In recent days we have all seen Bullet Factories with stacks of bullets and falling prices all over to combat this change, but what exactly has caused such a radical change? Is it just the increasing prices as some are suggesting? Are the underground shooters giving up? Well there is little chance of the latter but we at the Buzz can reveal the reason behind this sudden change in the careful dynamics of bullet supply and demand.
To explain the change it is best to explain the mechanics of the bullet factory system for players who have never been in the position of holding one. Every hour the bullet factory will produce a batch of 1,500 bullets, assuming the owner has enough money to fund this. The cost of a single batch is $15,000 and should the owner not have sufficient funds the factory will automatically drop from the possession of that player unless they set the factory not to produce. From this initial batch of 1,500 a percentage can be given to a crew, assuming the holder is affiliated with one, and this can be up to 25% of the batch. After this stage the rest of the bullets are available for other players to buy at the set price of the owner.
But why is this important? What is the point? The point is that this process should happen every single hour on the hour, assuming the production is uninterrupted. This means that, disregarding the 15 minutes it takes to back up Bootleggers daily, every factory should produce 36,000 bullets every single day. But has this been the case? Have 36,000 bullets actually been produced by each factory everyday? The answer is no.
The factory will only start the production countdown from an hour when a player clicks on the page. This means that a bullet factory could have no bullets for 3 hours because no one has clicked on the page to make the bullets arrive and the countdown start. Doesn't seem fair does it? Well after a few players suggested that maybe it should change our resident updating wizard waved his wand and fixed this problem. Sky has now updated and confirmed to us that he has altered the system so that bullet factories produce every hour regardless of whether or not a player has clicked on the page. In previous rounds this would not have been so noticeable as with a larger community the chance of someone clicking on the bullet factory pages is significantly higher.
So what does this mean? Well, put simply, the theoretical 36,000 bullets per factory (324,000 bullets overall) have now become a reality and thus we see many more bullets sitting in the factories rather than the normal amounts. Many bullet factory owners have reacted to the change by dropping their prices drastically in an attempt to shift their stock. Many others have left their prices high and, whilst their stocks rise much higher, they are still bought by the players when the cheaper alternatives have gone. As the prices have dropped and the amount of bullets increased we will see little change in the affluence of the owners but the stocks will remain higher.
The dynamic of the bullet and kill system are very delicate. Indeed, in previous issues of the Buzz we have seen players, most notably Mox, telling us how delicate and volatile these systems are. The evidence that has come to light here proves these players correct because, due to the increase in bullets, we have seen a massive drop in prices and bullet factory tactics just from a simple change. The Elite Guard must therefore, be careful in their advances towards the alteration of such systems as one wrong move could well put the game in another unbalanced state.
