ATITD: The Psychology of the Pilgrimage

This has not been an easy post to write.

Like survivors of the aftermath of a game of Neptune’s Pride, I find myself wrestling with negative emotions and a gnawing feeling of unease in the pit of my gut.

It’s probably why I’ve jumped back into Guild Wars 2 lately, in an effort to escape the guilt. It’s taken a few days to try and put things into perspective.

Have you ever been benched? Put aside for another player?

Gone around? Had folks do stuff behind your back?

Betrayed? Backstabbed?

—

The damnable thing about the Test of the Pilgrimage in A Tale in the Desert is that you require a total of seven characters, no more and no less, to do something in-game for roughly an hour or more.

What that something is, is not really relevant, but I’ll describe it anyway. The seven pilgrims bring requested resources to pilgrim shrines set up by other players, in order to tithe (donate/give) them to those players. This accrues points. The highest scoring team at the end of each week passes the Test.

If you are less dedicated to test-passing, you can opt to just finish the Principles, which only requires that your team score 700 points, and nets you a level.

A slight complication arises in that each pilgrim shrine, which has to be 600 coordinates apart from each other (a pretty long jog) in order to be valid and score you the points.

Early on in the Telling, when the most competitive players are out to outdo each other and level up the fastest (which gets them a heads up on technology and skills and easier test passes for other things,) a pilgrimage can be quite a long and grueling affair.

Many teams are in the running, and there are a number of strategies used to eke out a slight point advantage so as to pass weeks before another team. This can involve tithing extra rounds (assuming one has the materials) for a diminishing return of point score. One tithe nets you 100 points. Two tithes at the same shrine nets you 150 points. Three tithes 175, four 187 and so on.

Or a team can get members to set up their own private pilgrim shrines and keep them secret and off the wiki, so that other teams cannot find them and tithe at them, while their team does so and gets extra points. (Except those pilgrim shrines require marble to build, so that opens a whole new kettle of busywork.)

Or teams can simply do herculean routes of pilgrimage and run together for hours across endless roads and sands of Egypt to get to every last scrap of a shrine there is, and outlast the stamina of teams that are unwilling to or cannot stay on long enough to recreate the same feat.

Assuming one can afford all requested materials to begin with. If the pilgrim shrine asks for materials that one cannot afford, one is out of the running for that shrine in the first place.

Those are all the technical game-design rule considerations.

The more sneaky social aspect is that it’s pretty hard to get seven disparate players online at the same time and coordinated enough to go anywhere together. It’s like arranging a dinner meetup with a big group of not-very-close friends, like classmates or something. There’s always one or two bound to be late, or one that simply doesn’t show up or arrive at the same time.. cat herding stuff.

In hindsight, I made the first mistake. I tried to form a PUG pilgrimage.

I would never have done that if it was the early part of a Telling. I would have found reliable friends that were always online during the times I play, and raised the question with them, and done it with as little ‘outsiders’ as possible.

However, at this late stage of the game, I’d imagined there was no more competition and no more interest in the Test. All the groups that wanted to must have passed by now. For a good many weeks past, there were zero pilgrim groups passing – essentially a ‘gimme’ for any team that scored any amount of points.

Furthermore, most of all my friends and veterans that I was familiar with had stopped playing. Not to mention, probably already passed.

At this stage in the Tale though, nearly all materials are ridiculously easy to obtain to the point where I could essentially sponsor the entire group’s resource list by myself, and it wouldn’t have to be that onerous, we could just ride around Egypt’s chariots and go for the nearest shrines without running too far.

Filled with a benevolent confidence, I thought I’d just ask over an essentially public chat channel if anyone would like to join and take pretty much the first six people that responded.

That was a big fucking error on my part.

Not because I’d stir up interest and put ideas into many peoples’ heads and possibly create additional competition where there was none before. I knew it might happen. And I was okay with that. I figured there aren’t twenty one people left in a game that only has some 300 odd players that still want to pass pilgrimage. Even if my team didn’t pass this week because another more hardworking team overtook them, there was always next week or the next after that. ATITD’s a long term kind of game anyway.

Not because I might have to turn away extra people, and possibly leave them feeling benched or rejected or basically passed up for the baseball or basketball game. I didn’t design the test. It’s a mean test. Seven. No more, no less. I need one more. You’re the seventh, sorry, you can’t bring your friend along. Don’t want to do it without your friend? No problems, I’ll find another, no hard feelings, good luck with your friend and the other team you’re bound to form, I’ll send you other peoples’ names who have contacted me too, but I had to turn away.

Yeah, I know I was creating competition for myself. Yes, I was experiencing an odd sort of cognitive dissonance about the fact. Yes, I was trying to brush it off and try not to mind it, despite some bits of my obsessive-compulsive win-at-all-costs Achiever nature screeching that it was an illogical thing to do. Remember, I’m trying to be its master, not let it rule me.

No, I made the exceptionally critical mistake of assuming trustworthiness, reliability of log-on time and shared priorities among strangers I’d previously never met.

And they the same in me.

To be honest, it -usually- doesn’t steer me wrong. I like to think good, positive things about other people. I find folks tend to respond in kind. Trust them first, smile at them and the natural response is to reciprocate.

However, I do follow game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma and tend to subscribe somewhat to the Tit-for-Tat strategy if cooperating first doesn’t yield cooperation in return. That’s the head talking. The heart? Well, it kinda exploded. Once in a blue moon, I have hot-button volcanic rage issues.

It all started well. We talked, exchanged broad timezones for scheduling purposes, expressed interest in getting the pilgrimage done. One person wanted to delay for a few days for some real life concerns. Okay, I thought, there’s still some five days to go before test passes are run, we can work with that.

Another person kindly made a guild hall for us. This opens up a shared chat channel. Remember, in ATITD, anyone can join multiple guilds and often do. A shared chat would make things easier to coordinate and I could post proposed timings for all to see.

Two days passed. Real life days.

Three people still had not joined the guild.

Three people did not have the courtesy to speak one single word to me about why they could not do such a simple thing.

It did not bode well for the actual concept of being logged-in together for an hour to achieve the pilgrimage.

I checked their log-ins and all of them had logged in at least once each day during those two real life days. It wasn’t as if there was some real life emergency that stopped them logging in to the game. If they aren’t logged in, of course, I would understand that it’s physically impossible for them to join the shared chat channel.

But they were.

So they were online. Doing other things. Not considering the pilgrim group important enough or worth enough respect to even offer a word of excuse or explanation or hell, conversation.

I spoke with the person who made the guild for us, and he too, was unable to get any response out of them – in fact, one closed the chat window on him – until finally, on the second day, one of the recalcitrants gave in to the nagging and joined. His flippant excuse? Living too far away from the guild hall, and not wanting to waste the 25 minutes it would take to get there.

Apparently helping the group get organized was not worth that amount of time to him.

By now, my paranoia was in full swing. I was starting to imagine worst-case scenarios, which included things like those three members having gone on their own pilgrimage and all this being an elaborate deceit to stall us from even attempting ours until they had passed theirs.

The two missing members, who were related, and friends of abovementioned recalcitrant third seemed to have a new excuse every day for being absent and unable to join the guild. Day 1, it was a test to study for. Day 2, a friend in the hospital. Day 3, guests over. Yet, they had logged in every day.

Despite my misgivings, I pressed on and decided to schedule a time, chatting our absent members about it.

Here, I’ll admit that I didn’t give MUCH warning time. It was only about 10 hours away. But I was in a hurry, and new priorities had come up. I’d just been accepted into a big GW2 guild and there were Guild Bounty missions I wanted to attend on the weekend, rather than sit around in Egypt hoping on the offchance that these people might show up online.

That third person said it would be fine. He was online all the time, so could do it any time. He was sure that was within his two friends’ regular play times. We could go ahead, sure.

The scheduled time came, and you guessed it. The two weren’t online. The third wasn’t there. The third’s excuse? “Oh, they have people over, I think. Guess we can’t do it then. I won’t be wasting the 25 minutes to come over.”

And you didn’t tell us earlier? Or attempt to reschedule?

You just let us wait until the time, turn up at the agreed-on meeting place, and THEN drop the bombshell on us when we ask?

Boiling over, seeing red and generally pissed off and supremely paranoid about the very strange behavior shown by the three, I promptly moved coldly, efficiently and ruthlessly to Plan B.

Which I also had in mind, so I’m not a complete angel. Just human. And possibly over-reacting.

Plan B was simple. Cut the three of them out of the group. Bring in replacements. It wasn’t as if they had shown much interest in JOINING the group in the first place.

Fortunately I had chosen a prime time, so there were plenty of spare names that I had been eyeing as potentially more reliable pilgrim goers. Out went the chats, and thankfully, back came very positive replies.

I had to communicate the new plans to the other members of the pilgrim group who were there – and up came one more complication. On learning that I would be cutting out the third guy and the two that weren’t online, the guild hall builder balked.

The third guy was a member of another of his guilds. He would hear no end of it from the third guy if he went without him. Choosing the path of virtue, he decided to opt out.

Sheesh. I really didn’t want to cause drama here, but you know, you do what you gotta do. I respected the fellow’s decision. In another life, I might have done the same. But I think I’ve just gotten cynical about how ATITD’s tests are designed to promote maximum conflict, competition and drama.

That, and I had the Zeigarnik Effect BAD.

What the hell is that, you ask? The Psychology of Video Games blog explains it here. It’s basically that intrusive, dissonant feeling you get from a task started, but not yet completed.

This “Zeigarnik effect” subsequently entered the psychology lexicon to describe how we tend to find it easier to recall a task –and the details surrounding it– when we feel like we have begun to undertake it, but been unable to complete it. Apparently we as humans don’t like it when we begin something and don’t finish it, and such circumstances create an internal tension and preoccupation with the task. Completing the task provides closure, release of the tension, and –not to put too technical a term on it– goodie feelie type feels.

I needed closure. An end to the feeling that I had been left hanging and dangling on the hook for two whole fucking days. And I didn’t really care whose fucking feelings I hurt anymore when the whole situation had essentially gotten FUBAR.

(I didn’t understand what was happening to me then. But it makes a whole hell a lot of sense after reading the above blog.)

Except, of course, it was not. I was still in control. I moved on to the next guy on my mental list of people to recruit, he responded, and voila, about several hours later than originally planned, the seven of us – half of us completely new people – finished what had originally been intended to be a short pilgrimage.

Mixed in with the feelings of relief at finally getting at least the principles done – there were still ways for the test pass to go wrong – was the feeling that I might have overrreacted and treated the three people somewhat crappily, and inadvertently caught the fourth as collateral in a negative emotion blast.

I tat exceedingly well.

Also, there was an underlying fear that my overall reputation may have taken a hit if people talk. (And I’m sure people gossip in Egpyt.)

Still, what’s done is done.

I sent all four parties who missed the group one last chat to briefly apologize for essentially doing the pilgrimage without them, sent them the remaining names on my mental list of ‘folks who might be interested in pilgrimage’ and wished them good luck.

(Enter brief spurt of fear and cognitive dissonance again that they might just outcompete me. Except I wasn’t trying to compete, so that was not a logical feeling to have.)

((Trying to outthink and not get sucked into the inherent design of these Tests can give one an aneurysm if one is not careful.))

God knows what they think of me, but I guess when human beings come together, sometimes people clash. It’ll be nice if everyone could be nice to everybody, but sometimes it’s just not possible. Fast, done, nice – pick two.

Lesson learned: No more trying to prearrange PUGs. Schedule with friends, or pick up PUGs then and there.

Endnote:

With an amazing display of irony, the virtuous builder contacted the names I gave him – two of which are a veteran player pair – and that veteran player, who is understandably a lot more hardworking and actively competitive than I – formed a pilgrim group that outscored mine this week.

I quite expected that to happen.

(I hate losing, but knowing how ugly a person I can get when out to unabashedly win, I have to keep learning to swallow the bitter pill and re-fucking-lax.)

The virtuous builder also tried to get the third guy included in the pilgrim group – but as fate would have it, other more closely related friends of the veteran player apparently got first dibs at the pilgrim slot.

Which makes me chuckle. And feel just slightly more vindicated.

Guess we’ll see what happens next week.

For now, I’m just happy that I no longer feel compelled to stay online waiting for people to log on – something very antithetical to my nature – and am back following no one’s schedule but my own.

Time Flies When You’re Having A Good Time

Three aborted attempts at blog posting later, I have pretty much decided that I don’t have anything substantial to say for now.

It’s just taking up valuable time from actual gaming.

A Tale in the Desert

Part of the blame goes to my recent re-awoken interest in A Tale in the Desert. The thing about oldschool games is that they make you want to play hardcore. Or as hardcore as you can manage – which for me includes staying online for as many hours as I can spare, and staying up till 3am to join in a group event in order to progress one more teeny thing on one’s checklist of things-to-do.

I’m sure it won’t last, and I feel the burst of energy/activity cranking down, which is probably also why this post can be written.

Some day I’ll figure out how to properly balance my time in that game, but the design of it makes it very tricky. There’s stuff that once you start, you have to check back in at various intervals or bad stuff happens or things simply don’t progress.

I generally avoid games that do that because I feel it’s an artificial constraint placed by a developer to force addictive behavior or negative gaming patterns, but for some reason, ATITD has a ridiculously compelling draw for me that offsets it.

I think the key is that it’s not enforced or compulsory. It’s player-chosen, in the sense that you decided to do this activity or build that thing – which requires this other thing that needs you to check back in at set intervals or every now and again.

You don’t have to. You could go use someone else’s already built thing, or choose not to do that activity or bypass it in some other way and do stuff that doesn’t require the login-like-clockwork maintenance.

But since I decided that such-and-such was my goal, then for the next few days or weeks, I have volunteered to impose the schedule on myself until I get the things I want and then stop or continue on as desired. That autonomy is a big deal for me.

I’d love to write more descriptive posts about aspects of ATITD in the near future, but I’m having serious difficulty separating out each bit.

In the two weeks I’ve renewed my alt’s sub and been regularly playing again, I’ve built an extra water mine (figuring out my nemesis of glassmaking in the process) in order to get cuttable sunstones, massacred possibly 40 of them on a gem-cutting table and finally obtained the last full-eye sunstone I needed, with which to build an automated flax gin.

That was the start of the attempt to move into the automation age like everybody else – I desultorily tweaked my brick machine (though I honestly prefer manually making bricks), worked on getting mechanics skill levels for my characters to tune the automated machines, built a limestone auger to automate limestone harvesting, which is still awfully slow at basic levels and set up another goal to make a springbox to speed it up, which led to finally figuring out how gearbox designing works, which necessitated a lot of forge and casting time making small and medium gears, which in turn meant I needed to mine and smelt ore into metal, and also meant I needed to convert lots of wood into charcoal.

To top it all off, I need a spring and a cotter pin for the springbox, which means I either need to get very good at blacksmithing two objects, or break down and give up and look for another player blacksmith who doesn’t massacre the object’s quality like I do.

Speaking of gears, getting a handle on gearboxes meant I could quarry with two characters, so I did, and busted up the one Osyster Shell Marble quarry I owned, which necessitated going out to prospect for two more, and gathering the materials for those quarries. And why did I need Oyster Shell Marble? For a Test called the Ritual Tattoo, which involves identifying herbs and visiting odd locales satisfying criteria like near 2 cactuses and a road, or within a certain altitude – which by the by, meant I needed a barometer to measure the altitude with, which meant glass making once again. Oh, and I still need more Oyster Shell Marble for Acid Baths, which are used to make metal salts, for pyrotechnics (aka fireworks) which I’ve never played with, and chemically treating metal.

Chemically treated metal is also needed for a bunch of other things involved with automation, but I haven’t built myself a chemical bath yet, which requires acid (yet another thing to do) and on and on… I think you get the idea.

There was also flax, camel-catching, papyrus growing with newly built papyrus tanks, aqueduct-building, vegetable growing, beetle tending and competing, silkworm feeding with thistles, beer making, wine drinking and grape tending, a new citrus grove planted with indonesian bee hives, and learning about and attending festivals for another test, just to name some of the other things I did.

I hope to cover them all in greater detail some day, but for now, my focus was just on catching up (just a little) and restarting the fires of industry, so to speak.

Guild Wars 2

Coming along the tail end of a slightly flagging energy level in ATITD, is recently revitalized interest in GW2.

I’d been doing the dailies faithfully and sneaking looks at the Living Story while on effective break, but as the end of Feb patch dropped, I got off my arse and applied to a new guild.

As much as I’m a proponent of the peaceful immersive wandering about Tyria in a guild of one (or living a self-sufficient hermit lifestyle in ATITD unhassled by guild drama or the demands of other people,) I have to admit I also derive a certain enjoyment from seeing lively chat scroll across my window and friendly recognizable names/faces.

It’s about balance, I suppose.

The new guild has given me an opportunity to get back into WvW again, this time fighting for the Toast (and teh RPs!) and I’ve been enjoying myself thoroughly. TC appears to have a current numbers advantage on their two opponents during NA times, and it’s a low-stress reintroduction back to part of the game I’ve ignored for some time.

It’s been interesting to observe how different servers use different strategies. TC places siege a lot more readily than IoJ ever did, especially defensive siege. I haven’t seen a major stress on portal bombing yet – perhaps the meta has shifted while I was away and wasn’t looking, apparently counters were developed for it or some such. I’ve seen some brilliant speed siege builds and ballista sniping of opposing siege in just a few days of WvW, and shitloads of superior siege used, something I’ve barely ever seen while on IoJ.

Conversely though, I haven’t yet seen the very patient and methodical catapulting and trebbing that [ND] or Never Die was fond of using, with their massive guild defending the siege emplacements while opposing team morale whittled away under the relentless pounding. Different guilds, different strats also, I guess.

TC also seems to like to run in massive zerg balls, sometimes ridiculously massive, which makes me fear that in a higher tier, more mobile smaller guild groups of 10-15 like how IoJ fielded in its prime would run supply camp circles and havoc around the TC mass – but I guess we’ll see how things go in later weeks. The nice thing is having a numbers advantage immediately puts opponents on a slightly more defensive footing, so to speak, and makes morale shakier (for PUG participants, anyway.)

Dipping a toe back into WvW encouraged me to re-attempt some fractals, though I’ve been sticking to the lower levels for now. I just don’t feel like I have a specialist build good enough for over 20 fractals yet, I capped at 18 and already felt very torn up. It’s either my generalist build – to which there’s no solution until I level my new Guardian alt, I’m just too comfortable with the current one for farming and roaming and WvW and all to go changing it back and forth, or the lack of Agony Resistance to which the only thing to do is continue to accumulate fractal relics at a doable difficulty while I decide which, if any, Ascended Gear I want to buy and how.

My opinion on the Ascended Gear debate?

I don’t know. On one hand, I feel the gear difference between yellows, oranges and pinks is not that wide, and therefore I don’t feel the stress or urgency to max everything out.

My PTV exotics have served me well for a very long time, I still haven’t upgraded all my jewelry to exotics yet, there are still two yellows that I’ve been thinking I might just jump up to pink with, rather than ‘waste’ crafting an exotic to serve for a short time for not too much effect.

On the other hand, I’m feeling the decision about what stat arrangement to get one’s gear in to be a lot more constricting. I’ve been so far happy with my PTV and Berserker mix for a sort of off-tanky dps hybrid, but sometimes I worry that I’m not being as team-friendly as I could be by specing into something a lot more supportive, be it with boons, shouts or heals – which would suggest Cleric gear, or just not as tanky as the cookie cutter AH guardians – which might also mean a look at either Knight’s, Cleric’s or whatever stuff has mixtures of Toughness, Healing Power and what not.

Then again, my current main is not really meant to be a group-focused support guardian, my upcoming asura is destined for that. The main activity I end up doing with my Charr, besides WvW, is farming. LOTS of farming. Orr Events? Yes please. Dragons? Sometimes. One man genocide on wildlife? You bet.

And I’ve been feeling lately that my yellow magic find power/prec gear is not as hard hitting as it could be. The thought of blinging myself out in exotic magic find, plus one or two Ascended magic find pieces via the Laurels, is oddly… tempting. (And a new look, Vigil armor or racial armor might be cool. I’m getting tired of looking like a polar bear – the fur on the crafted armor was the only place I could think of to make use of the Celestial dye I gulped down without thinking.)

Thing is, there are only so many ways to get Ascended gear, and while I appreciate the fact that there are alternatives that suit different playstyles, it becomes somewhat tricky for a dabbler in many playstyles (but never professionally serious in one) to figure out which piece he should get where, by what means and statted how.

Faced with the prospect of three or four armor sets (x 6 slots each) and two or three jewelry sets (x 8 slots) to juggle in one’s bags, it’s enough to make said dabbler (who mind you, was never serious enough to pick one and stick with it) just bury his head in the sand, continue to save up currency in the bank and not upgrade any gear at all.

In a few months, there will be enough guild commendations to complexify the issue even further…

Which brings me to the other controversial issue raging in the GW universe. Guild Missions.

To be honest, I’m reserving comment. And waiting to see.

While I certainly appreciate that smaller guilds are feeling that it’s an impossible milestone to hit (let’s not even talk about my guild of one,) my reigning impulse is that it’s way better that fewer massively large guilds test this stuff out, than numerous small guilds that might later feel very jipped if stuff bugs out.

And I hear stuff is already bugging out.

I also have to admit that there is a certain community-building and player-retaining value in incentivizing people who might otherwise be loners like me to get off their arse and join a big guild.

While running around in my guild of one was fun, it also did feel somewhat disconnected. All I saw were other people with unique guild tags, roaming about by themselves or in duos, and they felt like strangers. Friendly strangers, to be sure, thanks to GW2 encouraging cooperation, but people I probably wouldn’t see again. If I weren’t long term committed to the game and the lore, I can easily understand why someone might feel discouraged or lonely and quit.

Being part of a big guild and seeing the same tag out and about in big events or WvW creates a bit more of a bond with fellow players. For me, at any rate.

Our guild’s first Guild Bounty mission was mind blowing in terms of how the leaders managed to organize some 60-odd players across various zones in teams to go hunting for the NPCs. That’s an experience one just wouldn’t have without the crowd.

On the other hand, one nitpick I could see was that the big guilds kept running into each other and grabbing bounties at inconveniently staggered timings. Not at the same time, so that both guilds hitting it could get their own credit for the activated bounty. Not well after each other so that one guild would be done and gone before the other started. But just a few minutes before so that the mob would die and respawn somewhere else, making the slightly later guild end up delaying once more while the poor team in that zone ran about looking for the damn bounty again.

And these were just the big guilds. I don’t want to imagine what would happen if every small guild could activate their bounty and be hunting at the same time. There would no doubt be a lot more screaming at each other over chat. (Little unanticipated kinks like these is one reason why I’m ok with stress testing via big guilds first, btw.) Weekend prime times are a bitch.

I like the idea of each player being limited to 2 guild commendations a week. You get them as a personal reward with the first boss you take down, so you aren’t necessarily compelled to stay for an entire extended event if you’re time pressed, nor do you have to follow some hardcore raider-like schedule of gaming at set times three or four or five or more days a week for maximum optimized rewards. I managed to make it to my guild’s Saturday Guild Bounty, but had Sunday available for other real life concerns, even though they ran it again for those who couldn’t make Saturday, and also to max the guild’s reward of whatever its currency was.

I’m not sure what good solutions would be for guilds of moderate size stuck in the middle. Alliance or multi-guild chat would be a good start, imo. In more ways than one. Enable guilds to talk to each other in-game. Enable players to hear and talk to their separate guilds in-game. At this rate, you’re forcing guilds who want to coordinate with each other to use a third-party voicechat program.

Alternate missions that smaller guilds can do more easily might be something good for future development. Though those things necessarily take time. Or allow guilds to sync their missions with each other for an alliance. Though I don’t want to imagine how much coding that would take.

And frankly, I have no idea what they were thinking gating the stuff behind Art of War.

Obviously someone thought that guilds weren’t using their fortification buffs enough or something. Perhaps defending places were balanced with that in mind, which is why attackers seem to have a pretty good advantage when not many people are defensively minded enough to begin with (cue lack of siege placement, lack of siege usage, lack of defenders, and lack of guild buffs.) A well defended place by a determined guild is actually a bloody tough nut to crack. It tends to eventually crack, since the attackers want in and won’t give up most of the time, but yeah.

But it’s a heavyhanded and clumsy move, and PvE and WvW move in different circles. It’s like asking PvPers to go run dungeons before they get geared enough to duel.

Rather nonsensical.

—

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks. I’ve been playing browser game Fallen London in between spurts of ATITD and GW2, and sampling their other StoryNexus games. My Steam list is still a mile long. I do kinda want to check out TSW and/or DDO again. SWTOR has been deleted, I just couldn’t feed their cash shop in good conscience.

Others can look forward to Wildstar or what-have-you, I won’t be there until much later and only when a free trial comes out.

I just have no time left between the two mainstay MMOs.

ATITD: Can I Have Your Stuff?

Karen Bryan over at Massively has been covering A Tale in the Desert recently for their Choose My Adventure article series. It’s an enjoyable read from a new player’s perspective, and it suddenly reminded me how much I actually love and miss the game.

I jettisoned it five months ago for Guild Wars 2, after playing it all out for a year, and it seemed like a good time to poke my head back in for a visit and putter around.

I’d maintained a sub on my main character, while letting my alt account lie fallow. This preserved my compounds and my resources from the scavenging player vultures – one of the first and only laws that is passed every Telling is an act that allows active players to tear down and salvage resources from players who have quit or let their subs expire.

Known as the Departed Persons Act (or DPA) this time around, most of the wording never changes except for the length of leeway time a previously paid up player has. In all fairness, the act that seems most generally accepted is the longest period, of two months, in this case, despite a few players trying to argue for a shorter timespan.

The stated ‘public good’ idea behind this is one of resource renewal and lebensraum for new players. If old player structures are allowed to sit there for all eternity (or at least until the new Telling), slowly and gradually the best locations will get taken up and newer players forced to move outward to less convenient territory. See Wurm Online for an example of this – one has to walk a very long distance from the starting area to maybe find a good spot to build – and even Wurm has building deterioration for non-subbed players baked in.

Trial players of ATITD especially have a habit of leaving wood planes, brick racks and flax distaffs littering the landscape behind them – since the citizenship tutorial requires them to make said items, and then they promptly either quit because the grind / the running / the graphics got to be too much or they make their home far away from where they started and completely forget where the hell they left their early stuff.

Usually the former.

And since they have no knowledge of the long-term implications (the stuff doesn’t go away by itself), no interest in establishing long-term ties with the community or value the game as a whole, cleaning up after themselves is less important or just not a natural reflex (I mean, who destroys the stuff they themselves built?)

Hence the litter.

And hence the solution to solve it in the form of DPA.

That’s the nice explanation.

The profiteering explanation is that as older veteran players get bored of the game, and they will, a couple may storm off if they had a massive drama implosion somewhere, a lot will get knocked out by the unending grind and monotony after three, six, nine months, a year…

… other players can stand to gain from the resources collected and hoarded by these players. It’s a bit of a crapshoot, if they didn’t advance very far, there may not be anything of real value but you might be able to finally get rid of an annoying eyesore of a building too near you. Or you might find pretty nice stuff, like a wine bottled in the early days of the Telling, which would have developed into something very fine by the time you drink it down now.

It’s easy for some people to leap to a moral judgement about such things.

From one perspective, it is a bit slimy and vulture-like. Especially if someone watches the days of an unpaid player count down like a hawk (one can /info them and see how many days their account is unpaid) and turns up the very second (literally) the time ticks over 60 days to lay claim to their stuff. Some people can get quite competitive about this, since only the first at the scene will get the goods.

Then there was the recent complaint I just overheard over the Egypt public channel on my return – where apparently someone crept into an entire guild’s multiple compounds close together (of which there were still active players within) and located the one warehouse that a quit member neglected to set ownership rights to the guild for, and nabbed it with DPA before any of the active guild members could log on and get to it. They tore it down, apparently, so the guild members couldn’t see who laid claim to it, and the contents, whatever they were, walked off with.

Of such stuff is drama and conflict made.

From another perspective, we have a recollection of Van Hemlock’s venture into ATITD (whose blog post is now unfortunately lost to the mists of time.)

-I- remember, anyway, that Van Hemlock wrote about finding an old player’s compound much further along the technology tree than his compatriots and he, and claimed it with the DPA variant active at that time. They joyously ran back to their own compound with riches, riches beyond their wildest imaginings as newbies, and those resources allowed him to construct an anvil and experiment with blacksmithing – something he was most taken with and wrote about in his blog – which in turn captivated others like me into trying out the game in the first place.

If a newbie gets to an older player’s compound first, it can be an enabler. Something without which, they would not have progressed as far in ATITD.

Then again, what are the chances of a newbie getting there first versus the experienced vultures?

—

Personally, I would have liked to see something that allowed a player to tear down stuff after the sixty days are up, without gaining any of the resources. That would allow eyesores to be taken down, but remove all personal resource profit from the equation.

That, I suspect, would encourage folks to leave most of the buildings be, as long as they weren’t in anyone’s way.

Why?

I like seeing the remains of civilization. Egypt is so empty anyway, it’s nice to see where people have been and stayed. Yet, if someone new really wanted to build in that location, they could take it down and set up there regardless.

But I doubt that law will ever pass.

For most players, those unused resources are ‘a waste’ if never used. After all, if a benevolent veteran gets to it, they may use it to further research in the Egypt-wide technologies at Universities. So sayeth the public good explanation anyway.

—

In the previous two Tellings I’ve participated in, when I lost interest, I left for good and only came back on free weekends to poke my head around – and sure enough, my stuff was gone.

I hope it made -someone- happy.

(Funny story: I did meet an extra-friendly player once on one of these check-back-in visits, who actually plied me with completely free items to sacrifice to a Vigil in progress. I kept her company, because I was in the mood for chatting and because I loved the adrenaline rush of a good Vigil, growing more and more stunned at the sheer quantity of stuff she was generously throwing at me to let the fire consume for good…

…then it turned out in the course of the friendly conversation that she was the one who had salvaged my compounds of stuff.

Lol, guilty conscience, perhaps? And wanting to even out the scales?

At the time, I had no intentions of restarting the game and assured her so. I was just there for fun, for a good chat and also help the Vigil along by my presence (since having more people participate multiplies your points, over doing one solo as she had been attempting.))

Guilds have an advantage in that as long as there is one player still subbed, no one else can claim it from your collective. Then again, the disadvantage of multiple persons in a guild is that any of them can steal the guild’s stuff if they wanted to. Guild theft is a possibility of pretty much all MMOs, not merely ATITD, if one’s permissions are not set properly to trusted individuals.

Me, I’m a paranoid type of person and need to keep my personal stuff separate from group stuff. I like to think this makes me more reliable when joining group guilds because I don’t -need- the guild stuff, I have my own stuff to draw from.

But it means that to keep my stuff, I’ll have to maintain the sub (with a month or two of leeway.)

As a mostly solo player, such is life in the desert, vultures and all.