Cardea: Through the Gateway and Beyond
by
Bob
Having played Cardea for at least a year and having belonged to separate factions and guilds within in the game, the authors feel that they can review the game with a reasonable and wide ranging knowledge of what playing the game involves and hence have some authority on the subject.
Cardea has had some problems from the outset with the justification being that this is a beta version of the better game that is coming along. Presumably at some point in the near or distant future – what you believe regarding this depends very much on how much of an optimist you are and how much faith you have in the members of the Cardea administrative team – the current version will be updated to a much better one. We have been waiting for this since about March 2003 and thus we suggest that you do not hold your breath.
The game is set in a medieval type of world with a wide variety of regions, factions and deities, all of which are constantly engaged in a struggle for power. The skills within the game are quite fun to use while the quests range from simple ones which can be done within a few rooms to much harder quests where players have to gather items from all over the realm to complete. There are a very wide variety of walks of life which any given character can follow, whether it is that of a merchant, healer or soldier, and many different ways in which an individual can rise to power.
That is what Cardea is in theory, anyway. The reality is somewhat different. Anyone who spends any length of time in Cardea will soon become aware of a number of major problems.
The first, and perhaps most noticeable, is the gross imbalance of power within the game. For goodness sakes, there isn’t even a God of Light. If you are not going to follow darkness or at least join one of its associated factions, then your character’s life is going to be very difficult. By “difficult” we mean being forced to sit in a building {Not that there are any personal buildings left due to the so-called plot} behind multiple runes or face the consequences and die as soon as you take about three steps outside your safety nest. Let’s not even begin on the existence you will have if you dare join a faction that outright opposes darkness {You’d be killed about three seconds after you enter the game if you’re not somewhere safe}. As for those who wish to keep completely out of physically fighting, they’re labeled as “useless” or just “sitting on some fence” and hence killed for existing or for fun. However, comically enough, despite the amount of warnings the gods give about PK {Player killing} without a valid reason, nothing is ever done about this type of behaviour, especially if it involves one of the more prominent players {Or pay-to-play}.
The few attempts to manage this problem by administration are mediocre. Past mentions of the imbalance within the game have always tended to end with “it will be sorted out in version three” without any attempt to address it at all within the current version. The few that have been tended to usually lead to the crippling of some factions of the realm {Mainly through skill “tweaking”, e.g. Knights.}. The last time they even mentioned the problem was to deny there was one at all and instead announced that their plotline had effectively dealt with the problem (… and no, they weren’t joking).
The current plotline has been moving along at snail’s pace for over a year now. It may have had potential at the outset but has long since become beyond boring and shows no sign of changing or suddenly becoming exciting any time soon. This plot has centred largely on the falling of several meteors {Which might I add has destroyed quite a large proportion of the land, plus any property that may have been on it} and a war between two factions, chaos and {Surprise, surprise} darkness. Again, this may have been semi-acceptable if the plot had lasted only a short time, but it has not. As a result, most other factions have been pushed to the sidelines, or dragged into the war by those who label them as the enemy. For example, those of light are seen as “helpers of chaos” because theoretically light opposes darkness and *therefore* they *must* be of chaos! {Great reasoning isn’t it?}. This type of behaviour has caused a large number of players to become very distressed and to leave the game. This can also be shown by the comparison of players online a year ago, and now. It has depleted thrice times.
Plotlines too often center on combat rather than on any other facets of the game. If your character is non-combative, you really do not have anything to do, especially given that around six months ago, another weak plotline eliminated any character’s capacity to make or build anything. All the buildings within the game apart from the guildhalls were totally destroyed, along with all the items within those buildings, leading to the destruction of the economy and thus the end of any power whatsoever that non-combatants may have had a chance of exercising. An example could be the Alchemists – their purpose is to create and trade in goods – how can they do this without any equipment or necessary infrastructures? And if that wasn’t bad enough, another player decided to abuse a bug within the game which led to the creation of millions of extra talons, so what did the admins do the solve this problem? Yep, they wiped out of all the gold within all the players’ accounts, with no compensation what-so-ever, which dramatically crippled those who took upon the role of merchants. The situation has not really been rectified since, with the admin’s excuse being that players should “find a way around things” and the fact that they have not solved the in-game problem that allegedly destroyed the economy in the first place. This meant that money was completely worthless. Given that this coincided with an administrative decision to a database wipe of many objects and that there have been no clues given at all on how to solve this problem after six months, one must question whether it is meant to be solved. Even further exacerbating this problem is the fact that items that can only be made by gods are seldom provided, with the few god-run shops there are rarely having anything in them.
The lack of anything else to do, and the providing of plots to justify it, means that PK is rampant in Cardea. This is not frowned upon at all, but is in fact seemingly encouraged, with the plot clearly allowing for this as well as a number of major PK’ers being held in high esteem by members of administration.
Any roleplay whatsoever has also been very much pushed to the sidelines. It is now practically non-existent, with most players either not having the desire to roleplay or simply lack of opportunity. Those who do attempt to roleplay, often find themselves walking the halls of the dead as their “personality” annoys the more powerful players, and hence are repeatedly killed as a result. Given that the game claims to have very high roleplaying standards, this is more than a little disappointing.
Plotlines have been used to justify a variety of other inappropriate behaviour. This ranges from ongoing bug abuse {Again largely ignored by admin members} to the allowance of a number of “key” characters to return after their initial and very public banning due to a major hacking attempt on the game. Significant bias is frequently shown to a number of players, particularly those who have paid to play or who happen to follow the god characters that they play. This can be illustrated through the *many* times that these pay-to-play players have been let off after serious offences. Let us take the money-wipe incidence as an example, the three players who were involved, only two were banned, why wasn’t the third? Go figure, it’s plain and clear. Other examples include where smaller players have shouted insults across the land and were punished by the gods for using “abusive language” where some older players have shouted even worse things were left alone. Funnily enough, those who follow the gods that tend to be around more often, have significantly more power than those who do not.
Right now, the groups of dedicated players that still remain are the only reasons that are allowing the game to keep going. If it wasn’t for them, this game would’ve fallen apart eons ago. How do they expect to get new players to become interested and play if the first thing a new player comes in contact with {The newbie quest} doesn’t even work? Without the dedicated players who are always there to help the newborns, they’d all quit after 5 minutes of wandering around aimlessly.
Hey but who knows, at the rate old players are quitting and new players are coming in, maybe there won’t be anyone left by the time v3 comes out?
