Usually I’m not that much into writing but as frustration is kicking in now I made an exception. It’s not something new I’m going to write about, instead it’s an ongoing problem for quite a while. It’s about the number of active players on Bootleggers. Right, there are not much active players. Bootleggers is dead!
When I started playing back in 2005 or something, the game was active. Lots of players online (between 1000 and 2500 any time of the day), active forums, active moderators etc. The players who are still here from that time for sure know where I’m talking about. It made the game fun to play. There was always something to do; never waiting to complete oc’s, always gamblers on the casino’s, many kills, funny topics in the forums, waiting ages for bug fixes, points verification and updates. Now as you can see there’s not much left of it. Let’s take this step by step.
- Doing an oc can take a while. Even though you give a fair percentage and let all ranks join, there are not enough active players to fill oc’s fast. Now isn’t this the biggest problem but it’s worth mentioning.
- Lack of gamblers on the casino’s. This is for most casino holders a bigger problem. As a casino holder you want gamblers to either make a profit or lose the casino. You take a risk by giving players the chance to win money, but it’s very frustrating when you set a nice max to attract gamblers without any result. The last few weeks this came to my attention as there are some players with high maxes on Racetracks and Roulette’s but no gamblers as we could read in the forums.
- Kills are made rarely lately. There is a crew war once in a while and sometimes somebody steps up with many points/bullets to make use of his high rank and shoot some random people. This should happen daily! It’s a mafia game, not a tea party.
- The forums are completely dead. The only active forum is the classifields as it’s used for oc’s, casino’s and points. The game forum is in coma, the off topic forum is just dead. You can find 3 days old topics on the first page in a matter of speaking.
- Lack of updates, points verification and bug fixes. This is what annoys the current players the most. We do need to keep in mind that mod’s and BSF have a private life as well. But they should not forget that some people pay money for the game and they have their expectations, fed by promises of mod’s. Let’s take the well know state don issue. The state don issue is there since last reset. That’s 7 months ago! The Blackjack update is another example. Promised months ago, still no update revealed. If you see people returning after months and they notice nothing has changed yet they will probably not log in again. Results in losing more players and bad publicity.
As BSF mentioned earlier he’s thinking to hire another programmer. He doesn’t want to have the same situation as the Sabin issue which is very understandable. But why doesn’t he let another programmer write in a test environment? Like that he can contribute to a better game without the risk of cheating. It does cost money but with a better developed game he can earn that back easily. And the money he currently earns by point purchases doesn’t need to be invested in extra servers as the players traffic is not high.
Now there’s not only on Bootleggers a lack of active players. I’ve lately tried some other text based mafia games and most of them have no active players. Furthermore they are just not as good as Bootleggers. The interface and functions were not as good and that are the most important points for a text based game. Therefore I decided to stick to Bootleggers and try to turn things around.
The reason why I wrote this article is the number of active players. The reason why I mentioned all the above is because this is what I think is necessary to satisfy the players and to attract new players. So how can we attract more people to play Bootleggers? As Bootleggers has it’s own Facebook page, why not advertising on Facebook? Or advertising on a mmorpg website? Better search results on google? Maybe an email to everybody who has ever registered for Bootleggers once some major updates are released? We as players can also do something about it. Maybe a bonus for new players registered via an existing player? Word of mouth is the best publicity there is. So people, SPREAD THE WORD!
I’m sure I’m wrong about some of the above points. This is my point of view and I do this because I like this game. Any additions are always welcome. I do also know this can offend some people. That’s not my intention. Bootleggers just celebrated it’s 9th year anniversary but there should to change something to keep it up another 9 years. Player traffic is lower than ever and without action it will not change.
