I've been trying to learn the game by
quietly taking on cities smaller than me. I scout them out, check to
see if they are affiliated to a powerful guild, and observe them over
a period of time to see when they are active. I probe them to see if
I can get a response before attacking, and if they're not online, I
pounce.
If this sounds cowardly and unsporting
I have two answers for that. Firstly, this is not a symmetrical PvP
game where players begin with identical resources and abilities. In
such games the starting conditions are as equal as possible in order
to maximize a skill-based result. The reasoning goes that all things
being equal it will be skill that decides the outcome. Real world
examples include combat sports like boxing or judo, or any
other sport that groups participants into weight classes. My favorite
boxer is Roberto Duran, a lightweight like myself. Unlike myself
Duran is regarded as perhaps the greatest lightweight of all time,
and he even made a name for himself by enjoying success in higher
weight classes against welterweight and middleweight champions like
Sugar Ray Leonard, Carlos Palomino, Davey Moore and Iran Barkley.
Despite his greatness Duran would get annihilated by a top 20
heavyweight of any era, however, simply because he is too small. The
purpose of weight classes is to remove the advantage of weight so
that the result is primarily determined by skill, grit and tenacity,
not by size. KoW is not that kind of game. While you can argue that
skill exists in optimizing the various builds and logistical aspects
of the game such a skill set would do nothing against a player who
has paid thousands of dollars in building up their army and city. I
would bet that a 300,000 player who knew all the ins and outs of the
game would get rolled by a 2,000,000 newbie. The best thing the
300,000 player could do would be just to pop a shield, teleport away,
or attempt to negotiate. Fighting would be suicidal.
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| Two of the greatest of all time - Roberto Duran, the greatest lightweight of all time, versus Sugar Ray Leonard, one of the greatest welterweights of all time. |
My second point is an adjunct to the
first. Games like these are fundamentally asymmetrical, with the
biggest factors being time and money. Cities develop at a cost of
time and resources, but can be sped up through the injection of real
life money. Pay to win proponents argue that such mechanics are
justified because money simply offsets the advantage of players who
have a lot of time. Players are either money-rich or time-rich, so
the argument goes, and both confer an advantage in the game. Paying
money offsets the time differential and allows time-poor players, or
those who started late, a way to quickly bring themselves up to
parity. The problem with this is that players who are neither
money-rich or time-rich start at a major disadvantage. Theoretically
the end point is the same – everyone will upgrade their town hall
to level 25 and have access to T5 troops eventually. This is the
biggest argument used by pay to win developers – roughly
paraphrased it states that everyone has access to the highest tiers
of the game, and paying only speeds up the journey. Money confers no
advantages, only speed of access.
This is horseshit of course. If you
stretch out the power curve long enough the money-rich players
(meaning people who are willing to pay real money, not necessarily
rich people in real life) will enjoy huge advantages during the march
to the top, even if everyone gets to the summit eventually. If the
rise to maximum tier takes six months, and whales can get there in a
day by paying money, then those whales can enjoy six months of
beating on other people and feeling awesome about themselves.
Persistent worlds, by their very nature, automatically create
asymmetry and inequality. Symmetrical games like chess, boxing or
StarCraft are equal and finite. Matches have a fixed period, the
players start with identical resources, and the game is over once
time has elapsed. Persistent worlds, however, are ongoing. They are
finite in the sense that the company that runs this game will one day
pack up and shutter its doors, but in terms of gameplay it is a
single, ongoing match of indeterminable duration in which players can
drop in and out at any time. Even if pay to win didn't exist, the
player who started on Day 1 would still have a qualitative and
quantitative advantage over a player who started on Day 60. Add to
that the other inequalities imposed by time zones, levels of
readiness, guild sizes and individual skill disparity between
individuals, and there is no way you can argue that this game is
fair, at least in the way “balanced” games are.
 |
| Thomas Hobbes. He would definitely teabag you if he could. |
If you accept the game is fundamentally
asymmetric then you should try to maximize every advantage you have,
and minimize your weaknesses. Therefore you should not pick fights
with anyone bigger than you until you are ready. Or unless you can
bring friends. In asymmetrical PvP the words fair and equal don't
matter. Only winning does. Or living to fight another day. Diplomacy
trumps fighting, because it can circumvent conflict, or bring in
allies that can help you win. It's a world where big guilds prey on
little ones, and you need friends. No one survives alone in this
Hobbesian world made manifest. In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes laid down on paper his vision of a world without a strong central authority to govern it. He posited that such a world would be in a constant state of "war of all against all" - bellum omnium contra omnes, because humans by their very nature are selfish, greedy and brutish creatures. Perhaps you object to this dim view of human nature, but I point to the moral wasteland that is the Internet as a compelling piece of evidence to support this. If that is not convincing enough there are numerous examples throughout history of how the social contract breaks down in periods of scarcity. There is a saying by Vladimir Lenin, roughly paraphrased, that every society is three meals away from anarchy.
Why would people play such a game? I
can only answer for myself of course, but for me there are two reasons. One is the vicarious thrill of living in such a perilous world without the hefty consequences. If things go really bad I can just quit and uninstall. The second is the
road to power offered in such games. If you play KoW you will have to
accept that you are starting as a nobody, and will have to navigate
your way to the top of the server by being in turns clever, strategic
and diplomatic. You will have to make friends, fight enemies, face
good times or bad times. You will be forced to surrender, or flee on
occasion. You will have to lie, bluff, beg, bluster and trust. You
will have to find a guild of like-minded individuals and share in
their story. Going back to self-determination theory, I satisfy my
need for competence by becoming better at the game and learning how
to play it well. I satisfy my need for relatedness by finding a guild
of good people, and sharing in their highs and lows as we try to
advance our status on the server. Finally, I satisfy my need for
autonomy by feeling like I am the hero of my story within the game –
I believe that despite the obstacles and all the inequalities in
front of us, my guild and I will carve out a little place of our own
in this virtual world. Real life has more in common with
asymmetrical, persistent games like these than in controlled,
balanced and finite matches that characterize balanced games. Perhaps
that's the attraction for me. We all know that life is unfair. But
maybe, just like in life, if we are clever, stubborn and tenacious
enough, we can get the things we want.
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