Tobold's Blog
Sunday, April 24, 2011
 
Mine Things

Somebody spammed several of the threads with a link to a browser game called Mine Things. Mine Things is running a standard word-of-mouth advertising campaign, where players get a link with a reference number, and new players signing up using that reference and spending money on that game give advantages to the referrer. I don't mind people placing that sort of links in threads talking about browser games (e.g. this one), if they add a bit of intelligent comment of why they would recommend that game. But with just the link spammed over several threads, I just deleted the spam. Nevertheless I did have a look at Mine Things, and found the game interesting enough to sign up, so now I got my own referrer link to Mine Things. :)

So what do you do in Mine Things? Well, surprisingly, you mine things. At an EXTREMELY slow rate. Different browser games work of different time scales, which is good because players have different amounts of time available. Mine Things is the most extreme time-lite browser game I've come across yet. You basically need to log on every 20+ hours to recharge your batteries. Playing this for 5 minutes twice a day, e.g. in the morning before going to work and in the evening, is totally sufficient to keep Mine Things running at near optimum efficiency. It would be actually quite hard to play this for more than half an hour at a time without running out of things to do and having to wait again. You have been warned, that pace is obviously not suited for everybody.

Mining runs automatically, no action required from the player. You start out with one starter mine, which is manned by a mining robot who mines at a speed of 30 buckets per hour. As far as I read you find something every 185 buckets, thus at the start you'll only find something every 6 hours. That tends to come as a shock to new player, especially since in the tutorial you find things every 30 seconds.

Mines can be set to either mine things or gold. At the start, and if you don't want to spend any real money, it is recommended to mine gold, which will give you a steady income. The gold can be used to buy equipment for your robot, which will increase his buckets per hour, and thus make him find gold or things faster. Once you have a bit of gold and equipment, you can switch to mining things.

What are things? Things can be pretty much everything. Many of them have no use of their own, but can be combined into "melds". You can't wear the "dress shoes" and "sneakers" you'll mine as some of the common finds of your starter mine, but you can combine those two into a meld. And the number of different melds you have thus created is your "level" in Mine Things. The more melds you have, the more professions open up to you, giving you access to other parts of the game. Thus leveling up requires you to find or buy a lot of things. Things can also be useful, like equipment for your mining robots, or vehicles to travel between cities, or weapons, or various other things. By the way, the number of melds also increases your battery timer by 1 hour each.

Now each mine produces up to 50 different things, in 5 levels of rarity. And there are 18 different types of mines, with different sorts of mines being available in different cities. But you can make melds only in one city, your home, and while you can move to a new home, that move disassembles all your melds. Thus you need to gather items from different cities, which means transporting things from one city to the next. This is where Mine Things becomes interesting to me: At the heart of it Mine Things is a game about trading. Different professions can either transport things on land or on sea, or they can try to rob such transports on land or sea, or they can chase such pirates and highwaymen. Items tend to be cheap in the cities where they are mined, and more expensive in cities where such a mine isn't available. 7 years ago I wrote a post about a game I wished there was, which would have trade and dangerous journeys to transport goods. Of course I would have wanted that to be MMORPG in 3D. But from all the games I have seen (except SciFi space games), Mine Things comes closest to that design I wrote about.

Now Mine Things certainly isn't a perfect game, if such a thing even exists, and it has its flaws. I think many players of the "gimme now!" fast action attention deficit disorder generation will find Mine Things far too slow for their liking. And like in EVE there is a way to buy something in-game with cash (in this case mines), and sell that on for the in-game currency. I did that to accelerate the otherwise extremely slow start, but of course the ability to buy in-game currency legally kind of defeats the purpose of a game about trade and economy. The alternative is taking a loan or gift from a more advanced player. The cash shop is also used to buy increased inventory space, or to buy extended batteries that will keep your mines producing in case you are on holiday and can't log on for an extended period of time. Compared to other browser games I've played recently, the cash shop stuff is rather unobtrusive, and reasonably priced.

Well, if you are interested in Mine Things (Tobold's reference link), I'm playing on the Bromo server (Different servers have different maps!). You can send me an e-mail if you decide to play and want to know my character name.
Comments:
When I first started reading, my first thought was that this sounds a lot like Eve's planetary interaction feature, except more dangerous when moving your goods around (at least if you stay in high-sec). It sounds like you can be a pirate or anti-pirate. So does that mean there is both market and combat pvp?

I just have a thought about the ability to use real-life money to purchase items. I personally don't do it because I like the challenge of working my way up using game play as much as possible. But if the game allows it, I don't mind competing against others who do use the cash shop (or buy PLEX). In fact, I get a greater sense of accomplishment from a game if I can successfully compete against those using RL money. I guess you could think of it as playing the game in hard mode.
 
Sure you can't turn back time, but maybe developers should consider moving forward in time a little faster. The gameplay in WoW and Rift is over a decade old, it's no surprise more and more people are "burning out" .

Eventually there won't be enough new players that can truly say they've never played a EQ/WoW type of MMO.

Something gotta give, and it's already giving. At some stage a year was a good amount of time for an MMO , then 6 months , then 3 months , and we're probably now at 1.5 months . After that, the MMO is going to take a nosedive and nothing can stop it except two things:

1. Expansions
2. Significantly changing the game (i.e going F2P)


SWTOR, i give it 1.5 months too, unless they have a 1000 levels or content coming out of every orifice. Unfortunately looking at Dragon Age 2 and how it was shortened,recycled and streamlined into a "meh" game, i'm not convinced Bioware can pull off anything more with SWTOR.
 
I honestly believe the next "step" in the MMO genre will be creating a Second Life style XBox Live system to launch and buy games from. Make a virtual facebook with lots of pay to play Zynga style games.
 
noticed the game has a "bitcoin" offer, where you can get virtual currency by lending your gpu's use?

Innovative :)
 
Sorry for the necro.

I have been playing MT for a while and really enjoying it. BTW, with one can spend way more than 30 minutes on this game!

But I am now realize how entrenched the larger players (pirates) are; I am not sure how the two month old player progresses too much in this environment.

But the thing that set me off was I just saw in chat essentially "if they don't like being attacked by pirates then maybe this is not the game for them."

I can understand that in EVE. But seriously, in a browser game with "Mine" in the name. I was stunned.

Is there no game without a toxic environment?

Why can't I ever learn that I will enjoy games so much more if I don't read what other players say on chat, fora and blogs?

I apologize for the rant; please feel free to delete this.
 
I like minethings. I play on the Dempo server. My player name is naturegirl1999.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool