I played one intensively, Lunar Wars. I was in really early and stuck around until basically it fell apart, which was a couple of years. It, and from everything I understand/have read about other games that are heavily diplomacy based, was kind of a mess. It basically became a few people in each faction against each other, with a bunch of people who really only served as cannon fodder involved as well. I'm a pretty strong personality so I was "few people" the whole time so I didn't realize how lame it must have been for everyone else until later. You're not really much different from a unit in an RTS, you do your grinding, polish your sword and wait around until someone with a title tells you to go attack one of Steve's friends. And this problem was unique to the Nation Building subgenre, but it really is just a matter of brute numbers versus numbers, so people tended to avoid wars to maintain their numbers, form boring blocs and alliances to keep their numbers, and when wars did happen, they'd be boring too unless someone had devised a new tactic, for which there was limited opportunity. But the huge problem was the type of people who became Few People. Most of them are the same type of people who become mods on small forums, i.e. people who are looking to the internet for meaning in their lives. Some of them were cool, and just ended up where there where because people found them generally likable like I did. Others Cult of Personality their way up, and they can just be really bitter, nasty, sad people and its just a ****ing bummer to deal with them. So generally, yeah, I think diplomacy games are usually a bad time largely because of the type of people who are really drawn to being internet diplomats. Edit: I don't mean my comment about small forum mods to be disparaging towards that entire group of people; but I'm sure you've all ran into at least one example of the type of person I'm talking about, and that type seems to gravitate towards being a mod anywhere they can.
I guess 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609... Wait, this post could get very long. I might be some time...
"...When will milestone four finish? And how many more milestones remain before the public beta? These questions and more may be answered next week...!" That quote was taken from the recent dev blog, so in other words we will be able to start to estimate how long until beta! That is awesome sauce. Also I hope I am not reading to much into this, but public beta usually means the public, as in everyone who wants in?
I think that best way off geing beta tester key is to kidnap some developer guy than ask key as ransom
(Psst: I think the "selection process" will consist of them going "Hey, who wants to play the beta?") (Psst P.S.: In case I actually have to explain this to somebody out there, that was a guess.)
