EDITORS NOTE: This article is written by Nuvalari, boss of Asura, which is currently playing underground.
To begin with, I'm not against some subtle changes to the crew system, it has been stale for too long and needs some new features. However I do have a problem with the amount of people moaning that stats crews are sitting ducks. Thanks to gymnasium, getting a shooter ready has never been more time consuming than it has this round. Years ago, before Sabin introduced shootouts and wait times, the kill system was essentially the same as it is now. At the time: dupes were rife, missions were good for an easy 24,000 bullets and getting the top gun required no work. People back then never moaned that crews were in a weak position, so why now?
The demise of some large and well-known crews in recent months has resulted in a lot of negative discussions regarding underground play and in particular the disadvantage of running a crew on the statistics. I have to start by saying, with confidence, that ASURA does not use dupes, we click our gym and play the game hardcore style in order to do what we do. It is not easy or cheap. On the other hand you have crews like Event Horizon (EH), Death Valley (DV) and The Priory (TP), who all spent months and months on the stats while holding multiple bullet factories. Logic dictates that all three should have vastly more cash and bullets than comparatively small underground groups such as ASURA. In fact, all three crews had member bases at least four times larger than my group. So with superior numbers of members plus steady income from bullet factories, it comes as a surprise to me that they have all played their hand so poorly and currently do not hold a place on the stats.
EH showed their persistence in jumping back on to the stats after being wiped several times in the past couple of months. In doing so they have crippled themselves. This is because some, but not all, members treat the game like a social network and blindly follow a single boss. Having one over-ruling boss making all the decisions unchallenged is never healthy for a crew and this can be seen in the exodus of EH members earlier in the round who formed their own crew, The Phoenix Rebellion. I know for a fact that some people on bootleggers can not stand being 'underground', either because they can not cope with being temporarily anonymous or have no discipline when it comes to (not) messaging people. EH have missed an opportunity to capitalize on their extended stay on the stats. Instead of ignoring the fact that there are hostile forces out there and hording members in the crew spot they should have placed more members outside to serve in other ways. Make them stock bullets, level gym, infiltrate other crews and start preempting crew wipes by making frequent attacks on potential threats.
At least DV tried to do this. Unfortunately they were undone by their cheating ways, namely the gym exploit, which led to a lot of their victims being reimbursed. Had their shooter blademaster not been banned, we would have in fact lost a significant chunk of resources. Fortunately they were exposed and ASURA was able to go on to complete several legitimate sprees. Playing fair pays off; you don't have to cheat to acquire and maintain billions on this game, contrary to popular belief. Since the boss of DV has seemingly decided to call it quits, I really don't know what has happened to this crew. Only back in issue 34 of the buzz the very same boss called on the Bootleggers community to stop sitting on our asses and to make the game more interesting, promising frequent shootings from DV to hit The Family (TF) holders. There was fighting talk for a while but in the end they played the wrong strategy and suffered.
I have talked a little about the failures of EH and DV but what of TP? They have only recently been removed from the stats by Most Wanted so it is early days, however it is worth mentioning their lack of action in the lead up to it. Just a few weeks ago one of the owners of TP's bullet factories was killed in a spree. 500,000 bullets, which I can only assume were earmarked for crew use, were lost. Sitting on those bullets and not firing them resulted in losing them and the shooter. Simple. Offence is the best defence with this crew system and with the update to the gym requirements for guns it is even more viable for stats crews to use their huge stocks of bullets for striking potential threats swiftly and aggressively. This is a mafia game after all, not Farmville. The underground element to Bootleggers is and always has been crucial to the survival to crews, so really, it is a pity when crews call on changes to the game rather than adapting to how it is played.
In addition to my discontent of the views on stat crew fragility, there have been comments made with respect to the actual play style of underground crews, the ethics of shooting crew-less players at random as well as not claiming kills. It may come as a surprise but ASURA is a shooting crew and as such we shoot people, derp. There have been many crews like us before such as Stray Rounds, Black September, Club Boogie etc. There has also been a lot of hate towards crews like these, so nothing changes in that department. If we have a surplus of bullets then we can and will shoot them at random players in a carpet bomb attempt to remove cash and bullets from our enemies. This strategy has been employed for many years and reached its peak with the manual reset in November 2010. It is extremely aggressive and can be perceived as dirty. It is also expensive for us and more often than not, effective. In not claiming kills it allows groups like mine to avoid the blame for such massacres but continue to progress towards our ultimate goal. It also gives our shooters a chance to live another day, lay low and go again at a later date. It should be noted however, that more often than the Bootleggers community realises, it is in fact stats crews that are responsible for random shootings and not taking credit for them. Several of these this round have been incorrectly attributed to TF, casting an increasingly negative impression on them and underground crews in general. So there you go, fun facts aplenty.
Some may go on to question why this style of guerrilla warfare has become commonplace on Bootleggers in the past few years when it was not so back in 2004. The reason for this is that the game population is steadily declining. It is simply not as competitive as it used to be, allowing us to put together large killing sprees more frequently. New players do come but not in the hundreds that Bootleggers once saw. From my perspective, joining Bootleggers was something that everyone at school encouraged everyone else to do. I'm sure many others that are still here started playing in the same manner. Does this happen now? No, kids at school these days play games on their iPhone and spend the rest of their time whoring Facebook. Of course this isn't helped by the fact that the owner of the game has stopped bothering to promote it, and appears resigned to milking the cash cow for as long as possible without making any significant changes. If he were to make the game available on smart phones and Facebook, he would bring this decrepit browser text based game into 2013 and boost numbers dramatically. Unfortunately though, he does not care.
There is one final thing I feel strongly about, and that is game domination. The mods at the end of last round promised that no one crew could dominate the game again. However I believe that a game, especially an MMO like this, is there to be beaten, to be won and eventually dominated resulting in a reset. This happens on other MMOs and is accepted as the end of the server or ‘world’ once one clan has taken over completely. In other words, it is a satisfying and definitive conclusion, allowing a new era to commence. On Bootleggers this has happened on at least the previous three rounds. By the end of round 4 The Clericuzio had a monopoly on game cash thanks to their establishments and banking strategy. Round 5 was dominated by The Syndicate due to their scripts and large numbers of dupes. Then, the manual reset by The Family, The Triad, Komodo and Event Horizon effectively put an end to round 6 and resulted in a sustained period of extremely low game activity. The mods considered this act an attempt to ‘kill the game’ but in fact it was not our wish to do this, rather to pull off something impressive, never done before, and ultimately to win the round. The fact that the game stagnated for a full year following this shows that BSF does not appreciate the importance of resets and what they mean in the context of crews taking over the game.
What happens next then? It is unlikely 2013 will see another manual reset spree on the same scale as before, though it is not out of the question. Unfortunately I am not in the business of making idle threats as some like to do in the Buzz. No one can predict the future; what will be will be. As far as ASURA goes though, our aim and desire is to continue playing within the TOS and to work with allies towards eventually winning round 7. Why else would we play otherwise? Have a Happy New Year and happy Bootlegging.
