Just wanted to congratulate/thank you for this brilliant description of what kind of game Ogame really is. It’s without a doubt the best review so far that I’ve read.

I played it during 1 – 1,5 years, stopped when I was #53 in the universe (developing my empire at the pace of the top10’s), with I don’t know how many million points. I have a lot of good memories from it, but also a lot of bad ones.

As a confirmation for you, and anyone else that reads this, your final analysis was spot on from my point of view. The game itself is without a doubt a really good game, but the truth is that the longer you play, the less fun it’s going to get. But most won’t quit, because the longer you play the more addicted one gets to it and the pleasures that come with playing it.
These pleasures range from attacking to developing your empires infrastructure. And especially the major pleasure of this game is the friendships that you can make there, and I really want to point that out.

It requires that you have a lot of time on your hands and preferably a flexible schedule (even if you can adapt your way of playing to your schedule, which only adds to the addictiveness), also you need to able to follow the schedule exactly and prioritize the game above almost anything else. As Balaji explained, even one little schedule slip-up can cause the destruction of your entire fleet ( = possibly months of your spent time). It is NOT a casual game, if you have ANY ambitions at all, and no matter how you play you won’t be able to escape your enemies if you don’t login.

I do however feel, Balaji, that because you quit so early on (thank god for you, because trust me, it was not a coincidence that you ended up seeing the game get more and more out-of-hands) you missed much of the more advanced sides of this game.

There’s so many different ways you can catch somebody’s fleet, some so advanced compared to the normal method of just attacking, that you can’t believe how somebody actually has figured this out and been able to successfully implement it. I also feel compelled to point out that the way of “fleet saving” that you described in your post is very easy to catch (unless the game mechanics weren’t the same as when I played), and you wouldn’t be able to save it even if you were online, in that case.

The game has a lot of good sides, but many more bad sides. I hope that people thinking about playing Ogame read Balaji’s blog post. At least that way they know what is awaiting them. I would say, for the community and many of your fellow players, absolutely. For the game, no no no and no.

@Alucard0 : I recognize your thoughts of regret, but I think the reason why most people start and continue to play this game is because there’s something missing in their lives. A thrill, a challenge or maybe just the joy of doing something you actually choose to do, unlike your job or school maybe.
People are very illogical creatures and we don’t always do what is most logical or productive. Even if we hadn’t played Ogame we probably would’ve wasted that time or more, in the long run, doing other pointless stuff, because we wouldn’t have learned our lesson.

At then end of it, I believe people keep keep playing it until they realize that they’re losing more than what they’re gaining, just as it was for us two, and even for Balaji who played considerately less. Some realize it sooner and others later…

actually some years, getting on and off again, I finally decided to play seriously 3 years ago. I took over a small account that I basically transformed into a wayyyy bigger one. Huge mines, huge fleet ( 8k battle vessels for those who knows) , 6 moons, really hard to get in the game, over 3 million points … and so on and so on ….

well, I eventually came to the same conclusion ?

why am I wasting my time for that ? what is it at the end, it’s just a game nothing more. Worse, when you want to fleet crash and raid other players ( because your mines are never enough when you have a big fleet) you have to spend hours raiding, wasting your time.

When I found myself nightering/doing white night/ brief, not to sleep all night long because it was the only time I could play, I started to wonder why I was doing this …

then my school grades, marks and so on started to go off so well, I quit playing eventually

Now that I look back, I regret … If I had spent the whole time I spent playing learning whatever language, I would be fluent at that time :s

Don Lapre Zach
webmaster@don-lapre-richards.com
http://www.don-lapre-richards.com

I’ve pretty much given up on all PC gaming recently, though not cuz of marriage, mostly because I’ve found other hobbies

That was a nice fleet – kills ya when you forgot to log in and shit happens doesn’t it? Well I’m not sure if Ogame will be around for decades to come, but you never know

Thanks for stopping by – I’m astonished at your patience to actually play in 3 separate universes. How do you keep everything straight?

Yes, I think the realtime play really slows ogame down a lot, though it does make casual play a bit easier, since you pretty much can only do 1 thing every day.

I feel that fleetcrashing is not as bad as the realization that once you recover, you can be fleetcrashed again whenever someone decides to and you might not be able to do anything about it, simply because you are not online – that’s what killed it for me.

Glad you liked the post – best of luck with your quest for galactic domination!

Thanks for stopping by. Yes, like you, I found the change of pace that Ogame enforces from RTS games (even a TBS game) to be a huge shock. But when you go into attack mode, that realtime play can really ratchet the tension up quite nicely.

Your resources really only start to pile up once you get to a level 10 and above metal,deut,crystal plant and you need to settle on other planets – till then yes, you are really scraping by.

Nice going with the satellite – I didn’t get one even though I settled on 3 planets and got fleet crashed once.

Since I posted this, I’ve dropped off from Star Wars Combine as well, so it looks like MMO’s are not really my thing.

LOL on the hitler bit