| If you still have yet to hear about Beyond Protocol, it is an MMORTS about to launch November 21st. It offers the player the chance to run their own empire with more options for customization than any other game on the market. It also balances the 5 main elements (Diplomacy, Espionage, Research, Trade, and War) of a typical RTS, rather than focusing on one or two. However, this article, as you may have gleaned from the title, focuses on the cooperative play aspects of the game: Guilds and Aliases. Guilds encourage individual empires to band together, while Aliases encourage players to work together in a single empire. The developers know that MMO players want to play together, so they have implemented these features to allow them to have fun doing just that. They have also cooked up a great deal for guilds, so read on to find out how you and your guild members can each play the game for about $5 a month!. |
| When a guild is formed, requiring 5 initial players, there are several integral options available to those players. Once the guild is created, these options are compounded with even more, such as, event creation, promotion/demotion and treasury control, all of which can be voted on. The voting process is also up for customization, not only can members propose just about anything and have the guild vote on it, but the ranks within the guild can be given custom powers, including voting weights. It is therefore possible to make any sort of government within the guild, from a pure democracy to a complete autocracy. Will it be one vote for every citizen, one vote above every one else, or some combination thereof? Of course this level of customization would not be complete without the option for editing rank names. This allows players to mold the feel of their guild as well as the function. Are the low level players in the guild Grunts, Flies, Peasants, Cadets, Kindergartners, while the highest rank could be Elite, Knight, Juggernaut, Supreme Ruler, Omni-Potentate, or can you think of something more creative? Finally, no organization is truly complete without an event planner of some kind, and one has been included in the guild system. |
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Alias accounts allow one player to log into another player’s account legally, with customizable access, and without exposing any passwords. If player A were to give player B an alias, then player B could log into player A’s account and play it as if it were his/her own.
| That is, if player A trusts player B enough to grant full access. Access can be restricted to a single portion, or granted to the entire empire, and any combination in between. Any number of players can be logged in to one account simultaneously, but the player giving out the alias accounts, player A in this case, holds sovereign control over the rights of all alias accounts. So, while it is possible to invite a saboteur into your empire, once the betrayal is made known, any future damage can be prevented with a few clicks. However, if player A picks the correct players to alias, then the result is an empire run by players all doing what they love most about the game, which would be a very formidable force. It would be akin to being able to simultaneously use all four main classifications of an RTS player: Commander, Rusher, Strategist and Turtle. |
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| So, all of that is well and good, but someone said $5 a month? You read right, there is a real opportunity to pay the equivalent of $5 a month in subscriptions for the life of your account, rather than $12. How do you qualify for this deal? Well, first of all, there has been a longstanding deal between the beta testers and the developers that any player who logs about 10 days of game play by October 31st, 2008 and preorders the game will qualify. However, here’s the new deal, if your guild has 20 or more members who have preordered the game, by the 31st, then the target mark of 10 days is reduced to 5. There will also be at least one more opportunity to further reduce that time, so be on the look out for Beyond Protocol news! Additionally, the deal for 20 preorders in a guild has always been, and still is, that the guild will receive a unique Space Station hull with a texture/logo of their own design, signifying the prestige of that guild for years to come. Feel free to encourage/recruit/bribe anyone you need, to hit that mark! If you have any questions, click here to talk to a customer service representative. |
