Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Issue: 70   Editor: NyxxiPoo


Bullet Prices; Greed or Not? GPEnergyV9
Early this week we saw a few killings done by RFN. Amongst the dead was the NY BF holder, InsertNameHere. According to Ozark, one of the people who were responsible, it was done, among other reasons, because of the high bullet prices. Now it is interesting that DNA, another person behind this attack, made a comment on the game forum that he didn’t convert a single point in bullets and stated that bullets from factories are much cheaper.

Besides that this shows a contradiction within RFN it also shows a nice point for a discussion and in this article I’d like to point out some views on bullet prices. So are BF owners greedy or not?

The argument for greed is quite simple, most of the players of BL cannot afford to buy bullets and there for the owners who make countless millions are greedy because they are not willing to lower the prices and be happy with less profit so everyone can buy a few bullets. You can hold a BF with a bullet price of $100 and still make profit.

A well known argument against greed is that bullets are still a lot cheaper to get by buying of a BF then to convert points. 500 bullets will cost you about $875,000 ($1750 a bullet) while 10 points cost about 1,700,000 so that is about double the prices. Now off course points should be more expensive but it still shows buying bullets is much cheaper.

This argument has been proven by underground crews like The Clericuzio, The Syndicate and The Triad’s who all said they never used a single point for bullets.

Coming back at that you can hold a BF with bullet price of $100 a bullet and make profit is not really true. Yes, the BF management screen will show profit, but in fact you don’t really make profit if you calculate it back to points with a time factor.

At the start of this round a BF holder with a $100 bullet price would make $112,500 per hour, with for example a point price of say $5000 per point the holder makes 22.5 points per hour.

Nowadays a BF holder with a $100 bullet price would make the same $112,500 per hour, but nowadays we have a point price of $170,000 per point so the holder makes not even 1 point per hour.

If this example would represent the real thing the bullet price should now be 22.5 * 170,000 = 3,825,000 / 1125 = $3400 per bullet in order to make the same amount of points now as back in the early days of this reset.

Another argument is that crews have become more and more vulnerable the last few months and need to protect themselves. This is because of a few updates made to the game like the online crew members being shown in green at the crew profile, the removal of the search on rank at the find player and the hard kick feature.

To explain this a little bit

  • Online crew members shown in green: with this feature it got a lot easier to wipe a crew because you first kill those online just in case any of them has recruiting rights and can let in extra members
  • Removal of the search on rank: in the past everyone could search the ranks for people they didn’t trust and shoot them before they could become a problem, now try to find a l.don (especially when in a fixed Organized Crime team) you have to get lucky either on the forums or at the users online page
  • Hard kick feature: when a crew gets taken over with a insider it just takes a fraction of the bullets to kill everyone and make sure they have to start from scum again.


In order to protect themselves crews make sure that when people do want to shoot them the shooters have already paid the crew a good amount of money for the bullets which can be used by the crew to shoot back if needed.

You could obviously argue that it is because of the high bullet prices that crews are targeted.

Here we have a few different argument both pro and contra greed. For me I would like to see how many points a BF holder makes today per hour and how many that was 3, 6, 12 and 18 months back. If that rate is growing rapidly I can agree with people calling BF owners greedy, if it’s not growing BF owners are not greedy in my eyes.

Any comments to this article are more than welcome.