Freesky Online was a browser-based multiplayer empire building game originally released in the Asian market as 天空左岸 and later bought and translated to English by Internet Gaming Gate

Internet Gaming Gate

IGG is an online game operator in North America run by the company of Skyunion Co., Ltd. Currently, IGG's business is primarily focused on operating free MMORPGs which would allow thousands of players to concurrently log on to network servers to "role-play" characters in a virtual world.IGG has...

 and later Garena

Garena

Garena is an online gaming platform that supports various games from different game developers. Based in Singapore, the company has expanded its operations in the South East Asia region, including Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines...

. Players are given control of a small land that can contain a maximum of ten cities. Gameplay is simple and it is designed so players will not be forced to dedicate large periods of time to the game micromanaging their account.

Gameplay

Gameplay revolves around collecting and using resources to build an empire. Players can choose to build their empire through military might or by commercial success. Players get to choose a server, a user name and one of four factions, (Light, Devil, Holy and Shadow)

There are five resources, food, sandstone, metal, wood and crystals. Food is to provide energy to your deployed troops, sandstone is used to build and upgrade buildings and metal, wood and crystals are used to build weapon parts.

Each player starts with one town. Over time, players can increase their "dominance" level, which allows them to build new towns.

Military alliances

In the game, there is an option of joining an alliance. When creating an account, there is an option to join a random alliance at the beginning of the game. Alliances can be created once the Alliance Chamber is upgraded to level 3. Quitting and joining new alliances is possible. After creating an alliance and becoming a level 3 lord, players can upgrade production time, attack power, defense and gathering skills through building and upgrading miracles.

Once an alliance has 30 members, alliance gives an option to trade with other members, who are in the same alliance. Currently (April 2010) the maximum number of members is limited to 80.

Sky points

Sky points are similar to a paid subscription, but can also be obtained through surveys found on IGG's homepage. They allow players to reduce the amount of time actions take in the game and allow them to obtain blueprints and other items through the treasure box.

Skill points

Skill points allow players to advance up the tech tree. They can be obtained by fighting or by selling raw materials and goods to Empire.
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Servers

Freesky servers in IGG include, as of early April 2010, the four main servers, Aurora, Avalon, Ares and Mercury, along with the new Eos server that contains characters and alliances from the canceled Garena server.

Special Servers

The game often has event servers. As of March 30, 2010 these have included Venus, which was a miracle battle server where the 1st alliance to get their miracles to lv 25 would get a prize for 50 of its members. Many people found this 50 cap to be unfair to the members who worked just as hard but didnt get any reward. A new server, The Gauntlet, was announced to be released in March, but as of now it has still not been released and no comments have been given by the admins.

Miracle Villages

The Miracle Villages were never well integrated into the game. While players were able to move their cities, Miracle Villages were unable to move, even if located in the land of a player who had left the game. The experience granted for participating in battles also did not include Miracle Village levels in the calculation—so a player with a 30% attack and defense bonus from miracle bonuses would also get a large experience bonus for attacking someone with higher total skill points but lower actual attack and defense bonuses thanks to miracle village differences.

Garena Closure

Around early February Garena merged all servers into one server and banned duping, however continued commerce reputation exploiting continued on the IGG servers and any ban was never enforced. This caused outrage in the forums. Freesky servers in Garena were announced to be closing at the beginning of March, on March 29 the merged super-server was moved to IGG. Compensation included bonuses for Garena's new game Dark Orbit. The game was then reduced to a single server, Athena, with the large majority of players having left. Many accounts were still active however as alternate accounts for those exploiting the commerce bugs in the game to cheat. In spring 2011 IGG announced the discontinuation of the game due to many bugs that would take too long to fix. The last server, Athena was shut down in July,2011.

External links

• Freesky Official Webpage
• Freesky Online Dev Journal: Just Say No to Multi-Character Play
• http://sk.chinesegamer.net/index.asp Original Asian Website