Franz's Internet village

[OGPhilly]

I wasn't around for this. Can someone explain what an Internet village is and how Sazari ruined it?

[Boris Johnson]

Basically this game.

http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/

Which I tried to get people from the forum to play as a community building project.

Saz begged to be involved, so I let him.

Premise is, you have to team together and cooperate to build a small iron age village. However, most of the game involves having to deal with various levels of sociopathy and due to the communication barrier its one of the few online games i've seen that actually has ingame xenophobia and racism and such griefing takes a number of weird forms both within and without the community your trying to build (which is quite interesting on a number of levels I think and generally most people agree's is what makes the game intresting).

Anyway, I will admit he started off fairly cleverly, by essentially planting evidence suggesting (as we'd had to move once previously due to this happening for real) that one of the larger Russian clans on it were moving into the area and looking to basically enslave us all (this actually happens quite a lot in the game). Paranoia being the default state of the game, I took him at his word. So we moved.

After that he just resorted to griefing tactics and as a result the project began to fail as people couldn't be f**k to play anymore with someone supposedly on your team just being a massive rooster. So we basically moved again without telling him (which I can imagine he handled with his usual level of self-control) and then managed to set up a fairly successful village that lasted untill the end of that particular instance of the world. We also managed to get Emerald completely hooked on the game and she's now a pretty big deal in it.

Considering as with any game it involved quite a bit of investment of time, it was of course, pretty annoying and i'll admit I called him many things but a child of god. Defining point in anyones life or even in the game, nope not really. A few days later we were happily prospering saz free.

I imagine his account will conflict though.

[Boris Johnson]

Also, as I think it adds to the richness of the story, some necessary explanation about the game mechanics of the time is needed.

At the time (its changed since) basically in order to do anything required the building up of LP, essentially experience points. Most of the things you did (for example building buckets was a favorite of botters) gave you a small amount of LP. In order to do things like gain skills to steal or claim bits of land, you had to aquire and then invest often hours worth of LP. People familiar with RPG's and shit might know the term 'grind', well the game at this time was pretty much the case in point of a grind fest. In order to get anywhere in the game you had to do fairly repetitive maneuvers over and over (why the real powerhouses of that era of the game used bots to do so)

In order to do most of his griefing of the PP village (calling it 'my village' some what ignores the fact we had about 8 or so people playing from the PCF community) Saz was required to amass quite a bit of LP, especially for his land grabs which were the 'russian trick' aside mostly what he did (he would essentially expand his 'personal claim' over stuff people had been working on assuming it was there own plot, being so early in the game there was little that could be done about it). My memory is fairly hazy about the whole thing, but the LP expended in doing what he was doing, would have required at least dozens of hours of play to amass. To preempt any possible claims of 'I used a bot bra' both sites our villages (though not our third he was uninvolved in) would not have been applicable for bots as both were either relatively developed locations or in the second case on a relatively small island (bots back then required large virgin forests to work).

Now consider this, some people from the pcf community invest their time and energy into a game like this, why, simply to have a bit of fun and put the usual bitching and political chit chat aside (even Daktoria got involved). Whereas one person from the community put in, in fact considerably more effort simply to ruin the game for others. Oh my, what a victory for that one person, hours and hours to accomplish what exactly. Annoying the others? Ruining an exercise in community building for a few days. Quite the 'epic win' indeed.

Thread going the way you wanted so far?

Anyway, that's my side of it. Want more, I'm sure the others involved can chip in.

[Boris Johnson]

Oh yes sorry, Correction: i've got the griefing tactics mixed up, the Russian trick was actually after about 12 or so days of playing. Before which he'd been using his griefing tactics for about 5 or so days. Part of the reason i'd took him at his word is due to how much time he'd invested in it, and thus I assumed he felt he had some stake it, and, wanting to make the community play nice together still maintained the naive illusion that his childish tendencies (he did for example steal quite a bit of stuff that later turned out to be fairly useful) could be harnessed for the good of all.

Again hazy, but that's definitely the long and the short of it.

[Spider]

I was in the original village, on that island. Was actually a kinda cool location. When Saz did the land grab he actually dropped his boundary directly across my front door, literally trapping me between my house and his property, which I couldn't cross. So I basically had to abandon that character and start over again. (The sleazy little f*cker)

The game features permanent death, and very little carries over.

Got a few fun gaming memories out of that. Like this one time I was out exploring in my boat and came across a bunch of chickens...I was like, "Sweet! Chickens! Now I can build chicken coops and have eggs and chicken to eat and *nerdgasm nerdgasm*". So I load up my boat full of chickens and start trying to find my way back to the settlement. Was going along down the river and saw another boat...only these people had fancy gear and iron weapons and they started heading my direction.

Russians. With weapons. In what universe am I not going to get ganked? The permanent death angle added some real urgency to the situation. So I take off the other direction in my boat, and they chase me closely. This goes on for about 40 minutes or so, me madly clicking along trying to stay ahead of them. The boats all move the same speed and eventually they gave up and left off. But then I was lost. Took another hour to find my way back to the settlement. (The world is very large)

But. Chickens. Hell yeah.

And then the world ended and I just couldn't build up the motivation to start over, especially with the scarcity of game to hunt in the new instance.

Am going to try Salem when it launches.

[Boris Johnson]

[Spider]

I think I do remember some of that diplomacy stuff going on. That was later on though. At that point we still hadn't established a supply of metal, so we were limited in terms of having to fight anyone off, but we were very self sufficient.

My big problem was the interface. Everything was very clunky and unintuitive. A graphics upgrade and a smoother interface would make all the difference to me. Plus some sort of assurance everything I've accomplished won't be simply erased out of the blue one day. The concept really is the ultimate sandbox.

Ya, Em talked me into getting back into the game a while back, before she went AWOL. She had quite a little empire going up when I was taking the tour. I can imagine her expanding to snuff out the neighboring powers. Or sweet talking them into becoming bannermen or something.

[Boris Johnson]

[Boris Johnson]

[Spider]

Wow, Em. Looks pretty ship shape.