April 21, 2020
In the six years since I lasted posted anything here, we've tried a lot of other mutli-player online fantasy roleplaying games. So far we have not found anything more fun or rewarding than Second Life, which is not a game at all.
Second Life
We have been active in Second Life since 2008 and for the past year our online activities have been almost exclusively in SL and in a very similar private grid. The community that has grown up around the new Bellisseria regions of Linden Homes has been quite enjoyable.
Of course, by now we have learned that the only joy that lasts is that which we create ourselves. Second Life lends itself well to that (as long as Linden Lab does not mess it up with feature bloat). It is far more a toy than a game, a place where you can create your own worlds and your own adventures and share them with others.
As for the rest, well, there's a saying in the UK that is becoming increasingly popular: "End it before it goes bad." That is, everything eventually goes bad, so know when to walk away.
Sic transmit gloria mundi. That is most often nonsensically transliterated as "thus passes the glory of the world," but Gen. George S. Patton got it right:
All glory is fleeting.
So, armed with knowledge and understanding that we have gained since we first ventured into these adventures so long ago, we continue our journey on down that Glory Road!
July 19, 2014
Wartune was enjoyable at first, but with additions over the past 2 years, it has degraded into little more than a cesspit of Pay2Win PvP junk. All the PvE fun has been reduced to incredibly boring, tedious, and time-wasting grinding, to the point that Wartune is rapidly approaching the point where everything about it is an unpleasant experience.
To our dismay, we learned that not only does 7Road tolerate hackers, it actually employs them. Their employees act as shills, staying just head of the paying customers to keep the customers paying more ahd more.
With that experience in mind, and regretting all the time (and a little money) that we have wasted on Wartune, we thought we would look to see what else is available. We want a real multi-player fantasy roleplaying game, preferably one that has withstood the test of time and is still being enjoyed by a lot of people.
Player-vs.-player action, if present in the game, must not be required to develop your character. Totally eliminating PvP from the the game is far better; it filters out the psychos.
Costs must be reasonable. If a game requires more than $10.00/month from each player, it is a failure. A good game would quickly attact and keep enough players that as low as just $1.00/month from each player will pay the bills.
The presence of hackers in a game is a failure. If you allow hackers, it's not a game
anymore. If you pay hackers to act as shills, pretending to be "cashers" to make
it seem like it's reasonable to spend thousands of dollars on a silly online game, that's
just plain criminal. (Nevertheless, it certainly appears to be the case for Wartune.
Does anyone really believe that there are thousands of millionaires in Indonesia who would
waste their time and money on Wartune?)
Below is a list of games we want to look at and try. A game would not have to try very hard to be better than Wartune, but our bitter experience with Wartune has left us very skeptical about the whole online game-playing thing.
Aion | Wikipedia article about Aion