It's all about Online Games

MMOs are a strange beast. They are designed to make you play as much as possible, yet addictiveness does not always equal fun. In the field of pyschology, there are several kinds of rewards systems, and the one that seems to be the most successful is the random reward introduced at a random time. Sometimes you click the button, and nothing happens. Sometimes you click and get the food pellet. It's this mechanism that fuels the slots in Vegas, and when you walk away empty, as is statistically inevitable over a long enough stretch of time, you tell yourself that the overall value was the experience itself, since you come away with nothing tangible. MMOs take away your time and they never deliver a discreet conclusion.

I played a ton of Dark Age of Camelot shortly after it launched, and I find myself reminded of it negatively every day that I play World of Warcraft. To discuss the differences in favor of WoW would be an article in itself, but I'll try to keep to the main points.

First, let's talk about The Grind. In a traditional persistent online RPG, you advance your character by killing an endless string of monsters, and by doing "FedEx" quests where you get some money and/or experience points by delivering an arbitrary item from Point A to Point B. As your character advances, his or her progress begins to slow. It takes longer and longer to get to the next level, because you need more and more experience points each time, yet the experience returned from monsters and deliveries does not scale accordingly. Yet you feel compelled to continue because at Level X you get a really cool spell or other ability that's supposed to make the game more "fun."

The second part of the grind is "downtime," the amount of time it takes to recover from each monster (or "mob") encounter. When I played DAOC, it typically took every ounce of my resources to defeat an enemy that would give me respectable experience. Then I would sit down and wait while my energy bars slowly refilled. Then you'd have to wait awhile for the next batch of monsters to spawn again, and you'd typically be competing against other players and "camping" this same spot all day long.

Now, imagine an MMO where your experience is a string of quests where you're rewarded with a cool item, recipe, or a decent amount of pocket money. A game where the grind is virtually eliminated--a game where downtime is relatively nonexistent, where enemies respawn rapidly and dynamically according to how many players are in the local area; where you can use a healing spell, or bandage yourself, or eat some food, or all three, before diving right back in again. Your character's death doesn't result in the loss of many hours of experience points, or one of your items, or any money (although there is item decay, so whatever you have equipped currently takes a 10% durability hit). When you die, you resurrect as a ghost who moves quickly, runs on water, and cannot be harmed on its way back to its body. You can also have a player resurrect you in a matter of moments, even after you have entered ghost form. This is a game that understands Fun.

Flyff is one of the most popular free-to-play MMORPGs available. Flyff has a great animated graphical style that’s easy on the eyes, but is beginning to show its age. Like many other Asian MMORPGs, players in Flyff start out as a beginner class and must choose a job (class) once they’ve reached a higher level – in this case, level fifteen. The experience rate during the early levels is fast-paced, but begins to slow down during the late 20’s and early 30’s. Each class has a different skill set and two different second job choices at level sixty. Listed below are the four initial classes and their second job options:

Acrobat - Acrobats are the ranged specialists of Flyff. The Acrobat can specialize in the use of either yo-yos (Jester) or the bow (Ranger.)

Assist - As the name suggests, Assists support other players with buffs, but also have powerful area of effect (AoE) spells. Assists can specialize into Bill Poster, a hybrid class that uses melee knuckle weapons, or Ringmasters, who possess the most powerful buffs.

Magician - Magicians are the spell casters of Flyff. They have very low HP, but deal heavy damage. Magicians can specialize into Elementalists or Psykeepers.

Mercenary - Mercenaries are the main melee class of Flyff. The Mercenary can specialize into a defensive Knight who uses a sword and shield, or into an offensive Blade who wields a weapon in each hand.

I had been seeing banner advertisements for a game called Evony for several months touted as being Free Forever and a browser based game so I finally decided to check it out and see if it was for real and what is was all about. After a couple of weeks I decided to write a review on it and my first impression is that it is very addicting. It reminds me a lot of playing the old board game Risk crossed between the old computer game Civilization when it first came out. Is it as graphically intense as World of Warcraft or fast paced and exciting as Unreal Tournament or Diablo? In a word, no. But for what it is I find myself drawn to it over and over again to play and for that Kudos to the Evony developers and marketeers for creating a simple yet highly addictive game that is fun to play with many other people online! I love it.

The game is set in a medieval time frame with lords, ladies, knights, warriors, castles, catapults, and other remnants from the past and is a real time strategy based game that continues on whether you are logged in or not. There are many cool things about this game and this type of game I am learning. The first being it is free and there is no software to download or load on your computer at all. You just create an account in your browser and off you go ready to play in Firefox or Internet Explorer. The game is basically all about building a city and then multiple cities and then turning them into strongholds and eventually large defensible castles. Inside each city you build a myriad of buildings to run your city from cottages for people to live and grow your population to barracks for producing an army and an academy to increase your skill in certain aspects of the game. All of these construction and research activities cost resources which is the name of the game in Evony. Resources, resources, resources so you can constantly build, upgrade, recruit, and attack your enemies. As you get more advanced things take longer to do like upgrading to a level 9 barracks may take about 8-9 hours to complete and you can only do 1 construction and 1 research activity in a city at a time. So the nice thing is you can hit build something and then go to bed or go to work and when you get back to your computer it is done and ready for you to do something else. Attacking your foes is similar in nature. Depending on how far away they are an attack can take as little as 3 minutes to multiple hours depending on how far the march is and how many upgrades you have made to compass and horseback riding skills to speed movement. There are a ton of things to build and upgrade even if you don’t plan to attack anyone but be prepared, in the end this is a war game about domination so nobody is neutral for long.

evony-city



Another important and interesting aspect of the game is that of alliances. You start the game with a 7 day beginners protection period where nobody can attack you and you can’t attack anyone else either. This allows you time to learn the ropes and build up your defenses and army before you can be attacked. For more beginner tips and tricks check out my post here. The game is divided up into a bunch of very large “states” like countries and most Alliances are based in a particular state and you will see people messaging for members to join. Alliances can get up to 100 members and are critical to ones survival in the game. As the 7 day periods end for most people they will start looking for easy targets where they can get more resources to build themselves up quickly. An alliance provides you protection just in the name because most people don’t want to pick a fight with a large alliance early on because of retaliation. And if you aren’t in an alliance you are a target of coordinated attacks coming your way to steal your resources.

evony-town


The numbers are staggering in this game. I remember when I got my first group of 250 archers and was thrilled. Now I run raids with 15k archers and lose 1500 and don’t think about it. I just produce more. Early on 1k archer towers was a must for protection and now I have 10k meaning it would require an army of 100k archers to defeat me most likely. I have a stockpile of food of 14 million resources right now and that is nothing according to some old vets(the game has only been out for about 6 months). When you attack someone you basically get a report that shows how long the fight lasted and what the casualties were on both sides, who won, and what was plundered. The battles in Evony aren’t nearly as exciting and graphically intense and World of Warcraft but they aren’t as stressful either and if you have to get up to do something for awhile nobody is yelling at you.

Something that is always controversial in many games is that of real money having an influence and in Evony you can buy in game Evony Cents to use to help build yourself up. You can buy items, troops, resources, and a ton of other things by inputting money into the game. $5 goes a long way in giving you a nice jump start and I know some players that have input $200 to get started and are warlords early on taking people out. You don’t have to put any money in and can do alright. My first server I didn’t spend any money and was in an Alliance ranked 16th with 100 members and I was ranked 6th in the alliance. I was also ranked in the top 250 on the server out of over 8000 players on the server. Of course for a few bucks you can have even more fun.

evony-war-reports


One of my other personal favorite aspects of the game is the Wheel of Fortune. Every day that you log in you get a free Aries Amulet which is worth a free spin on the Evony Wheel of Fortune. It has a random set of items on it every spin and some of them are worth a ton in this game; like a mech battalion which can create up to 400 Ballistas or maybe 120k in gold or an item which gives a hero up to 500k experience and can level them from 10 to in the 20’s instantly. I look forward to my free spin everyday.

Hero’s are a fun aspect of the game as well. You can recruit them in your Inn and then house them in your Feasting Hall. They gain experience from each mission you send them on and level up thru the game becoming more powerful and specialized for your missions. You can also appoint one with high politics to be mayor of each of your towns which drastically improves your resource production as well. It’s a pretty neat idea and lets you personalize your army and characters a little bit more.

evony-world-map


One thing I wish Evony had was sound. At least some medieval background music to listen to while playing would be great.

Overall I have found Evony to be a big success and am very much enjoying the game. It is very addicting and can be played anywhere on any computer so it is very accessible as well. It is a lot of fun and although I wouldn’t say it is better than others games I play like World of Warcraft, Warhammer, Diablo, Unreal, etc it is very different and fills a different time and reward void than those games which are also time sinks. I definitely recommend checking out Evony and giving it a shot, I am sure you will have at least a little bit of fun and for the price you can’t beat that!

"Online gaming is a technology rather than a genre; a mechanism for connecting players together rather than a particular pattern of gameplay." Online games are played over some form of computer network, now typically on the Internet. One advantage of online games is the ability to connect to multiplayer games, although single-player online games are quite common as well.

An online game is a game played over some forms of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology; but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems. The expansion of online gaming has reflected the overall expansion of computer networks from small local networks to the Internet and the growth of Internet access itself. Online games can range from simple text based games to games incorporating complex graphics and virtual worlds populated by many players simultaneously. Many online games have associated online communities, making online games a form of social activity beyond single player games.

-Source Wikipedia.com