OGame: The Problem with Stars

For my very first blog, I want to talk about a particular problem (as I see it) in the online game, OGame (http://ogame.org/).

OGame is a strategy-game set in space. Thousands of players across the world compete at the same time. In order to play you only need a web browser.

OGame is a great game for casual and competitive players alike, because it's a game that you can actually play for years, with me being at least 5 years in, and it doesn't really take too much time to play. Most online games nowadays require that a player be very active to advance in the game, with some requiring hours of playing to complete a given task. Or worse, they require hours of mind-numbing grinding... OGame on the other hand does not. In fact, you could play OGame by spending as little as 5 minutes every couple of days and still make significant progress.

Although I find that OGame has many great qualities, like just about any game out there, it has its flaws too. One of the flaws I find in OGame is that its not completely balanced, which should probably come to no surprise to anyone. The biggest issue with the game being imbalanced is that high level players have free reign against newer players. Luckily, GameForge, the creators of OGame have taken been listening to the complaints of players and have decided to make changes in how players interact depending on their strength, but what exactly will they do, we won't know until it is released.

Related to that, is a particular ship used by high level players... the mighty Death Star. Death Stars in OGame are gigantic constructs capable of dealing massive amounts of damage against hundreds of ships in a single shot, and take enormous amounts of damage to destroy. The problem with Death Stars is that some of the very high level players have entire fleets of nothing but Death Stars, and these go into the hundreds. Death Stars in large numbers, unlike other ships, usually take no losses due to the amount of armor and shields they have. People have nicknamed them turtle crackers because you can bash other players over and over that have large amounts of defensive structures in place on their planet without taking any losses, and be able to deal huge amounts of damage per attack. GameForge tried to balance Death Stars by making them the most expensive and advanced ship in the game by a large margin, and by making them extremely slow, but the problem becomes that they are used as a tool for high level players to keep less developed players down and from advancing, which often makes them quit the game entirely. This of course, is not a good thing, for the OGame community, and GameForge.

So what can be done about this problem? Rather than nerfing, aka weakening, Death Stars, it may be a better idea to put into the a game a new ship that counters them instead. Something that less developed and casual players can use to at least provide some protection against them. I'll talk about this new ship in detail in my next blog, so stay tuned.