Unlike some popular belief, the ranking system of Bootleggers has been the same for the last couple of rounds. This ranking system is based on several game dynamics, which means it can change through-out the course of the round. In the past few months, several people suggested we changed ranking to make it even harder than it already was. However, I can once again guarantee that no changes were made, and that ranking is not likely to get any harder in the future. We had a very small discussion on the ranking process last February, in which BSF2000 stated he did not want to make ranking any harder.
That brings us to the following question: is it too hard? I’ll cut to the chase right away: I think it is. A few rounds ago, two new ranks were introduced into the game: State Don and Nation Dons. When they were introduced the spots were occupied most of the time. This round, we saw only three State Dons (all short-lived) and not a single Nation Don. For a large part of the current round, no State and Nation Dons could exist because of a bug that did not provide them with an invitation to the position. Surely, things would have been different had this bug not existed, but despite that bug I believe the number of State Dons would not have been significantly different, nor would we have tens of people fighting for the position today. To illustrate this point, I would like to show you the following graph. The graph shows the ranks (horizontal axis) and the number of ranks we currently have in the game.
The most important conclusion we can draw from this graph is that we saw only little over 150 people clearing the Don rank and only 70 people reached the highest always available rank in the game. On average, this means the game only saw one promotion to Respectable Don every 2.6 days. More worrying, only 13.4% of the people that got promoted to Don actually made it Respectable Don, whereas this percentage is significantly higher for any other rank. This supports what we already know: the gap between the ranks is highest between Don and Respectable Don and getting promoted to any rank above Don is very hard.
I continue with an image that shows the overall number of promotions throughout the round, which shows that despite small recoveries, the total number of promotions decreases over the course of the round whereas the number of boss+ promotions is relatively steady. The horizontal axis represents the month since the start of the round (in February 2012).
When we zoom into the Don+ promotions we see the following graph:
This shows the decline of promotions to any rank of Don or higher throughout the course of the round, obviously partly down to recent shootings. The 2.5 month ‘cycle time’ to get from Don to Respectable Don is also visible in this graph. Then we get to OCs and time. On average, it takes over 250 OCs to get to the highest rank over the round which means that even a good ranker will need several months to get there. The average promotion time between Don and Respectable Don is around 73 days for the current round.
Having provided you with some insights into the ranking process, most probably already known, it is now time to get to the root of the problem. To do so, I want to show the same graph as the first image, but in a different format and a cumulative version. It shows the (cumulative) ranks in the form of a graph, so it does not show the actual ranks in the game, just how many people reached every rank during this round.
As the image shows, this game is based on a pyramid system. The higher the rank, the less people who have reached it. Reduce the base of the pyramid, and less people will eventually reach higher ranks. Concluding, if you reduce the user base you eventually end up with less high ranks. That is exactly the problem Bootleggers has been facing over the last years: a declining userbase. Eventually, this draws to a whole series of problems and the thing is, everything is connected to everything and that makes it very hard to draw a conclusion on the ranking system just based on what we know about the userbase. Taking the last few rounds into account, the game has only shown that ranking seemingly needs changes for it to work properly.
I, for one, believe that ranking is on the edge of being too hard and therefore needs adjustment. This adjustment should not necessarily be massive and care should be taken when changing the system. However, the facts presented above show a remarkable gap between Don and Respectable Don and even though this never really resulted in any serious issues the ratio of Respectable Don versus Don is lower than ever. Closing that gap to a more realistic proportion should definitely be considered. It may not be a bad idea to make the whole ranking process slightly easier, perhaps only ten percent. Ranking works exactly the same as the old crime script that completely failed: people like a challenge, people don’t like it when it’s too hard.
Changing the system throughout the round is not something I would consider a good idea, as that would be unfair to some people. If changes were to be made this would be done for a future round, which should be (as Sky mentioned) due before the end of the year. I genuinely believe the ranking system at it is now is no longer sufficient in what the game wants and needs, and we shouldn’t just stick to it because that is how it has been for the past five years. We should be looking for what is best for the game, and make changes accordingly. In that spirit I will fight to get changes implemented, sooner or later. Thanks for reading.
