Travian
(Warning: this (sad, cautionary) tale reads like a prose version of the nights on Red Dwarf when Rimmer would read aloud from his ‘Risk’ campaign book; ‘then Atkinson rolled a five, and the fate of the Urals hung by a thread, I had a to roll a six…’).

Travian, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a time-consuming, life-consuming, all-consuming free browser based multiplayer game based around resource management, diplomacy and, I discovered, displays of petulance normally associated with chav toddlers denied a treat but not denied sugar and additives for breakfast.

You start with a village and build up a little town and then a city. If you do well, you can expand into adjacent game squares and build a little community, you can then set up alliances and decide whether to become a megalomaniac world conquering tyrant crushing the skulls of your enemies beneath your jewelled sandals. Or not. I was, at this point, merely a recreational user.

I spent weeks bimbling along, trading, ignoring my neighbours (mistake!) and building up my village. Over the weeks I was getting more and more into the game, the more resource you have the closer you need to manage it to prevent waste. Eventually I would be visiting every half hour.

Then came the day I marshalled my resources and founded a neighbouring village. I set my workers to work, posted guard, invested resource and went to bed, secure in the knowledge that while I slept, my minions would toil. In the morning I would have a new village.

In the morning I had a smoking pit where my new village had been, a decimated capital, a new mortal enemy and a habit that consumed my time like fat kids consume happy meals.

The next two weeks were a futile, joyless war of attrition against alliances that hugely outnumbered me. I would build my forces, launch an attack, then defend against the counterattack. What made it worse was that a timer showed when incoming attacks were due. The bastard tactic was for villages in the alliance to launch an attack that would arrive at three in the morning. I was staying up late to fight off attacks and getting up at sparrowfart to assess the damage. I was grumpy and irritable, fuming and mentally composing crushing messages to send to my enemy after humiliating him on the field of battle.

Oddly, when I stopped acknowledging the gloating messages that came after the battles, the attacks dropped off and I resumed farming. (A failure of the game, I felt, was that a smoking village did not automatically generate a hero-class muscle-bound warrior with an Osstrian occent almost as thick as his thighs who would go on a bloody rampage of revenge).

Then two weeks later another village raids mine. I respond with many many raids and reduce his shabby little hamlet to ruins. His alliance respond and for the next weeks I battled truly overwhelming odds. The very odd thing was that by now, I was in a state eerie calm. Yet I still couldn’t stop.

Then the game stopped. Some other player somewhere had won by building a golden village hall or something. I was free at last.

I didn’t bother signing up for a new game. To win you have to make alliances and to do that you have to ally yourself with the sort of odious little goits that take it all seriously enough to manage dozens of villages and mastermind hundreds of attacks. Given the sort of monster I turned into trying to manage one village, I suspect that anyone successful at this lists their hobbies as: Travian, pot noodle and wanking.*

*Not themselves either. Ugggh.
(Macnabbs may contain traces of exaggeration on, Mon 22 Dec 2008, 12:45, 5 replies)

I too know
the game that is Travian. I found it a few years ago through another online browser game I was playing (pardus, if anyone's interested). I had a similar experience with other players, accept after a whole alliance came along and catapulted my village to dust I couldn't be bothered with it any more. I told some friends about the wonderful farming opportunities to be had in my locality (namely my now abandoned villages) and left.
(7inchcodpiece, Mon 22 Dec 2008, 13:37, closed)

But then..
..I rolled a six and a two
(ldwater otherwise known as a 'jive turkey', Mon 22 Dec 2008, 14:12, closed)

Raided villages could also generate
a Spaniard who says "my name is Veangeful_Villager_68904. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Mon 22 Dec 2008, 14:20, closed)

the advertising for Travian that I've seen
strongly implies that it's like the board game Settlers of Catan (which has no direct conflict, only a race to build). So thanks for the warning.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Mon 22 Dec 2008, 14:21, closed)

Something Similar
In the early days of the web, there was an online game. The name escapes me but the idea was to build a business empire, building and managing stores and so on, competing against other players, building new properties, buying out or extorting theirs and so on.

It soon became clear that growth came from paying attention and downtime caused stagnation. It didn't require a huge amount of time so every hour or two, I'd log on, tweak some bits and prices and then go back to what I was doing. Presumably the other players couldn't or wouldn't devote the time and soon, I was the major player on the board. This continued for one or two weeks, a low-level of constant attention. Other players fell before me, fairly large empires shrank and disappeared. I owned 96% of the map and the remaining players were mere splodges not long to resist my overwhelming might...

The next game turn came and...

The map was empty. Well, I say empty. The tiny splodges remained. The game's financial year had come around and my taxes exceeded my income (many millions of income, a couple of grand discrepancy). I had been a bit over-aggressive in buying other players properties the last turn and the game decided I was bankrupt.

I closed the browser and never looked back.
(Richy_T hundreds if not thousands of dollars, Mon 22 Dec 2008, 19:16, closed)