One year playing

Day 796, 23:19 • Published in Spain Spain • by Calangao

My virtual life started here exactly one year ago. It was January 25th, 2009. Now here I am: advanced 21 experienced levels, worked 365 days in a row accumulating 10.58 skill in manufacturing and acquiring 12 hard worker medals, one congress medal (oh boy!, how I hated to be in congress), trained to accumulate 21.03 strength thanks to Napoleon (which was a terrible idea), and two battle hero medals, most likely the only ones I will ever win. I got them in two completely irrelevant battles, but at least I had a lot of fun publishing how I got them (for the nostalgic ones, here, here, and here).

Exactly 365 days ago I started playing in USA. There was still trivia to work and train. My first shout was as lame and noobish as it could be: "I want lower taxes on food". But even in my very first days I could figure out what was this game about: to tax the great majority of new players in order to supply the oldest ones. The limits people impose to receive fancy stuff or join the elite of the army always go up so that everyone that was below it before remains below it one month later.

Later I figured out most of the new citizens are actually fake accounts and some people compete to see who can do the best bot to manage hundreds (maybe thousands) of them to change the outcome of battles and elections, and to take their early stage game gold bonuses for themselves. A good friend of mine thinks one third of the citizens are real. I think it is more like 10%. Of course this is all illegal, but if they are banned for any reason they can come back with a citizen even stronger than the one they had before if they have the right friends.

I'm bored with all this. At some point you will get bored with all this as well. Well... Maybe not if you are one of the guys creating a new bot that can get around reCaptcha to register new accounts, work and train to flood the game with fakes. But if you are not this guy, you should get bored with all this after you reach Field Marshal. Now all I want is 2-click.