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The popularity is supposed to be +1 for a completed job and +2 for a check-in as I understood it. Franchising differs and I don't know precisely how they determine that but the value I see most often is +20. The thing is, I have noticed that at level 50, the game is not engineered to count jobs or check-ins towards popularity. I do plenty of both each day and since attaining the max level, I am unable to positively influence my popularity AT ALL. The only thing that does raise it is the franchising by other people.
Please understand, while it sucks that Booyah is doing this stuff without any sort of announcement to alert the player base (as they did with the bucks cap), these changes may be for the best long-term. Players ARE taking advantage of the system, which is unhealthy for the game and Booyah's business interests.
That said, they have to take positive steps going the other way. Right now, I can't make my town more popular. The only real way for me to influence it is to buy popular businesses, but the businesses are on a one-way downward slide and I am capped at 36 businesses.
There's also a guy on the leader boards with a popularity of over 2 billion, which is not even remotely possible without manipulating the system code (you can only own 36 bizs and the highest popularity ever was Mixer Bar hitting about 250k...again, do the math). The second highest player is barely over 4 million. Nobody seems to care.
Look, the game is not just about rank. Hell, most of my bizs are local LI favorites that started with almost no popularity, and which I had to build from the ground up. But it is meaningless now until they fix things, and so far all these "changes" have been only negative. 🙁