I have rejoined the Buzz at this critical point in the game's history in order to help out the very small team. For my first contribution to the Buzz, I am going to cover a topic that has been covered extensively already on both the Game Forum, and by the Buzz. I'm going to talk about the game as it stands right now, and I am going to speculate on whether things are likely to improve going forward. While I understand and acknowledge the previous coverage of this, in order to reintroduce myself to the readership of the Buzz, I feel it would be only suitable to begin by restating my stance on the game's management to date.
At the point that I write this article, in an admittedly hurried and caffeine induced spurt, it is 09:25AM on Saturday morning, according to the Bootleggers clock. There are 67 players online. It doesn't take a genius to see that this is far cry from the days when thousands of players would flock to Bootleggers in droves (admittedly, many of those accounts were dupes, but it is still undeniable that game activity is crashing and burning). The player-base has been decreasing at a pretty worrying rate for the last year or so. Why? Previous articles have tried to explore this issue, with one in particular which I have remembered over time; an article written by Aldarion about the fall in popularity of online text-based games. Indeed, I have no statistics or facts to back this up, but common sense would certainly support that there is a movement in internet users' preferences and behaviour patterns. Increasingly, apps would appear to be a major platform for online gaming and yet Bootleggers has absolutely no presence in this medium. This again begs the question; why?
As far back as I can remember, people have been asking for an app for Bootleggers. There are plenty of games which rank highly on the app store that I can remember off the top of my head, but I won't mention here for fear of it being branded advertisement, that make huge revenues from being created in this format. Often, these games also have a web-based alternative as well. Why has a Bootleggers app not been made? I've seen people going as far as to draft up images of what the site could look like when transferred to app format which were entirely satisfactory. Yet still, we have heard no word on this. As usual, the big man in red stands mute and refuses to converse with us mere players.
Instead, updates are delivered to us sporadically in his 2,000 characters article which was, by the way, initially promised as a bi-weekly communication method. This, like many of the attempts that BSF2000 has made over the years to re-establish some kind of connection with his player base completely fell through. Players are simply reaching the end of their tethers with the lack of communication from the top. Especially now, at a time when the game is fledgling and being dominated by one group who are clearly doing more to harm the game than help it, we hear no words of encouragement, no reason is given to us to keep trying to play this game, and so people are leaving en masse. I would like to appeal, yet again, to BSF2000. You are neglecting your player base and it simply makes business sense to make more effort to communicate with those diehard players who are still hanging around despite no hope of exciting future prospects. If you cannot even respect those who are still here, supporting the game, in this time of great uncertainty and apathy, then why should we still play? How can anybody really argue that it is more beneficial to continue playing this game (much less, spend REAL money on purchasing points), rather than the multitude of alternative and more convenient options that are out there for us.
The community that this game was once revered for is still around, but it is a torn apart, barely active, very small group of players who are still hanging around. Essentially the only reason a lot of those are still here is because they want to stay in touch with those friends they have made over the years and have no real other way of contacting them. Surely this is not, from a staff members' point of view, an acceptable primary motivation for logging in to this site. Surely you want players to actually play this game, form factions, kill one another, and make the game exciting and fresh. Not, I should think, use it as a social networking site.
But okay, there are measures being put in place. A reset is on the horizon, although not yet announced. We can assume it will be soon (that is, soon by Bootleggers' standards), but honestly, will anything change? Yes, there will be an influx of players, as is always the case when a reset occurs. I can equate this to my experiences in running the Buzz at the beginning of this round. Initially, I was overwhelmed with applications for Buzz writers. Quickly, however (and perhaps, quicker than you might expect), the first batch of writers dwindled, stopped logging in, and were eventually either fired or quit. A second batch was then easy to obtain. But it only took a few months before I was struggling to find anybody. By this point, the Buzz team consists of three writers and is being forced to publish every two weeks, for the first time in the Buzz's history. If the Buzz is a true representation of the game (and I would like to think that it is), then this is simply poor. The point I'm getting at is that of course people will come back in droves, but do not get too encouraged by this; history has proven that this interest does not last THAT long, unless players are given a reason to stay. New features are the most obvious way to keep people interested. The rate at which features are currently released, and have been released this round, is simply not enough to keep players interested. Another way to keep players from giving up in frustration (which is worse than boredom) is to make more effort to control the game from reaching a point like now, where one group of players are able to control the majority.
We can expect a crew overhaul along with other updates (hopefully) when the reset comes, but can we really hope that they will come soon enough? And even when the reset is finally done, can we really expect Bootleggers to really get any better unless its main administrator is prepared to adapt with the times? It would be sad to see Bootleggers go down the toilet, as I certainly feel a particular nostalgia for it (and I am sure this is shared by many others), but it seems like NO new players join anymore. I believe that in order for Bootleggers to stand a chance at being playable again long-term, the staff need to not only understand their player base, but actually try to accommodate them. Most new features are implemented with no input from the players and are force fed to them until they accept it (we all remember the forum overhaul debacle way back when).
It's not all doom and gloom though, I mean, we can hope that maybe THIS time BSF2000 will change along with the new reset. That's a big reason for hanging about, isn't it? That hope that maybe things here will change. My relationship with Bootleggers is increasingly beginning to feel like going home to a girlfriend who you once thought was the most beautiful thing in the world, and you'd spend hours together and forget the passing of time, but is now beginning to resemble and come to epitomise a feeling of wasted time while you hope and pray that things go back to normal. What do you hope to see in the next round? How do you think BSF2000 can respark our relationship to the game? I'm certainly up for being wined and dined, and not taken for granted for a minute longer.
