Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Issue: 102   Editor: NyxxieV30


Bust Feature got Busted? Pt. 2 Aldarionimo
Last week, I submitted a freelance article on busting and the difficulty which that brings along. As you may have noticed I added a question mark instead of a dot in the title of this article. My previous freelance article was somewhat written as a plea. In this ‘sequel’, I want to take some more things into consideration, so I thought it would be right to add some consideration into the title as well. Sabin replied to the topic after I wrote the rough version of the article and by chance it matches it pretty well.

So, last week I tried to point out that the busting was too hard and I still think it is. Don’t get me wrong, busting shouldn’t be easy. What’s the point of the jail if you get busted out all the time? But, on the other hand, when busting is too hard it gets really annoying and people start to ignore the feature. However, as long as it is challenging people will continue to bust. Simple fact of the matter is though; people aren’t using the feature as much as before and that is probably caused by its difficulty.

Now why did they make busting this hard? Thanks to Mikamon I was able to get a reply from Sabin on this subject. Sabin stated that busting was made harder so that jail would become a meaningful penalty for getting caught.

Thing is though, it seems people don’t really take the current punishment very serious. So instead of making people aware that jail is not such a nice place to be, it rather causes people to get annoyed by the lack of successful busts (as pointed out above).

Let’s take a look at several of the ‘components’ of busting and find out what might be done in order to make the jail a place which won’t be ignored and yet ‘frighten’ people.

First of all, the feature that allows users to bust themselves out of jail. When introduced, it seemed a rather nice and proper feature. However, once the staff decided to make busting harder, it seems this became another cause of people ignoring the bust feature.
Once people didn’t get busted out as much as they were used to, they started to use the feature to bust themselves out even more. Now, before busting was made harder this usually worked pretty well. I remember the fact that I busted myself out several times in a row.
It didn’t work quite that well afterwards. It seems people kept trying even though they were caught most of the time. Since one gets unbreakable once failing to bust oneself out, jails got full with unbreakable users and that really is quite annoying.

Combined with the fact that busting was made harder, this feature caused things to get even worse. If busting will remain to be this hard, a solution could be to remove this feature. There are some more less radical solutions though. For example, harder punishment once one tries to bust oneself out and fails, although I doubt if that would work. An extra option might be to create different chances of succeeding to busting someone else or busting oneself.

Second of all: The punishment of being caught while trying to bust someone out of jail. The current penalty isn’t that severe, once one fails to bust someone out there’s just enough time to get another cup of coffee. In other words, the penalty isn’t that serious. Higher penalties would definitely be a proper solution in my eyes since once being stuck in jail for a longer period the penalty does become meaningful. Apart from that, it would also make busting worth more; consider that everyone will feel happier about being busted out if they are stuck in jail for ten minutes than if they are stuck for just two minutes.
There is one major drawback though, this certainly won’t work combined with the current difficulty of busting.

In order to make the busting feature worth more the staff could also consider to change the penalties for being caught while doing crimes. For example, higher ranks get arrested for a longer period of time than lower ranks.

So to conclude, it seems there is plenty of room for this feature to be improved, so let’s hope Sabin will look into it. I still feel the current feature is a bit wide of the mark.