My 7 week go at Project Entropia (review)
Initial setup of your account and avatar was easy and straight forward but once in game, there is little help as to what you have to do unless you ask some of the regular players. You start life in Port Atlantis, a town which to be honest, has nothing much to do in it apart from spend money on buying equipment or repairing items already decayed. (more on this later).
After asking around for a while, it seemed the only way to earn money in game was to “sweat” the animals (nicknamed mobs) in the game. You do this by selecting the animal and sweating it from the menu. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t – also after a couple of attempts you will get attacked by the mob. Now, depending on your success, (and its not very often) you may get some bottles of sweat from the creature which appear in a “loot” window. Now, at the time of writing a bottle of sweat is worth around 1.5 PECS (project entropia cents) so you have to sweat creatures for hours to actually make enough money to buy even the cheapest item, say a rifle. (3 or 4 PEDS (project entropia dollars) Suffice to say, this is a tedious endeavour and the only other way is to deposit money. (note, you can now find fruits to sell as well as dung, but again few and far between).
Depositing money requires a credit card and MindArk charge a whopping 3.5 % to deposit. For example, I deposited $100 into the game and that gave me 1000 peds minus 35 peds for MindArks fee. ($1 = 10 PEDS). To start, I find it outrageous that they charge you to put money INTO the game – not a good sign.
There are 3 professions you can choose at the moment – hunting, manufacturing or mining. Each profession requires money to buy equipments to start with.
Economy:
This is the big carrot on a stick which draws a lot of players into the game, the “real” world economy.
Project Entropia uses a currency called PED (Project Entropia Dollars) and PEC (Project Entropia Cents)
One real world dollar equals 10 PEDS.
You can withdraw money from the game, but are charged a hefty fee – 1.5 % of the withdrawal OR 100 PEDS whichever is greater. Also, it takes up to 3 MONTHS to get your money sent to your bank – and you will probably get charged a fee by your bank as well. So, hidden nicely and not mentioned in any of the PE literature I see.
The other thing that draws in the punters is the marketing to say that there is the chance to make real money from playing this game – don’t believe it – you can’t unless you INVEST a great deal of money and buy land etc.
Every item in Project Entropia decays and needs constant repair – costing you more of your money. Some things are outrageous in the decay – like for instance a 30 ped amplifier for a rifle – after one good 3 or 4 hour hunt you will have to repair it again – costing anything upto 25 peds!! (that’s over $2 real money). Plus the cost of ammunition etc. and you WONT win that back….
Hunting :
You will pay 3 or 4 peds for a basic rifle – 25 peds for a sword.
Ammunition for a rifle will set you back 1 ped per 100 rounds – and most rifles fire more than 1 round per shot (my rifle fired 6 rounds per shot)
Armour – to buy a full set of basic armour you are looking at around another 10 ped – and it is basic.
Once you have all that you can go hunting the small animals to build up your skills. This is where the gambling aspect of PE comes into play – when you kill a mob, it sometimes has loot and more often than not, it doesn’t have any loot. When it does, the loot can be items or pecs or peds or a combination of those. Also, rarely, you may get whats called a hof (hall of fame) or a global (which means everyone is told of your win by a message in the main chat window) – of which its value can be anything from 50 peds to 1000’s of peds worth of items or money. Now, I shall say, these are RARE.
I spent my first few weeks hunting, and loosing around 30 peds or so each hunt.
Mining :
I moved to mining after loosing so much on hunting, again you need to by around 30 peds of equipment to get started, plus you need to buy bombs (1 ped each) for mining minerals and ematter probes (2 for 1 ped) for mining liquids etc.
How you mine is you go to an area and drop either a bomb or probe and a radar type instrument tells you if you have found anything and guides you to it. Now, mining seems to be better than hunting, but again you will loose money hand over fist unless you are a lucky enough to find a big resource which pays well.
Manufacturing:
I cannot comment on this as I have not tried it as again, it was quite expensive.
Overall, this game is just a fruit machine – people pump money into it for a small chance to win big – the only people who will win big are MindArk, and the people who invest large sums to buy land or the space station.
Vast sums of money are in this game in the forms of armours weapons etc (some costing more than the real life cost of a car!) but these players have been playing this game for a lot of years and obviously spent a lot of real money in the game.
If you have a lot of free cash each month to spend and I mean a lot – then this game may be for you. In my opinion, there is nothing to do in this game that warrants spending any money on it at all. There are no quests, no missions, no jobs, no vehicles (you have to run everywhere or teleport if you get a teleport chip or run to the teleports in the map and “capture” them).
Graphics and gameplay:
Graphics in the game are dated and old. The interface is clumsy. The actual game engine is buggy to the extreme, frustratingly so in some cases – laggy as hell when there are a lot of players around you. ( a lot being 4 or 5…)
The gameplay is flat and uninspiring, after a week you know all there is to know and have done everything.
Support:
MindArks support system is archaic and abysmal. The support system revolves around you creating a support item on their website and then waiting for a (more often than not canned) reply. You cannot even REPLY to a support item, if you want to do that you have to make another support item. There is no official forums, so no help there, no email support, no telephone support no real way of informing MA of bugs or problems etc. They will not even use email “for security reasons”.
Summary:
Stay WELL clear of this game unless you are a gambler and have lots of money to waste and don’t mind mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again while you spend it.
This is a cash cow for MindArk only, don’t be fooled. Remember, who makes the money in casinos?
You are better off (financially as well as better gameplay) paying a monthly fee to play WoW or similar.