Planet Calypso (formerly known as Project Entropia) is the original planet of the Entropia Universe platform of virtual MMORPG worlds. The most attracting feature of this MMO game is its “Real World Economy” which is pegged to the american dollar. The game’s currency is called Project Entropia dollar (PED) and its exchange rate is ten PED to one dollar. Which player who undertook playing videogames seriously with mires to learn how they are designed and/or to develop a set of gaming skills hasn’t ever dreamed of getting something of real value in exchange for the effort and the dedication put on gaming? I did.

The community sealed the contract for my induction into EU minutes after I found out about it on the web. I went to youtube.com and searched for some gameplay video and was mindblowed by this one, which was made in the times of the old engine:

This awakened racing thoughts of greed and curiosity. It is reported that there are big players in this MMORPG that make a monthly income out of the game. But these are players who have already invested thousand of dollars in their avatars besides playing it since the mmo’s inception or whereabouts.

Before knowing of the existence of virtual worlds (with real 3D graphics) I took my time to dream my own before stepping into any of them. One of the essential features I bestowed on my created worlds, before knowing any, was the ability to exchange inworld credits for real life currency. It follows that when I searched the web for a game like that and found a page reviewing Entropia Universe I rushed to their site and downloaded the client and, I must admit it, deeply thrilled and with my head full of dreams of digital wealth. It was January of 2009, so the game was still using the Gamebryo engine but I appreciated it from the start for its high level of customization.

The first thing I saw was the avatar creation system which is cool because it lets one create any bodily shape and face and choosing hair style and skin and eye color. Way more flexible than a system of permutable features. I designed an avatar slightly resembling my form and was astonished with the results. When I accepted it, the system made me choose an outfit. I remember there were a handful of different ones like business suit, soldier and so on. Entropia Universe offers an avatar creation system that is reminiscent of Second Life but with more restrictions; once one’s avatar is created there is no way to modify its face, hair or shape, at least not for free. More on that below.

A click more and I landed on Port Atlantis’ teleport and at once I ran to the newbie area of the game, known as “Swamp Camp” with my pauper clothes as sole belongings. Of the clothes that were available on the character creation section I saw none. Not in me nor in any of other newbies around who either had a camo outfit in tatters or an orange coverall. The noobcamp, which was a short walk from the spawn area, was (back then) full of Daikiba mobs (the low-end of Calypso’s fauna) and I started earning PEDs by “sweating” them. In or around late 2009 the game migrated to the Cryengine2 which gave a huge boost to the MMORPG’s looks and physics. Things changed, one of them the location, mob populations and landscaping of noob camp. Nowadays the place is different and there are other types of mobs.

The Swamp Camp Of The Old Engine (Gamebryo)

Entropia is a MMORPG but its skills system is very original. One doesn’t come to distrubute skills/ability points at any point in the game but they raise only with the use of the actions that they entail. If I were sweating a mob I’d eventually get points in my Sweat Gatherer skill and also in Concentration plus the eventual points in my Evade and Dodge skills that I might get when the mobs, disturbed by my sweating, start to hit me. There are a total of 146 skills and many of them are very difficult to raise. But these are not all the skills one needs to play this game, there are many others that don’t tally in the game’s soft. Social, sometimes leadership and team work and economical skills are required; also financial skills if one plans to invest inworld.

Planet Calypso’s backstory themes are contemporary science fiction fare with a tad of western flavor, hence western biopunk. Its germanesse is copious and it took me more than one sitting to read it all. It’s ultimately forgetable: Global Alliance’s Odysseus Probes find colonizable planet after a century of roaming space, corporation makes claim on building its industrial/military colonial system and starts to bring settlers to Calypso by means of the, originally named, Exodus Project.

Cities like this are prone to robot attacks

Then the large robot comunity built by the probe that found the planet goes FUBAR and turns against the human population; this while it’s unoriginal (The Terminator, anyone?) it’s nicely integrated into the game since there are random robot attacks (events) on Calypso’s cities.

Getting started I was shocked by the cold fact of how difficult was to rise from the rags of my reluctancy of putting some money into the game upfont. The first moments in swamp camp I felt shocked by how difficult the task of gathering some monies resulted; at first. The most basic occupation in the game is “sweating” mobs which means milking any mobs from their “vibrant sweat” a commodity that can be refined and made into a substance called “mind essence” which is used to power implants that are used to teleport, heal and such.

Sweating mobs tactically On Gamebryo Engine

But the sweating part, which is hard on itself more if you’re a noob with low skills, gets worse when one has accumulated a certain stack of vibrant sweat and needs to convert it to PED, because one has to peddle it to other players a task which can take hours, even days if one’s not lucky as to find a buyer fast.

This game is very frustrating at first if one is playing it for free because you start with no gear at all and no skills. It took me many hours of sweating and skilling to raise the funds necessary to buy my first gun and once there I was confronted with the fact of needing more PED to buy ammo.

My first guns were from the trade terminal

Trading one of my first Vibrant Sweat batches

Playing for free was a drag because of the insane amout of time it took at first to get the sweat and then finding buyers. But I was yet unwilling to charge my PED card, this is accomplished with a credit card.

One thing that hooked me to Entropia, I think, were the female avatars slightly dressed running around as noobs or advanced players. When I noticed how hooked I was and how poor level of fun I was extracting from my playing of it I decided to make my first deposit I bought essentials like a set of noob armor and weapons. I didn’t discard this game and continued playing because I was told that one can hit the jackpot even from the monsters which are considered “trash mobs” like the ones at swamp camp. By hitting the jackpot I mean doing anything substantially higher than standard loot.

Mining my first global

There are three ways of doing this: one is getting a global (from fifty to around three-hundred PED) or a HoF (Hall of Fame, from around three-hundred PED upwards) while for the biggest loots it’s a thing from higher than a HoF up to two-hundred thousand PED (twenty-thousand U$D) and they go to the game’s ATH (All Time High) chart.

Involved how I was in combative games I didn’t pay attention to the other occupations. Some occupations come with the game’s software while others, were started by the community since they aren’t included in the UI.

Slightly dressed avas manufacturing

For instance Crafter (weapons, clothes and/or house items), Hunter, Sweat Gatherer, Miner, Mind Essence Dealer, Hair Dresser, Body Sculptor, Esthetic Surgeon, Animal Tamer and Pilot are interlocked to the skill system while other jobs like trader, fashion model, guide, real estate dealer, travel agent, investor, shop owner and lurer are not.

When I started playing this MMO it had a fully functioning mentoring system. It went like this: noob player is clueless about the game.

Mentors' heyday was before the update to CryEngine

Experienced player meets noob and tells her that she mentors down other players. Noob player asks to be mentored. Mentor starts mentoring noob and sets the noob in his avatar as mentored by her. Then the system computes the pupil’s achievements until he graduates from one of the professions. Mentor receives a present from the game for the pupil’s graduation.

Seeing that I wasn’t getting much in return from the game, even after doing my first deposit, I searched the web for guides on how to make money from the game.

At a hairdresser ready to get a new hairdo

One the strategies I found for making money in Entropia Universe was not getting skills, the best gear and either hunting hard mobs for big returns or trying to hit the jackpot mining or crafting, but instead trying to build up a business giving services that make money out from other players and not from the game, like Sweat Gatherer, Miner, Mind Essence Dealer, Hair Dresser, Body Sculptor, Esthetic Surgeon, Pilot, fashion model, guide, real estate dealer, travel agent, investor, shop owner and lurer.

As I said before, it is very difficult to rise skills in this game forcing players to invest hours on end in the same activities as to be able to become proficient in them. But that’s not a problem since Entropia Universe is going to last more than the ordinary MMORPG game. Mindark’s business plan is of fifty (yes fifty) years, so the platform is here to stay.

On the 11th of May of 2010 the second planet of the platform opened. It’s called Rocktropia, it is rock themed and owned by the MMORPG entrepreneur Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs. A third planet (Next Island) is available and Mindark is even trying to sell the platform as a system for serious gaming. What’s more, the planet roster shows that six more planets are in the works.

For Sci-Fi fans Entropia Universe/Planet Calypso can sound like a win-win situation where one can hone gaming (and some other) skills while enjoying a favourite genre and with the chance of earning money but the amount of hours needed to advance are breathtaking and if one doesn’t have the help of an organization or friends with whom to play it, one can become bored fast.

More sweat gathering

That is what happened to me, because I am very anti-social… and felt more bored the moment I joined an organization giving away my freedom of loneliness. But about this specifically comes to mind a redeeming feature of the game: the possibility to give up without losing one’s hard work on the game. Yes you can opt out by means of the practice known as “chipping out”. The idea is putting all of one’s skills in an implant and selling it at the price one wants. So, say that one has invested ten-thousand dollars in one’s avatar, if one chips out her/his skills one ends up with a chip worth ten-thousand dollars or more.

A self-implantation gone awry

With much of rat race but also much of a digital dream come true I had seasons of continuos play and also very long vacations from this game. At this moment I am installing it again…

http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/107/ http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/107/#comments Thu, 25 Nov 2010 16:45:34 +0000 Bholenath Valsan http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/?p=107 Read more.]]> Don’t you just hate it when you disover that you are stuck and unable to progress in a game because it is actually cheating on you?

During six years of careful video game studies I have had the opportunity to witness the demeanor of many games which kept on cheating the player and preventing, a way or another, of achieving any progress at all.

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.”,

Alvin Toffler said. Pertaining the virtual reality of videogames not one but many definitions were the kind of reflections which enabled me to cope with this frustrating issue of games cheating the player.

Rule of thumb number one: any CTD (Crash To Desktop) is unreal pertaining the reality of the game’s world. One example of a game which almost drove me crazy with CTDs was a particular level of Blood II: The Chosen. The episode in question was “Cabalco Meat Packing Plant” somewhere in chapter two. The design of the level and how the mobs were disposed encouraged and/or required the use of the sniper rifle. But among the bloody places of this level there was one special zealot which, if shot with the sniper rifle, will everytime crash the game to the desktop.

When one is having difficulty with a game and has already ruled out every misconfiguration or issues related to the game’s software itself one should be easy to realize that it is the game’s fault and not one’s.

In the two-thousands I’ve been studying the DOS era of PC video games; sometimes. I had vague recollections of my gaming seasons in adolescence. I must admit that I haven’t had much luck nor scads of fun with videogames back then. But sometimes memory gets deformed and ten or fifteen years later I remembered the DOS era with a vague self-satisfied nostalgy; thinking that I did have fun!
But now I must confess that it wasn’t so. I had only the essential fun with videogames from ’91 to ’99 (except in ’93 when I didn’t play), meaning that the only games that I played and finished were only the staples which “everyone else was playing”, something along the lines of Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, DN3D and the compulsory graphic adventures (Lucasarts et al)…

Building a database of DOS games and starting to fire them up in DOSBox I have had many delusions about what that era was (really) about. It wasn’t about assimilating the whole commercial PC video game scene, playing to it, finishing it and then feeling glorious. It was more about choosing what really would be fun and discarding all the trash with potentiality to scar one mentally with contionuos deep frustrations. I am speaking of corporate trash, not even touching the topic of shovelware games.

In those years, many of them pre-Internet, it was difficult to find the information needed to fix an offending game. I am not talking from the resentment of picking an obsolete object of study for being out of touch with reality. Sadly the most painful memories are unforgetable, along with the erroneous ones (the ones of having deep fun with DOS games).

I remember very well that, for a myriad of factors, games back then did ”cheat” a lot more than the ones of present day. Not only strange acts on the meat of the game itself, but also OS-wide horrors like:

Heap overflow, (the gist), data error, fail on INT 24H, access denied, sector not found, sharing violation (BBS games), CRC error, invalid memory block address, file not found and the dreaded insufficient memory.

These traumas aren’t easy to forget. Now, to fire a high-end DOSBox emulating all the hardware that I lacked when things went wrong, and to start seeing the same acts, by actually the same perpetrators, is a
dumbfounding occurrence.

In 20 years of PC gaming some of the games that “cheated” me were:

The Dark Half: Once you reach game over the game quits to DOS.

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen: played in a retrograming rig, yet something happened.

Shadow Warrior: The OpenGl, fanmodded version which is playable in modern OSes, very annoying and often occurring CTDs, but I remember it acting up, specially when using the missile launcher, in the late 90ies too.

Terminal Velocity: The Build3D games were all more or less buggy, except maybe for Blood, so to speak.

Redneck Rampage: Cheated me when I played it in the dedicated retrogaming rig which was high-end compared to the computer I had when I played it for the first time in 1996.  I think it cheated a lot less back then.

Doom II: Played with Risen-3D on XP. I can’t remember what it was, but it did.

Starcraft (on XP): Would appear to work okay since fired up until quitting it. Then when returning and going to open a saved game it just hadn’t any saved games.

Age of Mythology: I wonder what was it, can’t remember.

Unreal Tournament: can’t remember exactly, but surely bug-related crashes.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Can’t remember… CTD?

GTA: San Andreas: I can’t remember how did it cheat me, but it did it five times.

Far Cry: Woot, CIA cheats!

Painkiller: Another cheater…

Tony Hawk Pro-Skater: In PS, suddenly the menu stopped to work as it had to, this was weird….

I documented some of the games above when they were cheating me, other are mental recollections.

Now, the game wich I specifically researched how it cheated me, because I thougth was the one most offensive in this regard, was The Terminator: Future Shock.

The game crashed constantly, when playing, when loading up, even in the transition from a level to the next. The crashes were protected mode errors that crash to DOS with a lot of binary data garbage in the screen.

I was one hour walking in the sandbox-like scenario of level two without finding anything out of one of the sides of the death camp. Supposedly here I had to drop an explosive satchel, yet there wasn’t any really indicators of the spot being the access point to the death camp. This was more of a design flaw, subject for other set of articles.

The game freezes in the “LOADING…” (long) intervals…

The machine gun firing muzzle’s animation looks like two ansis, I know this game’s very dated, but even in its heyday, that was just cheating the buyer for the sake of code reusability. The pipe bombs explosion animation is the most grainy graphic I’ve seen in a game considered classic and a muster… The humming of the soundratrck in the transition from level two to level three, its bass, is really annoying!

The old-fashioned cutscenes are quite revealing but not 100% satisfactory. I lost more than one hour in level three simply because the cutscene didn’t explain how to select the satchel charge.

Around forty meters away explosions aren’t heard… why?

Enemies so easy as those wafting mines are not killed with half a dozen rounds of the shotgun? WTF?

Inside of death camp trying to hit a switch thingy from the exit to the sewers, the primitive of wall where the switch is just dissapears (when looking down), in the sewers the playing character just won’t transfer from a pipe to the preceding one if jumping backwards when trying to avoid a surprising mob and if falling from a ridiculously low height the playing character will lose a nonrealistic quantity of health points.

I concluded thinking that many times the cheatings are produced by buggy software, but there are times when the causes appear to be totally software unrelated. In this way they start needing to be judged from a techno-pagan point of view beyond the technical one.

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http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/manhunt-review/ http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/manhunt-review/#comments Sat, 01 May 2010 19:32:39 +0000 Bholenath Valsan http://oldievibes.wordpress.com/?p=69 Read more.]]>
Year: 2003