Gamer Communities Spotlight: Garena

Communities can make or break anything in the digital world. A terrible community can bring down a great program, such as (arguably) Shaya or a great community can glorify a terrible program, such as Runescape. A community can even pull its act together and make something great, although unappreciated, out of almost nothing, most notably Second Life and Garry's Mod. However, what communities are there for gamers overall? I'm going to take a look at a few of the most important of these communities and see which bring gamers together as they should and which you can count on to find that 'epic lootz guild' you've been looking for.

This is the first addition of  "Community Review" and we'll be looking at an unsung underdog. Garena.

Garena: Like many of the applications we'll be looking at, Garena is a program that you run from your computer. However, there is one dark twist to the program: it's for hacked games. Online games downloaded from torrent sites can be circumvented with the hacked servers of Garena, and while I will neither condemn or condone this, Garena has made quite a spectacle out of itself, if nothing else.

Starting up Garena you're greeted with the Garena login. Username, password, server, ect. The programs will then auto-update, then you're brought to the 'overall lobby'. Once it opens, the top right will have your avatar, username, unique ID, mail, status, EXP level, clan, rank, ect ect. On the right will have a 'friends online' tab with 'join room' and all of the buttons you'd expect from an Xfire type program. The left, however, is where the new stuff comes in. The top tab on the left has 4 tabs, Games, Leagues, Garena Fire, and Causal Game. Games is where you join a game, a lobby, and a room to play in. Currently, Blackshot, Warcraft 3 TFT, Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty 6, Killing Floor, and many other games are present.

I jumped into a few rooms to see how many people were playing. The number of players at any time is very important for any community. Trackmania, a leffer known game, had a pathetic 15 members playing. Starcraft was better at 1000, Age of Empires at 7418, and Warcraft 3 RPG leading the pack by a breath taking number of 236,759 players playing or in a room waiting right now. 2066 of these players were from North America.

Playing cracked games works perfectly fine, as does playing legit games on Garena's servers. Lag is a minimum, from what I've played, and the ability to find new people to play with and add them in game thanks to "Garena Fire" is a huge bonus.

Garena Rank:
     +Ability to play legit plus cracked games, or more importantly two games with the same serial at the same time.
     +Can find and add friends in any of the games Garena supports
     +Moderate number of games supported
     +Has own servers
     +League matches give competive gamers somethign to do
     +GarenaTV will broadcast (with 5 minute delay) all of the tournaments going on.
     +Garena's very own games supported
     +Constant cash prize contests
     +Garena has their own, relatively good, hack prevention system.
     -Much fewer games supported than, say, Xfire
     -Painfully few players for some games.
     -'Gold Membership' and 'Premium items' shouldn't be in a community
Overall: 8.5/10