Stop playing Evony

I had a one-week introduction to Evony and have decided to stop playing it after reading the critics of the game.

Actually, I was repulsed by the game at first because of the obvious use of sexy female models in the advertising when the game had nothing to do with the ads. The ads enticed players with "Come play with me" when no one could so much as get near a playing partner like that. "Save the queen" the ads beckoned, when there was no "queen" to save, let alone a beautiful damsel.

Some friends of mine started playing it, so I decided to try it.

The game is actually quite enjoyable in some ways, but I would recommend that players stick to Civilization or the Age of Empires series. The creators of Evony have lifted some parts of those two games to create their game. But the makers do not have a polished game at all. Their interpretation of English is so bad that some of the descriptions are nearly impossible to understand.

Evony involves developing buildings in a town center (called a "town") and resources in an area called a "city" for some strange reason. The resources are food, wood, stone and iron. The game also has a wider map view where the player can see where his or her town is located in relation to other towns.

By developing soldiers, the player can defend his or her town or attack other towns run by npcs or players. Players can group together to form alliances. In my experiance with the game, players also united several alliances to form larger groups. That was something the creators of the game apparently never counted on, but players do what they want.

A big part of the game is the ability to chat with others, but "world" chat, meaning chat with players on a server, is limited by the number of "speakers" a player has. Beginning players are unaware of the limits until they run out of "speakers." So, players have to join an alliance, because alliance chat is not limited, or obtain coins to replenish the speakers. Of course, coins are obtained by purchasing them with real money.

Critics have pointed out that Evony has a form of gambling that may not be legal in some parts of the US. Each player is awarded a daily metal which launches a random roulette-styled wheel that gives the player a random reward. The rewards are various, but they can be given monetary value in the form of coins, so they can be said to be gambling for real money, even if the value of a coin is very small, around 50 cents American. A metal is worth one coin, so Evony is giving away 50 cents a day to each player to keep the gambling habit going.

But why?

Evony has a peculiar kind of game play. It is addicting, but it is very slow, so players wile away the time by chatting about this and that. As your town is developed, the time to do research and upgrade buildings gets longer and longer. At first, the time is not much of a waste, because development under six minutes can be cut to nothing by free "speedups." But after that, you either wait the time out by chatting or tabbing to another site in your browser or closing the game or buying coins.

Get the picture?

The developers are trying to lure people into playing longer and longer, staying logged on to the server for longer periods of time.

After all the criticism is done, I would like to know if there is any evidence that Evony is doing actual harm to individuals or computers. Some readers of blogs have pointed to malware allegedly introduced through the game, but there is no hard evidence that the game is attempting to download personal information or passwords. Is my World of Warcraft account in jeopardy? I don't know. I have found no actual evidence of harm to my computer or personal information, but meanwhile I am not playing Evony.

Someone with more technical ability than me should do an investigation of Evony to see what it really does. If it does harm, that is huge. If it does no harm, so be it.

Reference: Wikipedia