Sunday, June 27th, 2010
Issue: 34   Editor: HowlingMadMika


COLUMN: Don't Panic Altro
It’s a popular opinion that the game is slowly dying, that the staff are inactive and it may be time to move on. Well I’m going to disagree, not only because it makes an interesting article, but maybe because it isn’t true, just maybe. Cast your mind back, a ten strong Moderator force logged in daily to deal with everything from racism to hacking. Yet on the day of writing, only one moderator has logged in so far, and the world hasn’t ended. Moderator tickets are still being answered, no miss-placed topics, no spammers in either BootMail or the forums and as far as I can see, no huge hacking attempts. In fact if this was a mere three years ago I would be kissing the heavens for bootlegging peace.

Of course a popular opinion could be that with less people online, we require less babysitting. However, consider the setting. We now have looser rules than ever before, a freedom to scam, a freedom to curse and name call. All of which no longer have to be governed. Since round five moderators have had more tools to catch duplicate accounts, and a better ban system for dealing with it. Something which has taken time for players and staff to get used to, but something we are now seeing a huge effect from. We also have better controls in place in the game, such as benefits to duping have been eased, not erased entirely, but certainly, at least, decimated. We could also consider the new forum, better classification of topics in a nice subject header leads to less confusion among players. In essence, the game is not dying because we lack moderators, oh no. The fact we no longer need as many shows how far the game has come.

However, there is a dark side. A side which all who have been here a while are aware of. The game is becoming less active! Wait! Is this the fault of Bootleggers? Better yet is Bootleggers weathering the storm better than others? Come to think of it, is this even a bad thing?

Text-based games are dying! They have been since the start of the 90’s, when people started to realise that worlds outside of command prompt were easy enough to make. They were briefly revived by the online game play in the early 00’s, but in essence other games grow into 3D worlds allowing better visual interaction, customization, escapism and what many people find a better experience. I should probably point out that this does not suggest text-based will disappear. In fact, we still see many arcade games around, but it’s been years since we saw them as the leading market. Really this just means much of the market will move on, leaving a purer form of the hobbyist behind. Many other text based games have been finding a similar drop in user levels over the past half a decade.

Bootleggers fluctuates between 150 and 450 members online in a daily cycle, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. These statistics can be found on bootcrews.com for those interested. These numbers are indeed down from a few years ago and massively from half a decade ago, but do not panic. The game once operated with a lot less. It could do so again, however undesirable it may be. The game is a lot more resistant to changing environments (that being the world and in particular the gaming market,) than many would have you believe.

In fact losing some members may not be a bad thing. Round four saw users with masses of dupes, some claiming to have over a hundred. Losing this one member takes an edge out of the game, yet the game is better for it, fairer for it. Unfortunately we must therefore accept quieter times in exchange. There are of course less attacks and longer periods between retaliations when one person must re-rank every time he or she dies, rather than logging in to a different account. Really, logic dictates you should have a more involving game if there are fewer members. Just think, same amount of bullets in the game, less targets. You are bound to die more often.

Well at least some of it can be put down to the ineffectiveness of the staff, right? RIGHT? Maybe, but what do they do wrong? A common complaint is BSF2000 doesn’t talk to the players. Does he have to, to do his job? Not really, in fact it may help the game if he doesn’t. That added level of mystery that surrounds him allows speculation which makes an interesting conversational piece. Do we even know what his name stands for? Yet we guess to his state of mind, blaming him for being disconnected. For all we know his dupe could be a crew boss playing the game all day, he could even be a forum whore.

Bugs, however, go unchecked for ages, errors that affect our game play. It is undeniable, however big problems have existed this round you may not know about, errors which were fixed within an hour of reporting despite him not even being online when reported. For example, did you know at one point in this round you could not kill user accounts with an underscore in their name? The bug was reported to the helpdesk and a Bootmail sent to a moderator, within 30 minutes the bug was fixed and order restored. Issues that are indeed extremely urgent are fixed accordingly. Those minor issues, which may seem like major issues to you but are not in the grand scheme of thing, do take a little longer to patch. That’s just the nature of design and implementation.

What we as players really want is attention, our leader to look down on us and smile as he grants our wishes, while we look back up in admiration. As we aren’t getting that, we try to goad him into answering us. If you are aware of systems thinking you may have heard of the Hawthorne Experiments. The idea was to try and increase productivity in the work place by changing factors. They found that no matter which variables they changed productivity increased; even when they raised then lowered the conditions for the workers. The conclusions they drew was we just need the illusion that someone is taking an interest in what we are doing, and that is the problem Bootleggers has.

Players “feel” disconnected for the staff, that doesn’t mean they are.