I've been playing in
Mytholia for about six months and recent problems make me wonder if the game needs CPR. Launched around the start of 2011, Mytholia is a multi player fantasy strategy game that's played by building up cities, constructing armies, forming clans and beating up weaker players. It's a well thought out game. To advance you need to build cities, but it's not a linear path to get them. You get a new city for a variety of reasons, such as gaining experience points, completing many missions, building certain buildings to a specified level (e.g., the Pantheon to level 100), acquiring knowledge and researching technologies. For each of the our races in the game there's a chart that lists all missions and their rewards. If there's a 1 in the last column then when a mission's done, you rise a level and can build new cities. To found a city you just need the right number of resources or the requisite number of God Powers to command a miracle, choose a spot and --
wham -- a new city appears.
Troubles
One thing that troubled me right from the start was the lack of adverts, or any obvious monetization. Similar games (like
Illyria or
Lord of Ultima have ways for you to speed up the game by paying for it. Not
Mytholia. Servers and bandwidth cost money and the more successful the game, the more they cost. How is this being paid for? In my recent game (World 2) I had been rocketing up the score board from position 60 when I started to 14 in about 40 days play. Other player's scores didn't move that much, and for a while I thought I'd discovered the winning formula. Hah! Now I think the game had become moribund with only a few players still active. That's not a good sign. Even worse is the bug
WithdrawResources, which has been present at least ten days as I write this. All games have bugs, and
Mytholia has a pretty good bug reporting mechanism, so I used it. I'd seen this bug once before and it was fixed quickly. Some magical items generate extra gold or food that you can harvest. Normally about 100,000 Gold per day, but in this case, because of the bug, I can't get at any of the gold. Worse still is that the pot is full so any new gold is lost. Ten days is too long to go without fixing a bug that has such an impact on game play. It doesn't help that the game's administrative staff don't seem to want to talk to players. Ive tried emailing them without success. So reluctantly I've decided to stop playing, and I suspect others will as well. That's quite sad.
Related Links
I've been playing in Mytholia for about six months and recent problems make me wonder if the game needs CPR. Launched around the start of 2011, Mytholia is a multi player fantasy strategy game that's played by building up cities, constructing armies, forming clans and beating up weaker players. It's a well thought out game. To advance you need to build cities, but it's not a linear path to get them. You get a new city for a variety of reasons, such as gaining experience points, completing many missions, building certain buildings to a specified level (e.g., the Pantheon to level 100), acquiring knowledge and researching technologies. For each of the our races in the game there's a chart that lists all missions and their rewards. If there's a 1 in the last column then when a mission's done, you rise a level and can build new cities. To found a city you just need the right number of resources or the requisite number of God Powers to command a miracle, choose a spot and -- wham -- a new city appears.
