Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Issue: 86   Editor: NYX2000


Bullet Prices on the Rise ViennaBeef
As everyone should know by now, most crews have raised the price at bullet factories from $2,500 to $3,000 per bullet. While there are still some cheap bullets to be found at state owned bullet factories and at bullet factories held by certain crews, the vast majority of bullet factory owners have raised the price.

I asked many of the crew bosses and bullet factory holders about the price increase to find out why they chose this previous week as the time to raise bullet prices. While most of the responses I received were about what anyone would expect, there were a couple of responses that actually surprised me.

The Deadly Alliance members that I contacted all gave very standard responses, and you really can't blame them. According to both ArcLight the price went up because "bullets were (and still are) kinda cheap." Airen responded to my question with "It's just inflation. There's nothing more to it, and it has always been a part of the game." Airen also added that he was surprised that the price didn't go up sooner. While these responses were very standard and to be expected, they also have quite a bit of truth behind them. Bullet prices stayed at $2,500 per bullet for quite some time, while the amount of money within the game grew quite a bit. While I cannot give an exact number on how much money was added to the game while bullet prices were at $2,500 per bullet, they were at that price for well over a month and during that time the amount of money in the game grew a ton. Bullets from factories are also still much cheaper than using points for bullets. If you were to do the math you'd find that bullets from factories at $3,000 per bullet are more than twice as cheap as using points for bullets.

While The Sacred Empire has been wiped from the statistics page, I talked to some of the members last week before they got taken over and received a very interesting response from one person. Balanar, who is now dead, told me before his death that the price went up from "too many killing spree's." I cannot put words into his mouth, but it is interesting to think that the crew raised the price in order to make massive killing sprees more expensive, and therefore harder to accomplish. Unfortunately for The Sacred Empire the price increase didn't really work as the crew was killed and taken off the statistics page.

Bullet price increases are to be expected as a round lengthens, and to be honest bullet prices have remained quite cheap in relation to the price of points and the total amount of money within the game. To any established players within the game the recent raise in bullet price won't be that big of a deal, but for those new players it certainly makes killing or hitlisting someone much harder.