Sunday, January 21st, 2007
Issue: 6   Editor: Nobody


Casino Carnage Broken
Casinos. They’re sometimes a one way ticket to the Food Stamps queue and sometimes they’re a gateway to instant riches. However, one player’s crusade against boredom made them death traps, for a few days at least. A Casino owner a day was popping up on the stats page and there were no prizes for guessing who had done it. So, who was this lone player? Which casino owners were unlucky enough to find themselves a target? Is there anything deeper in these shootings? Let’s take a look at all the facts and reflect.

The person behind the Casino killings was Lethal. He decided to load up his gun and fire for the first time on January 12th when he killed the owner of the New Jersey Keno table, Leximus. The initial killings resulted in topics being created in the Game Forum, some praising Lethal for his guts to shoot down a casino owner, and some criticising Lethal for his actions. One thread in particular though, created by MafioKv caught Lethal’s attention. In this thread, MafioKv threatened Lethal with death for killing his friend. A few hours later, MafioKv had also fallen as Lethal’s second victim. Lethal left Bootleggers with the message that he would kill a Casino owner a day until he died. Whether he was going to follow through on his words was, at that time, anybody’s guess.

January 13th. Day two of Lethal’s killing spree. The scene of the second casino murder had changed, from New Jersey to Louisiana. The second unlucky victim was SneakyRebel, who was killed holding the state’s Blackjack table. As you can imagine, the second killing created a buzz around the Forums and Lethal was following through on his words. Owners of casino's were taking note as some had been seen starting to put up their casino tables up for sale on Classifieds. Day two ended with a few questions on players’ lips. Surely, one of the biggest questions was whether or not Lethal could be stopped.

January 14th. The Endgame. This day was the third and would prove to be the final day of Lethal’s killing spree. Today’s unlucky victim? fgh891, holder of the Louisiana Slot Machines and a member of Sempre Famiglia. This was the big one, the kill with the highest stakes. Not only because of the value of Slot Machines, but also the fact that fgh891 was in a position where he would have crew members ready to defend him. Surely enough, fgh891 died and Lethal took control of the casino he was holding but unfortunately for Lethal, somebody figured what he would do.

The person who ended Lethal’s killing spree was a player called Slice. I caught up with Slice to ask him about the kill he made. Here is a quote from Slice detailing his exact reason behind the shooting.

“He shot a crew member. I had been paying attention to what he had been doing in the previous days and on that day when he posted he was searching someone new, I first looked at all the slot owners. The day before he did say he was going for slots. Well, after I looked at all the slot holders, it appeared to me the one holding from the crew I'm in appeared to me to be the likeliest person to get shot. So I started searching Lethal right then”.

It took Slice 35,000 bullets to kill Lethal. When asked why he used that number, Slice said “I knew he had a caddy because we used to be crew members in False Impression when he had his Bullet Factory”. This shows that a degree of planning went into the kill, and that this was no simple “Shoot enough to kill any protection” kill.

So, whatever happened to the star of the show? What happened to Lethal? I got in touch with him on his new account and asked him why he made the kills, to which he said “I decided to do some shooting to bring some fun back into my game”. He informed me that he had no intention of reaching the rank of Respectable Don and he also originally didn’t plan to kill Casino owners. He shot Leximus because he lost $7,500,000 on his Keno and it seemed like a good enough reason to shoot somebody, but he figured after his first kill he’d just keep on going. According to Lethal he “didn't shoot for profit but shot for fun” and actually made a loss of 500 points after he was killed before he could kill the owner of the Michigan Blackjack table. I asked him whether Slice would expect any revenge, to which he replied “Usually I would have paid someone to kill him but I have respect for Slice so I figured I’d let him live”.

There we go. Lethal killed the Casino owners not for profit, but for fun. As Rouge also stated when he killed some members of Dies Irae, Lethal believed that Bootleggers was getting boring. One would be right in thinking that the game may be getting a bit stale, with more people willing to just sit back and bank their money rather than make things happen. It leaves us with the question of which direction we are going. Is BSF2000 doing enough to keep this game alive? He is introducing new features into the game at the moment, such as the Casino Crew colours feature and the Online Dominance features... small features leading up to what many people call “The Big Update”. But is it enough?

For now, Casino owners can breathe a small sigh of relief and Casino Ownership can become a slightly safer pastime while we can wait and see what is being done to combat boredom in this game by BSF2000. I do ask myself though, if boredom brings on something as entertaining as Lethal killing casino owners and Crew Takeovers left, right and centre, then why complain? Only time will tell.