Darkfall Re-Reviewed By Eurogamer

Sorry to say, but EVE is boredom incarnate. For those who aren’t in on the metagaming, or getting giggles at the thought of scamming people, there’s nothing to enjoy; if you’re not in one of those super-alliances which dominate the game, your game is pretty much limited to (cookie-cutter) mission-running, with only money as your reward, or mining your hours away…

Or that was my experience anyway. One look at the official forums and I had the impression of being a nobody trying to butt in on an existing community already used to doing things their way with no consideration for outsiders just joining the game. And it’s not a case like World of Warcraft (which I had also started playing a few years into the game), where the forums were nothing more than ancillary; here the forums are where all the metagaming is going on. It’s a part of the game which me and my little mining operation clearly do not have access to; and my friends, who started playing at the same time as I did (late June), already indicated that they would not renew, so I won’t stick around either, especially since I don’t know anyone else playing EVE, and that EVE makes it impossible to trust strangers. Nice work there, CCP; I’ll feign compassion when the Goons cancel their subscriptions after having won the game.

Yeah, by all means continue to call EVE a sandbox; it’s just a sandbox for which the vast majority of people (you know, those who don’t leave Empire space, or who don’t or can’t come with their ready-made corporations and alliances) won’t even get the opportunity to enjoy 95% of it, while the pricks playing the game will just make it their duty to ruin the little 5% you’ve been segregated into.

I haven’t played Darkfall (and won’t), but based on what I read, I want nothing to do with that game. The same large guilds in the same large alliances bashing one another over the head for any stupid Reason of the Day which needs no elaboration because it’d be *gasp* roleplaying if they bothered to construct a plausible scenario. In that way, it’s quite similar to EVE, but deprived of the remaining 5% of the sandbox which the unaffiliated can safely play in.

Kieron’s review is interesting in its asides, rather than its conventional discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Darkfall itself, because it opens a door into the games-reviewing process which a guy like Zitron would never have given (and which I think partly led to the annoyance that followed the publication of that review).

As for Ms. Hamasaki’s video, I’m pretty sure that such oddities in Japanese culture can all be attributed to the national shame that followed their defeat in WWII. I think. I hope.

@Guy

The problem starts when I see some players actually think of the no-holds-barred capitalistic world of EVE as a good thing. When I complained about nothing stopping fraud in EVE on another forum, I was offered the usual responses that the poor are poor (in real life, mind you) because they don’t do their research and just whine instead (wish they’d say that to the single mother of three children), that “natural selection is a good thing” (even though something definitely went awry in the transfer of that scientific principle to the field of socioeconomic ideology), that regulations are bad, that government intervention is about protecting stupid people (rather than the weakest in society), and that I should just read Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” to be enlightened (even though I’m well aware of some of the controversies surrounding both book and author). As I’m always been wary of people who can’t differentiate between a game and reality, and that the libertarian fanatics appear to be drooling over the game (while I despise that ideology), why should I want to stick around?

Oh well, the whole conversation’s over there: mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/14/view/forums/thread/242539/page/2

So they dismissed me as a whiner who didn’t want to learn how to play. The problem with this reasoning is that at its core, the real matter is that EVE is boring. I would gladly be content with being just another nobody in the game, if the game to which I had access proved interesting to some degree.

Take Puzzle Pirates, my ideal comparison point. I’ve never been in a large alliance, let alone one powerful enough to run an island. And even then, chances are that I would just have been an ordinary officer in that alliance just running a ship instead of an island governor. Did I mind? No, not really, because the game to which I had access was varied enough to offset the loss of a meaningful role in the political game. I ran stalls, owned a small fleet, etc. And puzzles were at the centre of the game; as long as you enjoyed doing them, did you need anything else? Sure, I tired of it eventually, but it took months.

In comparison, I started playing EVE on June 24. Mining asteroids was fun for a week or two, then shipping it to market became an annoyance, so I resettled as close as possible to my selling point. Then mining got boring, to the extent that I would mine asteroids just as much as I needed to. Finally, two weeks into the game, I had to wait a week for my skills to level up to be able to sail my already-bought mining barge; that broke what was left of my spirit. At the time, my friends were already indicating that they would leave the game as well, so what reason could I now have to return?

I’ve been told that my approach to EVE was wrong — that I should not be waiting for skills to level up — but then what else could I do? I’m not in a corp, if you exclude that which my friends started; I wouldn’t trust, nor be trusted by, a corporation run by a complete stranger; I don’t really like PvP (especially not the griefing kind); and I’m sick of mining. The only reason I log in these days, as I still have a month to go, is to replenish the skills queue, on the off chance that I could change my mind and renew. Since I’m past the 1.6 million point training speed bonus, that’s pretty much once every three to five days.

So it isn’t, and hasn’t been, a matter of L2P in my case. If anything, I like steep learning curves in games, except when it gets to the point of being steep beyond what I am supposed to learn as a result, like those command inconsistencies in Dwarf Fortress. EVE, while being complex, has such gaping holes that I simply can’t excuse even if they turned out to be deliberate design choices, yet similarly can’t overlook as unimportant; corporation management, for instance. Sure, I was not the CEO of our small corp, but it seemed to me that the corp management interface was a step down from Puzzle Pirates, as though CCP voluntarily left a gaping hole to make sure that people with enough rank could steal everything your corp kept in its hangars, instead of just part of your corporation inventory. I saw huge parts of the game remain unused (at least among the Empire space outcasts), like offering shares in other corporations or meaningful contracts, even of the courier type, because everyone is either a scammer or worried about being scammed.

My interest in most MMO’s has always been economic (and yeah, I guess you could regard it as a form of PvP), but it has always been above-board. So seeing people gleefully announcing their latest scam (along with the victims’ names) on the official forums is too unsettling for me. As for a legitimate business pattern, all I have seen so far is that most of the money seems to be made in tier 2 and tier 3 items, which are impossible to produce without research facilities, which in turn require a player-owned structure you can use — hence back to this need for a corporation. I’m sure there is some money to be made producing newbie stuff, but it’s probably small potatoes in a crowded market, so the game deliberately excludes new players from the economic game.

I saw one of those EVE ads on a website recently, and I jotted down the numbers it mentioned: Week 1: 500,000 ISK; Month 3: 180 million ISK; over a year: 4.7 billion ISK. So this is, according to CCP, how much a player should be expecting to have on this time scale. When I see people on the forums talk of a billion ISK as though that were a trivial amount, I’m tempted to agree with Geldon: players starting out are nobodies, and will stay poor for the better part of a year (assuming they don’t get scammed or don’t go broke). Add on top of that being forced to join a corporation which, in turn, will treat you like a mole, and you’ll understand why I have tired of EVE.

@JuJutsu

In a way, the “level up while logged off” plan is good for people who don’t have much time to play, as opposed to the “grind to level up” approach of most MMO’s. Unfortunately, the downside is that the former gives you no reason whatsoever to log in if you’re just waiting for that essential skill to finish training. Being logged in will not speed things up, so there is nothing you can do about it.

A hybrid system where levelling up offline, with the process going faster while you’re logged in, would have been much better. And I don’t mean the lazy trick of keeping the computer turned on at night; I mean that the game should keep track of players doing something, whether it’s mining, PvP or mission running, and give them a bonus accordingly, whether on the skill currently being trained, or on any skill vaguely related to the activity you’re doing. (If you’re mining for several hours, shouldn’t that give you enough experience in mining that levelling up the mining skill would go faster?)

All of this, as it stands, reeks of “don’t overload our server, please”. And it means that no matter what you do in the game, you can never catch up with older players. But wait, wasn’t EVE supposed to be about commitment, winners win, losers lose, etc? Doesn’t this levelling scheme go against all that? If it’s just about keeping people subscribed even if they don’t play, it’s crass.

@geldonyetich
I think you’re right when you say that there is no believable reason for the RvR involved. Who is winning the game? The Something Awful (“The Internet Makes You Stupid”) Goons. They don’t care about winning the game — which is why they WILL win — and much prefer to be professional griefers instead. How can anyone talk of a meaningful RvR with those guys around?

I also see what you mean (I think) by the vicious circle of economic production (“accumulate power that serves the means to accumulate power”).

When I played Pirates of the Burning Sea, I thought this was a problem specific to that game, as every trade item in PotBS was either a direct component of shipbuilding (which meant, to keep the economy going, that ships had to sink, usually in PvP), or typical Caribbean trade goods (tobacco, cochineal, etc.) which you could exchange for shipbuilding components, and nothing else, at NPC traders. Likewise, any money made would in turn have to be ultimately invested in ships, because there was nothing else to spend it on.

The problem of PotBS was in the way the economy was implemented, which required no investment of the player’s own time (and instead had production pegged to structure labour in real time, with a maximum of ten lots per server), which meant anyone could be a crafter at no time loss to oneself; even your economy-abhorring PvPer put up his ten hemp lots for his society’s effort. The obvious result was internal society production, bypassing the market altogether, and to make matters worse, the official forum was full of brazen threads such as “my ten lots on Server X in exchange for your ten lots on Server Y”. When I briefly returned to the game last April, one French society on my server was derided by their own side for working under a capitalistic model; that old chestnut of “working against the national interest” even made a guest appearance.

But a few days after showing up in EVE, I realized that the problem which I thought to be PotBS’s — the market serving one activity vital to keep the market going — was really EVE’s. I’m pretty sure the same model also applies to WoW, WAR, etc., but in those games the market never struck me as anything more than an afterthought (and an utter joke in WAR). It would disappear overnight that not much would change; people would just discard their unwanted loot drops instead of putting them up at auction. Instead, PotBS and EVE were, ostensibly, RvR games with a robust economy. The former was undermined, as I wrote above, by the designers’ choices in terms of structure time; but the latter, which correctly pegged resource gathering to actual player time, makes the mistake of having a perfectly hermetic economic system, where every trade good must serve one activity, which must be performed in order for the economic system to work.

Somehow I’ve always liked the system of Puzzle Pirates best, where a good chunk of the economy came from non-essential items like clothing or furniture, sometimes using the same resources as essential goods like ships. It added a complexity to the economy which is lacking from EVE’s, which is entirely dedicated to having more pew pew.

@Guy (your latest post, which wasn’t there when I started writing my previous comment)

That’s what makes this utter belief in the free market on the part of some of EVE’s players all the more ironic. I remember one forum poster at MMORPG.com laconically replying to this “sandbox” mantra in his signature: “Even sandboxes have fundamental rules such as; “Don’t eat the cat poop, you’ll die.”" Pretty much like the “free market” that the libertarians espouse: The government sets up a framework. Even if it’s not an interventionist plan, it still provides laws under which a free market can flourish. If they didn’t exist, what would the free market look like? Pretty much like the Mafia, I’d think, or at least like Enron and Madoff — except it’d all be fine and legal. And this is what really, really bothers me about the free-marketeers espousing EVE: The game has nothing against scamming and protection rackets, they’re even encouraged, and those guys are proud of that? It’s so easy to say that if people get scammed, it’s all their fault, but I can’t believe they’re actually in favour of that in the real world.

Okay, so we don’t get a government in EVE, but we do get a framework, courtesy of CCP. Sometimes the developers’ hand is subtle, but it’s the particularly obvious cases which make you realize how it’s done. From PotBS, for example, take the river placement. Rivers increased production, so the developers placed rivers as resources only in cities around the Antilles, the level 40-50 “endgame” area. Which meant, notoriously, that New Orleans, being a continental city, has no river among its resources. A clear example of crafting the map in order to create one type of gameplay.

I’m pretty sure we could pore over EVE to try to figure out the overwhelming popularity (I’m told) of the Caldari, and how Jita became the main trading hub. Or how about jumpgate camping? Isn’t that a blatant example where the developers created the game that way in order to generate a certain way to play the game, and a despicable one at that?

@JuJutsu
“We already know how that system is treated in practice don’t we?”

I assume you mean botting/exploiting, powerlevelling, or both. I can see the concern about botting/exploiting, especially if it leads to a Darkfall scenario where everybody uses the shortcut to gain an early advantage. The question is interesting, though: How much botting takes place in EVE? I’m not familiar with that aspect of the game.

Still, the incentive to log in ought to go beyond mere monetary needs on the part of the player. And the fact that it’s clearly not a game for casuals makes it even worse.

Well, there are the puzzles, true, but as far as the economy is concerned, they added them gradually and I think some professions don’t yet have puzzles. When I played, the only professions which had an associated puzzle were shipwrightery, distilling, alchemistry and blacksmithing — and in fact, they haven’t added a new puzzle in this regard in over a year. Last thing they’ve added to economic puzzles was foraging, to close a loophole where people would use multiple accounts at once to forage (it never was considered an exploit). At the peak of my foraging industry, I had around five accounts, or 15 characters overall, and that was considered minor-league. A puzzle just meant you could continue using your alts, but you’d waste entire days at it instead of just 10 minutes for each character.

The introduction of the foraging puzzle, by the way, was the reason I left PP. I’m all for closing the loophole, but not when that loophole has been used for years on a server, with older players/crews/flags being able to sit on a cushion of foraging money as opposed to new players. My own take on it was the same it is today: Get rid of the loophole, by all means, but have the courage to wipe the servers; otherwise, let the loophole stand.

But to return to the subject of the PP economy, you’re right, it wasn’t all about frivolous expenses, though the latter made the game more fun than being forced to reinvest everything into shipbuilding. And I think those frivolous expenses were part of the larger reason why the PP economy was rather fun: the large part of casual players. And this may also explain why EVE and PotBS are relative failures as far as their economies are concerned: they target Their Hardcore Leetnesses, players who don’t care about the economy except as a means to an end, which isn’t economic.

I’ve talked about the closed-society shipbuilding operations in PotBS, which is a typical example with their autarkies in miniature that see the open market as a waste of money and productivity — even if it’s just to sell their extra production there. Why should they need the market for their own shipbuilding effort? They’re Hardcore, they’ll grind for all the money they need to produce it, and if they’re good at PvP, they’ll sell the marks of victory on the market for additional funds. But as far as actual production is concerned, they’re fine with what they have (especially since production time is, as mentioned above, pegged to structures and not the player’s time). They don’t need the market, or independent traders, because nothing beats having everything at cost.

EVE works differently in some respects, such as forcing players to actually go out there and grind those asteroids (though I’ve heard that the Goons’ strategy is to steal from miners and never mine themselves). You can’t beat relying on yourself, though: it’s as cheap as can be, and it’s a relatively safe way of guaranteeing supply, especially if you’re out of the way.

PP, however, had tons of casual players who weren’t part of such hardcore guilds (as soloing is actively discouraged in PotBS and EVE), so even though your major flags/crews probably had some form of internal production going, you still had plenty of outsiders who were going to buy from small shopkeepers. The only sector of the economy where you had to be affiliated to be profitable was shipbuilding; not only did the largest shipyards require a building permit (which only an island’s governor could deliver, so you’d have to be politically connected just to be able to erect one), but only the major alliances (flags) could guarantee a steady stream of orders. Otherwise you’d be selling a sloop every now and then, and it wouldn’t be enough to make rent, which was one of the highest in the game. I should know; I owned a small shipyard at some point, and it was a money sink — never had an outside order during the time I owned it. However, I did make great deals of money from selling cannonballs, an item which anyone setting sail would need.

All you needed was enough labour, and a few alts with the proper skill (if a puzzle existed) would be enough. (Here I’m talking specifically about the “doubloon”, or free, servers.) Anyone could create two accounts of three pirates each, equip them with labour badges (with enough capital), and you were in business. If you had friends, even better, and occasionally you’d get complete strangers trying out the puzzle on free days. Maybe it’s another area where alts ought to be eliminated, but when I was there it still worked decently.

So I would say that the reasons why PP’s economic model worked better are multiple: 1) As stated before, you still had room for frivolous expenditures. You didn’t have to spend a penny on clothes, and you didn’t need to paint your ship black, but you could. It’s a vanity expense, true, but it’s something which is available to you. EVE? Sure, make money selling spaceship parts, and you can spend all of it buying spaceships; there is nothing else to spend it on. 2) Casual players who still rely on you and see no reason to start playing the economic game (or maybe tried and failed). EVE? “Oh, but you _must_ join a corp to go anywhere.” In PP, you can be a small shopkeeper in a regional centre and still make a profit (if you know anything about Hunter Ocean, I was based out of Sayers Rock instead of Aimuari Island, the ocean’s hub). EVE? No salvation outside of Jita. Pity for me, I’m Gallente and don’t hang out nearby.

So I’m tempted to think that EVE and PotBS’s economic systems might have failed as a result of those games’ inherent Hardcoreness, whereas PP, with its casual outlook (never mind RMT), encourages a more open economic model. It also raises another interesting question: Could this be possible at all in a subscription-based game? World of Warcraft could have managed it, if it didn’t make the economy a completely insignificant aspect of a game as a result of the gear-and-level treadmill. What you get instead is insignificant — like that 2,000 gold I made selling small eggs during Winterveil. There is money to be made, but for the most part it is so fully integrated into the general treadmill of WoW that the economic game cannot come into its own: you can’t specialize as an economic player while just starting out, and there aren’t enough goods for which a market exists. I took blacksmithing; what a waste of time, since you’re forced to grind mobs for ingredients anyway — mobs which you can’t even kill until you’re of an appropriate level. So you’re forced to jump on the general-levelling treadmill just to play the crafting game.

But maybe a working economy isn’t something to be expected to show up in a subscription game anymore, between the Scylla of games for hardcore leeters who will appropriate the market to themselves (and seek independence) and the Charybdis of mindless treadmills such as WoW that are based on quest rewards and loot drops. The very presence of a subscription model seems to have sucked out any chance of getting casual players, whom I suspect are the real life-blood of a working MMO economy.

But I’m just rambling now.

@pxib
I think this may have as much to do with Darkfall’s momentum having passed as with people who read and comment on this blog having for the most part never played the game. As far as I know, Geldon never tried it, and I have been too wary of Aventurine (not to mention being cash-strapped) to even bother with it. Even Mr. Jennings stopped playing Darkfall a while ago, instead of delivering further installments of his in-game adventures we were gleefully expecting. Even the resident Darkfall supporter, Owain, was considering leaving the game after Aventurine’s American cash grab, and since he has not commented since, I am assuming that he left (though I hope he’ll stick around here; the more the merrier and all that).

So what’s to talk about? A game we’ve only read of and never experienced first-hand? That protracted Eurogamer controversy provided ample fodder for discussion when it started, as you could discuss reviewing standards or criteria for success without ever having to address Darkfall itself. But now? In a way, you’re right, nobody seems to care about that anymore, and if Eurogamer had stuck to its 2/10, or given a worse score, nobody but the dwindling Darkfall supporters would have been manning the walls, and everybody else would have been pointing out how stupid and deluded those supporters looked. And Eurogamer sure seems to have dragged its feet before bringing us this latest review; it’s been more than two months since the controversy, yet Kieron played what, 20 hours?

@geldonyetich
Regarding the loophole, I was the only one who actually asked, though obliquely, for a server wipe. On the official PP forums, everybody else was seemingly more content with closing the loophole while continuing to enjoy the wealth that some of them had derived from it. But that was the problem, I found, with the PP forums: those reading them were the elites, not ordinary players — and therefore those most likely to be using the scheme on a large scale.

So there was no pickle, or if there was, it did not get expressed by the players on the forums, who were wholeheartedly behind Three Rings, and certainly not by the developers. Because you see, mass-foragers were seen as exploiters, who then used bots to move their fruit to market. Bots were forbidden, and I certainly did not use any, but mass-foraging was not an exploit. It was frowned upon by the devs, but it was not a bannable offense; I made damn sure of that before starting out.

Here is how it worked: The game would keep track of how many accounts you created on any computer, so you could theoretically only create three accounts (or 9 characters overall), but it would only keep records for three months, so at the end of those three months, you could create three new accounts using the same computer. And if you owned more than one computer, it would go even faster as the system worked by computer, not by IP address; so you had the horror stories of one guy going through his college dorm to create accounts from each computer.

So yes, it was being abused, but as long as you didn’t mess with the game files to create more accounts on a computer faster than the three months, there was nothing to be done. All you needed to forage was to have a character stand on a forageable island for ten minutes, then you could forage, log off that character and log in the next one. Not to mention that you could run as many accounts simultaneously as your computer or connection could hold. The maximum this computer could run was four accounts, or twelve characters overall, and it probably took me, with delays, 40 minutes to have them all forage.

Enter the foraging puzzle, and suddenly you’d realize that it would take 10 minutes per pirate to forage, if not more — so 120 minutes in my case, as you were forced to pay attention to the puzzle. People with more characters would have spent more time doing it, so they could have wasted entire sittings just playing the foraging puzzle.

The unraveling of this was quite fascinating, as it brought the hypocrites out of the woodwork, those who were welcoming the new puzzle because it would be a triumph of skill over exploiting. This, in fact, is the darker side of Puzzle Pirates — a class-demarcated game where your puzzling skill in large part determines your status. For example, I excelled at precisely one of the more useful shipboard puzzles, and my status was semi-elite; financially, middle-class.

Instead of repeating myself, I’ll just direct you to a recent post on this blog where I commented on PP’s class system: brokentoys.org/2009/05/15/freerealms-has-a-million-users-not-including-your-raiding-guild/

What I really want to bring up here is how different PP is from EVE in regard to what the game offers to people at the top and at the bottom; the hardcore and the casual. And just to prove that there are enough similarities between the two to warrant a comparison, guess who was running the largest alliance on Hunter Ocean in 2007? If you answered the Something Awful Goons, you’re correct; if they showed up, that says a lot about the game.

EVE sees fit to separate the two games (hardcore-elite and casual) by distance, with Empire space and nullsec as the two extremes, which means the gameplay is affected, and if you stay in Empire space you will see only a fraction of what the game has to offer; Puzzle Pirates, on the other hand, prefers to use a parallel system, where everyone uses the same space, but never run into one another because of the inherent skill-based class system. The elites have their own pillages, etc., and everything short of the political game and some high-end events can be played by everyone (blockades, for example, demand so much manpower that everyone can usually take part). EVE is all about alliances and corporations with nothing outside of them, but PP is more about skill-based connections. To be part of PP’s elite pillages, not only do you need the skills, but you need to know the appropriate people, and as long as they aren’t your political enemies, it’s perfectly fine to team up with strangers as long as you know something of their reliability. Somehow I can’t imagine this being possible in EVE, amid the paranoia.

A new player in Puzzle Pirates has a place, and the better he gets at puzzles, the higher he can climb; it’s perhaps what makes PP unique. None of this really affects the economy, though, so on the latter point, I will add that it is possible to get involved in the economy quite early on, as long as you have the capital for it. You can rent a stall and start making money if you have enough savvy (except shipbuilding, as mentioned above, and tailors/furnishers are also seen as money pits though I never tried them).

You don’t necessarily need a game that will alienate the hardcore grinders; you need a game where it is possible to succeed without being one. If that’s enough to piss them off, all I can say is good riddance. I can’t imagine succeeding in PotBS or EVE without being a hardcore grinder — nor in WoW, for that matter, which makes the hardcore players of that game even more annoying for their weak attempts at denying it.

But I’ll just make an attempt at explaining my general theory of what makes a successful game economy:
1) The economy, including crafting, can be played independently of the general levelling treadmill, without hurdles not economic in nature, such as the impossibility of access to resources in higher-level areas, or a blur between mob-killing and resource harvesting. Hence WoW’s economy is a failure by being based, in large part, on your general level and forcing you to grind mobs for resources.
2) The economy must play a vital part in the endgame (such as RvR) instead of being an aside (making WoW’s yet more of a failure, because it is irrelevant), but at the same time must be broader than just a means to an end, with a particularly faulty pattern being that vicious circle of economic production on which we seem to agree. EVE, for example, would fail in this regard because it limits itself to war production, which must be wasted on making war in order to justify more war production (and keep the game going).

So how about this for a chicken-and-egg dilemma: In an ideal game, should the economy serve the political/military, should the political/military serve the economy, or should the symbiosis be so complex that it becomes impossible to find out which serves which?

@Gx1080

“But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays)”

Not anymore. I played it for quite a few months in the summer of 2007, came back to it last summer for a month, but I don’t think I will return to it.

@geldonyetich

I still insist in saying there was no pickle over closing the foraging loophole, because of the PP financing model. The foraging loophole just allowed you to make insane amounts of money if you pursued it on a grand scale, while I’m pretty sure Three Rings would have much preferred to have all of us buy doubloons with real money. So who would they lose as players? Freeloaders who never bought anything, and so on, so no big loss, but it was probably because of RMT (and the possibility to convert doubloons into game currency, and vice-versa) that wiping the servers was impossible. You paid for stuff with real money, and now it’s gone? Had it taken place, it would have been ethically questionable, to say the least.

That’s why I’m saying there was no pickle, no dilemma. There was just one sensible course of action available: Close the loophole by introducing a puzzle, and don’t do a server wipe.

Yes, I rather like the skill system of Puzzle Pirates. It’s not as annoying as, say, the “if you do something long enough, you will be rewarded” of WoW.

Without having to ditch personal accumulation altogether (and what a boring game that would lead to), I like to think that in an online game you need a possibility to succeed on a smaller scale, that you can open your little store and stay in business against Walmart, even though your corporate bank account doesn’t have as many zeroes at the end of the fiscal year.

What I’m dead set against is the play-to-crush, number-one-or-nothing mentality, where the smaller guys immediately get killed off, are forced to amalgamate with larger groups, or are relegated to eating crumbs. Shadowbane, EVE, Darkfall, they’re all examples of that. The first notoriously had three dead servers when the Asian large alliances took control of the map; the second is a perennial fight between the Goons, BoB and maybe some Russian alliance. The third is still up for grabs, yet the dots on the map seem to appear in patches of the same colours these days: df.urme.com/map/ (It appears to have changed somewhat, but maybe that has to do with the North American release.) And if you’re inquiring about PotBS, it really doesn’t belong in this list because guilds don’t hold genuine power, and alliances don’t stick; you’re still The British, The French, The Spanish or The Pirates, and you play accordingly, as opposed to EVE where Gallente and Caldari players can still mingle and go pew-pew together even though they’re supposedly mortal enemies.

Remember when we were discussing Darkfall (I think) a few months ago, and someone (not Owain) showed up to say that a smaller group should never ever aspire to owning a city but should go guerrilla instead? That’s what I mean. That was a perfect example of being prohibited from playing a large part of the game because you weren’t large enough. Small crews in PP can still achieve something on a smaller scale, because they play a game parallel to Their Leetnesses, best demonstrated by the fact that the Goons couldn’t exactly wreck everybody’s day, except for those who played on their level — high-stakes politics. Those who despised the Goons were mostly their adversaries; average players didn’t give a damn. Yet PP is not exactly “never the twain shall meet” either; if you know the right people, you can still progress, or so I’ve seen, not like EVE where everyone is paranoid of their own shadow.

I think that the problem with EVE’s economy was that it was entirely at the service of the political/military, because it was not designed to be anything else. PotBS had the same problem, though far more acute, because crafting required no time involvement from the player, just money. One of the game’s most famous players once said that he was puzzled that PotBS was “an economic game where your financial success is intentionally gated by grind”. Yep, grind for money, then turn the money over to finance in-house ship production or unrest bundles to flip ports. It was a game where economic players were seen as second-rate, or just cows to be milked by PvP players for funds.

In comparison, the opposite, that of politics/war serving the economy just leads to lopsided maps once a side has access to all the capital it needs as well as strategic resources, because the economy still remains a tool for war. So I don’t really know where this is going, or whether there is any nice exit point/miracle solution.