by Sevenless » Mon Feb 13, 2012 8:12 pm
Edit: Misread the point of the post. For what you were talking about, try some of the RogueLikes out there. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is nice because it has tile support for beginners in the ASCII gaming world. Lotsa fun, permadeath, very hard. Took me a year (gaming on and off of course) to get my first 3 rune capture? Didn't win that game though. Stupid smiter. I started after someone mentioned playing the game on and off for 8 months before managing a full win.
EVE...
For those who don't know what I mean:
A game where the only rules are limited to about 1/4 of the world. Basically you can't attack people there or put up stations (otherwise the police NPCs rape you). Other than that, there's literally no rules as long as you don't hack accounts or bug abuse. Some of the most famous stories are about scandals where people scammed others through pyramid scheme investment banks. Massive (1000+ player) conflict from the largest alliance over contested space. Supposedly their new technology for servers is actually making those battles playable (only 1second lag or so). I was involved in the BoB wars in the south at one point, although I wasn't a mainstay pilot or so.
Oh god. The hours spent loving spreadsheets in that game. It's much more analytical than your average MMO, as such the intelligence level of the "high end" players *tends* to be better than what you see in most MMOs. The downside is that... well it's been around a while. Skills train in real time, whether or not you're logged in. As such, a "good" account tends to be at least 1 year old. Anything less than that and you just won't have the skillpoints to be useful or competitive in the more dangerous areas/pvp. Manufacturing businesses are controlled by old players/corporations. No real chance you can compete as a newbie. (Everything in game except starter items is manufactured by players or looted off rats). Essentially no females play it (it's a known scam for younger boys to pretend to be girls to get items off male older players).
They've made some inroads for smaller corporations to have somewhere to go. The big lawless zone is completely controlled by the super corporations, but they've made this really neat transient area called wormholes for small corps to play with. It requires a fuck tonne of communication and coordination to live in them, but the loot is absolutely amazing (the wormhole loot provides the components to produce the best small/mid sized ships in the game)
So yeah, if you've got cash and don't mind a sausage fest of a game, eve is viable. So long as you like to play the thinking game at least.