Civony: Gold farmers go first-party
You may have seen these Google ads on sites like… well, everywhere. While I can’t find screencaps of the original “Your queen is waiting” ads, they were what got my attention because I’d always wanted my own sexy fairy queen. A few nights ago, I finally gave Civony a try - hell, the worst case scenario was that I’d unearth some blog fodder!
Let’s start with the good here, because there’s so little of it: The interface is spectacularly well done. Aside from not being able to move windows around or scroll the world map view, everything worked fluidly. When you write a game in Ajax, PHP, CSS, Flash, and XHTML (and this is just what the client sees) it takes a lot of talent. Hats off to the programmers… though it’s probably all stolen from another game. The beginner’s quest chain walks you through every detail of building a city, army, and empire. Engrish aside, these were tremendously useful tutorials. I never even had to look on the forums, which are filled with player complaints (even the moderators join in).
And for the bad? Where do I start…
- The cost: They use a bait-and-switch tactic to make items seem reasonably priced in “cents.” However, that’s the in-game currency, which is equal to USD $0.10. To put it simply: Every $10 gets you $1. Everything is 10 times more expensive than you think it is, and a hundred times more than it’s worth. You could play for free, but with everything else I’m about to say, why would you?
- The items: overpriced, retarded, and lock out the most basic of 4X game functions. This has to be the first MMO to charge players extra to interact (the only free chat options are in-game mail and chat with your “newbs-who-joined-to-finish-a-quest-but-will-quit-playing-altogether-in-three-days” alliance). $5 US to get a building from level 9 to level 10, $2 to deconstruct a building, $0.60 to change your flag initials, $20 to change your name (not in picture).
- The pace: Free browser-based games are supposed to be slow because they’re casual. Normally, you queue up a few things, go back to work, queue more on your lunch break, etc. Civony has no queue, so you either wait out the insanely long build times; have it open in the background and let it log you out from timeouts; or pay $0.50 USD for every 15-minutes of speedbuilding with times at 10 minutes-128 hours per building level, with 10 levels per building and 33 buildings per town plus walls and farms\mines\mills\quarries outside of town.
- The player base: While most of the players are fun to talk to (they’d better be since it costs money), most don’t stick around longer than a few days. Every Civony territory is a ghost town full of the long-abandoned villages of dissatisfied customers.
- The challenge: You can basically exploit the economics. Even if you don’t, the game is still a joke. Nothing has consequences, because no one is around to play against you. The few that still play won’t waste their time and troops to attack you because there are resource-producing ruins (see: the player base) everywhere.
My village in the middle. Black flags are NPCs, all others are abandoned PC villages. Also of note: Clearly, charging people for chat doesn’t stop spam.
- The mechanics: Economics aside, the gameplay itself is alright. While it might pass the “Is it fun?” test, it fails the “Is it worth my time?” one. No, it’s not. Go to the Wikipedia list of 4X games, pick one, and buy or torrent it. You’ll be much happier. If you want a free MMO browser-based TBS, try Utopia (I played this for two years).
- Server instability: In 4 hours of playing I had to log in 9 times, 4 of which were in succession because the game failed to load. Don’t blame my computer either: I’ve not had a crash or lock-up in 6 years unless it was thanks to opening over 15 porn videos at once
Their next game will feature Warcraft’s Night Elves! Woot!
- Intellectual property theft: Last, but certainly not least. The average person might be jaded about copyright with all the illegal downloading we do, but if we built a for-profit game, we’d have some goddamn respect for the IP of other companies. Civony is run by WoW gold farmers in China, so they needn’t worry about international law suits. Hence, many of the sprites are straight from Age of Empires II and one of the (incredibly hot) ad models is stolen from a costume shop’s online catalogue.
It’s obvious that MMOs are a veritable gold mine for anyone who can make a marginally addictive game with a smart pricing strategy. UMGE puts a new spin on this by releasing a hodge-podge of other games, using sneaky ad tactics to draw in suckers, and tricking them into paying more than they meant.
Don’t waste your time with this piece of shit scam-game. Every time you build a Cottage, the communists win and a legitimate game developer cries.
Tags: browser, company-umge, erdtirdmans, free to play, linux, mac, multiplayer-massively, PC, reviews-avoid, series-evony, tbs
May 14th, 2009 at 11:49 am
[…] NFOpocalypse Maybe they’ll listen to REASON « Civony: Gold farmers go first-party […]
June 15th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I agree that Civony isn’t that great, I played for a couple days then got hundreds of attacks on me, I quit.
July 5th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
The game rewards playtime and paycheck on a curve that makes it ridiculous for new free players to get into. Most MMOs make /some/ sort of effort to discourage ganking newbies…
Chances are, they thought you were one of the tens of thousands of abandoned towns and were raiding you for easy resources. From everything I’ve heard, read, and seen, raiding the ruins of players who got sick of the game is the major pastime of Civony\Evony. If you last long enough to be an actual military threat, you become a comparative non-target.
July 31st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I’d say that it was about time there was a post about this, good job.
[ErdTirdMans: This poster’s URL has been removed as I suspect this comment is a bot advertising in a manner intended to slip by us because it fellates my ego. I’d remove the comment entirely, but I enjoy fellatio even when it’s from a robot.]
August 11th, 2009 at 12:43 am
[…] name on there… anywhere!
August 11th, 2009 at 2:40 am
[…] good honest review here: http://www.nfopocalypse.com/index.php/2009/05/13/civony-gold-farmers-go-first-party/ […]
August 24th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Awesome, I was getting tired of the cookie cutter MMORPGs, WoW, RoM, etc. I think it’s cool you can build up a castle of your own & raid others. can you post a link to the game site so I can get the download? Thanks in advance
August 25th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Now Evony have solicitors on the job trying to get rid of the truth: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/08/25/evony-want-to-sue-me-for-telling-the-truth/
August 25th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I hope Chaz Patterson is a troll.
Bruce: I posted a suggested response as a comment to your blog. If I make another Evony post, I’ll be sure to include some notes about that.
September 8th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Evony is by far become much better. The GUI (graphical user interface) has changed greatly and they attempt to make it cheaper to buy cents. They give bonus packages and ways to increase the amount you get for your money. Yes in the beginning it was cheap, but now its grown to a large player base with many servers. They pretty much had to change the user interface or well face loosing players.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
And as a result, a boring, annoying, scam of a game developed by plagiarizing, greedy, ethics-free, sexvertisement-loving, gold farmers becomes a fraction of an iota less troublesome.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:19 am
[…] If you’re not up to speed on CivonyEvony, you might consider reading my original post, and both of my updates before taking the plunge […]
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:22 am
come on people most of you make it sound the makers of evony are the end of the world offcourse they try to make money who doenst these days and about stealing if you have trubel about that stop using any software all the software companies steal from eachother.
And you dont have to put monney in the game to be strong im ranked top 100 in 2 servers and didnt put any monney in it . and even when you put monney in it compare it the games for ps3 you pay 40 euro for a game and your sick of it after a few weeks so even if you put monney in the game its stil cheaper then most other gammes. and about the inactive people on the server its only the first 2 weeks on a server then they will be deleted the only thing i hate about evony is the how they try to get people to join evony whit sexy animated girls if you like those i like the real stuf more
if you like games like civilization series you like this game its just a fun game
February 23rd, 2010 at 12:11 pm
L: I’m assuming you’re a sock puppet\bot, but i’ll respond anyway:
I enjoy paying for games. I enjoy developers receiving money for creating an entertaining experience for me to enjoy. They deserve it for their hard work.
Evony is neither an enjoyable experience nor did its developers do any hard work besides reverse engineering a copyrighted game in China and repackaging it as their own - blatant infringement - and, of course, coming up with ways to dupe their players through misleading advertising and prices.
And to exonerate them with the broad strokes of “all developers steal” and “all companies exist to make money” shows a clear bias and misunderstanding of what constitutes IP theft and fair business practices. The game is a direct clone. Cloning and reselling an entire game is different than finding inspiration in a mechanic from another source.
Either you’re overreacting to my post’s comedic presentation or you’re underreacting to being fleeced by Chinese thieves. Regardless of which: you’re wrong.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:07 am
I’m a game developer (technical artist) and have played Evony for a couple months while I worked from home, and was looking for a free fun game to play.
Evony isn’t Fun and it certainly isn’t Free.
This game would only take a couple of people a few weeks to make even if they didn’t lift most of the graphics or the source code.
It doesn’t do anything special and some things like the User Inferface are so badly designed it will make you tear your hair out.
The gameplay and mechanics have been tweaked into helping you part with your money. It is possible to get to the end without spending a penny, but the majority of players wouldn’t have the patience.
They’ve put priority to adding features to make them more money, like vacation mode. Pay to NOT play. That sums up their development.
The pricing is outrageous, to put it into perspective, its like iTunes charging you $300 per track.
A typical full feature MMO charges a $15-20 subscription per month, so why are people spending $1000-$5000 on this game?
The $5 package deal probably had the most uptake since it appears to be a bargain. Once you’ve bought something, it makes the decision easier to then spend more to protect your “investment”.
I don’t have anything against micro-transaction games, if you’re getting value for money, but this isn’t one of them.
It just “feels” like a game that has aggressively gone out to get as many “punters” in the shortest amount of time, and fleece them before the bubble bursts.
They’re VERY protective of their fat cash cow. ca-ching!