As to why I've retired from the game, well there are several reasons. The rules of the game have changed for the worse from my perspective. The game is heavily slanted against talented players. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, get larger and you will =) Furthermore the game is an enormous drain on your time when you play on the level that I like to play at. I could probably create a million Nw province with a minimum of effort but personally I just wouldn't be satisfied with a province of that size after running top 25 in the world. The people playing the game have changed as well. That's just natural. The average player is much, much better than they were in the first age because of pages like this one. But the game has gotten much more cut throat as well. Some people liquidate their entire provinces and give them as aid in order to help people on their kingdoms rank higher on the top 100 list. Having people attacked for no other purpose that to allow another person to pass them in the rankings is now a common practice. There are a huge group of nimnods who bascially do nothing but thieve top provinces all game round for the express purpose of annoying them (although the new rules will helpfully alleviate part of that problem). The game is just a huge pain in the butt to play at a high level.
All that said Utopia is still a great game. The first game I got for my PC was Doom. Doom was a superb game that in my opinion was the best shooter ever. I played a Hell of a lot of Doom for a long time but eventually I just got tired of it. It doesn't mean Doom is bad, just that all good things come to an end =). Most of my ICQ list is made up of people that play Utopia (or used to play, which reminds me that I need to delete a lot of people..hehehe). Some of the coolest people I know online, I've met through Utopia (of course some of the worst pieces of human debris I've ever met play Utopia too :\). I had a great time playing the game and putting together this page. I'd like to thank Mehul Patel not only for making a great game, but taking the time to do an interview with me, and then actually linking to my page for a while. I also appreciate the large number of people who took the time to check the page out. I averaged over 8k hits a month for a game that has around 30k players. That means a huge portion of the Utopian populace checked out the site. Thanks for the patronage. I hope you check out the new site as well when it's up (I'll post on the Utopian forums when it's ready). In the interim I don't expect to be posting on or even reading the Utopian forums. Also if anyone in game tells you they are really Archfiend (I heard last game 2 people on the same kingdom both claimed to be me :) they are lying. The page will be left up as reference material for anyone who's interested even though there will be no more updates. Unfortunately everyone will have to deal with a pop-up add again as well since I'm going to go back to a basic (and free) Geocities account. Good luck and have fun in Utopia's 5th age....Archfiend
(C) Archfiend 1999