Review Submitted By: Cerelum
Author Status: Player
Started on CyberSphere: June 07
Submission Date: Aug 23, 2007
TMC Listing: CyberSphere
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Cerelum]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
Well, I've reviewed this game before, and I've some things to add.
The game has made strides to enhance the cred-making capability, but
it still has it's one fatal flaw. The group of administrators is so
loosely monitored and seems to have no established chain of command.
They all do what they want, when they want and without need of
approval or whatnot.
The game is unique, two others are close, but they are both hollow
shells of what CS has and does right.
The game has some awesome features, some incredible things that
haven't been done on other muds before, at least things I haven't
seen before. Such as turrets that you can purchase that guard rooms,
and will fire on anyone who isn't authorized to be in that room, plus
you can upgrade the turret to fire larger or smaller caliber weapons,
through weapon mounts and what not.
The cloning system is sweet because it gives you permadeath, but a
way around it. So just cause you have one bad day, doesn't really
mean your week or month old character is gone cause he died. However
they make this cloning extremely expencive in the swing of things,
they have cheaper ones, but the chance you'll clone fail (Go retarded
stats wise) is 1/4 at the cheap joint. And goes up from there.
Mid-range cloning costs about 2k, now 2k can take you multiple hours
of play or even days to make if you find yourself in a bind for a
clone.
There is a base playerbase of about 20-30 on a good day. Now these
players are mostly old timers, multiple years old who I feel just
haven't experienced a fun or worthwhile moo or mud outside of the
genre, let me explain why.
They see that doing these small courier jobs and only making say 3k a
day as a plausible thing, but this is where the game truly lacks. The
amount of ways to make cred should be in accordance to the things that
you have to purchase or maintain. What I mean is simply that stuff is
too expensive to maintain (Rent, clones, gear, weapons, ammo etc) for
the pathetic amount of credits your character can make.
Now have I found ways around it? Sure. You make a character who can
fight, give him dodge shock and a killing skill, max his agility and
perception and strength, then give him decking skill, lock expert and
lockpicking skill and you've got a pretty good pot to pick from.
Deckers make a ton of cred, so if you do kryptech, jobweb, oracle all
that, then you are doing pretty decent. If you have lockpicking
you can go see the chick that gives lockpicking jobs about once every
two days for a decent hunk of cred. And after you get sick of running
kp and janya, you have the fighting skills to take on a job with the
mafia, yakuza or whatever.
However with this particular set, you're not really GREAT at
anything, you're just mediocre, if you want to specialize, you have to
tweak your stats in chargen in such a way that you can't really be
good at more then one or at the most two things, (Fighting, Decking,
Stealth) etc.
Now the Admins, as I said before, they just sort of do whatever, they
don't like people who submit ideas that will cause them to actually
work or fix anything. It is my belief that half of them only signed on
for the ability to kill players with superninjas. They make one or two
changes to the game and then play the 'I'm not paid, I volunteer,
why are you asking me to do stuff' whine. When in reality, according
to their own changelog and announcements, they really haven't done
anything to improve the lacking game. They have a whole database of
corps and companies that are supposed to be around the world, probably
in the numbers of 20, but only have about three active.
I just tell you now fair reader, check the sphere out, but don't
have sparkling grandure in mind, settle more for a few sparklers on
fourth of July, type feeling, it's fun, but not as fulfilling as it
should be.
