Review

 

There’s a huge ruckus going on both in game and on the forums. The reason for all the hubbub is that there’s a new content patch scheduled to be released, but due to bugs encountered while translating it it won’t be released this particular week. Many people are in an uproar, threads are being locked even more than usual, and everyone is generally quite stressed out. There’s a new “I’m Going to quit” thread every hour or so.

 

This makes me quite sad to see so many people upset. Grudingly I have to admit that I’ve lost my sense of cool objectivity. I really like this game but can’t figure out exactly why. Its not solo content, as that’s rather underwhelming. Its not graphics, because I run off of a laptop and everything looks rather crappy on a laptop. Its not PvP because I suck at it. Its not sound, because I turn it down all the time. And yet I’ve logged more hours onto this game than any other game I’ve played in the last 2 years. Hmm.

 

I take a few hours away from the game to think about this. If its not content, music, graphics, or PvP, then what is it? How could something so seemingly bland be so addicting? Or have I just lost all sense of standards? Eventually I reach a conclusion. Its not so much as the game, as it is the people that play the game.

 

This is easily the best online community I’ve ever seen. My fellow players are helpful, supportive, and easy to play with. More importantly, they’re vital to play with, as this game requires an enormous amount of time and energy if you attempt to do everything yourself. This is a fairly small community, so most people are familiar with a lot (if not all) of the other players on their server. The GMs are also supportive and helpful. With the patch delay, however, they’re in somewhat of a pickle. Can’t really do much about buggy code, but its evidence that they’re trying to do what they can by listening to players. That’s another crazy thing; the GMs actually listen to players. They take ideas for events, content, server names, and whatnot, and actually consider them. I’ve never seen another game that’s done that.

 

On the other hand, sometimes its flat-out just hard to play. This can be a really frustrating game. I lag a lot, am at a significant disadvantage in some things because I’m a lower level, and when I was just starting out I was incredibly confused on some things that should have been explained in the tutorial(psst, put chat commands in that thing).There are also some odd bugs. One player who I party with can’t see my character. Yet, I play. And am playing. And will play.

 

So, I guess I don’t really know why I like this game, but I do, and I play it a lot. Its definitely not for everybody at this point, as I’m sure that some players don’t place a high of a value on a stellar community than I do. Nor would they be as excited as I am about banding together to fight off a common foe. Its frustrating at times, sometimes very frustrating, but for me that makes the payoffs all the more rewarding.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Chip War to fight.

 

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