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


COLUMN: The Eleventh Hour 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 agree, not only because it makes an interesting article, but maybe because it is true, just maybe. Cast your mind back a few years to a ten strong Moderator force. They patrolled the game every day, every hour of the day, and if by some chance no Elite Guard members were online we would have an army of Help Desk Operators to fill the void. Now we spend most of the day without the Elite Guard while the three HDOs work tirelessly around the clock to keep the game in check. Can we go on like this?

This lack of staff interest has started to show. Players are starting to feel abandoned, which may be why player levels have slowly been falling for the past few years. It is questionable if we will ever return to the old glory days of several thousand members playing daily. With all the theories in the world it becomes hard to fathom the fact the game has lost over 75% of its members from the good old times. We have better controls for stopping duping, for catching cheats but they are slipping through the nets. Why else would the staff have to ban proxies if the problem was not getting beyond their control?

It is not just a lack of Moderators which are causing the problems. The lack of effort put in to bug fixing, for some, is laughable. For a service which is no longer publicly advertises itself as Beta there are aspects that don’t even work. Take for example major crimes, while some give errors, some return zero profits and others that do work give pitiful payouts compared to minor crimes. That new dimension added to the game in round five has just gone. We at least have recognition that the staff know about the bugs via the Game Forum topic. However, in the good old days if a feature didn’t work it was disabled untill it was fixed. Now, however, un-expecting players are left to occasionally waste a crime or more before they become aware of a pointless feature. How must it look to new players to simple see features that do not work? Unprofessional?

Maybe we are being unfair to the staff. Bugs have been fixed. The infamous NaN error only took several months to get around to. Oh yes that is right, a quick patch taking 10 minutes could have done the job untill a better solution could be found and, in fact, a player had to issue their own solution. Alas, a large proportion of the users were left out in the cold. With the last feature release or update (that the players are aware of) being two and a half months ago, which itself still has a problem, it is not hard to see why players feel left out in the cold. A feature you may know of as the Roulette and Cashier system. Can we truly think BSF2000 is in touch with his players when he removes the ability to gain a ball park figure on how hard it is to win a casino? An aspect we were told would be fixed with the next update, which we don’t know when it will take place.

With the speed of innovation that takes place in the rest of the market, how long will it be until Bootleggers falls too far behind? How long till Bootleggers becomes more nostalgic than playable, untill it becomes the Final Fantasy 1 to the Lost Odysseys, or the Golden Eye on the N64 to Halo 3 on the Xbox 360? Both games have a fan base solely because they were original at the time, but now pale in comparison to the new guns. Can we see Bootleggers going the same way? The text-game market may no longer be the leading area for online games, but it is far from a dying platform. Every year thousands of new domain names are snapped up for the sole purpose of this market. Many fade away, fizzle out or die. Bootleggers.us was uniquely placed to dominate, given a very strong community and a strong social aspect. Now, however, this is fading, players are leaving, crews are less profitable than they were, meaning there is less of a reason to join and once thieving features such as IRC CHAT, go for hours without a message.

The game is suffering. A lack of innovation, activity and suitability are driving players away. We were once preached to by high ranking Staff members about the structure of the game, and its staff’s roles, the development process and game balancing. Sometimes, they themselves need to be reminded of.

Let’s once again look at the old glory days, Bootleggers has had its ups and downs. This situation has arisen before, and the game came back from the brink. However, it took one very drastic measure, an online, public and humiliating apology from the owner of the game. That triggered fixes, updates, a resurgence in play and returned that now lost spark that just made everything click. Maybe one day we will login to once again see that immortal word “Sorry”. Let us hope it is not an eleventh hour plea for redemption after the game reaches the cliff edge and falls out of reach.

Players “feel” disconnected from staff, I wonder why?