Stamina is an anti-cheating measure designed as one of several measures to help protect the game against unwanted behaviour.
How does Stamina work?
Stamina scores your account based on its level of activity over the past 24 hours and the past 7 days. In short, the more time you spend playing the game, the lower your Stamina score is.
Leaving the game open doesn't affect your Stamina. Only actual usage of the game counts as activity, such as attempting crimes or sending messages.
IMPORTANT: Stamina has NO effect on your gameplay as long as your level is "Normal", which is the case for over 99% of players.
In the rare case that your level falls to "Low" or "Critical", some areas of the game may become more difficult or restricted as detailed below.
Please note that the changes applied when your Stamina level reduces are subject to change at any time in future.
Stamina levels
Low Stamina
When your stamina reaches the "Low" level, the following changes occur:
- Your Armed Robbery timer is doubled
- Your Small Crimes timer is doubled
- Your Vehicle Theft timer is doubled
- Your Extortion timer is doubled
- Your Prison Busting timer is doubled
- Your Bomb Defusal timer is doubled
- Your Looting timer is doubled
Critical Stamina
When your stamina reaches the "Critical" level, the following further changes occur:
- The number of Looting options reduces to 2.
- You cannot purchase bullets from the Bullet Store.
- You cannot make bids in the Auction House.
How does Stamina help prevent cheating?
The purpose of Stamina is to help limit progress made by accounts engaged in rule-breaking behaviour which hasn't been or can't be prevented by traditional methods.
For example, it's impossible to detect if two or more people are sharing an account on a single computer (which can occur even if the account operators are in a separate locations using remote desktop software). Stamina at least ensures that when this does occur, the activity of the shared account is throttled once reaching a certain threshold, allowing fair players the opportunity to still compete.
How does Stamina work in detail?
Your Stamina score is primarily looking backwards at your activity over the past 24 hours. Specifically, 20 hours of activity over the past 24 hours will bring you into the Low band, and 24 hours of activity over the past 24 hours will bring you into the Critical band.
The way this is determined is by dividing your time into 10 minute blocks. If you perform any action on the game (whether that be committing a crime or sending a message), you're counted as being active for 10 minutes.
However, the game also looks back at your activity over the past 7 days and penalises you for high activity days. This is what allows us to have the initial activity thresholds quite high. Specifically, for every day with over 18 hours of activity, the amount of hours over 18 hours is halved and added to your current day's activity.
Why isn't my Stamina increasing while I'm offline?
Your Stamina will only increase if your activity over the past 24 hours (and 7 days where applicable) decreases. It's possible to be offline without your activity over these periods decreasing.
To give an example, let's say you play the game from 12pm until 6pm, meaning 6 hours of activity is recorded. Your activity over the past 24 hours is now 6 hours (assuming no prior activity). Even if you then don't play the game for 12 hours, you're total activity over the past 24 hours is still 6 hours. Therefore, your Stamina score doesn't change.
In other words, your Stamina doesn't increase every time you play and decrease every time you don't play, it's a score determined by looking back at your activity over the past 24 hours and 7 days.