Review Submitted By: TwilightMan
Author Status: Player
Started on Firan: 2003
Submission Date: Jun 23, 2005
TMC Listing: Firan
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [TwilightMan]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
Firan at one time was a wonderful and exciting game that I would have
encouraged everyone I knew to come and check out. The players were
great, the staff was unbelievable and the plot was stunning. Over the
past two years or so though that has begun to change and more often
than not, you are dealing with constant angst, problematic plots and a
very, very slow response from the staff.
I blame most of this on staff burnout which the game owners have
failed to address. It's no surprise when you're dealing with 150-200
individual players a week that you would burnout over time, but the
players should not be punished for that burnout. However, right now
they are being punished for it. For example, a time sensitive plot may
require a response from a wizard but due to them all feeling burned
out it does not happen in a timely fashion and your character or
someone else's character is killed/hurt/punished for something that
may have been preventable had you received an answer to your question.
Their own ingame statistics ,which they publish, confirm it and show
that the average response time to answer @requests (their question
system) has grown from 2.5 days to over 5 days since January. On a
game that relies heavily upon staff intervention due to the depth of
the theme, its almost impossible to survive without timely responses.
The problem with this is that they're never too burned out to work
when they feel like running a plot to have an invasion happen or have
some building burn to the ground. It's very selective burnout.
Another major problem is the fact that they definitely gear the game
toward the success of staff played characters or characters played by
friends of people on the staff, which I suppose is their right to do
as they're running the game; it's just disappointing for those not
within their inner circle. I doubt this will ever be addressed and I
believe most people just cope with it now. For some people these
things may not be a big deal and that is fine, for others they
definitely take away from the overall enjoyment of the game.
