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Evony Online Review Part 2 (Rant) |
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Written by Mark Caliber
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Wednesday, 05 August 2009 |
Frustrations of Evony.
(The Rant of a three week veteran.)
First, there aren’t any hawt chicks, anywhere to be found. Their marketing ploy is all a lie!
The rest of the game doesn't get much better, either . . .
Frustrations of Evony.
(The Rant of a three week veteran.)
First, there aren’t any hawt chicks, anywhere to be found. Their marketing ploy is all a lie.
In the beginning, I got the principle of increasing and scaling development by time. For instance a level 1 farm takes all of 30 seconds to build. Upgrading to level two takes a minute 30. Level three is just shy of 5 minutes.
Level 5 buildings take an average of 30 minutes each and Level 6 & 7 buildings will set you back an hour.
Level 7 and 8 buildings will day over a day, in real time, to build.
Now for a casual gamer, I’m okay with that. I just que up a building before going to bed, and come back 12 hours later. Or come back from work and spend 5 minutes programming the next best thing.
But, I’ve hit my breaking point, with the medals.
Let me explain. You are limited to controlling only a total of 10 cities. There are 10 city slots on the interface, and sure, when you’re trying to take control of a 250,000 playing tiles square playing area, that makes global conquest a bit . . . impossible?
If that weren’t hard enough, you are limited by how many cities you can control by your Title. There are ten titles and for each title, you control one additional city.
Acquire titles is a bit harder than advancing, in any other area, because it requires you to acquire “Medals.” Each rank advancement, further requires collections of specific medals!
And there’s only ONE way to get medals, and that’s by beating up NPC’s in unoccupied valleys.
Except it isn’t that simple.
You see, when you attack an NPC valley (a playing square tile) there’s a “chance” that you’ll get a medal.
After two weeks of experimenting with this, I had exactly nothing to show for it.
NOTHING!!!!
I did some deeper research and learned that beating an NPC wasn’t enough, but you need to barely beat the NPC. Are you serious?!?
Okay, so there are some formulas around out there that seem to yield good results, and I tried a couple of them out. Viola! I started collecting medals!
There was one other bit news that I kept stumbling over during my research as well. Apparently it was a LOT easier to find medals in the past.
Well, yesterday, I was sharing the good news about my new found formula with my guild, and noticed a momentary lag in the system. Coincidentally, I haven’t picked up a single medal since.
The result?
There’s absolutely no way one can advance in Title in Evony, anymore!
Now, I’ve sacrificed a LOT of time, sending out raiding teams to hunt for these elusive medals over the past couple of evenings and normally I’d have expected to collect between 8 and 12 medals by now.
My efforts have yielded exactly 1 medal and I didn’t even need that one for advancement.
Now the other interesting question, that everyone must be asking, is how is it that Evony is “Freeware forever” and yet they’ve added 30 servers to their list?
Here’s the real skinny. In the game, they have “coins” which you can use to purchase targeted advancement buffs. You DO start the game with just enough coins to familiarize yourself with them, but if you want more coins, you need to purchase them with real hard cash.
Being dead broke, that’s not an option for me, and quite frankly, the game isn’t all that interesting, to begin with. So I seriously doubt, that I’d really consider spending real money on this game, anyway.
So, my recommendation, is that you set aside the viral marketing buzz, and just steer away from this one, as it is a monumental waste of time.
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