Life is interesting to watch. One of the most introspective things you can do is sit down with a cup of coffee and just watch it happen. Usually, at a coffee shop, interesting things happen infrequently. You might see a couple meeting up for the first time after being introduced through a dating site, or maybe you’ll see a group of friends laughing while they pretend to study for next week’s big final. You will, however, undoubtedly see me, face glued to my computer screen, while I drag my mouse across the river of life that is Agar.io.
Bringing life back to the basics
It’s a dog eat dog world in Agar.io. The entire world is a buffet and you’re just another entree. You start off as a simple cell and you’ll immediately notice you can drag your mouse cursor around the screen to lead your cell around. The world itself is lush with grids. There are grids as far as the eye can see and they’re the only way you can get a sense of scale about how large you eventually become.
You’ll also find a few other things while you’re out exploring. First up, there are a lot of colorful cells that only exist to be eaten and that’s exactly what you should do. For a while you’ll get one point for every non-player cell you eat and this is how you’ll grow in the beginning. After a while they’ll be useless to you, however. Second up, you’ll notice these larger green fuzzy cells. When you’re smaller than them you can actually pass through them and they’re really good for protection. As you get bigger they can be a double edged sword. Lastly, you’ll notice a lot of larger cells chasing you around that are trying to eat you. These are players and they’ll quickly let you know that they only exist to wreck you.
Ignorance is bliss
Despite the fact that there are only a few things you can actually do inside the game, there are a lot of interesting systems that the players create themselves. And I’ll be frank, I had a lot more fun with the game when I didn’t know about them.
My favorite moments all occur in the mid-game. This is when you’re right between 600 and 900 points. You’re large but you’re not so large that you’ve got a target painted on your back. You’ll notice that you’re mostly ignored by the super small cells and the super huge cells alike. This is when you begin to realize that there is a bit of a hierarchy. The game helps put this in place because the larger you are the slower you move and you have to be at least 25% larger than another player cell to eat them. So at this point the gameplay is slow and you have to play strategically and aggressively to ever move on from this point. Those tiny non-player cells won’t help you now.
The real anticipation kicks in when you start to expand from this stage. You can split yourself off to projectile a smaller part of you in order to try and catch someone who is faster than you. Movement between these two cells are still managed the same but now you’re vulnerable and this is when those larger cells begin to take notice. It’s like you just cut your leg out in the the middle of the ocean and sharks are out to smell it.
Assassinating a king
Once you get larger you’ll notice that other players start to target you. The last time I played I made it to the top of the server and I was massive. I’m talking 8000+ points massive. Nothing could touch me, or so I thought. Soon enough I saw a lot of players with [$] tags in their name all feeding each other.
You see, I had taken down the top dog even though I was only fourth on the leader. He had made the mistake of splitting up and I spotted him hanging out in the corner. One of his smaller cells happened to be closest to me and I knew that if I absorbed it then I could absorb the next larger cell and the rest of him too, so I did.
Then I quickly found out that I had just signed my own death warrant.
Those fuzzy green cells? Well, turns out that you can feed part of yourself into them and after a second they’ll also split off like a projectile and break you into smaller parts. When you’re an 8000 guerrilla there is no dodging, there is simply floating. I noticed a player named [$] Help floating inconspicuously close to one of the green cells, and after a minute my bits suddenly exploded everywhere and everyone on the server was trying to nab a part of me. It was clear that this unnamed cell had dethroned the hierarchy and no one liked that. The next two minutes was an excessive chase for my life while I ran from literally every player on the server. Nowhere was safe and death was inevitable.
This is only a single story in a vacuum, though. That wasn’t my first time being top dog, but it was the first time, in any game, that my success had managed to piss off every single person on the server and it was interesting to watch the whole thing unfold.
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