The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Castle Marrach Review

Castle Marrach is a game produced and hosted by Skotos Tech and is currently one of three games available from that company. The other two games -- The Eternal City and Galactic Emperor: Hegemony are games that have been purchased by Skotos. The first of these was a once-free RPing MUD that has been made a pay-for-play game as a result of the purchase, but which would likely have died an ugly death had Skotos not entered the picture. The latter of these is another purchased game—in this case a strategy game—that has been altered a small amount to fit a background that was originally seen in a discontinued Skotos game.

This review will focus on Castle Marrach because it is the only game of interest to me and because it is the only game which uses Skotos Tech's in-house game engine – a game engine which is supposed to eventually result in many other games being hosted at Skotos' site. (When these other games are supposed to be released is unknown. The only reference to them says:

"Numerous other games, in a variety of genres, are being written by both internal and external game developers. The first of these will be going online in late 2001. Exact release dates will be published when they become concrete."

Seeing as the current date is well past the first quarter of 2002, the above claim will have to be taken with a certain amount of salt.

When reviewing online games there are three things which must be reviewed:

The engine and user interface of the game.
The game's setting and enjoyment potential.
The game's community.

In the first of these, the game engine and user interface, Skotos has a definite winner. The Skotos "Alice" client (the only one I used) is definitely a good thing to have. Despite taking quite a long time to download, the wait is well worth it—the ability to mix web content and MUSH-style interaction makes for a very nice feel to the game. Gone are the tedious ASCII/ANSI maps of traditional MUSHes; instead there is a nice, synchronized graphical map on the side panel of your game's window. Attractive artwork populates both the left and right side panels of your window, and beginner-oriented help is just a button-press away. Also present, but feeling more gimmicky than useful, are clickable directions. Since going in most directions is one or two characters of typing at most, and since moving the mouse to the directional arrows takes your hand away from the keyboard where all the rest of your activity is going to be, I question why this feature was added.

The game's server-side engine is also quite impressive. Seeming to disdain traditional "free emotes", Skotos has provided a game engine in which you emote through judicious use of verbs and adverbs. Instead of having just something like:

say "I think this is a waste of time."

You would instead say things like:

mournfully say "I think this is a waste of time."
opine thoughtfully "I think this is a waste of time."

The game engine converts these for other players so that they see things like:

Foobar mournfully says "I think this is a waste of time."
Foobar opines thoughtfully "I think this is a waste of time."

This technique takes a bit of getting used to, admittedly. The lack of free emotes means that you have to look carefully over the lists of verbs and adverbs that pop up when you type an incomplete command. And, sadly, what Skotos' parser considers to be an incomplete command can be very idiosyncratic (with mistakes leading to rather embarrassing in-game consequences). Still, this is a relatively light learning curve for a lot of gain in expressiveness when it has been passed.

Also powerful in Skotos' software, albeit perhaps not as powerful as the fully-programmable clients for MUSHes that are available (but for that much easier for a technically incompetent person to use), are macros. The verb/adverb system used by Skotos can place a large burden on the user: both in terms of coming up with the perfect adverb for the situation as well as in terms of raw typing. A review isn't the proper place for documenting all the features of the macro system, but a quick example would be in order:

MACRO ADD br bow respect1
MACRO ADD respect1 {respectfully|honorably|flawlessly}

This pair of macros would replace the command "br" with the word "bow" followed by one of the words "respectfully", "honorably" and "flawlessly" selected at random. Since macros can contain calls to other macros, the combination of random selection lists and nested macros can allow very complicated behaviour to be provided with a far shorter command. During my trial month I was often very tempted to make long, complicated macros that would allow me to simulate very realistic behaviour without me bothering to think about things. I resisted the temptation, but had I continued on past the trial month into the pay periods, I likely would have succumbed at one point or another.

On the downside of the technology -- there is always some -- the consent system that Skotos has put in place is... quirky. It is based upon "proximity" consent, not individual actions. This can lead to some surprises. Some unpleasant ones if you're prone to being disturbed by in-game actions. (I'm pretty much unflappable in this regard, so I didn't care.) Other problems I experienced seem to be the product of system upgrades being implemented and then not fully tested until players started to use them.

Overall, however, the good points of the technology outweigh the bad points, so I'll rate the technology of the servers and client as 4/5.

The game's setting did not impress me quite as much. It is an intriguing idea. You wake up somewhere with but one memory wrapped in linens in a place you do not recognize nor know anything about. The only thing you know (maybe) is your name. The rest you have to find out for yourself. It sounds interesting, and the extra flavor text you read on the game's main web site makes it sound like there are mysteries to explore and unravel.

Sadly this doesn't appear to be the case. Despite just under a month of play, and despite careful reading of all of the game's materials (a staggering amount of which is on the game's in-character forum), I saw no sign of any mysteries being unravelled. I instead saw a game that was seemingly a Machiavellian's wet dream: conniving and backstabbing being the normal mode of character interaction. Still, this in itself makes for an interesting environment. To make this work, however, staff has to ensure that all (or at least most) such interaction is purely in-character. This is made more difficult by the fact that such conniving and backstabbing games seem to attract people who are conniving and backstabbing out-of-character as well. I'll discuss my impressions of how well this was accomplished below.

A major weakness of the setting, however, is an artificial split of the castle into an "Outer Bailey" and an "Inner Bailey" (OB and IB for short). The theory of this split is that the OB is where "guests" of the castle's queen reside until they can prove themselves worthy to enter the IB. Guests in the OB will rarely, if ever, see the higher-ups in the castle. The process of becoming "worthy" is part of the Machiavellian process I mentioned above and, in theory, this should create much exciting tension and conflict as people strive to climb the social structures (the so-called "Great Chain of Being"). And in practice it does create some of that. But it creates a much larger problem as well.

The problem is that once you have reached a secure IB position, there is apparently some strong in-character pressure to not associate with the OB inhabitants. I have not experienced such pressure directly, of course, since in a month-long trial subscription I could not possibly have climbed to even the lowest levels which include access to the IB. But, again, from reading the game's forums—this time the out-of-character one—it seems to be real, not imagined. The effect this has on the game is unfortunate. The sad fact is that those who get promoted to the IB tend strongly to be superior role-players. Those who are left behind may also be good role-players who are playing roles that aren't ambitious, but it is more likely that they are the mediocre-to-poor role-players. And this is where the tragedy lies: do you really want to put your new players together with the weakest of your players? Is that really the impression you want to give to people evaluating your game?

Don't get me wrong. While I played my trial run, I really enjoyed some of the RPing interactions that I had. There are some very good role-players out in the OB; characters who are there for a variety of reasons ranging from being newcomers themselves to playing characters who are not ambitious to playing characters with inscrutable motives for remaining in the OB. Sadly, however, these sterling role-players are outnumbered by the pedestrian and the just-plain-bad. One of the reasons that I decided to not continue with my account past the first month is that I wasn't receiving ten dollars' worth of enjoyment from the game – and much of that was due to frustration at being essentially fenced away from the people who, judging by the contents of the in-character forum, were exactly the kind of people I wanted to role-play with.

So, basically, my impression of the game's setting boils down to this: it is an intriguing notion that, with proper policing, could be a very entertaining environment. Unfortunately a major design flaw reduces much of that entertainment to the point that I decided I would not be continuing past my trial period. Since my own standards may well be quite a bit harsher than most others', I will wind up rating the game's setting and enjoyment as 3/5. (For my personal use it would only be 2/5.)

The final component of a good, enjoyable online game is its community. A social game especially lives and dies by its community. In this case, sadly, it is the latter and not the former. It has been a long time since I have encountered a game community as hostile as that of Castle Marrach.

In the many MUSHes I play—and all of them are free—it is recognized that new players are the lifeblood of the game. This is, indeed, recognized to the point that most of them have special players who are partially (wholly?) staff who are tasked with greeting and integrating new players. In theory Castle Marrach also has such players (they're called "Awakeners"), but these seem to provide little-to-no useful support. I spent the first week of my stay in Castle Marrach bewildered and, essentially, alone. I was, to be fair, very quickly clothed in something other than the linen wrappings I woke up in, but beyond that was given little to no support. Worse, I got the distinct impression of being shut out of everything. In that week I heard the Castle Marrach jargon for new characters ("newly") spoken in almost-constant disdain. And I don't mean only in an in-character context. It was used disdainfully several times in my presence (albeit not directed at me) in an out-of-character context.

I personally find it hard to fathom why a game whose owners expect money would be so hostile to newcomers. When I consider the almost-astonishing levels of support I've received in games which have a far more complicated setting (complete with a real background) that cost absolutely nothing to play, the lackadaisical approach to supporting new players that Skotos Tech seems to have is mind-boggling. This is especially compounded when you consider just how simplistic a setting Castle Marrach actually is. It should be dirt-simple to integrate a new player into Castle Marrach and, yet, it took over a week before I was able to get players to even notice my presence in the game.

Even worse, however, is the apparent lack of policing that the game's owners do. As I mentioned above, Machiavellian games are fun, but only as long as the politics are purely in-character. Since Machiavellian games tend to attract people who will often allow the politics to extend into real life, out-of-character politics, the staff of such political games must very carefully watch for such things and cut them off when they start. This apparently (and I stress this is appearance) does not happen in Castle Marrach. Scanning the game's forums (both in-character and out-of-character) from the beginning you will find complaints of alternate character abuse and staff favoritism in a low level, but constant simmer. All of the allegations are unproven, however. It's just their constancy that makes me suspicious. Well, their constancy and one incident in particular.

This one exception is a confirmed incident of staff abuse where a staff member of the game used multiple characters and accounts to publicly lambaste some players she didn't like. The setup was as follows: a staff member offered, under her staff identity, another player's character a choice between staying in a relatively low-ranking craft position or a very high-ranking position in the IB. Needless to say, the player chose the promotion. The staff member then, in the out-of-character forum, used another identity, in effect disguising herself as "just another average player" to complain about the behaviour of three other players that supposedly drove the promoted player into quitting her craft position in the castle. The staff member named three specific names and, then, in a fit of Machiavellian nastiness, "apologized" to the three players, thereby naming them again, thus stressing those three names in the minds of the readers. If true, this would be very nasty behaviour indeed.

Initially, when confronted with this story, I placed it into the rumor category. I have, after all, heard similar rumors and complaints from disaffected players in most of the games I play. What caught my attention in this, however, was that I started to hear the story more and more from players that showed no signs of being disaffected. They were well-placed and upwardly-mobile. They enjoyed the game. They just seemed to be disgusted by the action of this one staff member. I started to doubt that this incident was a rumor.

The incident turned into fact when the staff member in question suddenly announced her departure from the game. In her farewell post she listed the roles she played in the castle (an impressive list of them!) and, in the list, were both her staff name and the name of the "average player" who complained. Needless to say, this confirmation lends credence to other complaints about similar problems in-game.

So, in the end, my evaluation of the Castle Marrach community is unremittingly negative. Its approach to newcomers (both in terms of in-character support and out-of-character respect) is flatly worthless. All of the MUSHes I play (all of them free, recall) offer far better support for new players and new characters than Castle Marrach's community does. This despite, mind you, the simplistic background and setting of Castle Marrach which should make integrating new players quite simple. The further, near-constant, allegations of out-of-character player (and even staff) misconduct leave me with no choice but to rate the Castle Marrach community as 1/5.

I'm tempted to say that the final rating for any game should be the lowest of the ratings for its technical facets, its setting and its community. I think this is unfair, however, since apparently some people do find their place in the Castle Marrach community. So my final rating for the game overall is 2/5 for substance (game setting and community). For style (game engine and client) the game is a solid 4/5 (which, I should mention, is the highest mark I would give to any online text game I've played ever).

What specific recommendations would I give to improve things? First off find a way to make the community more friendly to new players. What is in place now is very badly off-putting. Second would be to do something about the continued impressions of player and staff misconduct. If the allegations that are constantly made are, in fact, correct, some kind of purge is needed to weed out the problem players. If the allegations are false, there is a serious PR problem in the works that needs to be addressed. The final thing to fix would be the current problem of moving all your good-to-perfect role-players away from new players so that new players mostly see your mediocre-to-bad players.

And I would very much like to see other games based on Castle Marrach's game engine. Perhaps games that are less openly Machiavellian will be more enjoyable and more open to newcomers.

Castle Marrach
Castle Marrach Playtest Review by William Yan on 20/04/02 Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money) An intriguing premise supported by excellent technology but marred by some conceptual flaws and a user community that is hostile to newcomers. Product: Castle Marrach Author: Various Category: Online Text RPG Company/Publisher: Skotos Tech Line: n/a Cost: $10/mo. Page count: n/a Year published: 1999 onwards ISBN: n/a SKU: n/a Comp copy?: no Playtest Review by William Yan on 20/04/02 Genre tags: Fantasy Other	Castle Marrach Review Castle Marrach is a game produced and hosted by Skotos Tech and is currently one of three games available from that company. The other two games -- The Eternal City and Galactic Emperor: Hegemony are games that have been purchased by Skotos. The first of these was a once-free RPing MUD that has been made a pay-for-play game as a result of the purchase, but which would likely have died an ugly death had Skotos not entered the picture. The latter of these is another purchased game—in this case a strategy game—that has been altered a small amount to fit a background that was originally seen in a discontinued Skotos game. This review will focus on Castle Marrach because it is the only game of interest to me and because it is the only game which uses Skotos Tech's in-house game engine – a game engine which is supposed to eventually result in many other games being hosted at Skotos' site. (When these other games are supposed to be released is unknown. The only reference to them says: "Numerous other games, in a variety of genres, are being written by both internal and external game developers. The first of these will be going online in late 2001. Exact release dates will be published when they become concrete." Seeing as the current date is well past the first quarter of 2002, the above claim will have to be taken with a certain amount of salt. When reviewing online games there are three things which must be reviewed: The engine and user interface of the game. The game's setting and enjoyment potential. The game's community. In the first of these, the game engine and user interface, Skotos has a definite winner. The Skotos "Alice" client (the only one I used) is definitely a good thing to have. Despite taking quite a long time to download, the wait is well worth it—the ability to mix web content and MUSH-style interaction makes for a very nice feel to the game. Gone are the tedious ASCII/ANSI maps of traditional MUSHes; instead there is a nice, synchronized graphical map on the side panel of your game's window. Attractive artwork populates both the left and right side panels of your window, and beginner-oriented help is just a button-press away. Also present, but feeling more gimmicky than useful, are clickable directions. Since going in most directions is one or two characters of typing at most, and since moving the mouse to the directional arrows takes your hand away from the keyboard where all the rest of your activity is going to be, I question why this feature was added. The game's server-side engine is also quite impressive. Seeming to disdain traditional "free emotes", Skotos has provided a game engine in which you emote through judicious use of verbs and adverbs. Instead of having just something like: say "I think this is a waste of time." You would instead say things like: mournfully say "I think this is a waste of time." opine thoughtfully "I think this is a waste of time." The game engine converts these for other players so that they see things like: Foobar mournfully says "I think this is a waste of time." Foobar opines thoughtfully "I think this is a waste of time." This technique takes a bit of getting used to, admittedly. The lack of free emotes means that you have to look carefully over the lists of verbs and adverbs that pop up when you type an incomplete command. And, sadly, what Skotos' parser considers to be an incomplete command can be very idiosyncratic (with mistakes leading to rather embarrassing in-game consequences). Still, this is a relatively light learning curve for a lot of gain in expressiveness when it has been passed. Also powerful in Skotos' software, albeit perhaps not as powerful as the fully-programmable clients for MUSHes that are available (but for that much easier for a technically incompetent person to use), are macros. The verb/adverb system used by Skotos can place a large burden on the user: both in terms of coming up with the perfect adverb for the situation as well as in terms of raw typing. A review isn't the proper place for documenting all the features of the macro system, but a quick example would be in order: MACRO ADD br bow respect1 MACRO ADD respect1 {respectfully\|honorably\|flawlessly} This pair of macros would replace the command "br" with the word "bow" followed by one of the words "respectfully", "honorably" and "flawlessly" selected at random. Since macros can contain calls to other macros, the combination of random selection lists and nested macros can allow very complicated behaviour to be provided with a far shorter command. During my trial month I was often very tempted to make long, complicated macros that would allow me to simulate very realistic behaviour without me bothering to think about things. I resisted the temptation, but had I continued on past the trial month into the pay periods, I likely would have succumbed at one point or another. On the downside of the technology -- there is always some -- the consent system that Skotos has put in place is... quirky. It is based upon "proximity" consent, not individual actions. This can lead to some surprises. Some unpleasant ones if you're prone to being disturbed by in-game actions. (I'm pretty much unflappable in this regard, so I didn't care.) Other problems I experienced seem to be the product of system upgrades being implemented and then not fully tested until players started to use them. Overall, however, the good points of the technology outweigh the bad points, so I'll rate the technology of the servers and client as 4/5. The game's setting did not impress me quite as much. It is an intriguing idea. You wake up somewhere with but one memory wrapped in linens in a place you do not recognize nor know anything about. The only thing you know (maybe) is your name. The rest you have to find out for yourself. It sounds interesting, and the extra flavor text you read on the game's main web site makes it sound like there are mysteries to explore and unravel. Sadly this doesn't appear to be the case. Despite just under a month of play, and despite careful reading of all of the game's materials (a staggering amount of which is on the game's in-character forum), I saw no sign of any mysteries being unravelled. I instead saw a game that was seemingly a Machiavellian's wet dream: conniving and backstabbing being the normal mode of character interaction. Still, this in itself makes for an interesting environment. To make this work, however, staff has to ensure that all (or at least most) such interaction is purely in-character. This is made more difficult by the fact that such conniving and backstabbing games seem to attract people who are conniving and backstabbing out-of-character as well. I'll discuss my impressions of how well this was accomplished below. A major weakness of the setting, however, is an artificial split of the castle into an "Outer Bailey" and an "Inner Bailey" (OB and IB for short). The theory of this split is that the OB is where "guests" of the castle's queen reside until they can prove themselves worthy to enter the IB. Guests in the OB will rarely, if ever, see the higher-ups in the castle. The process of becoming "worthy" is part of the Machiavellian process I mentioned above and, in theory, this should create much exciting tension and conflict as people strive to climb the social structures (the so-called "Great Chain of Being"). And in practice it does create some of that. But it creates a much larger problem as well. The problem is that once you have reached a secure IB position, there is apparently some strong in-character pressure to not associate with the OB inhabitants. I have not experienced such pressure directly, of course, since in a month-long trial subscription I could not possibly have climbed to even the lowest levels which include access to the IB. But, again, from reading the game's forums—this time the out-of-character one—it seems to be real, not imagined. The effect this has on the game is unfortunate. The sad fact is that those who get promoted to the IB tend strongly to be superior role-players. Those who are left behind may also be good role-players who are playing roles that aren't ambitious, but it is more likely that they are the mediocre-to-poor role-players. And this is where the tragedy lies: do you really want to put your new players together with the weakest of your players? Is that really the impression you want to give to people evaluating your game? Don't get me wrong. While I played my trial run, I really enjoyed some of the RPing interactions that I had. There are some very good role-players out in the OB; characters who are there for a variety of reasons ranging from being newcomers themselves to playing characters who are not ambitious to playing characters with inscrutable motives for remaining in the OB. Sadly, however, these sterling role-players are outnumbered by the pedestrian and the just-plain-bad. One of the reasons that I decided to not continue with my account past the first month is that I wasn't receiving ten dollars' worth of enjoyment from the game – and much of that was due to frustration at being essentially fenced away from the people who, judging by the contents of the in-character forum, were exactly the kind of people I wanted to role-play with. So, basically, my impression of the game's setting boils down to this: it is an intriguing notion that, with proper policing, could be a very entertaining environment. Unfortunately a major design flaw reduces much of that entertainment to the point that I decided I would not be continuing past my trial period. Since my own standards may well be quite a bit harsher than most others', I will wind up rating the game's setting and enjoyment as 3/5. (For my personal use it would only be 2/5.) The final component of a good, enjoyable online game is its community. A social game especially lives and dies by its community. In this case, sadly, it is the latter and not the former. It has been a long time since I have encountered a game community as hostile as that of Castle Marrach. In the many MUSHes I play—and all of them are free—it is recognized that new players are the lifeblood of the game. This is, indeed, recognized to the point that most of them have special players who are partially (wholly?) staff who are tasked with greeting and integrating new players. In theory Castle Marrach also has such players (they're called "Awakeners"), but these seem to provide little-to-no useful support. I spent the first week of my stay in Castle Marrach bewildered and, essentially, alone. I was, to be fair, very quickly clothed in something other than the linen wrappings I woke up in, but beyond that was given little to no support. Worse, I got the distinct impression of being shut out of everything. In that week I heard the Castle Marrach jargon for new characters ("newly") spoken in almost-constant disdain. And I don't mean only in an in-character context. It was used disdainfully several times in my presence (albeit not directed at me) in an out-of-character context. I personally find it hard to fathom why a game whose owners expect money would be so hostile to newcomers. When I consider the almost-astonishing levels of support I've received in games which have a far more complicated setting (complete with a real background) that cost absolutely nothing to play, the lackadaisical approach to supporting new players that Skotos Tech seems to have is mind-boggling. This is especially compounded when you consider just how simplistic a setting Castle Marrach actually is. It should be dirt-simple to integrate a new player into Castle Marrach and, yet, it took over a week before I was able to get players to even notice my presence in the game. Even worse, however, is the apparent lack of policing that the game's owners do. As I mentioned above, Machiavellian games are fun, but only as long as the politics are purely in-character. Since Machiavellian games tend to attract people who will often allow the politics to extend into real life, out-of-character politics, the staff of such political games must very carefully watch for such things and cut them off when they start. This apparently (and I stress this is appearance) does not happen in Castle Marrach. Scanning the game's forums (both in-character and out-of-character) from the beginning you will find complaints of alternate character abuse and staff favoritism in a low level, but constant simmer. All of the allegations are unproven, however. It's just their constancy that makes me suspicious. Well, their constancy and one incident in particular. This one exception is a confirmed incident of staff abuse where a staff member of the game used multiple characters and accounts to publicly lambaste some players she didn't like. The setup was as follows: a staff member offered, under her staff identity, another player's character a choice between staying in a relatively low-ranking craft position or a very high-ranking position in the IB. Needless to say, the player chose the promotion. The staff member then, in the out-of-character forum, used another identity, in effect disguising herself as "just another average player" to complain about the behaviour of three other players that supposedly drove the promoted player into quitting her craft position in the castle. The staff member named three specific names and, then, in a fit of Machiavellian nastiness, "apologized" to the three players, thereby naming them again, thus stressing those three names in the minds of the readers. If true, this would be very nasty behaviour indeed. Initially, when confronted with this story, I placed it into the rumor category. I have, after all, heard similar rumors and complaints from disaffected players in most of the games I play. What caught my attention in this, however, was that I started to hear the story more and more from players that showed no signs of being disaffected. They were well-placed and upwardly-mobile. They enjoyed the game. They just seemed to be disgusted by the action of this one staff member. I started to doubt that this incident was a rumor. The incident turned into fact when the staff member in question suddenly announced her departure from the game. In her farewell post she listed the roles she played in the castle (an impressive list of them!) and, in the list, were both her staff name and the name of the "average player" who complained. Needless to say, this confirmation lends credence to other complaints about similar problems in-game. So, in the end, my evaluation of the Castle Marrach community is unremittingly negative. Its approach to newcomers (both in terms of in-character support and out-of-character respect) is flatly worthless. All of the MUSHes I play (all of them free, recall) offer far better support for new players and new characters than Castle Marrach's community does. This despite, mind you, the simplistic background and setting of Castle Marrach which should make integrating new players quite simple. The further, near-constant, allegations of out-of-character player (and even staff) misconduct leave me with no choice but to rate the Castle Marrach community as 1/5. I'm tempted to say that the final rating for any game should be the lowest of the ratings for its technical facets, its setting and its community. I think this is unfair, however, since apparently some people do find their place in the Castle Marrach community. So my final rating for the game overall is 2/5 for substance (game setting and community). For style (game engine and client) the game is a solid 4/5 (which, I should mention, is the highest mark I would give to any online text game I've played ever). What specific recommendations would I give to improve things? First off find a way to make the community more friendly to new players. What is in place now is very badly off-putting. Second would be to do something about the continued impressions of player and staff misconduct. If the allegations that are constantly made are, in fact, correct, some kind of purge is needed to weed out the problem players. If the allegations are false, there is a serious PR problem in the works that needs to be addressed. The final thing to fix would be the current problem of moving all your good-to-perfect role-players away from new players so that new players mostly see your mediocre-to-bad players. And I would very much like to see other games based on Castle Marrach's game engine. Perhaps games that are less openly Machiavellian will be more enjoyable and more open to newcomers.