Last Friday we all logged in to find a brand new multicoloured bar adorning our normal Bootleggers page accompanied by the tantalising yellow glowing update button. After finding out that Sky had produced a huge batch of new updates we discovered that this bar was counting down the time until we were able to do our next activities whether it was negotiating booze prices down or planning another organised crime. Every single player who was alive had been given a free 7 day trial of this bar and this must have been one of the most active weeks Bootleggers has ever seen. The clear cut colour system meant that if there was any green on your bar you were not working hard enough! A large percentage of the community became obsessed with making sure their bar was fully red and indeed one player even commented "It's a shame this wasn't ready in December, the BL world turning red and green, you know that's what Santa would want!".
Most players grew fairly attached to the bar and enjoyed the freedom of being able to see all of their timers from any page on Bootleggers even if they were in jail! However, the shock came when on Friday 1st the bar disappeared as everyone's free trials all expired. The forum was suddenly ablaze with players arguing about whether they should buy the bar, requesting more trials and even some demanding it to be put back. The marketing division of Bootleggers clearly had their brains screwed in on the day this was devised. People had become so used to having them there that the points page was suddenly awash with hundreds of points being used to buy the bar back. However, shortly after this, when many players had purchased the 7 day pass for the bar, this feature was put on hold and then the option for 7 day countdown timers had completely disappeared. The only option left was to buy the bar at the cost of 100 points ($1,100,000 equivalent) with the assurance that, should you buy it once for your accounts lifetime, buying it back on your next account would cost only 40 points instead. Many players seem to have decided that, despite the heavy price tag, this feature is worth doing and their productivity increase would exceed the cost in the long run.
For those of you who were sleeping for the trial week, the bar shows the time left until you can do the following actions:
Auto Burglary
Bootlegging
Crime
Gymnasium
Jail
Organised Crime
Travel
With all of this information so readily available on every page you visit it is difficult to ignore a green box proclaiming you are ready to perform various actions. ToiletCleaner told us that his best moment of this round was purchasing the timer for the lifetime of his account. The features like this, which come at a price, are the sorts of things which would encourage players to buy points from BSF2000 just to get some of the features of the game which only points can unlock for you.
Once again, the updates which have arrived help to embolden the chance of the game becoming more successful in the future but is this enough to quash the mumbling undertone of dissatisfied players who were expecting a lot more from round 7 than they are currently getting? We at the Buzz hope so but we'll have to look to the future to find out.
