Tarrakhash:
It's always a bit of a crap shoot when you play bad guys that you get all the people who want to play lone wolves.
So perhaps something where all the people start in the same gang/organized crime family?
I HATE lone wolves. It's probably true that members of the same crime family would help. Or at least the same gang/set or whatever. Members of the same heist crew, perhaps... If they're literally in the same family there's a bit less freedom re: names, ethnic diversity, and the like, but that wouldn't be so bad if they're just part of the same crew.
At present, the game doesn't do anything like a lot of the recent games do of establishing ties with each other. That was a design intent with the idea behind it being to create social situations for the players to overcome and grow together through the experience (e.g. when a GTA character was revealed to be a CI with the feds, his pals should have shot him on the spot but they overcame, or at least that's supposed to be the assumed story). So far people haven't really done much with it.
It seems that I may have to do something like ties anyway though, because otherwise you get situations where certain characters should die, but we're arbitrarily not making that happen, because they're being played by a player.
That's a thing I'm willing to work out in this playtest.