When we at The Buzz report on events throughout the mafia landscape, your mind may automatically shift to the gangs and crews that dominate higher level criminal activity, or the State and National Dons that have their own slice of everyone else’s action. You may also think about the intricacies of finding a good team to rob a bank with, or even the prominence of certain players at busting casinos and bringing previously untold wealth to themselves and perhaps their crew.
Amongst all of this though, what of the independent player? You may see one from time to time, conducting his own interstate Booze run in a newly reinforced Duesenberg, or freelancing and hitting a State Bank with some of his affiliated peers. A couple of mobsters are able to find their way through the ranks and get themselves tantalisingly close to the top of the ladder, but that currently tends to be where the story ends for many people.
One only has to have a glance at their local Graveyard from time to time so see a trend. Godfathers, Legendary Godfathers and Dons of seemingly no affiliation, slain by what are often parties unknown. In the cases where a killer has publicly claimed their scalp, they tend to be a member of a well-established crime family or crew. The Buzz picked up on this in one of our earlier issues, and the trend of crewless deaths shows no signs of stopping. In order to assess the impact of this on players and the community, we at The Buzz anonymously interviewed two mobsters who returned after their own brush with death between Godfather and Don Rank, in addition to combing through the community’s response to our earlier article.
Mobster One: Killed, returned and is now in a Crew
I interviewed the first gangster at a speakeasy in Illinois. He tells me he came to Illinois from Louisiana and had returned to Bootlegging around six months ago after a prolonged absence, and set himself up as independent as he knew nobody. “Things had changed so much since I last played the game, I didn’t know anyone and to be honest never planned to. I was happy doing my thing alone. Then I got shot.”
The Mafiosi stood and showed me three perfectly formed bullet wounds in his side. “Turns out my lack of Crew was enough to get me killed. Some knob in one of these big crews had a shot at me because I looked ‘suspicious’, so I ended up finding a Crew just to sustain some hope of progressing anywhere. Fortunately they’re a great crew to be in and I’ve fallen lucky.”
When asked how he felt this affected the game and for his views on the crews carrying these actions out, the Mobster confirmed that “it hasn’t exactly broken the game just yet, but it makes a lot of what you do beyond Respectable Boss pointless unless you get a crew. As for those carrying this out, I respect their achievement by controlling a lot of the game but I don’t view them as prominent strategists or the crewless killing thing as particularly skilful. A lot of these guys I don’t recognise anyway, and those that I do seemed to have come from older, dustbin crews like Resistance or Eternal Labyrinth, so I think this comes more from a lack of competition rather than competitive dominance. They wouldn’t have even gotten to their position if some of the older crews were still around. Scattergun shooting is no more strategic than me standing in a garage making me a car.”
Overall Assessment: Not a game breaker yet (although close), makes progress beyond a point difficult
Mobster Two: Killed, returned and is now back in a Crew
The second gangster I spoke to was much more cautious, assumedly because his killer had not revealed themselves or been found, and was still at large. After a couple of dead drops and a late night phone call, the second Mafiosi eventually agreed to meet me at an abandoned distillery in New Jersey, flanked by two well-armed friends.
The second gangster I interviewed was a longer serving criminal, with several arrests, near misses and criminal jobs under his belt during the past decade. He confirmed that when he started out there “were random killings, [in that] people took it upon themselves to kill inactive Scums” and other random low ranked accounts. The deaths of crewless, higher ranked mobsters however is something that this returning veteran had not really seen before, and he confirmed to The Buzz that “had this happened back when I started out I wouldn’t have carried on [playing]”.
This second source confirmed that he has worked independently for a long time, and was generally left alone due to him “not [being] a threat to people”. This all changed when the source joined a gang that was ultimately restructured. It was upon his leaving the gang that he was then shot days later at a higher rank due to him being identified by a crew as a ‘potential threat’. It became apparent in the case of this mobster that he was not a threat, but only after shots were already fired and further investigation carried out.
Visibly irritated, the gangster told The Buzz that “they didn’t look into me before the shooting” and asserted that the current environment is “pretty stupid, it stops new people from playing the game. If you’re not in a crew and get to a certain rank you’ll be shot for nothing.” As for the shooting in the context of the game in general, our source asserted that there is understandable paranoia about being shot by Underground shooters and that it is part of the game today; but this is coming at an ever increasing cost to the community.
“The Alliance War is keeping the game [going] but only for the people involved. Anyone who is new and/or looking in must feel alienated and constantly at risk. What can be done? I don’t know but I wish, for the game’s sake, that it stops.”
Overall Assessment: Makes the game less friendly to new players, stopping a new wave of players from joining and propelling this game to previous heights.
From the two interviews I had conducted in addition to combing through community responses, it would appear that response to this development has ranged from indifference to overwhelming negativity depending on the side of the fence the responder sits on. Despite claims and assertions that killings are properly researched before execution and are a response to a lack of visible targets, player reaction has mostly rejected this and centred more towards calls to reintroduce the ‘Opt In’ aspect of the Users Online page.
When asked about the dangers of remaining crewless at an advanced rank, Mika stated that "dying should be part of the game for everyone" and that everyone will experience being shot at one point or another, regardless of playing style. Mika also confirmed that it was never the intent of the Elite Guard to have a situation where accounts at Godfather or above are needing to be routinely killed for players to feel safe; although they do not feel that this is the case at this time.
In regards to future changes to the game in order to provide balance, Mika confirmed that "our future revisions of and additions to the game will focus on making it possible to hide or show yourself and to utilize a way of playing you like without feeling like you get shot over and over if you are staying clear of the more aggressive playing styles". This suggests that the situation surrounding crewless deaths is currently under review, with changes coming up on the horizon.
When asked specifically about calls to reintroduce 'opting in' to appearing on the Users Online page, Mika told the Buzz that "where the users online is concerned you can expect some changes to it, but opting out will not be one of them. We feel that the users online is important as a social aspect and can play a role in making new players stick. It is a lot more believable to see 200 players online with 200 names alongside it than it is just seeing the number and a handful of names from players that decided they wanted it to be shown on there. "
In this writer’s opinion, the enforced lack of safety for crewless accounts represents a slow and gradual strangling of Bootleggers’ competitiveness and long-term viability as a game (this round is only two months old or so too), which would have only been exacerbated had the Elite Guard not intervened in the control of Bullet production. I found it telling that one of my first complaints when I decided to disband and sell my own gang was from a Don who told me that being crewless at their rank was tantamount to a death sentence. While there has always been an inherent danger to operating alone, it is certainly more prominent now than it may have been before (with of course the notable exception of when similar events eventually rendered the game unplayable not so long ago).
So what is there to do? I believe that the best course of action is to introduce measures or updates that allow for less aggressive players to maintain some measure of anonymity if they are unable to opt out of showing as online altogether. I feel the current climate makes this all the more important, given the renewed focus on some crews to form alliances these days and fight an unknown and unseen enemy rather than each other (the merits of that itself is an argument I’ll focus on in another issue).
Of course it is the prerogative of whoever is in control these days to whatever they want until somebody stops them (despite many of the strongest defenders of this policy having been the most opposed when they were on the other side of the fence). However, the community could do not to forget that the game has gone from nine States to six for a reason, and some of the players we have left have said on record that they have left the game after being shot for being crewless.
My own opinion is simple. Scorch the earth all you want if you feel you have to, but don’t complain when the crops eventually do stop growing; and you end up being the King of a virtually nonexistant hill. History has already shown the harsh realities of this kind of in-game climate, and there is nothing this time round to suggest it would ever be any different.
