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-UE
GoCrossCampus (GXC) had shut down.
There used to be an online game called GoCrossCampus.
It was basically massively multiplayer Risk. With custom maps. They made Risk-style maps of college campuses, office buildings, and more into Risk-style maps, then got people from those organizations represented to join the game. People would choose their team, and teams would battle using Risk-like means (i.e. having some number of armies, then either defending or attacking) to try to take over the whole map. Though the way you got extra armies was by logging in, and also by logging in consistently (3 days in a row or something)--they never implemented things like continent or control bonuses. Each day was one turn; at the turn change time all the attacks would be executed simultaneously and then the site would probably be down for a few minutes due to everyone F5ing the shit out of it and a few minutes later you'd find out that you now have 3 armies left from the 15 you ordered to attack the Stata Center two hours ago, but you've won because you're now at Stata.
Of course, like Risk, you often had pretty cool politics involved in the gameplay, between the many teams--for example, one of the most interesting things about the MIT game was the politics of the two major alliances--the Simmons-Next-New-EC-Random alliance versus the MacGregor-McCormick alliance. (These are dorms at MIT. MacGregor was most notable/infamous for signing up, en masse, a large number of their residents, a la voter GOTV efforts.) And then BC kept on playing both sides. And stuff.
One major feature--or flaw, perhaps--is that they allowed "spies". Combined with the ease of making secondary e-mail addresses--even given domain name restrictions, one can just use mailing lists--this resulted in a lot of "spying". While signing up fakes is technically prohibited, I wonder if this allowance was made so that they wouldn't have to police users' IP addresses themselves due to reports of spying and fakes.
They let people nominate and elect "commanders" for their teams, who could send team-wide e-mails and edit the displayed team battle plans. At first, this was so simple that some spies were voted into power by other spies. Then they made it such that only commanders could declare spies. Spies had to be voted out by popular vote as well, with failing votes readmitting the spies. Though at least later they caused accused potential spies to lose access to their armies/energy units and, y'know, not be able to see the battle plan, once they got accused.
Gradually, the GXC company improved their offerings. Noting that they had a whole bunch of players left over after each game, who still wanted to play but had nothing to play, they started making their own games. Previously, games had been attached to companies or college campuses--and they accordingly restricted players by their e-mail address's domain name. They'd now let anyone join these site-wide games, which were based on "neutral" content territory, such as New York City or the Disney Magic Kingdom, and they'd randomly distribute people among the teams (which is why I ended up carrying the Minnie Mouse banner one time).
They'd offer one or more of these "open" games one after another, basically. They also somewhat improved the gameplay details, such as changing "armies" into "energy" and having everyone "energize" during each turn, and adding teleportation territories, fortress territories (higher defense), and radioactive and medical territories (get half or double energy per turn--later removed because medical territories were abused to high hell). And players also developed strategy traditions themselves; the most notable of these was the "special forces"--people who would log on very late in the turn in order to make movements hard to account for by opposing teams, even if they had spies (or were sitting on territories where you could see what was going on in an opposing territory). Though this also added to the server load right around turn change time...
Then they expanded their offerings further with the creation of "lightning" games--where each turn, instead of being a day, is just a few minutes long, making each game a hectic one-to-two-hour affair, at varying times of day. At first this (not surprisingly) caused even MORE server load problems, though they mostly got this under control after a while. As games went on they began tweaking the numbers, such as how long each turn was, slightly improving the game over time. Along with the responsiveness of their server of course.
Then they expanded their offerings even further, changing their name to PickTeams (even though you were randomly assigned to teams anyway), making "GoCrossCampus" the name for their Lightning games, and then featuring several new games, such as something called "Alpha Blitz" and a few others (I never tried them). Some people felt they kinda jumped the shark at this point, but...whatever.
Oh yeah, they called themselves "beta" all this time. I guess it was to cover their behinds in case they had to deal with nasty bugs.
The GoCrossCampus company, which I think was founded by some Harvard and/or Columbia alums IIRC, existed starting around Fall 2007 and then subsequently died in January 2010. At their peak, they had a whole ton of dedicated players, a fan wiki for the game itself (including history of past games), and even several Facebook groups made by fans, including subcommunities dedicated to specific games or play styles. Then I guess they ran out of venture capital or something. I know that people had, at least several months prior to their shutting their doors, openly wondered how the site supported itself, offering so many games, using probably a lot of bandwidth (especially for those "lightning" games, which often devolved into frantic F5-spamming on all sides), but featuring absolutely no ads or pay-to-use features. It seemed too good to last--and it was.
Though some people, such as a good meatspace friend of mine, did criticize them for not fixing some core issues with the original game, but instead developing more and more stuff for people to play with without perfecting anything. That, and a lot of us got tired of having to log in consistently day after day just to play these games. These games would go on for at least a month--the longest one went on for over four months. That's over 120 turns. I know I got sick of it sometime in 2008 or 2009 ish, and only returned in March 2010 or so to find the site no longer in service.
Come to think of it, they should have made some of these features:
* Give people bonus armies/energy for a sufficient percentage of the TEAM signing in. In fact, this might be far better than the personal consistency bonus--it's all too easy to miss a day and then lose the 3-days-in-a-row bonus for another two days.
* Let people order their armies or energy units to go to different territories, individually. However, this would require more processing/server load, so I guess they didn't want to do this just yet. Changing "armies" to "energy" was probably to get rid of the justification to do this, come to think of it.
* I could probably attach a tropes list to this post, edit it slightly, and turn this into a work page for this game on the TVT wiki.
That said, I'd love to see someone revive the idea. Someone out there owns the intellectual property for GXC, which means that it could be started back up, but presumably someone else could easily start up something that's similar but not the same--heck, they could fix a lot of the annoying issues that original GXC had, and then just throw it up on the internet (WITH SUFFICIENTLY RESILIENT SERVERS, *AHEM*) the way Nutsy Bolts has been doing.
It was fun while it lasted, I guess.
It was basically massively multiplayer Risk. With custom maps. They made Risk-style maps of college campuses, office buildings, and more into Risk-style maps, then got people from those organizations represented to join the game. People would choose their team, and teams would battle using Risk-like means (i.e. having some number of armies, then either defending or attacking) to try to take over the whole map. Though the way you got extra armies was by logging in, and also by logging in consistently (3 days in a row or something)--they never implemented things like continent or control bonuses. Each day was one turn; at the turn change time all the attacks would be executed simultaneously and then the site would probably be down for a few minutes due to everyone F5ing the shit out of it and a few minutes later you'd find out that you now have 3 armies left from the 15 you ordered to attack the Stata Center two hours ago, but you've won because you're now at Stata.
Of course, like Risk, you often had pretty cool politics involved in the gameplay, between the many teams--for example, one of the most interesting things about the MIT game was the politics of the two major alliances--the Simmons-Next-New-EC-Random alliance versus the MacGregor-McCormick alliance. (These are dorms at MIT. MacGregor was most notable/infamous for signing up, en masse, a large number of their residents, a la voter GOTV efforts.) And then BC kept on playing both sides. And stuff.
One major feature--or flaw, perhaps--is that they allowed "spies". Combined with the ease of making secondary e-mail addresses--even given domain name restrictions, one can just use mailing lists--this resulted in a lot of "spying". While signing up fakes is technically prohibited, I wonder if this allowance was made so that they wouldn't have to police users' IP addresses themselves due to reports of spying and fakes.
They let people nominate and elect "commanders" for their teams, who could send team-wide e-mails and edit the displayed team battle plans. At first, this was so simple that some spies were voted into power by other spies. Then they made it such that only commanders could declare spies. Spies had to be voted out by popular vote as well, with failing votes readmitting the spies. Though at least later they caused accused potential spies to lose access to their armies/energy units and, y'know, not be able to see the battle plan, once they got accused.
Gradually, the GXC company improved their offerings. Noting that they had a whole bunch of players left over after each game, who still wanted to play but had nothing to play, they started making their own games. Previously, games had been attached to companies or college campuses--and they accordingly restricted players by their e-mail address's domain name. They'd now let anyone join these site-wide games, which were based on "neutral" content territory, such as New York City or the Disney Magic Kingdom, and they'd randomly distribute people among the teams (which is why I ended up carrying the Minnie Mouse banner one time).
They'd offer one or more of these "open" games one after another, basically. They also somewhat improved the gameplay details, such as changing "armies" into "energy" and having everyone "energize" during each turn, and adding teleportation territories, fortress territories (higher defense), and radioactive and medical territories (get half or double energy per turn--later removed because medical territories were abused to high hell). And players also developed strategy traditions themselves; the most notable of these was the "special forces"--people who would log on very late in the turn in order to make movements hard to account for by opposing teams, even if they had spies (or were sitting on territories where you could see what was going on in an opposing territory). Though this also added to the server load right around turn change time...
Then they expanded their offerings further with the creation of "lightning" games--where each turn, instead of being a day, is just a few minutes long, making each game a hectic one-to-two-hour affair, at varying times of day. At first this (not surprisingly) caused even MORE server load problems, though they mostly got this under control after a while. As games went on they began tweaking the numbers, such as how long each turn was, slightly improving the game over time. Along with the responsiveness of their server of course.
Then they expanded their offerings even further, changing their name to PickTeams (even though you were randomly assigned to teams anyway), making "GoCrossCampus" the name for their Lightning games, and then featuring several new games, such as something called "Alpha Blitz" and a few others (I never tried them). Some people felt they kinda jumped the shark at this point, but...whatever.
Oh yeah, they called themselves "beta" all this time. I guess it was to cover their behinds in case they had to deal with nasty bugs.
The GoCrossCampus company, which I think was founded by some Harvard and/or Columbia alums IIRC, existed starting around Fall 2007 and then subsequently died in January 2010. At their peak, they had a whole ton of dedicated players, a fan wiki for the game itself (including history of past games), and even several Facebook groups made by fans, including subcommunities dedicated to specific games or play styles. Then I guess they ran out of venture capital or something. I know that people had, at least several months prior to their shutting their doors, openly wondered how the site supported itself, offering so many games, using probably a lot of bandwidth (especially for those "lightning" games, which often devolved into frantic F5-spamming on all sides), but featuring absolutely no ads or pay-to-use features. It seemed too good to last--and it was.
Though some people, such as a good meatspace friend of mine, did criticize them for not fixing some core issues with the original game, but instead developing more and more stuff for people to play with without perfecting anything. That, and a lot of us got tired of having to log in consistently day after day just to play these games. These games would go on for at least a month--the longest one went on for over four months. That's over 120 turns. I know I got sick of it sometime in 2008 or 2009 ish, and only returned in March 2010 or so to find the site no longer in service.
Come to think of it, they should have made some of these features:
* Give people bonus armies/energy for a sufficient percentage of the TEAM signing in. In fact, this might be far better than the personal consistency bonus--it's all too easy to miss a day and then lose the 3-days-in-a-row bonus for another two days.
* Let people order their armies or energy units to go to different territories, individually. However, this would require more processing/server load, so I guess they didn't want to do this just yet. Changing "armies" to "energy" was probably to get rid of the justification to do this, come to think of it.
* I could probably attach a tropes list to this post, edit it slightly, and turn this into a work page for this game on the TVT wiki.
That said, I'd love to see someone revive the idea. Someone out there owns the intellectual property for GXC, which means that it could be started back up, but presumably someone else could easily start up something that's similar but not the same--heck, they could fix a lot of the annoying issues that original GXC had, and then just throw it up on the internet (WITH SUFFICIENTLY RESILIENT SERVERS, *AHEM*) the way Nutsy Bolts has been doing.
It was fun while it lasted, I guess.
Comments
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Videogame/GoCrossCampus
I just created this page.
oh hey
the GoCrossCampus people actually came out and said what they did wrong
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-gocrosscampus-startup-failed-2010-8?op=1
tl;dr:
* inadequate long-term vision (by long-term I mean even one year in advance)
* growing userbase before developing good product
Pretty much exactly what I saw when I played it. They developed new features before making existing ones stable and polishing what was pretty promising but still somewhat buggy gameplay. Then they even developed new minigames and adopted a new brand name, after a while. And no one really understood why they did that.
Apparently, the leadership also had conflicting visions for the company, but that's not something I could tell either way from looking at it as a user. Not surprised, though.
They basically pissed away probably the closest thing we have to an MMO election simulator.
(Yes, the article doesn't note it, but the gameplay -- specifically, if you're a dedicated player trying to get a casual player to stay consistent -- actually turns out to be somewhat similar to voting turnout operations.)
Well, if I ever get around to it, I'll make one myself. And I'll do it better, because I have no userbase to worry about, nor funding. I hope.
Don't worry, I'll give you no funding at all if you want.
I'll do better, I'll take funding from you.