Make friends and then rob them blind

Like all MMORPGs, WYD advertises a group dynamic as a crucial part of gameplay. A party is the most basic group experience, consisting of an ad-hoc collection of characters who gather on the fly to boost the experience return rate in battle. But assembling a party is made difficult by differences in language. I found at least four languages being spoken in one town, and those with whom I could communicate were more interested in selling me items at exorbitant prices than in teaming up for some Orc-killing action. Also common were requests for player-vs-player combat in one of the game's dedicated PvP areas, which I consistently declined off-hand. PvP isn't integral to gameplay or character progression, though those willing to engage in successfully trouncing other players will see a quick return in experience and loot.

Purchasing some items in the early levels.

It's a virtual flea market of goods.

Sitting above parties in the group strata are guilds, the permanent banding of players with an internal leadership hierarchy. The WYD forums are filled with enterprising guildmasters who have the necessary 100 million gold to create a guild, but given the free-for-all nature of the game world forming a functioning guild seems unlikely. The guild system is predicated largely on financial means, with large amounts of in-game gold being a necessity for most guild functions. In my experience, none of these intricacies mattered, since English-speaking players are largely excluded from the mostly Spanish- and Korean-speaking guilds.

On an even higher level, the game is split into two competing Kingdoms. My lowly TransKnight had yet to reach the requisite level 220 to declare a kingdom affiliation, but once eligible a character can choose an alliance with either the Hekalotia or Akeronia kingdom. As with guilds, there's a currency attached to kingdom membership: in this case, sapphires, which are more difficult to procure than gold, form the cost of entry. Different capes signify a character's place in the kingdom progression chart. Once knighted by one kingdom, a player is pitted eternally against knights of the other kingdom.

This trader would not come down in price. Being poor, I took a pass on his wares.

Supporting a kingdom requires revenue, which is generated by levying a tax on all transactions occurring in towns under a kingdom's rule. The tax rate (as high as 30 percent in some cases) is frustratingly high, and the main benefactors are the kingdom's knights, who enjoy a share of the take. So-called "Champion Guilds", who own the rights to a town's special guild section, also get a piece of the cut. As with many of the game's other aspects, the kingdom system assures that players in the upper echelon reap more rewards than those underneath them. The motivation, then, is to rise to the top as quickly as possible. Of course, purchasing WCoin and spending large sums on items and quest scrolls is helpful in this regard.

Time for a spot of shopping

WYD is often tedious, sometimes frustrating and rarely, if ever, fun. The game world feels a bit like what I imagine the wild West to have been. Towns are a free-for-all of unmonitored item trading and unsolicited requests for virtual sex, and combat zones are filled with quest-item hoarders. Without an instancing model, even the introductory quest had a number of higher level players keeping the prize item for themselves. After killing the first quest's boss in one hit, these unscrupulous hucksters would then ask if I'd like to trade for the quest item. Most often, they'd ask for items, which seemed ridiculous; what did they want, my level-0 dagger?

Camping out for quest items is de rigeur in WYD!

But then their goal became apparent – what these players really wanted was WCoin or items purchased with WCoin. In other words, goods worth real money. After some cursory Internet investigation, it's apparent that the real-money economy surrounding WYD is larger than the trading economy in the game itself. Items are bought and sold on forums; even those under the watch of the game's publisher. For someone looking for a rewarding entertainment experience in a video game rather than a financial opportunity, this sort of economic pressure all but ruins the game.

To make matters worse, the language barrier with both other players and with in-game NPCs (due to poor or incomplete translations) substantially degrades the interactivity of the game. The death knell to finding any real connection with other players is the proliferation of bots. Towns and combat zones are filled with chatbots, tradebots and bots with no real purpose. While the game's executable purportedly checks for such non-human players on startup, there's still a wide array of pseudo-players with only a script behind the avatar. Combined with real characters selling their virtual bodies in steamy sessions of cyber-sex, towns become shady, back-alley marketplaces. And good luck finding a GM to report these and other problems to – I was never able to speak with a live GM in any of the towns I visited.