I Don't Need More Evidence

I want to talk about Dragon Wars today. It is a game on Facebook and MySpace. it is actually a poorly constructed game, but it is so addictive. It is not the kind of game you play for hours at a time. It is a real time game - and you can play just 15 minutes a day - any time during the day.

One of the aspects of the game is that you need to create alliances with other players to do well. So I got excited and went to discussion boards and invited over 40 random people to be my facebook friends for the purpose of forging an alliance in Dragon Wars.

The next morning, all the money I had in the game bank was gone. My first thought was - one of those "friends" hacked into my treasury. They are not able to do that using the game interface. But there are a lot of scripts avaiable on the WWW that you can install to do things beyond what the origiinal developers intended. None of these scritps are official.

I was angry. I courteously uninvited all those friends - saying that one of them violated me. this spooked other players, who responded to me about it. I sent the IDs of all those people to the developers and told them what I thought happened.

Later, another player responded to my discussion board posts - saying it was more likely a glitch during a software upgrade than a hack. I know that software upgrades on these 24/7 high transaction volume games have problems when they upgrade.

Once in World of Warcraft, I experienced a glitch where I would kill a lion, and it would ressurect again immediately, with an additional clone. The game is designed that you cannot just start over. When your character dies, you spirit appears at the nearest graveyard, and you have to direct your spirit to where your body has lain, and re-enter it, to continue playing. As I re-entered the body, I would only get a few feet away before I was killed again by at least 20 lions. It took a long time for me to get away from there. It was a bug from a software upgrade.

So I accepted that new explanation, and I felt a lot better about life.

But my reaction of un-inviting all those people was rash, and I am paying for it. It appears that you can only invite so many people to be in your alliance. After that, you have to ask other people to let you into their alliance. I used up all my invites. So now it is harder for me to grow my crew.

To make it worse, the game developers made an offering today to appease the players that lost money. They offered a limited time only that was too good to pass up. I could buy a tavern for 58,000 and it would generate 12,000 dollars every hour. But in order to buy the tavern, you had to have an alliance of a certain size. Each tavern would cost 1000 more and require 2 more allience members. So I gathered what I could, and bought 3 taverns today. I would have loved to buy more, but I could not get allies fast enough.

So my expectations of recieving less (or having less) came true simply because that was how I was dealing with the universe in that game. I got what I expected. The Secret is true - I just wasn't true to the Secret - that is, I didn't use the secret to my advantage - better said: I used the Secret to my disadvantage. I did this - I caused this.

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Addendum: Wow! Wow! Wow! Just 30 minutes after making this blog post, I almost had enough money to buy another tavern. The instant I made enough money to get a tavern, a person popped up to be my new ally, and I could close the deal. He showed up riight in time, as if on cue.