meta – Thulgrom's Tavern

Some afterthoughts, addressing criticism, counterpoints, stuff I didn’t think I had to mention and more about me. If you haven’t read the original TBBC post, read it before proceeding.

Winning

Disclaimer: this part of the post has nothing to do with Albion online.

The first competitive game with a public ranked ladder I’ve played somewhat seriously was League of Legends. I started playing during season 2, 2012. By the end of the season I was seriously hooked, trying to get better by any means available to me – reading guides, watching high level commentary on YouTube, watching streams. And, of course, playing when I could.

I was trying to become the best I could, and it was rewarding. I didn’t have time to play much ranked games in season two: you had to have more than 15 champions unlocked and level 30 to play ranked, and I’ve only managed that by the end of the season. But in season 3 all of my work paid off – I’ve reached Diamond 1 rank, the highest rank available at that time. According to op.gg, one of the best LoL stat tracking websites at the time, at some point I was in the top 2000 players on EUW server (more than 1.5 million players tracked) by ELO, arguably the server with the best players at the time. You can still see my stats on op.gg. That was my peak. I have still played the next few seasons, but not nearly as seriously. I’ve transferred my account to the RU sever to play with my girlfriend since then, and I still occasionally play ARAMs and 10 ranked games every season to get my rewards. I am pretty terrible at the game now though.

When I pick up a multiplayer game, I try to win at it. It doesn’t always work. Last game I tried to pick up before Albion was Tekken 7. Boy is it a hard game. I’ve trained and trained, watched and read countless guides about it, but I played badly no matter what. So I gave up.

I love single player games as well, but for different reasons. When it comes to multiplayer games – I need to be winning. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of fun learning things and failing in the process, making friends and enemies. But if I’m not winning in the end, it isn’t worth my time.

If you want to be winning at the games you play, you have to be ready to spend time on them. And often it means not only spending time in the game, but out of it as well. Other people are sharing their knowledge on the game and your competitors are using it, so if you aren’t doing so as well – you’ll fall behind.

Even more fun than passively absorbing public knowledge is partaking in it’s sharing and documentation. I’ve always been actively engaging in the communities of the games I’ve played, be it the forums, Reddit or Discord community servers.

Albion is the first game where I couldn’t find a good source of public knowledge about the niches that I chose to fill. This is half of the reason of why I created this blog, the other is that I just love talking about games and my gaming experience.

To summarize: I love winning and I’m going to be writing about how to win. If you have different goals in games, you’re probably not my target audience.

The Big Bad Opinion

How I feel about city plots is the same way I feel about city ownership or Mercia territories. It’s just late game content, something that is incredibly overpowered but locked behind a lot of walls and locks, so you spend time to reach it. If it gets nerfed or outright removed from the game – people who have been doing it will just move on to doing other things. But people who were on their way there will lose motivation.

I think the correct way of going about it in MMOs is to introduce more late-er game content with time, so that the game population is always moving towards something, and there is always something better to do. It is much easier said than done though.

Nerfing late game content is how WoW clones do it. Gevlon has it written out already so I’ll just link it here, read it if you care. I’ll just say that when there’s no longer anything to strive for – people like me will leave the game and play something else. So far Albion has proved to be different and I wouldn’t want it to surrender to the “slacker” culture.

The Big Bad Guy

I’ve had some interesting responses to my cartel post. I feel like addressing several of them here. Also some finger-pointing-and-laughing, just because I can.

People didn’t complain when I explained some obvious points in detail in my Crafting for profit guide. Most people just don’t bother thinking about some things, but once they do it may seem obvious. I’m just trying to make others think about the opposite point of view as well.

And addressing risk vs reward – this game is full of low risk – high reward situations, if you’re not using them it’s your fault, not the person’s who is.

Now comes this topic. Read the whole thing if you please.

I don’t claim to have a degree in economics, I work as a programmer. But I’m not talking about real world economics either. If you want to be technical, the gear does have 0 elasticity as a whole, but then the cartel doesn’t have a monopoly. You can always use stations on islands and territories. And don’t try comparing making your own gear in a game, where anyone can easily get an island with plots or even use someone else’s, to making gasoline in your backyard.

Here is the only relevant part of the post. The problem these people actually have is that “island crafting isn’t as profitable as crafting on city stations” and “most people don’t care and I care for them”. They somehow think they are entitled to high profits and the owners are not, even though we all are just regular players in a sandbox multiplayer game, free to do with our money and time as we please. And on the “saving those in need” – do what VOC does, just preferably leave the part about begging for donations out of it. You’ll be everyone’s hero I’m sure.

I have good news for you: it’s already in the game!

The only people who try to force something on others are people calling for admin intervention. You as a player choose what to focus on in the game, and you should expect to be bad at parts that you don’t care about. If I’m a gatherer who doesn’t care about PvP at all – I will die every time I get ganked. Is this the ganker’s fault, or my fault I didn’t bother taking precautions? Should the PKers get nerfed just because some people don’t want to partake in that part of the game and are forced to? No, because this is the whole point of having a sandbox game.