For about 3 months, I played a game called Tribal Wars. It’s an web-based online game (runs in your browser) that plays a little like a RTS game. There are some graphics to the game, but most of it is played out through numbers and stats. It sounded fun so I began playing one day back in November.Upon starting the game, you are given your own settlement and you can upgrade buildings, harvest resources, bolster your defenses, and build your army. I was pleased to give life to my new settlement, LazyTown. I soon joined a guild that prided itself on not attacking other players below a specific level, concentrating on defense and helping others in the guild that were in trouble.
Time passed, and as I got to know the game better, I grew to like it. Tribal Wars was fun and easy to play -- I only had to log on once or twice a day to see how my minions were doing. They were busy little guys, always harvesting and training. Over a couple months, I had built up quite an army and was very proud when I got my wall to level 20, meaning that I had reached the maximum defenses for LazyTown. I thought LazyTown was the greatest!
Then, one day I logged on and I was unable to see my town. I became frustrated, not sure what the problem was. At last I checked my game inbox in hopes of an explanation. And did I ever get one.
An automated message informed me that overnight, a player with more forces than me had repeatedly attacked my town over and over again (this is called XP farming), until he defeated my army. I was also informed that he had been given my town since I had been defeated. If I was interested, a scant few of my loyal minions would be interested in following me and starting up a new town elsewhere (read: start over again, loser). Three+ months of my work was gone in a single day. I logged out that day, and never considered logging in again.
What's to be learned here? Make the player feel like it was a waste of time to play your game, and you've lost them forever. This is bad news for any game that survives on player subscriptions. It's a complicated problem with a game like this -- there needs to be some sense of winning and losing in a game about war, and at the same time, taking away a player's hard-earned resources is only fun for the one doing the taking.
Games like Tribal Wars are too punishing to be appealing to the masses. They'll always be around for the niche audience that they cater to, but the level of success they see will always be relatively low.
I purposely didn't include a link to the game in this post -- I'm not recommending that anyone at all ever play it. Sorry, Tribal Wars.
...
Actually... I'm NOT sorry! Give me back my stuff, Tribal Wars! RAWR!!1~!`eleven!
To put this in perspective, the way Tribal Wars is designed, it's similar to MMOs that have an experience penalty upon death.
To illustrate: Imagine you have a level 20 character in an MMO, and while playing, a level 40 player of the opposite faction finds you and decides to kill you. Upon death, you are penalized with an XP loss and your character's level drops. Each time you try to resurrect and run to safety, the same player kills you again. Finally, after maybe only 10-20 minutes of play, you have been reduced to level 1 once again due to the massive XP hit you've taken. Hours of your hard work have been taken from you in a matter of minutes.
Would you be motivated to play up to level 20 again? Personally, I wouldn't. A game that allows my time and effort to be equated to nothing is not a game I wish to play.
So it doesn't really matter what the point of the game is. The majority of players that experience this in ANY game will quit.
However, games like Tribal Wars are appealing for a small niche market, and this is where they will find enough success to keep their game running.
1. You can't start next to your friends.
2. You can't share an internet connection with your friends or they can't help you at all.
3. You can't defeat the people who started near the core of the world.
Once you've been crushed once and are spewed to the outer edge, the outcome of continued play is inevitable. You will be destroyed again because the Borg-like entities towards the center of the world have an insurmountable advantage.
In other words, there's no point in even trying.
1,2, and 3 plus the final bullet here = a non-fun game experience.
-CommanderHate