Arkeus

Well, there's two routes I could have taken.

The first is the infinite energy route. This route means that you can play a lot more per day, and you won't get bored having to wait for energy. With this route, whoever puts the most time into playing the game gets the highest level everything.

The second route is the limited energy route. This limits your play per day, and once you've spent your energy you must wait for the next energy tick to take actions. With this route, the game rewards the people who play the most strategically, not wasting their energy on weak monsters they can one shot, but fighting strategically using skills in order to take out higher monsters to get most XP per energy spent.

The second route also, by limiting your play, is something you can do on the side. Sure, you can't spend 6 hours farming monsters, but as long as you set aside that 30 minutes to an hour a day, you can be competitive in the game. You don't have to worry that you'll never be able to catch up to the user who has time to spend 15 hours on the game every day. So it gives more people a chance to be "good", rewarding strategy not time spent.

Also, because the item system in the game is so heavily focused on, limiting energy helps modulate the rarity of items and the economy (but that's a very minor issue).

There are people who love games of the first route (I am also one of them), and there are people who love games of the second route (the one I took, I am also one of these people). For example, I personally play World of Warcraft, and that is more than enough to waste almost all the free time I have. But when I play web games also, because I already spend my time on another game, I like something that I can be competitive in without spending another 40 hours a week playing.

Oh, not to mention, server costs play a large role in it! (If I had a billion dollars to spend to make a game, it would have turned out very differently, especially since I could hire an artist and it would probably end up being a 2d MMORPG written in C++).

But yeah, I wish I could please everyone, but unfortunately that's not an option. =( I mean, you guys would like more energy to play longer, but earlier on the first impressions I got on the game were (wow this takes too long every day I don't have enough free time for this). So personally I am trying to strike a balance between the two things, but it's hard, since most people seem to want one of the two extremes, either a game that they can play in 5 minutes a day, or a game that they can play for 6 hours a day. =(

I may change my stance on this down the road... We shall see!

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