I completely disagree. Not in the sense of “he is wrong”, but in the sense of “we aren’t looking for the same type of MMOs”. He is looking for a themepark, a hub of games which stays the same every time you visit, like the garden of your grandparents. It’s a good place to be.
I am looking for a living world that has the mind of its own, not caring about me. It’s up to me to do something. If you pass out after getting drunk in the real world in a cold night, you might be found “face down in the sand” next day. It’s real. It’s how it should be in a game.
I strongly condemn the idea that actions should not have consequences in a game, just because “it’s a game”. The truth is that actions do not have real consequences, because nothing is real in a game. In reality, you spend time sitting front of your computer playing a game. It doesn’t matter what happens inside the game for that fact. The game character on the other hand can be a soldier, a pirate, an elf mage, a spaceship or a WW2 destroyer. Its life should be subjected to the harsh rules of that imagined world. I want to find my character face down if I played bad. This defines playing bad. If you get rewards regardless what you do, that’s an idle game with some cosmetic actions.
The design of EVE Online is as close to my ethos as it can be. The reality should not be discussed now. Citadels explode and sovereignty changes hands while you are offline. If I’d log back today, the world would be very different from what it was when I was playing. But changes can happen overnight. A wormhole pilot can log back next day, finding his home blockaded with no hope of relief. It’s harsh, but “real”. (or would be, without the Falcon-likes).
Bhagpuss is right on one thing though: no-lifing, off-hours attacks reward lots of play instead of good play. The solution would be time-sliced servers. The 18-21 server goes up at 18:00 and goes down at 21:00 every day, allowing everyone to play on even field. The time is frozen between these times. If you want to play more, you can have an alt on another time slice server, but can’t nolife-win on any of them.
The purpose of a game review is to help readers decide if they want to play that game or not. Bhagpuss did good work, he convinced me with his article that Atlas is a good game for me. It’s alpha now, full of bugs and with balance problems. I won’t play an alpha game. But as soon as it’s ironed out but keeps the “face down in the sand” ethos, I’ll try it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=0&v=M8pR1rZZHEs tells that actions in games can have consequences in real life.
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The game has been completely review-bombed on Steam. 33% approval rate.
Do you think it is down to this way it handles persistence?
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I completely understand both of your positions. However, I would like to present a counter-argument to yours.
Not logging in is not equal to playing bad.
That is exactly what pisses of many people about the dailies and other things that require you to log on to maximize the benefits. While I understand how why you would see EVE as a more realistic approach, it does not make it any harder or have more real consequences. You idea with the time slice makes it a bit better, but not by much, since you still have problems of “yesterday I only had time to play after 21, and the server already went down, I guess, fuck my life”. The only way you can make it fair is to have not persistent progress, but match length progress. MOBA that lasts an hour is almost this. Any more persistence and you create an unplayable game that is so real, that it borders real life and therefore requires the same ammount of effort. Not just momental effort (“I played well this match”), but continuous marriage-like commitment (“I played well for a year-long”) that does not leave time to any other activities (“nolifing”). If you make a server that only works for two hours, you do not solve the problem, you just regulate it a bit. Looking from another perspective: if we could do heroin from 19 to 21, we might as well make it legal for all the day.
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@Maxim: Bhagpuss also wrote (I didn’t play, so have no real information) that most of the negative reviews are about inability to log in or stay in.
@Roman: if you want a competitive, “serious” game, which is also not a MOBA, you need a marriage-like commitment. It needs to be regulated to not interfere with real life, hence the “you can’t play outside of this window”. This game is not for everyone, granted. But those who want such persistent game, should have it. EVE proves that there are such people. Too bad that EVE is corrupted, otherwise I’d still play.
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Eeeehhh…. world persistence is great, character persistence while you are offline is cancer. What you get with the current system is people dragging offline characters (that are “sleeping”) to cages and then keep them as slaves in cells, forcing you to essentially start over. It was a thing in ARK. It also kills the exploration theme of the whole game, if you constantly have to return back to your base to logoff, with the alternative being getting killed while your character is “sleeping”.
BTW, if you are ever inclined to play Atlas, you should join a mega guild that covers all timezones. Building a galleon is an expensive affair (probably not to you though), while destroying one takes only a fraction of the resources. So unless you want to build your ship from scratch again each time you log on, you better have it docked someplace where your clanmates can look after it during US and Asian primetime.
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@Gevlon:
A bit unrelated, but a mobile game: Ragnarok Online Mobile implemented your long time idea: battle time. You have 300 minutes limit per day, and you generate the number by being in combat and lower it by being out of combat. It stack if you don’t use it in one day up to 900 min. If you are over this limit you starting to get less and less xp and drop. As far as I know there is no way to increase this limit (not even by paying $), so even rich no-lifer cannot remove this restriction.
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I know you are against mobile as a platform generally so I thought you might be interested to know about a soon to be released mode on a thriving game that meets your other requirements as I understand them.
Ark Mobile is releasing PVX clock soon which features an entire pve zone except for a center map which is pvp and a slice of the map that changes by the hour like a clock to pvp. Ark features primal pass only servers which are subscription only servers, all structures and tames are killable and if you don’t upkeep your structures they disappear in a week. It has a clear win objective of becoming the Alpha Tribe. They have expressed interested in adding posted leaderboards. Stats per server are shown so a good server can be found. Map populations are limited to 60 people max online at a time.
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Persistent world means, there will be never common ground. Without common grounds, you cant compete. EvE cant be competive, well only if common ground is forced with some exact same setups. MOBA and 1 hour matchup time is exactly the best timeframe where you can set up a common ground for players. If it is longer, physical exhaustion will be the factor what differences the players. Physical limits can vary, bladder size, food quality, social life, sleep cycle, you name it. 1 hour is usually the mark where either of the physical limits put a great influence of the result. 1 hour MOBA is the rough limit of matchup based genre, but it needs to start on a equal base – what forces all the mirrored maps in the games. Btw, if matchup time get shorter, it slowly converts a match into random slotmachine, where skill decreases and importance to luck increases.
If Atlas expect to have persistent world and expects players to be offline significant amount of time, then it will be very intresting game to look. Only thing to look is persistent wealth, if they manage to do that, its like EVE.
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@Anon: I’ve started years after The Mittani and I played less (including metagaming). Guess which one of us has a station named after him in Deklein? I felt pretty competitive in EVE, until Falcon came.
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@gevlon … Eve it not exacly the same competition like on warships or LoL. For me its hard to call it a competition, its more like surviving, sustaining. In the sense you dont win or loose in EVE, you outsustain. Bigger you are, harder is to sustain. This gives the limit. Its not timeframe, it is usually people who are the limiting factor, how many people you can influence to do your will. Conflicts are there, im sure, but you cant play the same conflict ever again.
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Persistence is a bit of a confusing term, unfortunately. I’m not even sure I was entirely clear in my own mind what I meant by it in those posts. It’s entirely possible the problem I was trying to outline was too much persistence rather than too little.
I’m generally in favor of the gameworld having persistence; when I log back in I’m fine with things having changed. I’ve always been a strong advocate of one-time events, things that happen in the gameworld only once and are never repeated, so that you either have to be logged in and present to experience them or miss out entirely.
What I’m not fond of is lack of persistence of character. While it’s fine for the world to carry on without me (the player) it’s not acceptable to me for my character to do the same. My character needs to be just that – mine. If it’s not then I, as a player, have no real agency in the game. I’m at best a factor, if even that.
As far as the experience I had in Atlas, I’m not sure my red lines were really crossed. I did lose all the stuff on my character, including her clothes, but my character was intact and still under my control and her skills were unaffected. I guess the raft might have been destroyed by another player, which would be something of a grey area. I don’t play EVE but I don’t think your ships are at risk when you’re logged out there, are they?
I believe, however, that my raft simply decayed. That’s ridiculous, at least over the timescales involved. Yes, the server needs to clear out unused structures belonging to dormant accounts but not in a matter of days. Most people take a vacation at some point each year!
Still, even though losing stuff, like the raft and the contents of inventory is a bit too much for me, personally, I’m not quite sure it amounts to loss of character persistence in the way I was trying to express the concept. The behaviors Tithian describes above, however, cross every line in the book. I didn’t know that was a thing in Atlas (I did know about in ARK) and it would be enough to prevent me from playing in future, at least on a server that allows it.
I look forward to reading about your experiences, if and when the game reaches a suitable state for you to give it a try.
(Sorry if this comment duplicates – it didn’t look like it had gone through and I added some more to it before trying again).
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The flaw I find with your logic is not separating “world” with “self.”
The world is not yours, and should be free to change. No harm, no foul.
But your character is under your agency. It should only be in play WHILE it is under your agency. If I found myself playing a game where when you ‘logged out’ your character remained and was at the mercy of the elements / marauding animals / other players… etc. I would uninstall that game because it’s a cult simulator, a game where you must abdicate your agency to a group to “keep you safe.”
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@Smokeman: if the game doesn’t offer you methods to keep a character safe while “sleeping”, it’s a bad game. In real life, you can buy a home and lock it to keep your body safe while sleeping vulnerably. But the problem isn’t with the idea (the game goes on when you aren’t playing), but the implementation (you can’t build a safe place to sleep).
Your separation of “world” and “self” is wrong, as everyone is environment for everyone else. In EVE, it’s a common source of frustration if an enemy escapes destruction by logging out and refusing to log in.
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Gevlon:
No. There is no “safe place to sleep” if you have no in game agency while ‘sleeping.’ If the intent is to only allow you to log off while out of combat… then prevent logging off while in combat. Like Eve and many other games go. All you do with absurd “Stay in game while sleeping” mechanics is beg for people to find abuses for it.
If your gank target manages to get to a station and log, that’s your loser ganking skills that are at fault, not the perfectly logical action of going to a safe station and logging.
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