The two-tier limitation system is something I deliberated on for a while. Many times I considered doing away with the NukeZone-style attack limitations and I figured that the soft limits would all be enough to keep people generally in line, while still giving them the choice to be evil if they wanted to. However, memories of being continually zeroed in Mech Wars came back to haunt me, and I decided to include it for the most extreme situations.

They are both definitely things which will require balancing once the game makes it to a playable beta. Mech Wars had a community which could largely keep itself in check - clans and alliances which would stick up for the small guys. This more or less ceased to be the case in the latest round (Late 2005) because there were just too few players and clans were thirsty for blood.

So, I think that my game will be quite different when it starts off and is small, compared to when (or if) it gets big. Things will need to be changed and balanced accordingly. But generally I completely agree that being more like Mech Wars is far better than being more like NukeZone.

Mech Wars could be unfair at times, but that was part of the challenge and the fun in my opinion. Yes there were people who razed people into nothingness, but that was motivation to grow into a powerhouse yourself and return the favour one day. It’s part of the attraction of the game - although a bit less unfairness would indeed have been nice.

Mech Wars was certainly the most enjoyable text based game I’ve ever played. It’s politics made it into one heck of a game, allowing for some truly massive battles to take place. In fact, by the time I joined up for the first time the game had already known 3 gigantic world wars between player alliances of insane sizes (hundreds of clans - each clan being able to reach up to 100 members - on each side).

I teamed up with a real-life friend (and classmate) and we formed our own clan. I handled all the politics: forming alliances, declaring war, issuing public statements, etc. In many ways it was like 10SIX and EVE Online - and this was very enjoyable.
Unfortunately some of our members got attacked by a weaker (albeit same size) clan and we retaliated. This resulted in their clan being wiped out entirely and many clans responded negatively to that (although we weren’t the aggressors). I dissolved the clan and we went our separate ways.

My friend joined up with one of the uberclans at the time (SX I believe?) they had several sections, massive amounts of players, but weren’t very elite. I joined The Praetorian Guard, which was pretty much the opposite but still ranked highly.

If you played Mech Wars around that time then you aught to know what happened. Two incredibly large alliances were formed and waged war for many weeks. Many clans joined in the battles later on, but our clans were in from the start… on opposite sides!
We wasted a couple of clans, weakened some larger targets (orca) and still kept our military strength very high through use of good tactics and focusing. My friends clan on the other hand simply zerged their targets endlessly, with their incredible numbers.
It was only a matter of time until our clan was assigned his clan as their target. The battle between TPG and SX was very fierce and very enjoyable. Many of SX’s territories were wasted in the first day, but some of ours succumbed to their overwhelming numbers as well. In the end I managed to completely annihilate roughly 3 SX territories on my own, until I started being targeted as one of their primary hit territories.

I don’t remember who won in the end, SX and their allies probably because they had a vast numerical advantage (roughly 3 to 1). Still it was awesome just being able to participate in an event like that. It might have been an unfair game, but those kinds of truly memorable battles totally made it worth playing.

It’s unfortunate that Mech Wars is no longer around, but it’s more recent incarnations proved a bit less enjoyable than the game used to be. I’ll be picking up EVE Online now to get my fix of alliance wars - now I just need to reactivate my account and get into a decent corp

For a brief period of time I often noticed people rationalizing or forgiving open world games for having unbalanced or unpolished play in given areas. “You don’t have to play it that way” was often the argument attempting to trivialize what would have been glaring faults in a more linear experience. However, as these games become more and more frequent and a large scale GTA-like world is not such a rare event in a game, we are starting to see more developers having a hand in the player’s every-minute experience.

I think on the initial statement of The Project’s hard limits people might scoff saying such a thing would limit a players freedoms and ability to play how they wish. However, the sliding scale and more fluid nature of the restrictions is a very elegant implementation of a very necessary system.