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[Iituem]

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With the Alpha being over, I figure a new thread is valid.  To take it from the game's About page:

Might & Fealty is an entirely player-driven, persistent world where history is being made, not just replayed.

A roleplaying game, a strategy game, a political and negotiations game.

A simulation of a medieval / low-fantasy world not in the sense of realistic physics, but in the sense of having humans with human motivations and personal ambitions as the driving forces.

There is no predetermined storyline or victory condition. In fact, there is no victory in the sense that it ends the game, the whole game is designed to last forever and remain playable for many years. That does not mean re-play, it means one continuous history of the world. History created, written and interpreted by players.

The game is in rolling beta, with a 30 day free trial for new players.  As such, there are features still being implemented, so there are bugs and imbalances the dev is sorting out.  That said, I have found it to be an impressive political sandbox.  The dev's intention is to simulate only the laws of physics that permit the game to happen, so all political and diplomatic relations are roleplayed - there is not a single mechanical barrier to prevent you from betraying your liege and sacking his town the moment you swear fealty to him.  Except, of course, that you need to defeat all of his troops with the handful you were given as an initial offering, which might prove problematic.

Play mostly centres around being medieval-esque nobility.  There are a few departures from strict medieval simulation, mostly for game mechanics reasons (fun vs. realism).  For one, you aren't so much human as a member of a race of First Ones who are literally better than ordinary men in every way, immune to sickness and aging and entirely susceptible to getting their heads cut off.  For another, the game does permit you to communicate via messages to anyone you have met in person at least once and spoken to, which is fluffed with the idea of a simple magic item series (the Lendan Stones) that allow for instant distance communication - provided you have shared them in person.  Location is a big thing in M&F.

The game is very much still in development as for more roles for players besides being a knight or a lord - or an ambassador, which is a downright essential role for international politics.  I've seen players pull off a trading company quite well, and there are a few religions popping up (Embrace Trinity!), but I'll be interested to see what other sorts of roles develop with time.

[MoLAoS]

I was actually impressed by the way the Dev forced Rathgar to disband. There are a lot of issues going on that I wrestled with when I was creating my theoretical sandbox MMO, though it was 3D an d not text. And it appears that a large number of players are ignorant of how they affect Might and Fealty. The Guided Start was poorly set up, but its not like its such a common thing that the dev had any way to practice doing it right.

Personally I think he should restart, but the players probably wouldn't like that. That was one thing Warring Factions did right. It reset the world when one side got too strong.

[Silicoid]

Mmmm... tried it, but it suffers from the same problems as Battlemaster-the beginning game is too weak.  As a knight you have to wait on other players to do anything, which as a primarily solo player, I don't really like.

I wish there was some more stuff to do to fill in the time between being a knight and getting to be a lord, like crafting and such. 

I also find the dev to be a little heavy-handed and stiff, in a my-way or the highway kinda thing.

[Gervassen]

The developer broke apart Rathgar, eh? Glad I got right out of that game early on.

Once a dev shows an inclination to act like that, he'll keep doing it over and over, each time claiming this is the final time. It never stops. He's panicking about Rathgar causing players to leave? It's not because of Rathgar. Rathgar is just a word. It's because he set up a bad atmosphere among the players. No one simply plays the game and reacts to other players. Instead there's confusion and envy and complaining, a culture of whining, where no one is speaking to each other but rather grandstanding and giving speeches for the benefit of Tom, where "not having fun" is the way to get the developer's intervention to do what you want.

The cement poured into Tom's sandbox has hardened and set in.

[MoLAoS]

The developer broke apart Rathgar, eh? Glad I got right out of that game early on.

Once a dev shows an inclination to act like that, he'll keep doing it over and over, each time claiming this is the final time. It never stops. He's panicking about Rathgar causing players to leave? It's not because of Rathgar. Rathgar is just a word. It's because he set up a bad atmosphere among the players. No one simply plays the game and reacts to other players. Instead there's confusion and envy and complaining, a culture of whining, where no one is speaking to each other but rather grandstanding and giving speeches for the benefit of Tom, where "not having fun" is the way to get the developer's intervention to do what you want.

The cement poured into Tom's sandbox has hardened and set in.

This is dumb. Rathgar was screwing over the game. Either it broke up or they restarted the round. Why do you think OGame is up to hundreds of universes by now? Because a single universe invariably unbalances super hard. And the balance goes to shit faster the smaller the player base is. Warring Factions has to restart every year or two. SpaceFed has a win condition so that everything can reset, Travian has tons of different game worlds because the old ones go to shit.

The only way to maintain a hands off sandbox is to have a game world and player base so fudging large that the player base cannot create a power dominant enough to defeat all the other powers combined. Even EVE is slowly losing this battle.

[Gervassen]

Thankfully, nothing ever stays balanced. You think that a game can be balanced eternally to a precise equity without people being just as bored as if one side had won it all? That's even worse than one side winning occasionally. You still grind away at the gameplay, but no consequences result. No reason to be playing in a long "well-balanced" grind like that. Even worse when the dev swoops in arbitrarily to effect the pointless "balance" that his game mechanisms cannot.

Dev action won't stop the losers from leaving, because ultimately their "victory" attained on the forums is hollow and unmerited. It will only demoralise the winners in the game. Look at the posts by Alumaani in the "Not worth playing anymore" thread. He has a point. All the talk about people leaving because Rathgar is too powerful... what about the Rathgar players leaving because they feel persecuted? Don't tell me no one has left the game from Rathgar, either. I know exactly how shitty it feels to have the dev hovering over your every finger twitch. It chased me from the game.

No one cared about me leaving though. Apparently I was the problem. What problem? Oh, right, players leaving the game. Glad we got that sorted, then.

[Zangi]

Not in the game... but wouldn't Rathgar eventually have disintegrated from ambitious players trying to be boss?  Or is the top up leadership the kind that tries that curb that sort of thing?

[Gervassen]

I know for an absolute fact that at least one leader in Rathgar was a megalomaniacal dirtbag who would have eventually been destined to turn on everyone else in the leadership. It never got to that point. The developer, Tom, started panicking long before anything interesting actually happened in-game. You can't say Rathgar even won anything, because it was not even allowed to really have its war, before the threats of intervention based on Tom watching over the database numbers.

[MoLAoS]

Tom's problem was his ignorance of game design and marketing, his intervention was the least bad of several fucking terrible options, given the state the game was in. Relying on players to maintain game content is just stupid.

As far as turmoil from within, anyone who's looked at Goons, in EVE or in other games like Bloc, knows that's stupid. Its almost never the winners who explode from inner turmoil.

[Gervassen]

Lots of winning alliances do fragment. BoB was a winning alliance, for example. After the fact, you might look back and say it was the loser, but it wouldn't have been that simple without the turncoat that shut down its defenses. That was a winning alliance. It broke up. Goonsquad is a special case. SA is far bigger than the Goonsquad. I've subscribed to SA forums since the early 2000s. You learn how to cook on Goons With Spoon, peruse the Book Barn, TV IV... It's not about gaming. You've already got a built-in longstanding loyal community there before you even get to the gaming forums. You're basing a lot of your axioms about MMOs on one tight-knit culture which has managed extremely unique outcomes. Rathgar was a bunch of pubbies and internet randoms.

[Duuvian]

I dunno, Goons in Planetside 2 weakened themselves immensely by splitting in two due to drama.

They lost so many people that one of the two resulting outfits resorted to allowing scummy pubbies like myself in.

It's kind of cute how they treat pubbies as sub-humans. It bothered me at first but now I just roll wit it.

[MoLAoS]

Lots of winning alliances do fragment. BoB was a winning alliance, for example. After the fact, you might look back and say it was the loser, but it wouldn't have been that simple without the turncoat that shut down its defenses. That was a winning alliance. It broke up. Goonsquad is a special case. SA is far bigger than the Goonsquad. I've subscribed to SA forums since the early 2000s. You learn how to cook on Goons With Spoon, peruse the Book Barn, TV IV... It's not about gaming. You've already got a built-in longstanding loyal community there before you even get to the gaming forums. You're basing a lot of your axioms about MMOs on one tight-knit culture which has managed extremely unique outcomes. Rathgar was a bunch of pubbies and internet randoms.

Warring Factions, Travian, SpaceFed, Ogame, and all their clones have the same problem and none of them were dominated by Goons. And Rathgar was NOT internet randoms. A lot of people playing Might and Fealty played Battlemaster.

[MoLAoS]

I dunno, Goons in Planetside 2 weakened themselves immensely by splitting in two due to drama.

They lost so many people that one of the two resulting outfits resorted to allowing scummy pubbies like myself in.

It's kind of cute how they treat pubbies as sub-humans. It bothered me at first but now I just roll wit it.

Planetside 2 isn't really comparable to MMOs like EVE and the text based MMOs. The world just doesn't operate the same way. For several reasons.

[Gervassen]

I have no familiarity with any of those small webgames. I'm willing to bet most people don't.  If you want to make a case out of them, feel free to expatiate at length. I do know larger hardcore PVP games like Shadowbane and Darkfall where no full conquest ever took place. Well, in the end, Shadowbane went F2P and was pretty much conquered by Chinese, heheh.

Part of the problem in MaF is that Tom advertised one faction as being the large and powerful realm right out of the box. Seen that before. It always attracts the casuals. A perverse incentive. Dedicated players never want to be a mook in the crowd.

The answer was not intervention, though. Developer intervention just angers the advantaged side, unless it is clearly defined in advance. Over at MaF right now, no one knows the ground rules, because the only rule is make Tom happy. As a result, no one is happy. New players see that toxic atmosphere, and that's the real problem. One thing I can say with perfect certainty about game design is that a game ought to be playable without the forum. The forums over there are filled with quadripedal woodland creatures of a light blue-greenish hue. Teal deer scare me. That game is not even a browser game at this point. It is entirely being played on the forums by verbose posts about what other players should be doing in the game that theoretically exists as an ancillary to the almighty forum. Sad, man, very sad.

[MoLAoS]

Travian and OGame at least cannot possibly be referred to as "small web games." SpaceFed is debatable.