a variety of other crimes so we could calculate CE values relative to the warehouse arson.
For more precision, a smaller unit was needed than a warehouse arson, so we picked The Jacket. Shoplifting jackets from the clothing store is a well-known “safe” crime that is widely used and is commonly believed to be worth around 1/9th of the CE of a warehouse arson based on figures from Alexstrasnashstrza. We tested this repeatedly and our tests showed a warehouse arson to be worth ~10.1 times the CE of a jacket theft.
To calculate the value of a crime, Biggles would rise above Destroys in CE rank by a single jacket. Next, a single crime such as a factory bombing would be done, and Destroys would count how many warehouse arsons were needed to go above Biggles. Biggles would do more jackets to get back to the top, to narrow things down further. Every so often there would be a jailing, which was an opportunity to ensure that the CE loss was genuinely 20 times the CE gain of a successful crime. It was.
I'm Bored of Reading, Give me Values!
Okay then, here are the results we calculated from our experiment. Each number is expressed in terms of the Crime Experience gained compared to a Warehouse Arson.
· Search the Movie Theater = 0.025x
· Shoplift Jacket = 0.1x
· Transport Cannabis = 0.2x
· Transport Amphetamines = 0.4x
· Transport Cocaine = 0.3x
· Sell Cannabis = 0.3x
· Sell Pills = 0.2x
· Sell Cocaine = 0.3x
· Arson Motel = 1.0x
· Hijack a Car = 0.3x
· Steal a Car from Showroom = 0.3x
· Pawn Shop Side Door = 0.6x
· Pawn Shop Rear Door = 0.7x
· Counterfeit Money = 0.6x
· Counterfeit Casino Tokens = 0.8x
· Counterfeit Credit Card = 0.7x
· Kidnap Kid = 1.7x
· Kidnap woman = 2.0x
· Kidnap Undercover Cop = 2.0x
· Kidnap Mayor = 1.9x
· Arms Trafficking Explosives = 1.7x
· Arms Trafficking Firearms = 2.6x
· Bomb a Factory = 2.8x
· Bomb a Government Building = 2.9x
· Hack Bank Mainframe = 0.6x
· Hack FBI Mainframe = 1.7x
You’ll notice that this is not an entirely complete list. There’s no real point in doing lesser crimes than the warehouse arson – it’s legendary for a reason. The only reason for listing the drug crimes is the recent renewed interest in them, as everybody wants to finally get the drug crime merits that were skipped for so long. And while these figures do show the amount of CE gained by a success, how good they are overall is determined by the success rate - lots of blue and red results mean they are inefficient for building CE.
There are a few other things that we wanted to know too. Do fails on kidnaps – which give a red where you give a bribe – cost you CE? Not that we could measure. Does self-busting give CE? Not that we could measure. Does bailing give CE? Not that we could measure. Does being on cannabis give more CE? Not that we could measure. Does getting jailed for failing a bust cost you CE? Not that we could measure. None of these results were unexpected, but until we were able to test them, their outcomes were entirely hypothetical.
Busting
The final thing we wanted to measure was busting itself. In the pre-RESPO days, back when Jeffery Torn himself was still alive (or at least somebody pretending to be 172 years old and claiming his pension was), a successful bust would be rewarded by giving you a percentage of your CE - if you already had a lot of CE, you got a lot more. When Ched nerfed busting, he said “to gain crime experience, you’re probably better off doing crimes”. This raised the question of where the threshold to be better off with busting is.
Busting has lots of variables involved, such as your level, your target's level, their time in jail, how many people you’ve recently busted, faction bonuses, company bonuses, and education. What we already know is that the CE awarded from a bust is linked to how difficult a bust is. I wasn’t in a 10* law firm when we performed this experiment, so I couldn’t view the success chance of a potential bust.
The only correlations I could draw were based on the bail cost of an inmate, and that doesn’t directly tell us how much CE a bust can give. There were a few conclusions I was able to make, however:
Distilled down, it appears that hard busts do indeed give more CE per nerve than crimes, but easy busts are a waste of nerve. Having perks that reduce the nerve cost of busts makes them better still: nerve for nerve, a 4 nerve bust can give ~37% better CE gain than a warehouse arson, a 3 nerve bust can give ~83% better gain, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to be in a faction with 2 nerve busts, then you can get 175% better CE gain per nerve used compared to a warehouse arson.
Given that the Bomb a Government Building crime gives ~87% more CE per nerve used, we can therefore conclude that the best way of building your Crime Experience score is… *drum roll* ...busting.
Some things never change.
Disclaimer: these figures are player calculated and entirely unofficial. Sugarvalves checked with Chedburn who consented to their publication, which means that either 1) they're wrong, 2) Ched doesn't know himself and is looking forward to finding out or3) Crimes 2.0 is imminent and it doesn't matter.
While burning down warehouses led to criminals becoming harder to catch, those who focused solely on drug deals were, like Nova, buffoons, buffoons who spent vast amounts of time in jail. How could this be? Why would dealing more drugs make you a worse criminal? Why is it that giving someone coke on a street corner makes you incapable of performing crimes that require a degree of skill, such as the assassinating of political leaders?
Pictured: If Lee Harvey Oswald had been a dealer, maybe he'd have shot Jackie instead?
That is a question for others to answer. What I and I suspect most people are interested in, is which crimes make you a better criminal. To put it another way, what should I be doing with my nerve in order to gain the highest amount of Crime Experience?
What Is Crime Experience?
Crime Experience, also referred to as CE, is a hidden stat that affects how successful you are at crimes or organized crimes. Whereas some crimes require little CE for you to perform them successfully, others have higher requirements and can lead to you being jailed or hospitalized if you fail them.
Your hidden CE score is raised by completing crimes, with more difficult crimes supposedly providing more CE. For a long time, anyone who attempted a crime that was beyond their CE level was at risk of losing huge amounts of Crime Experience, with months, potentially years of work all undone thanks to one red result.
However, in October 2020, Chedburn announced that the amount of CE you could lose had been capped at a more reasonable amount. Now, if you are jailed after attempting a crime you were not experienced enough to perform, your maximum penalty is either 20x the Crime Experience you would've gained or 1% of your total CE, whichever is smaller. These may still seem like harsh penalties, but they're nothing on what the old system used to do to you.
The idea behind this change was to open things up, reducing the risk of jail at a high (CE) level so people no longer felt forced into the limited 'safe crimes'. Where previously, drug crimes and hackings used to be avoided at all costs by those with a 60 Natural Nerve Bar, these crimes have now become fair game. But there was another unforeseen side effect of this reduction in CE penalties - it was now much safer to study Crime Experience without a hugely detrimental effect on your own CE.
Which Are The Best Crimes?
And so to the main focus of this article: which crimes are the best crimes? Is the received wisdom of warehouse arsons being best really true? What about busting, is it genuinely nerfed as badly as Ched made out?
For a long time, these questions were essentially unanswerable, but the CE penalty nerf coupled with another change – the ordering of players available for an OC by their actual CE – meant that these questions could now be researched. All that was required was for two players with identical CE to do some controlled testing. Oh yeah, and if they could be really quite strong as well so that success rate was maxed out, and they could perform difficult busts that would also be great.
Enter Biggles (myself) and Destroys, two of the leadership team in PT-Calculated. The idea of testing began in late 2020 when an interesting observation was made. We noticed that when a Presidential Assassination was set up, Biggles was the lead, and Destroys was the #2. Okay, that's fine, it simply means that Biggles had more CE at the time. No big deal!
However, eight days later when the crime was initiated, Destroys was the lead and Biggles was the #2. This meant that both of us must have been very close in CE. We realized there was great potential to be found in both the new crime experience system and our statistical proximity, so Destroys brought all organized crimes to a halt until Biggles was able to pass him with a single crime. And then it was time to begin our investigation.
The Method
To determine which crimes provided the most CE, we decided that Destroys would perform only warehouse arsons to give a consistent benchmark (and because he’s bloody OCD) and Biggles would perform a variety of other crimes so we could calculate CE values relative to the warehouse arson.
For more precision, a smaller unit was needed than a warehouse arson, so we picked The Jacket. Shoplifting jackets from the clothing store is a well-known “safe” crime that is widely used and is commonly believed to be worth around 1/9th of the CE of a warehouse arson based on figures from Alexstrasnashstrza. We tested this repeatedly and our tests showed a warehouse arson to be worth ~10.1 times the CE of a jacket theft.
To calculate the value of a crime, Biggles would rise above Destroys in CE rank by a single jacket. Next, a single crime such as a factory bombing would be done, and Destroys would count how many warehouse arsons were needed to go above Biggles. Biggles would do more jackets to get back to the top, to narrow things down further. Every so often there would be a jailing, which was an opportunity to ensure that the CE loss was genuinely 20 times the CE gain of a successful crime. It was.
I'm Bored of Reading, Give me Values!
Okay then, here are the results we calculated from our experiment. Each number is expressed in terms of the Crime Experience gained compared to a Warehouse Arson.
· Search the Movie Theater = 0.025x
· Shoplift Jacket = 0.1x
· Transport Cannabis = 0.2x
· Transport Amphetamines = 0.4x
· Transport Cocaine = 0.3x
· Sell Cannabis = 0.3x
· Sell Pills = 0.2x
· Sell Cocaine = 0.3x
· Arson Motel = 1.0x
· Hijack a Car = 0.3x
· Steal a Car from Showroom = 0.3x
· Pawn Shop Side Door = 0.6x
· Pawn Shop Rear Door = 0.7x
· Counterfeit Money = 0.6x
· Counterfeit Casino Tokens = 0.8x
· Counterfeit Credit Card = 0.7x
· Kidnap Kid = 1.7x
· Kidnap woman = 2.0x
· Kidnap Undercover Cop = 2.0x
· Kidnap Mayor = 1.9x
· Arms Trafficking Explosives = 1.7x
· Arms Trafficking Firearms = 2.6x
· Bomb a Factory = 2.8x
· Bomb a Government Building = 2.9x
· Hack Bank Mainframe = 0.6x
· Hack FBI Mainframe = 1.7x
You’ll notice that this is not an entirely complete list. There’s no real point in doing lesser crimes than the warehouse arson – it’s legendary for a reason. The only reason for listing the drug crimes is the recent renewed interest in them, as everybody wants to finally get the drug crime merits that were skipped for so long. And while these figures do show the amount of CE gained by a success, how good they are overall is determined by the success rate - lots of blue and red results mean they are inefficient for building CE.
There are a few other things that we wanted to know too. Do fails on kidnaps – which give a red where you give a bribe – cost you CE? Not that we could measure. Does self-busting give CE? Not that we could measure. Does bailing give CE? Not that we could measure. Does being on cannabis give more CE? Not that we could measure. Does getting jailed for failing a bust cost you CE? Not that we could measure. None of these results were unexpected, but until we were able to test them, their outcomes were entirely hypothetical.
Busting
The final thing we wanted to measure was busting itself. In the pre-RESPO days, back when Jeffery Torn himself was still alive (or at least somebody pretending to be 172 years old and claiming his pension was), a successful bust would be rewarded by giving you a percentage of your CE - if you already had a lot of CE, you got a lot more. When Ched nerfed busting, he said “to gain crime experience, you’re probably better off doing crimes”. This raised the question of where the threshold to be better off with busting is.
Busting has lots of variables involved, such as your level, your target's level, their time in jail, how many people you’ve recently busted, faction bonuses, company bonuses, and education. What we already know is that the CE awarded from a bust is linked to how difficult a bust is. I wasn’t in a 10* law firm when we performed this experiment, so I couldn’t view the success chance of a potential bust.
The only correlations I could draw were based on the bail cost of an inmate, and that doesn’t directly tell us how much CE a bust can give. There were a few conclusions I was able to make, however:
- The single hardest bust I could manage gave me 0.5 arsons worth of CE.
- Two busts with almost identical bail costs in quick succession gave 0.3 arsons worth of CE followed by 0.5 arsons worth of CE.
- A small chain of 4 hard busts gave 1.8 arsons worth of CE, but a bigger chain of 8 easier busts gave 3 arsons worth of CE.
- Another bust chain of 8 really easy busts gave 1.5 arsons worth of CE.
Distilled down, it appears that hard busts do indeed give more CE per nerve than crimes, but easy busts are a waste of nerve. Having perks that reduce the nerve cost of busts makes them better still: nerve for nerve, a 4 nerve bust can give ~37% better CE gain than a warehouse arson, a 3 nerve bust can give ~83% better gain, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to be in a faction with 2 nerve busts, then you can get 175% better CE gain per nerve used compared to a warehouse arson.
Given that the Bomb a Government Building crime gives ~87% more CE per nerve used, we can therefore conclude that the best way of building your Crime Experience score is… *drum roll* ...busting.
Some things never change.
Disclaimer: these figures are player calculated and entirely unofficial. Sugarvalves checked with Chedburn who consented to their publication, which means that either 1) they're wrong, 2) Ched doesn't know himself and is looking forward to finding out or
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