I have a lot of conflicting thoughts and feelings about this game. Even ‘this game’ is an odd things to call it. Because what we really have here is a game engine. One that is not living up to its full potential. But, more on that later.
I think what annoys me most about this game is something I’m not honestly sure who to blame at this point.
I think it’s probably of no great surprise that I don’t really like wizard. They make a lot of decisions that I don’t agree with. Like, a lot. Far more than I take the time to point out. As negative as people think I am; I honestly probably only comment publicly on less than one out of ten things I disagree with. If for no other reason than I would be constantly in the forums complaining 24/7 if I ran in and complained at everything I disagreed with. When you have a body of game devs and admins constantly making bad decisions; there really is no way as one person to constantly police that.
This is not to say that I disagree with everything wizard ever does. They have made good decisions as well. But, then whenever I compliment them for that, people seem snide because God forbid someone criticize people at one turn and then compliment them at another. I guess other people don’t compartmentalize as much as I do. So, the idea of having conflicting thoughts about people is foreign to them.
I think what it boils down to at its base is wizard’s vision for the game is something far different than my own. When I see Space Station 14; I see a chaos sandbox simulator. A grand social experiment. A live action demonstration of the principle of entropy applied socially. The idea that everything inextricably drifts to chaos and destruction to spite best intentions to foolishly try to provide order to what is fundamentally madness.
The more I look at how this game is ran; it is very clear that this is not wizard’s vision of the game at all. Wizard sees Space Station 14 as a multiplayer RPG; heavy on the RPG. I don’t like RPG games. I find them stale and boring. Wizard delights in realistic inventory management, realistic physics, and reams upon reams of bureaucratic rules.
One of these things is not like the other. Rules get in the way of the principle of entropy. It’s hard to let people naturally degrade into chaos when they’re afraid everything they want to do will incur a perma ban. In an odd, meta, sort of way; wizard themselves un-ironically have taken the idea of “ foolishly try to provide order to what is fundamentally madness” into irl administrating. In so doing, ruining the social experiment. In so doing, constantly attacking the very heart and soul of my vision of what this game is.
You can see this vision baked into the DNA of this game. Everywhere are little text bubbles and wiki descriptions double dog daring people to play the game in a way that will get them banned. Everything is worded like the point of the game is to push the boundaries of what you can get away with doing. Yet, everything about how you actually play the game is like living in a dictatorship that constantly spies on you. It is a deep and cutting paradox. The game is ‘sold’ on the false promise of what it’s own administration doesn’t dare allow it to be.
Yet… here is where I don’t know who to blame. This is why I have often stayed quite on this issue, really the biggest issue. Because these are wizard’s servers. And wizard can run them however they want. I mean, who am I really to tell someone else how to run their own servers? So, I typically keep my mouth shut.
Furthermore, wizard has opened this game up as much as they possibly can in the sense that it is licensed as a Free Software (Free as in Freedom) project under both the GNU GPL and MIT Expat License. People can also host their own servers. People can even host their own server hubs. People can even make their own forks of the game engine, game data, and game launcher.
So… really, it’s the community that is to blame. I mean, honestly, why be mad at wizard for running their servers as they see fit? There are constantly people playing on wizard servers. Clearly, to what boggles my mind, there are a great deal of people who prefer playing this game as what I see as a stale RPG game instead of as a chaos sandbox.
Yet, it’s also painfully clear that a great number of people would also prefer to play the game how I would prefer to play it. People constantly complain about how wizard runs things. The ban list on wizard is an ever-flowing river of people who performed the sin of daring to want to play the game how I would like to play it.
So, I mean, where are all you people? If everyone who was banned from wizard for treating the game like an anarchy sandbox would actually ban together and make and play on a server together; we’d effortlessly have a server just as popular as the wizard servers with people playing the game how we feel the game should really be played.
Yet, for whatever reason, we don’t. Why is that? Why are people content to sit and complain rather than actually do something to fix the problem? Especially when wizard has set out the tools needed to fix the problem. I mean, is it just laziness?
Seriously, we have the tools to create our own communities of this game completely divorced from wizard. I have waited a little over a year to find someone actually make an anarchy server that’s high pop and yet everyone has failed to pull this off. Part of me wonders, then, if perhaps I am in the minority and am wrong. Maybe people don’t really want to play the game this way. Yet, the giant ban section and endless lists of complaints about wizard would seem to prove me correct. It’s like we have the numbers to run own server; but not the organization to recall all these banned people and get them playing and make it happen.
I honestly don’t know what to do. Or, like I said, even really who to blame. Part of me feels like wizard is actively killing their own game. Constantly sending people away for something as stupid as welder bombing. (If you didn’t want that to be a thing, why did you make that a thing?) Or getting a weapon as a present from under the tree and then going on a impromptu rampage. (Again, if you didn’t want that to be a thing; why did you make that a thing?) People are constantly banned for the most trivial of offenses. People constantly complain that wizard runs things like they have a stick up their ass.
Yet, where are you people? The tools are licensed and laid bare. We have entirely in our own hands the power to make the chaos sandbox game of our dreams. It would really be as simple as to call it ‘Anarchy Server’ and run the game as is except just strip out all the rules. And, yet, there is not a single server that does this that people actually play on.
I think that’s part of why I don’t like the limitation of one window imposed on the new inventory rework. It makes it more difficult to play this game fast paced like a chaos simulator should be. It was just one more step, in a long line of steps, of taking this game even further in the direction of a stale and boring RPG game.
‘Inventory management is fun.’
‘No, randomly welder bombing as a clown is fun. Getting a weapon as a present and going on a rampage is fun. Inventory management is boring and slows the game down unnecessarily.’
There is a fundamental genre difference between a fast paced, action packed, anarchy, sand-box, chaos simulator; and a slow paced, inventory managing, role play game. These are two very different visions. Deeply incompatible.
I love the game Space Station 14 could be. I begrudgingly tolerate the game that it is. Yet, as often as wizard causes me to hard roll my eyes with the decisions that it makes on the daily; it is really our own fault that we haven’t set up a true anarchy community for this game that is actively active.
It reminds me of Minecraft. How I hated playing Minecraft on the bureaucratic servers where you weren’t allowed to grief anything because everything was build protected. Part of the fun of a building game is the knocking down of what people build. Half the fun is lost. Yet, Minecraft actually had anarchy servers that were popular and populated where I could play with others who felt the same way that I did. This let everyone have their cake and eat it too. Everyone could just play on the servers with the communities that they preferred to play with.
You can’t do that with Space Station 14. The tools are there to do exactly that. But, the only active community is wizard. So, it’s wizard’s way or the highway. And I don’t like wizard’s way. Yet, for all the bans and all the complaining; nobody has been able to establish a true alternative to wizard that people actually want to play on.
I don’t hate wizard. I just hate their vision for this game. It’s over-moderated. Part of the charm of a game like this is if a clown can trip a Captain with a banana peal, take his ID, take over the bridge; and create an amazing story to tell. Try that on wizard and you’ll likely get banned for being self-antag. I am of the opinion that Sec and Department heads have it easy on wizard because they don’t get the challenge that they should. In an anarchy server, order is established by the players actually being good at the game. If the players want to attempt to make order out of chaos, then they need to be robust enough at the game to force that into reality themselves. Rather than A-Helping ‘Clown did something against the rules, please perma ban. Made my job hard for me.’
To me, it’s far more interesting to see how it would naturally play out if an unregulated Sec department police brutality war against an unregulated Clown and Mime than to watch everyone half heartily tease this because Sec knows if they beat the crap out of Clown or Mime they will get A-Helped and perma banned and Clown and Mime know if they bomb stuff and take over the bridge they will get A-Helped and perma banned.
It neuters the game of it’s true sandbox nature and thus its true potential, in my eyes. There is an endless amount of creative ways people could play this game; yet under wizard there is one strictly enforced idea of intended play that people are not allowed to deviate from.
This hamstrings the game to where you can’t really explore ‘what you can get away with.’ You can’t really try ‘out there’ ideas. You can’t really test the limits of Clown, and Mime, and Sec. Because everyone plays the game like Santa is watching and you don’t want to be on the naughty list.
This might be kind of a goodbye letter. It might not be. I’m dithering with the idea. I originally played the game as an chaos sandbox before the rules came in. I then got banned for something as trivial as welder bombing. I got unbanned by asking to be able to experience intended play. Now I have. And, frankly, I’m finding intended play boring. It has a certain charm to it as well. But, let’s put it this way; if there was a viable anarchy server I would ditch wizard in a heartbeat and play on that almost all the time. Only visiting back to wizard once in a blue moon for old time’s sake. I’ve been waiting about a year or so for a true alternative to wizard servers that have not come to be. So, I feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. I can keep playing the slow paced, RPG heavy game this game is day by day becoming. A style of game I find boring and stale. Or, I can go sit alone in an anarchy server because everyone who got banned and should want to play over there just left they entire ecosystem itself rather than migrating to an alternative to wizard. There’s no winning here.
Again, my intent here isn’t to get into some big flame war with wizard. It’s their servers. If anything, I’m more disappointed in this community as a whole for not stepping up and making a high pop anarchy sandbox server a real thing. Why knows, maybe five or ten years from now it will be.
But, I think the problem is that the community for this game is so small. There isn’t enough people who stayed after they got banned to build a true alternative to wizard’s servers and their vision of the game. So, that whole idea just died on the vine. Wizard’s servers and the people who like playing that way ended up being all that was left after the mass, sweeping bans that happen constantly.
It’s a shame too, because the game had so much potential as a chaos sandbox. But, as it stands, to me anyway, it’s a massively over-hyped RPG game. And I don’t really like RPG games. I tried to ignore the RPG elements as much as I possibly could. But, they keep creeping in more and more all the time. It’s getting to a breaking point where I can’t really play this game at all how I’d prefer to play it. As is, this is not an anarchy chaos simulator. It’s not a sand box. This is not a grand social experiment. It’s a stale RPG with atoms simulation tacked onto it. And that’s really just a very boring idea to me and not enough to keep me around long term.