Sunday, January 24th, 2010
Issue: 12   Editor: Mika


COLUMN: The End Has Come Aldarion
This article is classified as a column and may involve writer opinion

In my previous column, I wrote about the changes that were made to crimes and the effect it had on the game. This week, BSF2000 admitted he was working on an update to make crimes more accessible for the average player. But there is more to it. This game doesn’t fall or stand with proper working crimes, it’s the combination of all features that will balance or unbalance this game. If we look at it that way, it appears there is way more, in fact the messed up crimes feature is just the tip of the iceberg.

Before I go into detail, there are some things that need to be established. First of all, contrary to popular believe the reset did not cause an increase in users playing the game. There are more users online at a time which might deceive you to think that the game has more players. Truth is, the amount of players that logs in (at least) once every twenty-four hours decreased by over ten percent, compared to exactly one year ago. What does this mean? It means fewer players put more time into Bootleggers.

That immediately illustrates the main problem this game has; it is absolutely user-unfriendly to casual players and starters. In the first few weeks after the reset the amount of players that logged in decreased as fast as they got back to Bootleggers. I used to compare my own statistics to the statistics of the average player and in the first week of the reset it certainly wasn’t a piece of cake to get my cash above that of the average player. Now though, I am miles ahead. People left the game and they didn’t leave without reason.

I reckon most of the problem is down to one thing. Certainly, some may have left because of the crimes but I don’t think that is the major cause. I believe it is all down to the changes in the OC pay-outs. For some reason I cannot understand, this was drastically lowered at the beginning of the reset. Prices from weapons, protection and establishments remained unaltered. I’ve been trying to get the reason behind it but I am afraid my mind simply cannot comprehend it, which really makes me wonder why this was done. All I can do it come up with reasons why the change was wrong and that’s exactly what I am going to do now.

I am kicking this off with the prices of protection and weapons. The average money on the game statistics is not that reliable due to many players quitting the game. However, it seems pretty fair to assume the average player on Bootleggers can hardly afford enough bullets to kill a proper rank, let alone a gun. Now that happens to be a problem. The staff decided it was time for a different policy that was to bring Bootleggers back to the origin. Staff would intervene less and players had to shoot if they were offended. The goal of this was to get more action in the game.

This happened to be a scam. How would you like to have more action if affording a proper gun is almost impossible for the average player? To compare, the price of a Hitsquad is one-hundred points, which at the current point price equals 350K. That means a Thompson is over four times as expensive as the best gun in the game. And there is something else that is quite odd, too; the price for a Thompson in Organized Crimes is just thirty-thousand bucks. It’s the same story for protection and that is remarkable considering the staff’s announcement that protection would play a vital role in the game, when the new killing feature was introduced.

But it doesn’t all end with protections and guns. Establishments became effectively useless because of their high price. There is almost no value for money. I did some research about this at the end of round five and even then establishments weren’t really popular. Empty land remained empty land for weeks. Now, the overall amount of money in the game is even lower, how are people possibly going to be interested in this within a few years? The value of establishments was recently reset to one million, which seems reasonable. Problem is, people don’t really have a reason to build a garage as most of the cars are sold right away and chances of a car being stolen are very small. The other feature land can be used for isn’t particularly useful either, as they don’t offer the protection one might be looking for.

Then we get to the crews. The total amount was increased to thirty spots, which – in the beginning of the round - I found quite reasonable. I was wrong. It no longer is an achievement to have a crew. In fact, most people will find it harder to get rid of one than to get a new one. This was illustrated a couple of weeks ago when a crew dropped because all members higher than boss had been killed. It took at least five hours before someone created a spot. Last round there were huge fights for these spots and several times more than one crew was added because two (or more) people created a crew at exactly the same time. None of this has and none of this will happen in this round.

The reason more crews were introduced – which was to get more action into the game – makes it even harder to understand the decision regarding ingame money, or prices of protection and weapons. Now don’t get me wrong on this, it shouldn’t be too easy, you shouldn’t be able to easily kill someone if you just signed up. However, the drop in users does support my point that the game isn’t friendly to starters and casual players. Most people currently playing are the good old die-hards from last round. Some quit, and a few new ones did have the strength to continue playing.

However, most people that returned to have a look if Bootleggers really went ‘back to origin’ left again, concluding it certainly did not return to its origin. As a matter of fact, killing is harder than ever if we consider the prices of equipment. Overall, I’m struggling to find a reason in all of this and the conclusion I made when writing the column on crimes seems to apply to this situation as well. It was a decision made in the hurry of a reset, without considering the possible consequences to other features. This is something that might lead to the end of Bootleggers. However, I might have been wrong on all of this, which means this won’t be the end of Bootleggers, it will be my end.