Thursday, January 10, 2008

My new favorite game as a non-player

Since there's only 24 hours in a day, I have to make choices where to put my time. Unfortunately, this currently means that I'm out of all interesting MMO out there and the only game I still play is Dicewars for 10 minutes just before going to bed.

I often talked about how Eve Online was fascinating to me but I guess my heart is now set on Pirates of the Burning Sea.

I've been lurking this game since... well, since the website opened. Now that it's ready to go live, there's some neat things over there like this PDF, which is a preview of a game guide. Reading this preview I feel like I was 16, reading over and over the D&D books for hours to build my next character.

Recently, I discovered Joe Ludwig's blog. Wish I knew about it before. Reading about others' experience on releasing games is quite interesting. It can only be good for me, taking some tips here and there.

One of the reason why PotBS is now my favorite game as a non-player, beside interesting mechanics, is how close the devs are to the community. The process of building a MMO being never really finished (since it's always evolving), I believe you really need to be close to your players to know some success.

I've been following this approach with CT and now I can say I wouldn't have been able to get to this result without the help of others. Here's the words of Mr. Ludwig for this post: "Some things don’t change when you go live. Communicating honestly and frequently with your community remains essential ... Of course keeping them involved in your decision making process is just as important in beta as in live".

This is the same reason why I've set my choice on a new VPS hosting provider. I'll go with SolarVPS because I've read only very good things about their customer support. I'll probably pick the managed service just because I really hate to deal with weird Windows issues. I can handle the coding and database but when it comes to network, that's not where I shine.

Even if I'll pay more than I would have with 1and1, I'd rather pay more but have good service than stay cheap and be left in the dark because of poor customer service.

4 Comments:

Poo Bear said...

Wow - dicewars is incredibly simple yet you still get a good dynamic strategic game out of it (most of the time). I played a lot of risk in my younger days so it strikes a cord with me.

Over00 said...

Dicewars is the only way I've been able to get rid of my Risk addiction.

If you like it, you might also like it's multiplayer form: KDice http://www.kdice.com/

The crowd there is not always friendly but it's still an interesting experience

Micha said...

It would be really neat if somebody came up with a game kind of like Dicewars, but a little more persistent and against lots of people. Maybe on a bigger map? That changes landscapes from game-to-game? Maybe with power-ups or something too.

If somebody made that, then you'd have something to play for 10 minutes a day.

Over00 said...

hehe :-P

Did I mentioned that if I'm not winning a Dicewars game after the first few turns that I reset everything and starts again?

Yeah, it's only to make sure my lazy ego sleeps well that I play this game. I wouldn't allow myself to do the same thing on CT though ;-)

But you're right, I should really try (again) to be better at my own game!