Its a disturbing trend for a few reasons but I think the most obvious one is the disturbance to game balance. I'm not privy to the details but I've heard rumors that people are fully taking advantage (basically stopping just short of exploiting) of this system. It could be fully the intent of the admins to allow this for the reasons described in previous posts.

I guess the bottom line from my point of view is that the state of game balance makes me nervous as it stands right now so I'm wondering what the future of this game is.  (I understand thats a given with the whole npc crew/ria/durden system but from my understanding of the system as it stands now the scale of these things has continued to increase without any perceivable check/balance system.)

Giles, people have. I'm talking specifically about the original poster.

"Fakeory" does not exist in the dictionary. Unless my dictionary is wrong. As well as google.

Orithyia, you clearly do not know me very well. I have always been against the fakeory of the game. I actually wrote this before i lost a BG...and now we have a fake family to taker in newbies and train them sponsered by the admins. The organic side of the game is nearly done.

What next. Admins listing 400+ CDs to control the marketplace?

TBH I wouldn't mind admins listing 400+ CDs, Izzy if you hear this I'm for it.

Personally I think the bullets system is much better than the gun skill system.

Dank, I agree with some of what you said and disagree with other bits. however, I do feel that one thing you said should be answered.

Cantona's crew is not "fake". It is a real crew, the purpose of which is to allow real players to show other real players the ropes. too often, we drop new folks in, and they die because they don't know where to find the rules, or how to approach a crew, or what to do, and they leave. cantona invites them to his crew, teaches them how to play the game, then, with them now understanding the basics, gives them to us to play for real. I feel that this will improve the game by removing people who just randomly start shooting cause the don't know any better, and increase user retention by preventing the repetitive deaths of folks who don't yet know the ropes and are shot by the trigger happy hunting squads.

I like it when people make sweeping statements without knowing who someone is. =)

I still stand by my statement... I've listened to you enough in #divinelunacy DanK to think that the amount of free kills on offer hasn't been a major issue for you. I could probably name at least 3 things off the top of my head that you've spoken about 100x more.

Arsenal

lemonparty

The North of England is a shit hole

The 'fakeory' can't have been that much of an issue for you if these 3 things got more attention.

That's why the bullet factory system is better than the system we have here. With bullet factories, there are no NPC accounts to shoot, and the success with shooting someone depends on the amount of bullets you have.

Wtf is this "bullet factory" you keep harping on about, Nello? If you are implying that some sort of system similar to what .org currently uses, I think there are very few faster ways to cut the population of this game in half.

A bullet factory is an ownable business that produces bullets users can buy. Hence, bullet factory. I assumed the name was pretty self-explanatory.

yes the game has problems, yes is a constant balancing act, would i prefer it how i started on org in 2002, yes, but thats just me.  Would it be good for the income of the game, no unfortunately

Not as self-explanatory as you might think. If there were in fact "bullet factories," an entirely different wack system would need to be implemented. As we saw with .org, it would create a situation where only those who can afford bullets can train guns. If the people with the most money own the factories, and then hike up the prices, it could possibly create a monopoly on bullets for one city/godfather. Not to mention the actual coding of said bullet factories. How would one buy one? How would one gain materials to produce the bullets? So on and so forth, I could list a hundred questions about this. Being someone that has never played a game with a feature similar to what you are suggesting, I would like to know more about it if it were to be implemented. Which it hopefully won't, as I said before, it will cause the game's population to plummet in my opinion.

A game that I used to play that got shut down used the system. Every city has a bullet factory that can be bought and sold. The thing is, the prices are set by the Admins. The owners control the amount of bullets that is produced. There's a limit how much you can buy at once and a waiting period between purchases (it isn't long, less than a minute) so everyone can have a chance.

However that game had a system of gun and protection upgrade (meaning there are five levels of guns and five levels of protection, each stronger than the previous) plus the detective system instead of locals (where, if you want to shoot someone, you have to use a detective feature to search for them) so I don't know if bullets would work here where you have one gun.

I remember toying around with Downtown-Mafia a few years ago (I'm not sure if the current one is the same as the version I played) and, whilst it was an engaging game, it was ultimately the concept of bullets and bullet factories that turned me off completely.

It was an absolute crap shoot because there were far more people after bullets than there were bullets being produced. This is somewhat similar to the IA racing but the difference here is if you miss the IA, you try for the next one. On the other game, if you missed the bullet production it was 24 hours before you could try again; so naturally getting the bullets was a much bigger deal than getting the ia.

Secondly, I'm not sure who controlled the prices but they were extremely restrictive to newer players (or so it felt) and the owners of the bullet factories could change production times; which meant that changes were common and you needed the 'inside knowledge' to know when bullets were available which was, again, very disheartening for new players.

As a comparison to this game, the 'inside knowledge' of having an IA list is extremely helpful, but not having one is not restrictive because you can still search through the locals in your own. Whilst I appreciate that on this game it probably takes more training to have an effective account; this fact is still not really known to people when they first start playing and it's easier to use the attack options than it is on other game. From a new player's perspective, I think that's seen as a great thing and bullet factories would take that away.

In the game I played factories produced bullets every hour or two. A whole day is too long. Also the owners had no control over the bullet factory prices or production times whatsoever.