Sunday, January 10th, 2010
Issue: 10   Editor: Mika


COLUMN: That’s not Gone Well: Crimes Aldarion
This article is classified as a column and may involve writer opinion

In round five, the average bootlegger wasn’t much challenged by the crime page. The chance of success was mainly influenced by doing OCs and it was scripted in such a way that one could exactly predict the day of his next promotion. That, of course, meant crimes weren’t much of a challenge even though the crimes reached maximum only just once one got to don, roughly two to three months after starting as a scum. When we kicked off in round six, everyone expected this to be the very same. Everyone happened to be wrong, things had changed.

It soon appeared that ranking was harder and a few days later, when the first organized crime was committed, we discovered that organized crimes no longer influence a player’s chance of succeeding a crime. Later, it was discovered that these changes only affected the first few ranks and once past those one could rank away just as before the reset. But that is not where I’m on about; the amount of crimes one needed to reach their maximum chance of success was changed as well.

The reason given for this change was that the staff felt players would need more of a challenge; it shouldn’t be too easy to become successful at succeeding crimes. Thing is, the amount of crimes needed to get all crimes as successful as possible is now easily exceeding twenty-thousand. Before I continue I should first explain the concept of a challenge. Make it hard and rewarding and people will accept a challenge, make it nearly impossible and people simply won’t. For me, maxing out my crimes is about as attractive as walking from East-coast to West-coast for just twenty bucks.

And that is where the main problem lies; the average Bootleggers player will not be able to max out their crimes. Theoretically, it is possible to commit 30 crimes an hour and when we assume the average player spends one hour a day doing crimes, it would take him way over two years to even get close. There is something here that needs to be added, though, as the reward of the more difficult crimes was raised as well. However, the average Bootlegger will not get close to the real rewards, thus making it an impossible, unrewarding challenge.

It is likely that most players will not reach the amount of attempted crimes on any future accounts of this reset – at least in my experience – which means we could seriously doubt if anyone is going to get there, this round. And that is another thing; crimes should make this game interesting as it would let people stick to the game instead of just logging on for doing an Organized Crime every now and then. At this moment, we can, for sure, say that crimes are not something that will attract people to the game or something that will keep the players going. Contrary, I can imagine players leaving because it is too hard, too unrewarding for a normal human being.

There are other problems, too. When something is too hard, players tend to seek help in other things. One of those is the much discussed script that gives players the ability to commit crimes while being away from their computer. I dare to say that this challenge is almost provoking use of such scripts. Compare this to a hungry tramp, if he has no food or if it is almost impossible for him to get any, it is likely that he will attempt to steal some food. On the other hand, if someone offers him bread every now and then – thus making the ‘challenge’ of getting food – easier, it is less likely that he will attempt to steal.

Overall then, this decision regarding crimes seems to be one that was overdone in the hurry of the reset, a decision that wasn’t properly considered before implementing it into the game. I understand that the decisions regarding what is correct and what isn’t, is one that is hard. The fact that organized crimes no longer raise crime percentages might have made it even harder. None of this, though, removes my feeling that this is not the right balance between challenge and reward. However, don’t get me wrong on this; I’m not in for higher rewards as that would make it just better for people whose real life has less priority than Bootleggers. The challenge should be easier; it should be something that can be achieved by the average player on Bootleggers. After all, this game was not designed for robots.