I really like drama in MMOs. There's simply nothing like it in gaming, an organic chaos that can only be found in the strange hellscape of multiplayer online gaming. These are the people who do it: sometimes on their own, often as part of a guild. For a brief moment, a game like Throne And Liberty becomes the most important part of some people's lives. I am not exaggerating.
There's nothing quite like being an MMO player with a brand new MMO: wanting to level up your character, playing long hours into the wee hours of the morning, and reaching for your credit card to get that little edge in gear over your opponents. There are no showers. Vegetables are forgotten. I just want to repeat: I am not exaggerating. Their obligations probably border on caring for outsiders.
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Throne And Liberty is particularly heavy on guild drama because the entire game revolves around fighting other guilds. The idea of a guild goes beyond the game itself – it's about the connections you've made with strangers online, sometimes over many, many years. Some of these guilds are institutions, long-standing communities that span a wide variety of games, from MMOs like Black Desert to multiplayer games like Rust. This leads to a certain “us vs. them” attitude. This takes the form of PvP in Throne And Liberty.
Thus begins the drama. One guild on my server – which I won't name – is a large MMO guild that has transferred many players from Black Desert Online. Many of them had previously played Throne And Liberty in Korea and because of that, arrived on the Western servers with a significant advantage. If you fully understand the game, you can make huge progress and profit – especially in the first few days of a new MMO, this knowledge will help you play the market, be the first to access the best gear and items, and generally start beating other players in PvP.
These guys travel the world as part of a huge horde known colloquially as the Zerg. They have several guilds on the server with different name options. In Throne, you can form alliances between guilds (up to four), with 70 members per guild, which means that at any given time during open world PvP, there can be 280 players on the same team. To give you some perspective, my guild is struggling to get 40 players in the same place at the same time. With the alliance we could get close to 100. We don't stand a chance against these guys. In fact, basically no one does. By dominating PvP, they get the best rewards from world bosses and have the best territories for resources. They just get more powerful as the rest of the players struggle to keep up. They start the server.
That is, until they left. One day we woke up and all the guilds disappeared from the server. After a small whisper of gossip in the foul wind of Throne And Liberty's global chat, we soon discovered that they had moved onto a large streamer server to wreak havoc there. When you dig deeper, it seems like streamers themselves asked for a guild move to make the world more competitive. And so we started accepting refugees from this server on ours. Last we heard, streamers started complaining about the guild as well. What are you going to do against the people who have already “defeated” Throne And Liberty?
Mostly I'm usually into MMOs. I go down for a couple of months and then go down. I also write about video games, so I'm always looking for a story. Throne And Liberty has been a fascinating look at the current state of MMOs so far. The age demographic changed significantly as most of the players I interacted with were over 30 or close to it. But this does not mean that people are more mature. At any given moment, the Throne And Liberty world chat can be full of the weirdest crap you've ever heard. I don't even really want to get into it. Just imagine.
That's also why I think this guild drama could get even more spicy. For now, this guild rules the world: but what happens when there's nothing left to grind? Fights, quarrels, people steal gold. Power struggle and chaos. I've seen it before. Guild leaders absconding with gold hoards, players tricking guilds into false alliances just to steal resources from their merged kitty, and more. This is the stuff that always gets me curious about MMOs. I think they're awesome because of that. These players really put an RPG into an MMORPG, except for many of these people, they don't play: Throne And Liberty is life.
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