Reading the article The economics of hive idle gaming has led me to try a similar kind of review of some aspects of the Galactic Milieu.
The term idle gaming refers to the ability to sit back and let the game chug along while you are not actively "at the keyboard", so that you in effect just set things in motion then sit back and wait for them to "come to fruition". "Real time strategy" games are an example genre that falls into the category.
A lot of the #Galactic-Milieu suits itself to that style of play; then too since the #Galactic-Milieu does not frown upon the use of scripted / automated play, deployment of bots to handle actions and reactions that otherwise would require being at the keyboard can also be regarded as a form of "idle gaming".
Perhaps the ultimate in "idle gaming" is simply applying a "buy-and-hold" approach to the tokens, assets, currencies and such used in a game; in the #Galactic-Milieu you do not even have to "play" the game at all to do that, you just pick up some game "stuff" that has a good chance of growing in value and hold it, to sell later hopefully at a profit.
Even trading in currencies or assets can be a form of "idle gaming". From time to time you place buy and/or sell offers, then sit back and wait for an offer to be taken up, coming back to the keyboard only to react to such events.
The #Galactic-Milieu thus presents a whole spectrum of "idle gaming" opportunities.
One thing that stands out in my mind is that in a lot of the #Galactic-Milieu players are going to earn pretty much inevitably, unlike in things like #Splinterlands in which there seems to be a kind of threshold below which there is no earning going on at all.
(For example if you play #Splinterlands without a "spellbook", or with only a "spellbook" but no cards of your own, or even with simply not enough or not good enough cards.)
Another distinction is whether one can play "for free" at all. In for example #Splinterlands it is possible to play for free (such as by not buying even a "spellbook") but one cannot earn that way. In the #Galactic-Milieu, by contrast, the free-to-play rabbit-hole into the Milieu is, like most (or maybe all?) other facets of the Milieu, one in which one earns and earns and earns; one might not earn "a lot", but as long as one's characters are alive and doing stuff, they will earn.
Ah, but is that "idle gaming"?
Well the "rabbit hole" (window into the Milieu) in question uses #Crossfire-RPG, which, like #MUD and #Roguelike games involves maps (or areas, or "rooms" etc) that "refresh". (Some refer to such refreshes as "drops".) So even when your actual earnings do rely upon you (or your scripts / bots) being "at the keyboard" to snap up loot and critter "drops" when they happen, nonetheless the waiting for a "drop" to be ready to collect comes under the aegis of "idle gaming".
Not that you have to be idle between "drops", of course!
You can run around constantly from "drop" to "drop" as long as you (or your scripts / bots) are "at the keyboard", turning your active sessions into an almost constant stream of earnings. But. The "drops" are not "sharded" or "instanced" to provide each character or party with its own set of "drops". So you are in competition with other characters also roaming the same landscape of maps, possibly looting some of the "drops" you are hoping to grab before you get to them or maybe "camping them out" (lurking waiting to snap them up the moment they happen instead of roaming around looking for others that might already be ready to grab).
#Crossfire-RPG was never really intended for "player versus player" (#PvP) play; in fact one of the settings in its configuration file is how much it "nerfs" the damage players do when another player becomes a target of their attack, so "friendly fire" can be "nerfed" to an arbitrary extent in any given #Crossfire-RPG server. There is however an "arena" feature in which players do get to face off against one-another if they choose to use that feature.
There are also "passive earnings" opportunities, such as character-owned shops that can be bought and stocked.
Because the #Galactic-Milieu is built from free open-source components, you can download its parts - such as for example, #Crossfire-RPG, to explore and to practice on your own hardware, or, such as with #FreeCiv and #CoffeeMUD as well as #Crossfire-RPG, there are servers "out there" that are not a part of the #Galactic-Milieu but which you are free to play to learn how that particular platform/game works and develop skills and experience as a player that you can then bring to the Milieu. That is particularly useful for facets such as #CoffeeMUD and #FreeCiv and the various web-based "real time strategy" games that are so ridiculously lucrative, and in game backstory imply so much wealth just to tool up to a point where one could reasonably manage to put together the starting stuff that in the stand-alone games one is just given for free at the outset, that it simply is not reasonable when they are embedded into the Milieu to let people start into them "for free".
The #Galactic-Milieu has already had quite a bit of drama arising from the mistake of letting people start into some facet of it "for free", even when we incorporated a "startup loans" programme whereby although the players simply got their startup gear and location free in the backstory it was assumed that of course it was by means of startup loans that they had obtained all that initial stuff. The problem in that case was that too many players who get something free fail to value it enough to even bother to play it, let alone play it productively, let alone make payments toward their startup loans. That led to the eventual deployment of "Galactic Repossession Corps" to go take over the abandoned Corps and try to get them solvent again to get the startup loans paid-off; it also led to the decision not to use that model in the future.
Going forward, most facets of the #Galactic-Milieu will involve up-front startup costs or requirements; any "financing" of such things can be handled by players for players, the game itself is no longer equipping players with startup gear and situations / locations "for free" except, still, at time of writing, via #Crossfire-RPG, in which the startup gear a starting character receives is still currently deemed a small enough "hole in the economy" to remain, for now, allowable. At any moment though someone might come along and "take advantage" of that fact so egregiously that that loophole, too, will end up having to be closed.
So grab the opportunity while it still exists! Create yourself a player-account on a #Crossfire-RPG server that is part of the #Galactic-Milieu while they are still available free of charge, as despite so many years having gone by without us being forced to plug that "loophole in the economy" who knows how much longer we will be able to keep it open?
-MarkM-
