After a couple of boring days where the entirety of Egpt were chokepointed at silver, some guy finally located a silver vein along the borders of our region and our neighboring rival region.
The ensuing onrush was classic.
Especially since silver doesn't seem to be that essential later on, besides being a big chokepoint in technology.
What was sorta fun was the big push to unlock casting. Our region needed a ton more iron, besides the silver. The silver had been pledged quite early on by a guild who were residents of QR, but the rest, well, everybody who was anybody pulled together and there was a big night of unabated mining and smelting iron.
Personally, I'm not super-thrilled by mining. The minigame isn't half-bad. You have to pick the correct mine crystal, as indicated by odd color out, highest saturated, lowest blue value, etc. There's a memory component to it, if you lag behind a certain number of crystals, the quantity of ore extracted increases.
What drives me nuts in this game are enforced timers. Stuff where you can only click once every 30 seconds because you've run out of energy.
So after about 10 pulls (if I'm lucky) in rapidfire succession, I end up hunkering down waiting for 10-30 seconds to elapse, twiddling my thumbs, watching my stat bars go back from alarm red to normal black, and throttled to one pull at a time, dying slowly from boredom and too many youtube videos in the other screen.
Of course, if this lasted forever, I would quit the game in a jiffy. Like all good social dilemmas, the hope is held out that things will get better.
One will eventually be able to cook food that increases one's stats, and voila, faster ore pulls. And as you pass certain tests, you may also get certain bonus stats. Eventually.
So the trick is to try and do the minimum amount of awful necessary, while still seeming to be doing substantial things to contribute to society - so that one can free-ride while still remaining part of the in-group.
I found the mines of the slightly-more hardcore guild I joined had been set to the rank of Member-only. This is a rank one higher than the one I was currently at. This, of course, did not make me uber happy, so I set out to suck up, er, social network my way into the slightly-more-accepted reaches of the hierarchy.
This was entirely governed by self-interest, I fear. The casual public guild that I am in and like, is all very well - but mines are definitely a tragedy of the commons affair. The more idiotic people mess with a mine, the more it's going to break, the more it's going to cost to repair.
It stands to reason that one definitely needs one's own mines for certain easier to obtain products, and best leverages on another guild's mines for rarer metals.
Because I'm stubborn and independent and would never lower myself as to beg for a rank increase (doesn't it make it so obvious that you just want to pillage the mines?), I formulated a more cunning long term plan.
Resigning myself to a long grindy night of staring at colored crystals, I sat by a public works mine to mine iron, while running back and forth with a load of ore to the hardcore guild's compound to smelt stuff (rank permissions for those were fine.)
Eventually, as I knew would happen, the guild leader logged on, heard the 'silver found, need iron now' news, and came on down to the iron mines.
On my next run to the compound, I hailed him and asked if he could set a mine to my rank to save the trip. He did so, and I started mining away industriously, bringing boatloads of iron ore to be smelted. Several thousands of iron ore and a few hours later, we had a very nice sum of iron to be donated to the unlocking of casting. Shortly after, as he made the trip back up to the guild hall, my rank increased. :P
Without me even needing to ask. Rowr.
Of course, all my hard work might just go to waste because one of the members of this hardcore guild has done something rather equivalent to Israel shooting rockets into Palestine.
He's gone and built a god-knows-how big obelisk over in another region. Without asking. Without respecting the queue.
Very shortly, the residents of that region are going to find out, run over to see whose obelisk it is, check that he's a member of this guild, and go headhunting for the leaders to see if they can resolve the situation amicably. Or not.
Being hardcore, a number of its members don't particularly give a shit about diplomacy. And its leader isn't exactly the verbose sort. I'm kinda scared that he's going to say 'lol' at the wrong moment and all of that region is going to carpetmine our territory in retaliation or something. :)
Yay, drama.
Ah well, worse come to the worse, I can always a) quit the guild and move
or b) just quit the freaking game. :P
No comments:
Post a Comment