Diary of a new player.
I downloaded the game last night and jumped right in. I read up on depositing, and figured that I would try the game before I started committing money to it. Most MMOGs give you a 10- or 30-day trial period before you have to fork out cash, so that’s pretty much become standard.
I learned the controls, and looked around for the tutorial. There isn’t any. I found four information booths, and approached them, hoping to learn how to play the game, but they were universally unhelpful. I searched a few websites for a newbie guide and found nothing. Eventually I saw a forum post telling me to head west and seek a mentor who would answer my questions and help me get started.
I found people at Port Atlantis. I asked around a little, but nobody would mentor me or answer my questions. I ran north and found a mob. I clicked on it, and started to glow. It killed me.
I asked around for a mentor at Atlantis again. A player named Vargas gave me a broken axe to repair, told me I should “sweat” mobs, and gave me the coordinates for Camp Phoenix. I started running.
I died four times trying to reach Camp Phoenix. If I stray too close to a mob while running, it locks on and chases me until it inevitably catches me and I die. No matter which direction I ran, about halfway to Phoenix, my radar would simply fill up with red dots in every direction, and I would be forced to run too close to a mob that would eventually kill me. On my fourth death, I respawned at a place called “Billy’s Spaceship Afterworld,” and was able to make the (much shorter) run to Phoenix from there.
Once at Camp Phoenix, I figured out the logistics of sweating. I stood around and waited for someone to pull a mob in, then started sweating it. There were two or three players griefing, killing all the mobs we were sweating and calling everyone noobs. One was in a soc called “The Sweathogs” so I can only assume he does this kind of thing for kicks on a regular basis. Someone here offered to be my mentor. I accepted. He gave me another axe, then said “more if you don’t kick me” and disappeared into the teleporter. He would not answer any of my messages, and I never saw him again. I sold the second axe for .5 PED.
No matter. After a few hours of work (and I do mean work… hair-wrenching, nail-biting, “why does my sweat gathering fail 90% of the time” work), I gathered 100 units of sweat. I looked around online to see how much sweat sells for. After doing some calculation, I determined I had about 3 PED worth of sweat, and repairing my axe would cost 6.09. Then I read a post on this forum from someone who repaired his own axe and tried hunting, and found it to be a fantastic waste of time and money at this level. So even if I sell this sweat, I’m not sure what I would do with the money if I can’t use it to hunt.
We’ve reached the present. I’m sitting in Camp Phoenix. When a mob is pulled in, either the puller gets it stuck and we can’t sweat it, or it aggros some new player and he runs off into the horizon to avoid death, or a griefer walks up and whacks it to death before we can drain it. When I do get a chance to sweat a little, my attempts fail about 80% of the time. Someone is spamming chat begging for PED and free items, and five different people are spamming selling the sweat they’re harvesting. I’m still a little short of halfway to repairing the axe that will let me pointlessly hunt for a few minutes before it breaks again. I have no other items, and I don’t know where else on the continent I can go to do anything different from what I’m doing right now.
So this situation begs the question, Now what?
Somehow, I doubt I’m getting an accurate picture of how the game really works. Do I have to deposit to see the real Project Entropia? Is there no way to enjoy this game in the slightest before you drop cash on it? Are there any newbie resources available that start from scratch, explaining what the buttons do, how to make my first few PED, and what to do once I have them?
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