According to Aldarion’s article the Elite Guard has two choices: either leave the game unchanged and reset now, or wait for the updates to be ready and reset as soon as they are. Aldarion described that the first scenario is a short-term solution and the second scenario is, only if the changes are successful, a sensible strategy for the long-term. I agree with the biggest part of his article, but the article is missing one crucial point. Why is his article stating the two possible solutions and not the cause of the problem? The problem is not the so called ‘‘resource lock-in’’, but the continuous mistakes of BSF2000.
Round 7 is being dominated by an alliance, which mainly consists of four crews on the statistics; Penance, Enemy of The State, Haters Gonna Hate (also known as The Family) and Most Wanted. According to Aldarion’s article, the Elite Guard was not surprised by their domination. To be more exact; they saw it coming. The game is visibly being dominated for approximately three months. Before those three months the Elite Guard was already aware of the fact that one big alliance would dominate Bootleggers. It is too easy to claim that nothing has been done during these three months (and before), but at this moment I have not witnessed any change. The only visible change was the referral system, which was launched at a remarkable and the most foolish moment. So, the question of this so called ‘‘reset dilemma’’ is not the choice between a short of long-term solution, but the question why there are still no measures taken to prevent this dominating. If the Elite Guard was already aware of the dominating alliance, then why did they not start taking measures? Maybe they did, but in that case; why is it taking them so long?
The current problems of Bootleggers are not new. Bootleggers has not changed that much compared to round 6. Some small new features, but the rest is still quite the same. The ‘never change the ‘winning’ team mentality’ of BSF2000 has shown us that he has no idea of what exactly is going on at Bootleggers. For those who claim that he actually does have an idea of what is going on, that brings us to his mentality of breaking deadlines and not updating his customers. It is a fact that the decision of BSF2000 of not changing anything was completely wrong. Now, we are here. We are in the exact same situation as a few years ago; complete domination by one alliance. So, what exactly has to change to prevent this and why is it taking so long for the Elite Guard to implement these changes?
I believe four things need to change; the current rules and features, the length of a round and more advertising. The current rules are not strict and structured enough. If you play clever you can easily avoid being banned for cheating. Since it is not allowed to discuss cheating I cannot give you a lot details, but believe me; it is possible. So, how much time does it cost an entire team to set up new rules? Less than three months and this can easily be done by the Moderators.
Something which cannot be done by Moderators is coding new features on Bootleggers. The Elite Guard has already stated that a new crew feature is planned. Sky has no obligations to code this, which means we need to wait at BSF2000. If Bootleggers actually means something for him, this does not need to take more than three months. I believe we are also still waiting on a Blackjack Feature. Again, it proves the mentality of our administrator.
The discussion regarding the length of a round is interesting, but also complicated. The length of a round depends on the game-play of Bootleggers. I believe that with the current game-play we need a length of approximately one year. At this moment there is no set length of a round. Let’s wait and see what happens? With some new structured rules and new decent features we can definitely have a round with a length of approximately two years. With the current game play that is simply impossible and catastrophic.
Finally, some more and better advertising. Attracting new players is needed as the current amount of players is too low to have a proper game-play. In order to have a successful advertising strategy, BSF2000 needs to create a proper plan first. Starting advertising when your game is being dominated is not a very tactic move. Advertising with this mentality is devastating.
A reset dilemma? It would not have been a dilemma if BSF2000 was here when Bootleggers needed him. As the only Administrator of Bootleggers, he always needs to know of what exactly is going on at his game. If he is not capable of doing this, he needs to take action by hiring an Administrator or give the current Elite Guard members more privileges. This is called responsibility and I believe that responsibility means nothing to him. He has proven that he does not care about his players by breaking deadlines and having no propriety by updating the community. The community is why his bank account increased over the past ten years. We, the Bootleggers community, are the reason of his success. Every penny he earned has been paid by customers. Those customers are now waiting for measures which had to be taken months ago.
