A Newbie in a new game

Hey everybody, allow me to introduce myself. I am Syeed, also known as Haedonism Bot. I'm a fairly casual gamer with a life and job, so I usually only have time to invest myself in one game at a time. For the last 3 years that game has been EVE Online, my first MMO, and the only one I have found to date that is even remotely worth playing. I had tried WoW and Guild Wars 2 and found them cartoonish and unappealing. Other games I had heard of just sounded awful.

Then a short while ago, a friend turned me on to this game - Life is Feudal : Your Own. The title seemed sort of dull and uncreative, the logo is an obvious ripoff of the Soviet flag (trying to appeal to a Russian audience I suppose), but deeper digging left me feeling intrigued.

Sandbox, you say? Awesome. Open world PvP, you say? Nice. No PVE? PVE sucks anyway, so that's great. Meaningful loss when you die? Property that can be stolen or looted from your corpse after I murder you? Battles over strategic assets and locations? No ridiculous orcs and elves? Grit and realism? These all sound fantastic - just the things that I love in a game.

Some things give me pause though. Multiple servers. I realize that this is par for the course among MMOs but it's a wrong way to go. Conflict is more meaningful when everybody is competing for the same resources. Community is better when you can interact with anybody and everybody who plays the game. Also instanced battles. This one almost made me turn away right there. Instances are almost a game breaking thing in a sandbox. If you can create a little pocket of non-sandbox where uninvited third parties can't show up and try to fuck with your plans, then it isn't really a sandbox at all. Fortunately these have not yet been implemented, and it's possible that the devs will still come to their senses on this one.

Anyway, that's who I am and how I came to be here. Having tried the game for a week or so, I can confidently say that, while still very rough around the edges in it's alpha stage, it is already a game worth playing - one of very few such on the market. I will be here for awhile. As an EVE Online player I write a moderately successful blog about my gameplay experiences, and I plan to do the same here.

So read on, and I'll tell you my story.