malvasia bianca

Earlier this year, Instagram started showing me ads for mobile games, and I guess I didn’t scroll past them quickly enough because I started getting more and more of them. They generally followed the same script: show somebody play through a challenge in the game, have them succeed for a while, and then have them play badly in obvious ways and fail at the challenge. Most of these ads weren’t very interesting but occasionally the gameplay looked kind of fun, so I downloaded a few of the games.

My initial experiences weren’t promising: one puzzle game that was basically a scam, one where the intro gameplay was both boring and had nothing whatsoever to do with the gameplay shown in the ad. But one of them, Last War: Survival, was pleasant enough: the main gameplay wasn’t much like the ad (though the gameplay from the ad was at least present this time), but that main gameplay did seem like a pretty well done clicker / incremental game, and I like those.

So I stuck with it, and I’m still playing Last War almost three months later; I figured it was time to write up some notes.

Incidentally, if anybody reading this is/was in the same alliance as me (server 1791, [fknn] Airheads / Server Pirates, then [CNS2] HotShots), hello there, my name in the game was DBCXYZ, please leave a comment saying hi. (My real name is David Carlton; there are Mastodon and Bluesky links for me somewhere on the right sidebar, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

 

Time as a resource

As I mentioned, the core gameplay loop in Last War has a lot of similarities with incremental games; if you’re not familiar with that genre, Universal Paperclips is my favorite intro to the genre, and Kittens Game is my overall favorite and the example of the genre that feels most prototypical to me. They’re all about the loop of producing resources → spending those resources to buy buildings → improving your resource production; typically, building cost increases exponentially whereas production only increases linearly. That slows down the tempo of the game as it goes on, and it also gives incremental games an opportunity to distinguish themselves by how they handle that tension; typical mechanics include introducing new resource types, new building types, multiple interacting ways of increasing the production of a given resource, and mechanics that allow you to restart the game with a permanent production bonus.

With Last War, you have three primary production resources (food, iron, and gold); you have buildings that produce those resources, you can level up those buildings to enable them to produce more. There’s also a combat mechanic (you’re supposed to be in a zombie apocalypse, after all), so you send out troops to fight zombies (which sometimes includes the minigame that those Instagram ads showed me) or to gather resources out in the world. The game provides more buildings to support combat in different ways, and to more resource types to enable you to level up your heroes and troops across a range of dimensions.

Those mechanics are all pretty familiar to me; one aspect of the game that I’m not used to seeing in incremental games (though in retrospect it’s familiar to me from Facebook games) is the explicit use of time as a resource. In Kittens Game, it might cost 1000 wood then 3000 wood then 9000 wood to build more of a given building, so it takes longer and longer to be able to build subsequent buildings; once you’ve got enough of the resource, though, you click the button and it’s built. Whereas in Last War, buildings have not only a resource cost but also a time cost.

To upgrade a building from level 1 to level 2 might only take 5 seconds, but now I’m working on upgrading buildings from level 24 to level 25, and the time cost there is more like two weeks. Coupled with that is that you only have a finite number of construction queues (I have three of them right now), so that two week wait time really is something that both the game designers and players need to grapple with. And, in fact, it turns out that the time cost is the real cost for upgrading (at least as long as you keep on chipping away in fairly obvious ways at gathering resources): in practice, these days it’s literally never the case for me that I can’t find enough resources to upgrade a building once a queue slot opens up for me to kick off that upgrade.

The game also provides a heartbeat to your building upgrades, in the form of two special buildings, your Headquarters and your Tech Center. (Or Tech Centers, I’ve currently got two of them.) You can’t upgrade any building past your HQ level, so you want to (almost) always be working explicitly on upgrading your HQ. And the HQ is the only building type that has non-resource prerequisites for building it: to upgrade your HQ to level N+1, you always need to upgrade your Tech Center to level N first, and there’s also one other building type (a different type per level) that you need to upgrade to level N as well. So half the time one of your building queues is busy upgrading the HQ, while the other half of your time two of your queues are busy upgrading the Tech Center and whatever that level’s second prerequisite is.

Incidentally, the Tech Center is almost as special as the HQ: there’s a whole research tree that’s enabled by your Tech Center(s), and each Tech Center represents a queue for traversing the research tree. In broad strokes, the considerations for research tree projects are pretty similar to those for building upgrades: a similar resource plus time cost, with the time cost almost always being dominant (though there’s one prominent special resource that is only required in a subset of the tech tree), and a similarly small bound to the number of queues. But the texture of the research tree is different enough from the texture of building upgrades to give the game some pleasant variety.

 

Variations on time management

From an incremental game appreciation point of view, I really like the way that Last War explores variations on the theme of how to give players tools to deal with that time costs. Some of the ways that the game allows that:

Speeding up by a fixed amount

One of the buildings in the game, the Builder’s Hut, provides a fixed speedup to building upgrades. My Builder’s Hut is currently at level 18, and, between the level and between workers that are assigned to it (you can recruit workers for each of your buildings in the game that make it more effective), it gives me a speedup of approximately two hours on every building upgrade I do. The Builder’s Hut speedup was very important when I started the game, so I made the point of leveling up that building every time I could; and when I get a completely new building now (which doesn’t happen very often these days, but it does happen occasionally), that speedup reduces the time cost of the first several levels of upgrade to zero. But it’s almost completely irrelevant once your upgrades get past a certain level: my next HQ upgrade will take 17 days, and reducing that by two hours just doesn’t matter.

Speeding up by a percentage amount

If I could cut my construction time in half, though, that bonus would continue to be important even as buildings level up. Leveling up your Tech Center provides exactly that sort of percentage-based discount; the initial discount is small, but once you get some good workers assigned to it, it becomes quite significant. Right now, on my primary Tech Center, it takes less than half the time to research a new tech than it would if the Tech Center were unupgraded and had no workers.

Speeding up via batch size

I’m a programmer, and one of my favorite tricks there is to divide large tasks into small tasks; if I could do that in Last War and if I could then apply a fixed speedup to those small tasks, that would speed things up enormously! And in fact there’s one situation where you can do exactly that: when your troops get injured, you need to heal them, and you can pick the batch size to heal them.

Your Hospital workers give a percentage discount rather than a flat discount, so just controlling the batch size wouldn’t make a difference; but you’re part of an alliance in the game, and there’s a mechanism where other alliance members can help you. And, when you do that, each member helping you (up to a cap) gives you a discount of a couple of minutes or so. So if you get your healing batch size to somethign that allows the batch to heal in 40 minutes, say, then you just need 20 alliance members to click on the help button and the batch will finish immediately, and you can kick off another batch. (Note that part of the balancing act here is the behavior of other players of the game, not just the behavior of automated systems.)

No speeding up for you

And then there are some mechanisms that you can’t speed up through any of the above three mechanisms. Training new troops is probably the most important example of that: you can pick the batch size, but you can’t get help from allies, so changing the batch size doesn’t actually help speed up your training.

If I had to guess, the developers probably primarily don’t allow speedups here for balancing purposes. If members of active alliances could both heal injured troops and train replacements for dead troops immediately, then they would have an even more dominant advantage over other players in PvP battles, and that wouldn’t be a great experience for the losing side. I could be wrong, though: maybe it’s just a monetization strategy? (I’ll talk more about monetization later.)

 

Alliances

After going through the first few levels of HQ upgrades, Last War strongly encourages you to join an alliance. I’ve actually never played an MMO, or other games where a guild/alliance structure is important, so I can’t really compare alliances in Last War to other games, but here are some notes about it.

On a moment-to-moment level, alliances give you a place to chat and build personal relationships with other players; that’s certainly nice, and is a reason to check in on the game even while you’re mostly just waiting for builds to finish. And there’s enough going on in the game that being able to swap tips with other players is useful, too.

But alliances also have a lot of mechanical effects, even in areas of the game that would make sense in a purely single player game. One of the basic ones is doing rallies to fight enemies: at the start of the game, you’re mostly just taking on single zombies yourself without too much difficulty, but as the game progresses, the game throws in enemies that are tougher. And so it’s useful to be able to get help from alliance members by launching rallies: that way up to five of you can do a single attack together, and some of those other players might be significantly stronger than you. (Thanks for all the help in rallies, CDAWG13!)

The person who launches the rally gets most of the rewards from defeating the enemy, but other participants also get a useful little bonus. The bonuses are more subtle than that, though: every time that a rally defeats an enemy, everybody in the entire alliance also gets a small bonus. I didn’t think too much about that small bonus at first, but now I suspect that it’s actually quite important. (Similarly to how I thought of the construction time bonus from helping your alliance members as useful but not crucial, until I learned about the small batch size healing technique that I mentioned above.) I said above that in practice I’m never starved for the three basic resources, but for all I know that wouldn’t be the case at all if I weren’t getting all of these little alliance-wide bonuses.

 

And then there are larger scale conflicts that the game adds in, where your alliance fights as a whole against another alliance. (Or, on an even larger scale, where all the alliances on your server fight together against another entire server.) The most important of those is Alliance Duels; I’ll spend a whole section talking about them belom. Another aspect of alliance conflict that was important early on is that there are settlements of various sizes on your server; when alliances are young, fighting over those settlements is important. That settled down later, though, as the strongest alliances enforced a non-agression pact preventing alliances from fighting over settlements.

(I honestly don’t know what I think about that non-agression pact; fighting over settlements was a kind of fun mechanism, and it seems odd that that mechanism just stopped getting used? I don’t even know for sure if the meta of the game has settled into all servers agreeing that we shouldn’t fight over settlements. One argument for the non-agression pact is that the server is running 24 hours a day, and it would kind of suck if alliance A was taking a settlement from alliance B when alliance B’s members were asleep and then then B would take it right back from A when A’s members were asleep.)

One thing that those battles over settlments makes clear is that some alliances are stronger than others: maybe they have more members, maybe they have more active members, maybe they have members who are better at working the game’s mechanics, maybe they spend more money to get ahead. And, honestly, I think that sort of sorting is probably a good thing: it’s a lot more fun to be around people who, broadly speaking, have a similar approach to the game to you than to be constantly comparing yourself in global lists to people who spend a lot more money and time on the game. Yes, it means that the alliance I’m in is always going to be just under 10th place on the strength ranking; we can hope to be a little higher, but there’s no way we’re going to be in the top three, and that’s totally fine, those folks are doing their own, very different thing.

 

Or rather, the alliances that I was in were both at around that place in the rankings, because alliances sometimes merge, and so I ended up in two different ones. (And you can also choose to leave an alliance or get kicked out of one and then move to another alliance, but that didn’t happen to me.) I was part of two different mergers, a failed one where we tried to merge another alliance into ours, and a succesful one where our alliance merged into another one.

Those mergers were a reminder that, well, people are people and have feelings. At work, I was pretty heavily involved with integrating a couple of acquisitions of smaller companies; that integration work takes time and effort and even so there are going to be road bumps! Fortunately, mergers in Last War are much lower stakes than mergers in your actual job, but still, we got to speed run those problems, with the extra bonus of not particularly good communication tools and with people who aren’t very experienced with managing the ups and down of mergers. (It wouldn’t surprise me if most successful alliances end up setting up a Discord to help improve communication.)

So I’d be standing there, watching a few people being vocally frustrated with the merger (while a significantly larger number of people seem fine with it), and thinking “yup, that is totally 100% going to happen in any situation where group composition changes!” (The storming part of forming, storming, norming, performing, more or less.) It was easy enough for me to sit back, not take it too seriously, and predict that things would be fine in three days if we would just not overreact to bumps and if the leadership from both sides would help calm things down; in one case, that calming down didn’t happen, in the other case, it did. Though I also don’t want to underplay the problems that cultural incompatibility can lead to; I don’t think that the two sides in the failed merger had so much cultural incompatibility as to make it impossible, but the first alliance that I was in definitely had its quirks.

 

One other small aspect of alliances is that it gave the game a way to work in events that would naturally cause you to lose troops periodically. Every time you add a resource into a game, you have to think about what’s going to force players to use the resource, instead of having them just hoard it. (And you have to take into account loss-averse players like me who will go to some effort to not spend a resource if we can imagine that there might be a better situation in the future to use it!)

And the alliance system is part of how Last War solves that resource sink problem for troops. A couple of times a week, there’s a Marshal’s Guard event where the whole alliance teams up to attack a very strong set of enemies; once a week, there’s a zombie raid where waves of zombies attack everybody’s base; and once a week there’s a Buster Day (and usually a Capitol War at the same time) that gives pretty strong rewards for everybody to get out there and fight. There’s also a carrot that I’ll talk about in the next section, where once a week (right before Buster Day) you get rewarded for training new troops; but to do that, you need to make room in your Drill Ground, which means you want to lose troops.

 

Alliance Duels

As I mentioned earlier, once you get a couple of weeks into the game, it will start taking multiple days to upgrade a single building (or to research a new tech), and you only have a limited number of queues. This leads to long stretches of time where you just don’t have much to do; the game does give you speedup items, but the natural strategies for those are either to always use them (in which case they run out quickly) or to always hoard them until you get a better time to use them (in which case they might as well not be there) so that alone doesn’t particularly help solve the problem.

So, a couple weeks into the the game, Last War introduces a week-long event called “Alliance Duels”. In these, your alliance is paired up against another alliance, and both you as an individual and the alliance as a whole are competing to get the most points; you get pretty good rewards reaching certain fixed point thresholds, with extra points coming from your individual relative ranking and whether or not your alliance won. In particular, there’s one rare resource that basically only comes from Alliance Duels that you need for certain subsets of the tech research tree; initially you only use that resource to get better at Alliance Duels themselves, but then other tech trees open up that depend on that resource, once of which is quite important.

And the way you earn points during Alliance Duels is different based on the day of the week. So, for example, there are two days of the week where you get points both from finishing building upgrades and from using building speedups. If you’re in a situation where, say, upgrading your highest level buildings takes three days, then you might finish your HQ upgrade when one of those days starts (using speedup items if necessary), then during the day you might upgrade your fastest / lowest level buildings (which lets you get the most advantage of the speedups from the Builder’s Hut and from the help from other members of your alliance). And then, at the end of the day, you might kick off the upgrades for the prerequisite buildings for your next HQ level. (And if you’ve got enough speedup items, you might even finish them immediately, which gives you lots of points and lets you start your next HQ upgrade immediately.) This really helps give structure to your building upgrades; and a similar thing happens with your research tree progression, which also gets rewarded on certain days of the Duel.

I also mentioned the problem of creating a resource sink for troops; Alliance Duels help solve that, by having the next-to-last day of the week give you points for training troops, and having the last day of the week (it’s got a special name, Buster Day) give you points for defeating the troops of your Alliance Duel opponent. (And you also get points for losing troops on Buster Day, though the number of points is smaller.) You can opt out of Buster Day if you want (the game lets you shield up to avoid atacks), but it’s a nice incentive if you’re open to PvP combat.

Finally, Alliance Duels help strengthen the social aspects of Last War. They’re main repeating structure of the game, and every day your alliance is fighting to get more points than that week’s opponents. So that gives you something to talk about and strive together for; and there’s enough not-completely-obvious strategy involved in Alliance Duels that those discussions can have substance to them beyond just saying that we should all do our best. One of the things I like about my current alliance is that we’re all trying to help each other learn how to the play the better, and Alliance Duels is one of the big things we talk about there.

 

Monetization

In the circles that I travel in, free-to-play games have a bad rep; honestly, I think a lot of that is snobbishness, but there are real problems with free-to-play games, and the main ones are around monetization. That’s definitely a real thing; I used to work for a Facebook game company (the main game I worked on was Sorority Life), and there are definitely some aspects of how that game made money that I’m not proud of.

Last War, though, seems a lot better in that regard? One of the things that I like about Last War’s monetization is that, honestly, it’s only nominally a free-to-play game: the game is balanced in a way that makes it much more sustainably playable if you buy a few reasonably-priced one-time upgrades.

 

Concretely: when you start out, you can play enough for free to get a feel for the basic flow of the game, enough to know if you’ll like it. Once you’ve done that for a couple of hours, your build times will be long enough that you’ll want to be able to upgrade two buildings at once; you can get a second build queue for $2. And there’s also a UR hero available for $1. (I’ll talk more about the game’s treatment of hero tiers below.) I have to think that most people who play the game for more than a small handful of hours will buy those two items; and I think that spending $3 on two items that give you permanent upgrades is an entirely reasonable amount of money to charge for a game that you’ve already gotten a noticeable amount of enjoyment out of!

And that $3 will carry you for quite a way; I still hear chatter in my guild from people who have been playing for months (and are decently high level, too) who haven’t bought anything more than that. I probably stuck with just those two items for over a month; eventually, though, I got to where I wanted to have two parallel builds going on that each took multiple days, and so I bought a third build queue so that didn’t block me from doing smaller upgrades; that queue cost $10. A little later I bought a second research queue, also for $10. So that’s now $23 I’ve spent; this is for a game that I’ve been poking at for almost three months by now. Again, an entirely reasonable amount of money for the game to ask me to spend! And there’s a fourth build queue available if I want to spend another $20; I think that’s it for build queues, and I think 2 is the limit for research queues.

(Full disclosure: I also bought another UR hero for $5. In retrospect, that was a mistake, I didn’t quite understand the relevant parts game’s mechanics well enough; but that’s fine, I don’t begrudge the game for getting $28 (minus Apple’s cut) instead of $23 out of me.)

And, to be clear, the game is balanced in a way that doing what I did leads to a good experience. Everything I’ve bought was a permanent, non-randomized in-game benefit: you can spend money for consumables, but you don’t have to and there’s not very much pressure to do so. Sure, if you’re impatient or really have to win something in the short term, you can spend money; but if you just want to progress steadily and appreciate the game’s systems and the constraints in them, you can have a good experience with just those four upgrades, and probably even with the first two of them.

 

I mentioned UR heroes above; when I first saw those heroes, I assumed this game was all about rare random draws to try to improve your squad by getting high tier heroes. That’s the way Sorority Life worked (the good loot was just clothes instead of heroes); and I think that paid randomized very rare loot drops are immoral. That feeling was a big part of the reason why I was happy to leave that job; it’s a mechanic that I’ve seen over and over in games I’ve dipped into since then, though.

But it’s not the way Last War works. There aren’t that many UR heroes in the game at all, it doesn’t take that long to acquire more of them than you can actively use just by participating in regular in-game events, and if there’s one you really want to purchase, you can do that for $5. (And, incidentally, while there are more SSR heroes than UR heroes, there aren’t many of those either, and I probably had them all through normal gameplay a month in.)

Because, it turns out that, if you really want to power game, the issue isn’t getting the UR heroes, the issue is leveling up their number of stars. (A two star SSR hero is stronger than a no star UR hero.) That could be a distinction without a difference, except that the material to need to level up those stars is something called shards, and most shards that you get aren’t specific to a hero, they’re specific to a tier. (I.e. you can easily get UR shards that can be used to level up any UR hero.) So, from a monetization point of view, you’re not tempted to buy rare random hero-specific stuff: you’re trying to get not-super-common stuff that can be used across a range of heroes. This is a much more straightforward transaction.

 

And, as with construction queues above, the game is tuned so that you can have an entirely pleasant experience in this aspect of the game as well without spending more than a small amount of money. ($1 to buy one hero in this case!) The game gives you one UR hero for free and one UR hero for very cheap; so, early on, your main five-hero squad will have those two UR heroes and three SSR heroes. You will get more UR heroes, but because of one detail about how the game works (hero types and squad construction bonuses), those will be less attractive to you, so you won’t end up using them much.

As I said above, though, having UR heroes without UR shards doesn’t feel great. But, while UR shards aren’t common, they’re not that rare. The Alliance Duels structure encourages you to spend your shards on one specific day each week; and when that day rolls around, I’ll have maybe 120–150 UR shards available. And that is enough to make me feel like I’m making progress on two UR heroes: right now, one is at 4 3/5 stars, and I’ll either get him up to 4 4/5 or 5 stars this week, and the other is at 4 stars. And my three main SSR heroes are a little ahead of my UR heroes but not a lot: I got one to 5 stars three weeks ago, I think, I got another to 5 stars last week, my third one is probably two weeks away from getting to 5 stars.

So this is all done in a way that feels good to play. You don’t want all the rewards you get from tasks to feel the same, some should be special; but even the special ones shouldn’t feel super random or super rare. And UR shards are nicely balanced to meet those criteria: they’re a reward that I actively seek out when I’ve got a choice, they feel special, but also I get enough that I’m not frustrated by the lack of progress.

(People playing the game are also well aware that I’m simplifying this: there are multiple other dimensions along which you can improve your heroes. But similar arguments apply to the other dimensions: they all require some sort of resource that’s not specific to a single hero, in fact most of the other ones can be applied to any hero, regardless of tier. And you get enough of them to be making a weekly drip of progress on members of your main squad.)

 

So: Last War is only nominally free to play in practice after the first couple of hours, but also, the game is very well balanced to play by spending $3–$23: I think of it as a reasonably-priced game with a free trial period. Except, of course, that, if you do want to spend more money, you can. Every time you launch the game, there’s an exhortation to spend; and there are pretty clear benefits to doing so.

I find those exhortations easy to resist, though? I don’t think I’d be having more fun if I were spending more money, and my psychology is such that the lures that the game puts in front of me aren’t too strong. And in my alliance, there’s only one player who is clearly much stronger than me, it’s quite typical for me to show up somewhere in rank 2–5 in the leaderboard for various alliance events, so clearly there are lots of us who are happy with the same deal that I am. (I mean, maybe they’re all spending lots of money but I’m somehow so awesome that I do well anyways! Seems unlikely, though.)

Also, I actually think it’s completely reasonable to regularly spend money on a game that you enjoy: those servers and developers’ salaries have to come out of somewhere, after all. And if you want to set yourself a budget for how much money you’re comfortable spending on the game, Last War works with you: there are weekly and monthly packs that give you a reasonable boost, and there are also other permanent upgrades that you can spend a bounded amount of money on.

But, having said that, whales do exist in the game; and if you really want to play in the upper tiers of the game, you’ll join an alliance that’s full of them, and I’m sure the social pressures there are different. I don’t necessarily see regularly spending larger amounts of money as a bad thing, though? As an analogy, a restaurant meal that costs $30–$50 per person feels like a nice meal but not like something ridiculous, and that’s something that takes an hour or maybe two and then it’s over. So I don’t see why it’s a priori unreasonable to regularly spend that amount of money on a game that you spend noticeable amounts of time playing.

Sometimes, though, games do prey on vulnerable people, and that’s not good. Without seeing more evidence of that happening in Last War, however, I’m going to assume that they’re not doing that to an irresponsible extent. In particular, the game doesn’t have prominent gambling mechanics; Sorority Life was constantly tempting you to complete a set of clothing where you could only get the items via a randomized drop, and where one item in the drop had only a 1% drop rate; Last War has nothing nearly that extreme that I’ve seen.

 

Fragmented Attention

I’m glad I played Last War, but I also think it’s time for me to stop, because it’s eating too much into my time. My console game playing is nicely walled off: I normally play video games on Monday evenings, Wednesday evenings, and the second half of Sunday afternoons, and that’s an amount and shape of time that I’m happy with. With games that are on my phone, I don’t expect to maintain that level of discipline, but I do still want to limit them to parts of my day instead of checking them regularly.

Last War actually wasn’t too bad in that regard at first. After the first few days, your upgrades at least take hours, and also sending out your troops to fight zombies takes energy, and that energy is limited and takes a little while to recharge. So it was easy enough to pick up the game, spend ten or fifteen minutes to advance some things along, then check on build times and note that nothing was going to happen for, say, three hours, and take a mental note to check the game at whenever I expect my next break to be after that time. And that was a pretty healthy way to engage with the game.

Over the last month, I’ve been finding it harder to maintain that discipline, however. In the mornings, my initial checkin involves more steps than I’d like, but also I’m extending that time longer than necessary. And I’m picking it up more in short breaks than I’d like, too, even when there isn’t anything productive to do.

Basically, I’m finding it harder to resist the pull of low-value intermittent rewards. For example, is anybody saying anything interesting in alliance chat? Have alliance members uncovered any rewards that I should claim? I should be able to ignore that kind of thing, but my mental defenses have been worn down a bit. This is having real consequences: I feel like I’m getting noticeably less done in the mornings than I used to, way too often I find myself hitting lunchtime and not feeling good about how I’ve spent my morning.

Another part of how Last War interferes with my times is various Alliance events, and in particular how they affect my evenings. I talked about Alliance Duels above; they reset each day at 6pm, so it’s useful to check in right before then to see if it would be useful for me to put in a final push to get a few more points. There are also some events that happen every few days that we have a habit of scheduling an hour or so after the reset; they don’t require continuous attention but I’m much more successful in them if I check in on them every couple of minutes for half an hour or so.

And that is a problem: we’re cooking dinner then, or maybe eating dinner. That’s a time where I want to be paying attention to food and my wife, not to a game!

 

So it’s time for me to stop. Part of me is torn: the game is still interesting, I like my alliance members, and I’m genuinely curious about the new mechanics that the game is going to be introducing in another month or so. But I’m also pretty sure that gotten most of what I’m going to get out of the game from a lens of seeing what the game is doing that’s new to me, and the costs of fragmentation at my time have started outweighing the benefits of interactions in the game.

I’m going to stop playing this weekend, after the end of the current Alliance Duel. (And I’m stopping playing permanently, not pausing, because it’s not the sort of game where you can take a few months of and then just come back to and pick it up again.) If any of my alliance members are reading this, I’ll miss you, I hope the alliance continues to do well! Do please leave a comment saying hi, and if you happen to have a blog, please let me know, I’ll read it.