Sunday, January 30th, 2011
Issue: 66   Editor: ApocalypticAldarion


COLUMN: At World’s End ApocalypticAldarion
Another massive drop in the number of players, this week. People have been talking about the game’s death for a while now, but the point where it is actually going to die is closing rapidly. Some people put the blame entirely on BSF2000, some say that other people are responsible for this. People call for a reset, something that was regarded as ridiculous just a few months ago. However, it may have saved the game from getting into the state where it is in right now.


A graph representing the amount of people that play Bootleggers over the several issues of the Bootleggers Buzz. The red dot represents the last issue this graph was shown.


First of all, there is not one clear reason to summarize why so many players have left the game. Some people claim this is purely down to BSF, others claim that the shooters are entirely responsible. Some state that Mafia games simply belong to the past and that nobody is really interested in them any more. A few even claim that the game is now ‘shit’ because, they say, BSF is not really doing anything. They say that other games are better, because these admins are active, implying that the quality of a game is just down to the activity of the administrator. However, I think that there are several reasons why this all happened.

Surely, Mafia games are not as popular as they used to be some years ago but this isn’t the main reason for the decline in players. A (pretty big) group of people claim that this is all down to the crews that are currently dominating the game. This isn’t true, the biggest decline already happened before they even got to power. In fact, I believe that this was one of the reasons why they could get to power. They cannot be held accountable for the current state of the game, although their structural use of certain things that are not really legal allowed them to take almost full control. The recent wipe of the Communist Party shows, however, that no-one can control the game entirely. The people who say that BSF can be entirely blamed for this should open their eyes and realize that it is more than one factor.

I also saw someone making the suggestion to deliberately include exploits into gameplay. This idea, arguably the stupidest ever, would mean that the game would be much more fun, according to the lunatic posting it. People are already using cheats to gain an unfair advantage and to be quite honest, I do not really see how that makes the game more fun, and specifically for the people who do want to play fair. The claims that games are more fun when cheats can be used are probably coming from the sort of guys that use ‘godmode’ to finish a first person shooter on the easy difficulty. The argument that the game used to be more active and more fun with exploits doesn’t really hold either, as very few exploits were used during the last few rounds and the game still had quite a lot of players.

So, what should have happened to prevent this? A reset may have prevented a situation like this, but let’s face it, there is no point in resetting the game every time it runs into trouble. Perhaps another administrator could have prevented this. In fact, I know who could have prevented it. Although he is busy with a government job now, Sabin was the reason why this did not happen last round, I'm pretty sure the game could have been dead already. When we were, just half a year in the current round, the amount of players had already declined to a number lower than Bootleggers had ever seen since its release. That point should have been the sign that something was going terribly wrong. If action was taken at that point, the game could have been in much better shape these days.

The game got into some sort of imbalance in the beginning of the round, when OC payouts were changed, so that earning money became harder, but other things, such as establishments and weapon prices, remained unchanged therefore creating the imbalance. Back then, I wrote a column about it, and it stated, “This is something that might lead to the end of Bootleggers.” It is probably closer to the truth than I had ever imagined. On the other hand, though, we all knew it would not last forever. We all knew it would end one day, but we just did not know when. Perhaps we should just accept it and move on, perhaps it is best to say farewell to the game, too. But secretly, I still hope it survives.