A lot of players would say that underground crews aren’t worth the trouble of making. There is no in-game feature support for an underground crew and therefore, any effort to create one means doing something outside of the Bootleggers website. This isn’t an article to debate whether an underground crew is worth the effort or not though, it is to debate whether they are underrated.
When you look at the current crews on the stats pages, every single one of them had to start off with a small group of players. Maybe not this round, or maybe not last round, but at some point in the past, all crews started with a small group of friends.
So, let’s imagine that there was a feature for underground crews. Not like a normal crew, no colourful profile tags, just something simple like a forum, and a way for members to keep track of a member list. Players wouldn’t need to find a free forum outside of Bootleggers, try to get their members to register on the forum and actively pay attention to it. It would all be there, built-in to the game already.
If this was the case, would we see more underground crews? I think the answer is: maybe. But the answer definitely isn’t “no”. To organise an underground crew with no real support for them in the game at the moment, it takes a lot of work. Only a few crews manage to do it successfully. I think it is a big task for players to recruit an underground crew and be able to get onto the stats, recruit members and keep hold of the crew spot.
Should they already have an underground crew, they could be in a much stronger position to be able to take a real crew spot and be able to hold it. They would have the facilities to create a much stronger foundation to their crew. An underground crew would be a good way of seeing whether a player or a group of players could make a crew work. Many players decide to buy a crew spot and then find that they really don’t want to run a crew.
I write this article now because I wonder whether crew spots are seen as being too difficult to hold. Many players buy a crew spot simply to sell it on to someone else. The Buzz’s editor, Poison, was able to buy a crew spot this week for just 200 points. The cost of the crew spot to create was $1 million, and at the time of sale 200 points was worth $840,000. If you had more groups of players underground, able to communicate as a team, able to organise themselves properly, then I think there would be more action, more well established crews, and less groups of 10 players holding a crew spot just to sell it to someone else in a few weeks’ time.
Should there be an in-game feature supporting underground crews? Should there be more underground crews? Personally, I think the answer to both of those is: yes. Underground crews are a starting point for many, many crews. It is very difficult to get straight onto the stats and just build your crew from there. Underground crews are a good way to make friends in the game and as of late it’s a shame that I haven’t seen many underground crews recruiting on the Game Forum.
