Sunday, August 9th, 2009
Issue: 138   Editor: MikaTheGoofball


Stock Market on the Move MikaTheGoofball
It might have been the highlight of this week: The release of the new Stock Market. Over the past months, a lot of players had requested updates to this feature. Arguments being it was impossible to earn a lot of money with it, that holding a mere 150 shares of every company was not enough to make the feature interesting, the list goes on and on. On the other side there were the players who believed the Stock Market was fine the way it was as it allowed lower ranks to make some money. Nevertheless it seemed the Elite Guard was on the hands of those in favor of the update as the Stock Market received an update.


The updated Stock Market

Initially the update was well received by the players. Main reason for this was the new complexity of the feature. There are now national and local stocks. Local stocks can be bought and sold everywhere, whereas local stocks can only be bought and sold in their respective states. Contrary to the previous Stock Market it is now no safe way to make money anymore for stocks can actually crash now. Companies can go bankrupt if their stock value hits $0 and will disappear from the market, resulting in the loss of your investment. Nevertheless companies that are currently doing well will have a smaller chance of crashing than companies who already offer low priced and dropping stocks.

Despite the chance of losing a significant amount of money to this new stock market it is still worth it as there is also a chance of earning yourself a nice amount. With the update come new stock maxes that go up with the rank. With a maximum of 10,000 stocks to be held your profit can be pretty high if you buy and sell at the right times. Whether or not is is wise to buy or sell can partly be determined by the chart that shows a chart with the performance of the company. This will allow you to form an idea of how the stock might perform in the future.


A progress chart taken from the Stock Market

Even though the renewed Stock Market is seen as a great update, it had a bit of a bumpy start. Players were able to earn a lot of money with the stock market, inserting hundreds of millions into the game that was technically exploited money. Several players ended up banned for abusing an exploit, however the results could not be made undone. As a result, Bootleggers was rolled back to 2009-08-04 03:00:00 BL-Time. This rollback made the damage that had been inflicted undone and also came with a 'fixed' Stock Market for us to enjoy. In order to allow players to re-gain what they had lost due to the rollback, the timers of crimes, auto burglary, organized crimes and traveling have been halved for a not specified amount of time.

For now, we might just as well enjoy the reduced times in combination with our new stock market. Stocks are a bit less predictable now and profit is not always guaranteed. With the updated feature, it might be wise to remember what Peter Lynch once said, “In this business if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.” It may be a little harder to earn money now, but it the reward can be well worth it.