It's a rare game that has me thinking and chewing on some lofty philosophical thoughts. Perhaps it's the elegant simplicity of the timesink tasks, mixed with the depth of multiple systems to master, that exposes the high drama inherent in a chatroom, aka spontaneous tribal society-building and interaction.
It started with a little breakdown. Or maybe a localized implosion. I don't know what you'd call it.
See, there's this newbie, called Atheus, who started off playing ATITD about the same time as me. He has been rather verbose on all the chat channels, very enthusiastic and exuberant and generally a 'model newbie' or 'dream citizen.'
Personally, I saw him a teensy bit like a rival. Because he seemed to be wriggling an 'in' into the established cliques a lot faster than I could, and inherited a nice friendly mentor and so on.
Still, I am more of an aloof hermit-y sort, prefering to be as independent as possible and accepting help only if I cannot figure it out (and often, I can, with some wiki reading and lots of practice). So he and I are different there, and I do not truly begrudge him the close inclusion into the established society because it's unlikely I'd fully embrace it anyway.
And then one night he turned into a raging Dr. Jekyll of his former self, raving at his mentor and the guild, and most of us still have no idea what set off this berserk rant.
Part of the problem is that he never elucidated precisely what his beef was.
It seemed to be some sort of sudden unleashed anger that guild ranks even existed. That there was the potential to lock out lower ranks from using certain bits of equipment (even if in actual fact, very little was actually locked.) Coupled with rage at a general old/new rich/poor divide that had a strong potential to exist in the future, with the threat of the older veterans hogging rare resources and turning it into a monopolistic enterprise upon which newbies might be forced to eke a miserable existence as slaves and beggars hoping for handouts.
And he seemed abruptly very miffed at the thought that he had sacrificed a bunch of his time to help the guild, perhaps above and beyond the call of duty, and was considering a sudden reversal into self-centeredness (or selfishness) to build up his own equipment and compound and monopolize his own set of resources.
The above summary is, of course, far more eloquent than he could piece into words, and is simply my best guess (which could be utterly wrong) as to his position and what was driving him batty.
On the opposing front, we had his mentor, Salinor, who was taking personal offense at the implication that he was a self-serving rat bastard of an elitist oldbie.
With, imo, just cause because this bunch of veterans are the least selfish individuals I have ever seen in ATITD (I did me research, not to mention, got verbally assraped in beta by a far less understanding but very community-known individual for simple newbie ignorance in a territory far far away from Khartoum.)
See, even though the potential for lockout using guild ranks exists in theory, in practice, the Mixed Nuts guild is a public works guild that opens practically everything to public use. Nearly every single piece of equipment can be used by Anyone, or a bare Initiate (lower than Member) of the guild.
The only exception was a) a compression furnace that was still in the process of being built. Building rights are locked a little higher, because the elders don't want a random public joe -tearing down- the unbuilt structure, and b) some flax combs which were locked to either Initiate or Member-only, I forget. Mostly because flax combs break after a certain number of uses, and this piece of equipment is something you learn how to build for yourself in the freaking tutorial, fer chrissakes.
Sometimes, I am aware that certain elders do temporarily raise the permissions on equipment because they are in the midst of using them, and are scared that some random joe will stop it in its operation and make off with their resources.
To me, it's perfectly understandable.
And sometimes, because they are human, they do forget to reset the permissions after that, and go OOPS, later, and fix it.
But really, how is this a vast conspiracy of legacy players out to lock out the newbie?
(Because real monopolies would set up their own big fat compounds and you wouldn't even get into their guilds for any access, period.)
The vets don't need you, the random newb, for sporadic contributions and benefits. They can churn out 1000 boards a lot faster than we can. In fact, they do, because they need to contribute about 8000 boards and that many bricks just to keep the guild slots open to accept new players. And despite them begging for contributions because they'd get RSI otherwise, they are still doing the lion's share of the work. Because they are generous-hearted enough to want to welcome and help newbies.
Then there's the issue of mines. And access to the rare ore/metal resource they represent.
See, metals come in veins drawn in funky lines that Teppy likes the look of all over Egypt. To find them, you have to dowse for them (a time-consuming process that you can only do once ever 30seconds-2 minutes) and have enough perception stat to see them (another time-consuming heavily luck-based process at the moment until we unlock another technology).
Once located, you can place a mine. Mines cost 20 leather this Telling, so they are a fairly expensive investment. Most people will place for their private small guilds to use, because they do break after some usage and require more resources to repair. Mines cannot be put within a certain distance of each other.
This, of course, naturally leads to the threat of monopoly. Any idiot can see the potential. Once the set number of mines are placed in a row, that's it for that vein. You've got to hope that another such vein exists somewhere in Egypt and that you can find it and the travel distance would be a turnoff too. Without that rare metal access, you may risk being locked out of whatever technology requires it, and may have to trade things for it, if the evil mine overlords even deign to recognize your existence.
But this is where mining cooperatives and altruistic public guilds come in. If you invest the effort getting to know the people in the first sort of guild, and pass whatever membership requirements they have, you can have access to their mines - of course, what sort of hierarchical structure they want to set for certain mine usage is up to them, and you'd have to play by their rules.
Mixed Nuts is the second sort of guild. Salinor, our resident mine expert, is dedicating his time and effort to locating at least one of each vein and placing at least one public mine on them.
Yes, PUBLIC mine. That means, any Tom, Dick, Joe, Harry and Tutankhamen, not even in our guild, can use them. And BREAK them. Without bothering to repair them. And it's going to cost OUR guild resources to fix them for general public use again.
If that isn't a selfless act, I'm not sure wtf is.
His hope is that we can at least make sure there is some public access to every type of metal there is, so that newbies are never locked out of the technology tree.
Of course, he's only one guy. His efforts may not be enough to cover every last scrap of metal type there is, and Mixed Nuts may end up with limited access to top tier metals. That's just fate if that happens.
So I don't know why Atheus was freaking out over our guild channel for. He seemed to be taking some kind of personal affront that there were -other- guilds out there, reserving stuff for their own use, and that this seemed some sort of supreme injustice and old player conspiracy in the making.
Um. Maybe he just realized it now. Yes, the possibility for this sort of thing exists in ATITD. No, ATITD is not some sort of general love-huggles-wuggles socialist or communist or communal affair where everyone will share everything equally, regardless of how much hard work you put in, or the people you sucked up to or cybersexed this morning.
It's a people game, fer goodness sakes'. It's a grand sociological experiment. And people are DIFFERENT.
Personally, I'll confess that I am a LOT more self-serving in nature than the elders of this public guild.
My first impulse, on seeing the row of mines carpeting the precious ore vein resource and all the locked out guild-only structures was to think, OMG, I need to somehow network my way into mine access with certain guilds, and second, I need to plunk down my own mine on at least the common metal types so that I have bargaining chips to trade up for higher metals.
:P
Then I ran home, looted my storage for enough leather to make a mine (thank goodness I strategized this in advance and set up a sheep farm plantation) and hogged my own copper and iron mines over the next day or two.
My third impulse, though, was to think about what I could spare for the Mixed Nuts guild, and separate out half of my spare leather for the guild pool for more mines, and after I had looted my fill of the initial iron frenzy, I donated my iron mine to the guild for other members to use too.
To me, and I think to a number of veterans in the Mixed Nuts guild, ATITD is a game where you must find your own personal balance between private benefit and public good.
Some people thrive heartily on being overachievers, or griefing others, on being the uberest hermit or part of some blackmail guild that is out to monopolize a rare resource and make all of Egypt bow down to their demands. ATITD is a sandbox - and yes, the potential for this exists. With plenty of drama to boot.
(At least because the stated goal is cooperation, there are structures in place that necessitate some cooperation, unlike Eve where you are practically encouraged to be mercantile and Machiavellian.)
For me, I don't think there's any real value in going the other extreme either. Where you are so selfless that you give yourself 110% to the running of your public guild and get stepped on by any person who decides he will take just a bit more than he gives back (and there are plenty out there.)
In those cases, you are at the mercy of the group. Your fortunes are Siamese-linked to the rise and fall of the guild. And you might even be a little bit of a parasite by doing so, because you cannot support yourself and need to rely on the help of others to get by. And woe betide them or you if they don't quite meet your expectations of how much help you SHOULD receive or think you DESERVE.
For me, what I'm trying to use the guild for is to bootstrap myself out of the bottlenecks that require a community to cooperate. If I can skip some agonizingly tedious techs and crummy equipment usage because the public works has better stuff to work with to produce my own good stuff, I am so there and pawning off them.
In return, though I may not selflessly sit there carving 7000 boards for the guild because I hate the very activity and find it hard to even make a thousand for myself, I try to excel at accumulating resources which I do enjoy making my own little personal empire out of and dropping what I can spare, (say 25-50% of my wealth) to the guild to put to good use.
Sure, it's a little more long term a sort of investment to work towards. It's not as obvious. It's not as blatant as sitting there for 8 hours collecting wood for boards and getting rewarded by a rank increase because the guildmaster appreciated the help (and our darling Atheus got his increase, while I'm still a lowly member because I only contributed an hour of my time at most and small amounts of wood and slate).
To me, it makes me a lot LESS at someone's mercy and lets me relate to the guild from a position of power.
I don't HAVE to donate anything to the guild. I -could- hoard it all for myself. I choose not to. I choose to share what I can spare. I do have my own personal stocks and store that I make use of. If the guild appreciates and notices what I do for them, great. If they don't, shrugs. I'm benefiting from their public works compound and that's what I can give to them in return.
Fancy titles are just that. Fancy titles. I do not have to worry about hoping for access to some rare piece of equipment in the public works compound because it's not set to allow my rank to use it. (Not that such a thing exists.) Or have to worry that there are five other newbies queued up to use it, and will any of them snatch and run with my stuff?
Because that same piece of equipment can be constructed in my compound. For my own use. Sure, it'll take a bit more time to work toward that goal. Sure, I'll take shameless advantage of my 12 hour reversal to log in when everyone else is sleeping to have 100% use of the public works equipment with no queue or necessity to socialize or have people nearby watching me.
But the idea is to use it only until you can make your own and no longer have to rely on the public works. Because if you hog it and treat it like your own compound, always open for your use, then where the hell are less fortunate newbies going to go? :)
Anyhow, that's my outlook on where I'm going in this game. Any time I'm locked out for good with no way out of the slave-to-the-rich hole, my subscription will be cancelled, the devs can worry about their lost revenue and try and fix it for the next Telling or not give a fuck at all, up to them.
But meanwhile, still benefiting, so offering something mutual in return.
I'm also considering reading some sort of sociology textbook again because all this societal stuff and spontaneous tribal communities and people interplay is just so fascinating to watch.
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