Been meaning to post this for a while and hoped I'd have longer to prepare, but keen to just get this thrown up so others can critique / add to my suggestions with their own thoughts.

From speaking to various Cartel owners, it seems there's a general consensus for a bit more control over the armory and individual players. 

Special thanks to DSMOKES96, A_MERCHANT, MIDNIGHTRUSH and TOKENBOT for their valuable input and assistance.

Member management

A big request I found was the ability to have greater control over Cartel members. Many people mentioned being able to assign members to different ranks within the cartel. Some examples could be 'Co-leader' for the 2nd in command, 'Sicarios' for those well established and trusted in the cartel, and 'Narco' for newer members. Each rank can then be assigned with certain permissions etc, as opposed to having to specify this on a player by player basis.

Another suggestion was the ability for Cartel owners to be able to make notes on specific players, with 2 different note options available. One note would be visible for all cartel members, while another note would only be visible to members with a certain rank (E.G only owner and co-leader can read the note). This would allow a leader to make a public note next to player (E.G - holiday until ***), whilst also making private notes for the higher rank members.

Armory management

Currently, the armory is an all-or-nothing kind of deal. I personally think it would be incredibly helpful if Cartel owners were able to create categories for items, and individually assign each item in the armory to a specific categories. For example 'Category A' could have all drugs and medical items assigned to it, 'Category B' has weapons and armor, 'Category C' contains production / construction materials etc. A cartel owner can then grant permissions to the members for specific categories. Cartel members participating in a war could get access to the drug and med category, new members get access to the weapon and armor category etc.

Allowing members to 'Loan' items from the armory may also help, as currently (I believe) the item is sent to the player in question, which could resultin this never being returned. Cartel managers could then manually recall an item to their armory at any time if required to do so.

Automated Competitions

A lot of Cartels seem to run 'Rep competitions' quite frequently, where the members compete to see who can earn the most rep within a set period of time, and prizes being issued to the best performing members. If a cartel owner was able to configure a 'Competition' within the cartel, this could automate the process. They could set the event start / end date, the parameters required (E.G rep gained, attacks won, jobs / expeditions completed etc), and the prizes for players finishing in relevant positions to be issued automatically upon reaching the designated end time. 

Please do add any of your own ideas below, or feel free to critique my own.

I like these idea 

I wholeheartedly support everything in this post.

Highly agree with everything here :) I did message Diablo a few days ago asking if there's any plan for future roles within Cartels & I believe he said there will be custom roles at some point but there is also higher things on his list.

Brilliant post Bizz hopefully we see some changes as the game grows :D

Shameless self-bump as still think this could help cartel management significantly.

Please do add any suggestions / criticisms.

I like the auto comp, that would be nice to have this could be replicated to a point following the chain mechanics from Torn as once a chain begins it's then tracked showing who was involved etc

Bring that style of system could add a different aspect to cartels stacking and fighting also as each look for bonuses on rep hits etc 

Thanks for the awesome suggestions, I believe we've largely handled your Member management and Armory management suggestions, although there are some additional suggestions we've got planned such as a daily use limit.

At least at present we don't plan to implement automated competitions, as I don't believe we could dedicate the time to bringing it up to par with simply hosting this sort of thing outside of the game, but I'd be happy to revisit this in future.