Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
Issue: 42   Editor: SeanFailKnox


Your Country Needs You! PoisonBullet
If there’s a killer on the loose, in your neighbourhood, who the government gonna call? The Mobsters!?

Last Thursday, Nyxxie threw her Elite Guard duties to one side and joined the government, although there is some confusion here as they may be the same thing here on Bootleggers! Maybe next she’ll be asking us to call her ‘M’, or more appropriately ‘N’! She’s going to go power crazy and lead a revolution against BSF2000! Aaaagghh!!

Anyway, that’s enough of my baseless speculating, down to what happened! Thursday evening in the game forum was relatively quiet, some people asking for help with plenty of other people giving answers before the HDOs arrived with correct ones, some feature suggestions being quickly shot down or being given the classic response; ‘I like it, but there are bug fixes to be made first’, and of course a very un game related discussion or someone trying to sell a car.. We still haven’t figured out whether this is simply to be annoying or genuine mistaken placement, but this is beside the point. It was all normal.

Then Nyxxie (Aka ‘N’) piped up with a topic entitled ‘Hide and Go Seek BL style’, and the fun started! Quite simply Nyxxie, on behalf of the government, was asking the Bootleggers mobsters to help to kill a dangerous criminal who had murdered his family and crew and fled in exchange for a reward of $10,000,000 and 250 points (which later rose to $15,000,000 and 250 points)! Unfortunately for the lazy ones of us, it wasn’t a case of search, point and fire but instead the rather poor quality government intelligence trickled through in the form of clues at a speed a snail would be ashamed of (the government need some new staff)! First up was a simple clue ‘The suspect bought a train ticket for $92 from Illinois’. A simple enough clue to crack if you were in Illinois, Nevada (which turned out to be the answer) or simply had a look on www.altrozero.com/boot. So we knew his location, and for a long while this was all we had to go on. A number of players checked into the hospital to see if he might be recuperating after what was bound to have been a difficult fight with his entire crew and family (Nyxxie later told the Buzz that he was in fact down to 10% health), but no joy! Others simply searched everyone with a mafia sounding name and fired at them the second the detective told them he was in Nevada (no matter the degree of certainty). Clues continued to come through that no-one managed to use to find the killer until two that turned out to relate to his name. Firstly he was heard to be muttering ‘eroe’ under his breath, a clue that was quickly solved and in fact posted in the topic for those who didn’t have access to a search engine; ‘eroe’ was Italian for ‘hero’. The second clue, and indeed the one that ultimately led to his demise was when a witness spotted him carry a piece of paper bearing the address ‘"20 Nassau St, New York, NY" that turned out to be downtown New York. And the bright spark that put these two clues together, came up with the name DownTownHero, searched, killed and claimed the reward for killing him was FireyLandMasses! The Buzz contacted him to talk us through how he did it, he said "I logged on, solved the clues within about 4 minutes, bought a High Standard and fired a total of 1,100. Simple"
So $15,000,000 and 250 points given away for, quite frankly no reason other than to reward the players so everyone was happy, right? How naive you would be to think this, and unusually the complaints were not just Nyxxie bashing. Players were not happy that Nyxxie had picked a game that has to be won by someone who has the in game money to purchase and stock a gun, and then have enough in game knowledge of features to be able to search and kill quickly and efficiently, they argued that she was simply making the rich and more experienced richer and leaving the poor floundering. Many called for different types of games that would benefit others, especially if this was to be a long running thing. There was some bad feeling in the topic as players felt it was unfair to presume that buying and stocking a gun was a prerequisite of activity. The Buzz contact Nyxxie to see what she had to say about these comments, she told us ‘People need to start playing the game instead of complaining about those that do. I'm not interested in giving easy giveaways to people because they are too lazy to do what they should be doing to play the game, just because they look at this place as a glorified forum. Too bad! You snooze, you lose!’ The Buzz pressed her on the fact that there are other features on the game that could be used for a contest as there are very active players who do play the game but choose not to shoot others and therefore never stock, we were told ‘The Buzz had a giveaway that involved Auto Burglaries and sometimes the Elite Guard does Russian Roulettes. Those are the only two. Again, not everything needs to involve everyone. This giveaway is a case in point.’

It seems that the resounding message coming from the Elite Guard with the recent iPod bustout, and this contest is that they want to reward people who play this game to it’s fullness and do not intend to focus on new players, but instead show they care about the current players. Congratulations to FireyLandMasses, and we at the Buzz might just have to start stocking now with Nyxxie promising more similar contests to come ‘once a month’.