Dark Orbit
Since I'm unemployed at the moment I can waste time on games like Dark Orbit, a free MM space game. It's nice. It has a relatively simple interface (especially compared to Eve Online), and it's browser based.
I played for a few days but gave up. It suffers from two problems that plague most online games suffer from. First, is the player killer issue. The game does try to mitigate this somewhat with the concept of "honor points", but it's not enough. The kids with access to their parent's credit cards just buy their way out of it. Half of my deaths so far have been from PK.
The second problem is the noob fragging. There are "neutral zones" where you can't be attacked but they're small areas within sectors. The result is that kids with cloaked battleships armed to the teeth sit outside the neutral zones of your home sector, blasting us poor guys with nothing more than a small corvette.
Both problems could be greatly reduced by making home sectors "kill free" zones, and by making PK'ing much more painful to the PK'er, or simply banning it altogether.
Reincarnation is mostly painless - you get your original ship and equipment back - but it costs "Uridium Points". You only get so many and they're hard to acquire. You can't use money to buy them, either. But, since all of the best equipment also costs Uridium Points, you get into a vicious cycle where you can't get the best equipment because you keeping getting blasted, and you keep getting blasted because you can't get the best equipment.
But, hey, at least it's free. :)
I played for a few days but gave up. It suffers from two problems that plague most online games suffer from. First, is the player killer issue. The game does try to mitigate this somewhat with the concept of "honor points", but it's not enough. The kids with access to their parent's credit cards just buy their way out of it. Half of my deaths so far have been from PK.
The second problem is the noob fragging. There are "neutral zones" where you can't be attacked but they're small areas within sectors. The result is that kids with cloaked battleships armed to the teeth sit outside the neutral zones of your home sector, blasting us poor guys with nothing more than a small corvette.
Both problems could be greatly reduced by making home sectors "kill free" zones, and by making PK'ing much more painful to the PK'er, or simply banning it altogether.
Reincarnation is mostly painless - you get your original ship and equipment back - but it costs "Uridium Points". You only get so many and they're hard to acquire. You can't use money to buy them, either. But, since all of the best equipment also costs Uridium Points, you get into a vicious cycle where you can't get the best equipment because you keeping getting blasted, and you keep getting blasted because you can't get the best equipment.
But, hey, at least it's free. :)
posted by Daniel Berger | 9:42 PM
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