Our first week drawing to a close, the articles submitted and touched up, all ShyGuy and myself had left to do was have a lazy Saturday and bask in our up to now easy first week of editing the news.
We have an inside joke in the Buzz team that is quite long running. We aim to have all of our articles completed by Friday, and we tend to have no news up until that point, and then we joke that on Saturdays all hell will break loose.
Well it had to happen at some point. Between 02:30 and 03:30 BL time Saturday morning the vast majority of the members of both Gangsters Sanctuary (GS) and The Senate (TS) were killed.
One thing we strive for the news articles in the Buzz to be are unbiased, and as ShyGuy is a member of The Senate and Prince being the underboss of Gangsters Sanctuary, I decided to write the article and not have their opinions involved whatsoever.
I managed to quite quickly view three Witness Statements that all showed the killers as members of The Phoenix Rebellion (TPR).
In essence I am writing this article live as some of the story is still developing. I immediately approached Makarov from TPR who kindly accepted my invite of an interview. I also got in touch with SevenVirtues the Boss of The Senate, who also said he would comment.
When speaking with Makarov I got the formalities out of the way as soon as possible, he admitted to TPR being responsible for all of the kills. But my job is to find out why, I asked him directly and he responded with my least favourite word when shootings are concerned; “boredom”. He went on to say that they had an excessive amount of bullets on the designated shooters for the crew. As anyone I interview about shootings that tries to say that boredom was a major factor will know I never really believe that. I always think that even if boredom was involved there has to be a reason for why a particular group were targeted.
I pressed the boredom issue, not really satisfied with that as a reason, Makarov said “The round started promisingly activity wise, but it has soon got boring again, I think stats crews shouldn’t be able to survive for months”.
My questions weren’t really getting the response I wanted, I can sort of understand why someone would want to shoot GS, TPR currently owns their Bullet Factories which is a prized possession. But what of The Senate, the crew seems fairly new and friendly, there has to be a reason they were targeted, I hasten to believe that targets are selected at random.
When questioned on this Makarov changes the tone slightly and says that TPR were guided by a magic 8 ball. In order to keep this serious I ask why some accounts were left alive in GS and TS. Two boss+ accounts were alive after the shootings in GS, one was MrPibb aka Nuner the other was Michael1408, Makarov said that although three different shooters searched all states for MrPibb none of them managed to find him. As I write this however the second round of searches have obviously been more successful as Nuner is now dead. Makarov staying true to his word, as he previously said to me that TPR will continue to kill every new account in GS and TS until the crew spots drop from the stats, a big claim, but not an unrealistic one.
My final question about the shootings were to try and find out the resources that were used, Makarov told us that several accounts were used to shoot, and they fired between 1.7 million and 1.9 million bullets. He mentioned that after the planning session The Senate had recruited a few new high ranking players, meaning they had to shoot 1.2million bullets from factories and make up the deficit by using points, at a cost of around 12,000.
Now this makes me extremely suspicious of why TS were targeted. If the reason was as Makarov says to unload some unused bullets, then why not change the target once they are out of range for the number of bullets required to wipe them. Why would you continue to spend an extra 12,000 points just to get the job done. Makarov denied any conspiracy theory I thought up, and stuck by his story that boredom drove the kills.
I thanked Makarov for his time and we will all see him when he comes off holiday next week. I hope to question him some more, as I genuinely think there is more to this story than meets the eye.
Unfortunately after speaking to SevenVirtues no light was shed at all as for possible reasons why TS were targeted, he seemed just as bewildered as us. When asked if he had plans for the future he did say; “The Senate will be back shortly. We had every intention of being a peaceful crew, however I must now thank The Phoenix Rebellion for providing us an avocation. We will be seeing you soon”
So The Senate clearly planning some sort of retaliation, when I asked when we are likely to see this happen, he said that he has said everything he is willing to say on the matter.
The members of GS I contacted all seemed extremely busy and almost unwilling to comment, I would guess they are currently planning their next move, this has the potential to be an almighty crew war, and the Buzz will be there at every stage.
Think of this as a preliminary report on the happenings as I am certain there is more to come from both sides, maybe we will see a real reason as to why TS were targeted, maybe we will see the wipe of TPR.
But this has now come full circle, and I will kindly request that if anyone out there is planning shootings, can you please abstain from doing it on Saturday.
If you have any further information on this matter, and wish to comment, anonymously or not, please contact any member of the Buzz team!
