Sunday, December 12th, 2010
Issue: 59   Editor: McAldarion


New Crimes: Interview with BSF Poisonous
You can evade the police; steal from eight different cities in each state and up to eight different businesses in each city. So now rather than having a choice of 15 crimes when all are available you can now do up to 574 different crimes! Oh and there are some nice pretty colours for when you fail or succeed in a crime... anyway enough in depth and thoughtful analysis (for more of that see Aldarion's article in last week’s Buzz, issue #58), we got in touch with BSF2000 to find out the thinking behind the new update.

The most obvious and pressing question of the bunch that we had at the Buzz seemed to be why crimes! BSF2000 told us “As a lot of players might remember, Crimes was actually updated last year during the reset.” We remember, for those of you who don’t it was the introduction of major and minor crimes. He continued, “However, the end product simply wasn't what I expected nor did I feel it was accomplishing what such a feature should.” So BSF2000 wasn’t particularly happy with crimes, but with a number of features that could do with being updated why were crimes top of the list, we were told “Crimes is the first feature new players are faced with and continues to be a crucial part of the game even as players rank. I really just wanted something better. So even though it was a feature that had just received an update, I decided to come up with my own idea and redo it myself.” Ok so crimes were chosen for an update, but how and by whom was the idea thought up? BSF2000 said “I just sat down and thought about what would make for a useful Crimes that would satisfy new and old players alike. This is when the idea of multiple cities came to mind. I figured it would be a great way to allow for the balance between the speed of which crimes max out at. I also wanted to incorporate more aspects of the game into the feature.”

For those who haven’t read the game forum topic on the new crimes update it seems that having less than 100% adversely affects your chances of success in crimes (somewhat logically, robbing any kind of shop peppered with bullet holes wouldn’t be easy) and having a gun and protection boosts your chances of success, although by how much is not clear. BSF2000 expanded on the topic, “I don't like the idea that the only reason a player buys a gun is to kill someone. Or the only reason a player goes to the hospital is to help against being killed. If a player has 5% health they shouldn't be able to run around doing everything perfectly fine and only choosing to go to the hospital once they are worried about dying. Things such as guns, protection, and health should all affect more aspects than just killing. So to begin making this happen I thought of the whole offense and defense percents that businesses would have and also made health impact the percents as well. I plan to continue making more aspects of the game involved with each other.” To many of us at the Buzz, this was the most exciting part of the new update (except the nice colours); the integration of game features with others and the promise of further integration could ensure that all game features are utilised by the majority of players rather than the minority. Watch this space.

With a seemingly very sophisticated feature, the Buzz thought that there may be more to it than meets the eye, some hidden rewards for crimes perhaps. We asked BSF2000, and he told us, “Right now, the new Crimes feature is exactly as it appears. There was a lot of thought put into aspects of it such as how much money should be give out, how fast percents should build, etc. But it’s exactly as it is. You rob businesses in various cities, build influence, and continue robbing from more and more available businesses.” So the feature as it is currently is a very interesting one, but BSF2000 gave us hope of even better to come, adding “there are definitely plans to add an additional aspects to the feature which I think players will enjoy. There is no estimated date as to when this add-on will be released as other features are currently taking priority over it. If for whatever reason the add-on ends up getting cancelled or replaced than I have no problem letting players know that. But as of right now it is still planned to come.” If you thought crimes was good now, you just wait there could be more to come, this is all very exciting. However, even more exciting perhaps is BSF2000s comment “other features are currently taking priority over it” which certainly seems to suggest there are more updates to come in the hopefully near future!

We couldn’t resist an opportunity to dig deeper here and we asked but BSF2000 for more details of this plan of action, what was coming next? He told us “I definitely have a plan set in my head about what features I will be focusing on. This might deviate as time goes, but for the most part I know the direction I am headed. I really want to get the core-features of the game taken care of, the first of which was Crimes. I just don’t think some of the important parts of the game are as good as they can be. One such feature is the current Kill. It’s not necessarily the next feature that will be updated, but it’s one that I plan on taking care of.” I think we can certainly expect a kill update at some point then, and also the promise of a redoing of all of the ‘core features’ so Auto Burglary, Crews, Establishments? Who know, we shall have to wait and see, my breath is well and truly baited.

Where were we... oh yes, crimes. Sorry I got rather caught up thinking about all the future possibilities... anyway! We also questioned BSF2000 on how long it took him to come up with and implement this feature from start to finish, as we at the Buzz have little to no knowledge of how to do these things- all we can really do is write! He told us “This project actually officially started quite some time ago. However, some unfortunate incidents caused further work on it to be postponed until just a couple months ago. If you cut out such incidents I’d have to say around 2 months, including 2-3 weeks of HDO+ testing. Fortunately, the issues which delayed this project have for the most part been taken care of so I look forward to being able to being able to produce features more quickly.” So hopefully we’ll be seeing our next feature update in the next couple of months, even earlier if you’re a HDO, lucky you!

This entire crimes update was of course overshadowed by a much more complex, important and overall better update; the smileys patch (which saves a message if it has over 15 smileys rather than deleting it). We mentioned this to BSF2000, just to say brilliant, and we asked him why he chose to do it now, he said “Whenever I am working on a larger project I will take small 15-minute breaks every now and then. A lot of the time I will use this time to make small updates or patches, which this time happened to be the emoticon error. So during a small break while I was working on the new Crimes I had just remembered a complaint about players typing a large message only for that message to be deleted by too many emoticons being included. I definitely understood the frustration associated with this and figured a few minutes spent patching it would save a lot of frustrating moments for people.” Best update ever.

Please use this article to let us know your thoughts on the new update as well as what you think should be next on BSF2000s list of updates, these opinions may be used in an article on public opinion in the next few weeks, thanks!

BSF2000 ended the interview as he ended his game forum topic last week, reassuring the players of his commitment to Bootleggers, he said “I’m still here for Bootleggers and for all the players. I love Bootleggers and I love all the players, despite what some may think of me. Bootleggers has brought a lot of joy to me over the years and with the help of everyone here including myself I hope it can continue bringing joy to all.”

We hope so too, and look forward to more updates!