#but that was pretty much it for ToonTown Online back then | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

faeiri-tft · 6 months

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PLEASE do the toontown online rant i want it so badly

this post kinda got away from me, and by "got away from me" i mean this 3000 word toontown rant is Part One. there will be a Part Two to this later in which i actually talk about the fanservers i wanted to talk about. anyway let's go

toontown online (tto) was a children's mostly-turn-based subscription MMO released in 2003. after a few years of obviously being on life support, disney gave a one-month notice that tto (and several other games) would be closing on september 19th, 2013. on the same day the game closed, the fan-run server toontown rewritten (ttr) was announced (with multiple other fanservers/fangames/reimaginings being established since), and is a few months away from outliving the original game

see, one thing about tto that allowed fanservers to crop up so quickly and easily was that it had, um, interesting choices. very interesting choices. like, "kids could use a code injector to turn their backyards into giant mashed-together nightmarescapes"-level choices

youtube

(loose video description: a rabbit toon running around a chaotic mismash of rooms, obstacles, and npcs that Should Not Be There. audio caption: Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life".)

but ok let's talk about the actual game first.

toontown online (tto)

the game starts with you creating your player character - you can pick from eventually-9 species, a couple body types, and 2 dozen preset colors. the gender code is a spaghetti nightmare but you won't learn this until the fanservers come about so don't worry about it. you're then taken to the Toontorial, which explains maybe 20% of the game's mechanics before setting you loose into the main game

the toontorial also gives you the basic "plot", such as it is: Toontown is suddenly* under attack by a bunch of boring businessrobots called the Cogs. their goal is to turn toontown into a dreary gray featureless corporate hell; their business activities are so boring that they're physically painful to be around. luckily, they can't take a joke, so the toons have figured out how to defeat them: by playing pranks on them until they laugh so hard they Explode

*originally, the game installer had a little animation giving a backstory for the Cogs' creation. this was never referenced in game, removed pretty quickly, and i think even the devs kinda forgot it existed

that's...pretty much the whole story! in that context, your toon progresses through all of toontown, helping some mostly-pretty-interchangeable shopkeepers, reclaiming buildings from the cogs, eating ice cream, etc. occasionally, the cogs would Come Up With New Tricks (read: major content update) and the toons would Find A Way To Fight Back (read: same major content update). that was the closest thing to Plot, unless you count "the devs scheduled a bunch of invasions of high-tier cogs right before the game's closure". but...i doubt most the kids really expected a Plot. mickey mouse was there

the gameplay:

the Free Account

there were two...pretty different approaches to playing toontown online. when the game launched, there was a 3-day free trial to the entire game, after which you got kicked entirely until you subscribed. at some point, this was changed so that the first area, Toontown Central (TTC), was Always Free - you could do all of that area's quests/"taskline" and limited activities, indefinitely, and in theory this would make you beg your parents for the rest of the game

i have no idea if this actually got more subscriptions or not. from what i can tell it just spawned more warrior cats

(source)

there were. a Lot of warrior cats. there were some other social activities, too, such as Fashion Shows (with your limited range of clothes) and Begging Subscribed Players To Summon Cog Buildings To TTC and Getting Chat Banned. ...however, as one of the subscription kids i didn't really interact with this side of the game, so i'm not the best person to talk about it

2. the Paid Account

mmm look at those crisp clear graphics. hell yes

a subscription account gave you access to this whole map, along with all these areas' tasklines. to progress through the game, you must complete a variety of "ToonTasks" for the Toon Resistance (it's called that. their catchphrase is "Toons of the World, Unite!". you were giving disney money for this). these reward you by increasing your max health (your "Laff Points"), slowly unlocking more combat options, and sending you to different, higher-difficulty areas of toontown

some of these tasks were...longer than others. generally, though, they all boiled down to: "just go fight some cogs"

combat:

(source)

toontown battles are turn-based: the players use their attacks ("gags") first, and then any surviving cogs attack you with, usually, office equipment and puns thereof (unless the cog is e.g. a Loan Shark, in which case they can just fucking bite you). if you defeat a cog, it explodes; if the cog defeats you, you "go sad" and are sent back to the safety of the playground, lose your gag inventory, and can't leave until you heal.

early on, most your battles are 1v1, but later on almost everything is a multiplayer 4-ish-v-4.

an...interesting feature here in the game's early days was that you could only Type Your Own Words to someone who shared their "friend code" with you IRL. otherwise, you had to use this thing:

(source)

you had a set list of phrases you could string together, which generally covered most the things you wanted to say. but it could get frustrating when you wanted to have a real conversation with your toontown friends! so...as the source above mentions, people obviously found ways around the system. turns out that if you let players move objects around their houses, they will use that to Draw Letters and pass their friend code along regardless

eventually - before the warrior cats, of course - disney presumably realized this system was pretty goofy (🥁) , so the game got a real chat, albeit one that functioned on a very strict whitelist. my favorite is that it didn't let you type numbers, however you could just say won too tree for hive etc. like. disney i really don't know what to tell you. anyway

(isn't he charming)

cogs come in levels 1-12, with levels displayed above their heads, and as you'd expect their damage output and HP increase with their level. however, the game doesn't...actually show you cog HP? instead they have a little colored light on their chest that fades from green to red until they explode. you see numbers on all the damage you do, and you see your own HP/laff, but never the cogs'. also lategame cogs are Too Tall For You To See Their Level once they line up for battle (which isn't actually that bad but it's funny). there's a formula for HP per level, but it's never mentioned in-game. i guess someone can teach it to you but then you have to watch them type "a level tin cog has won tree too health" and is that really worth it

(as you can tell i just…don't get this. "my kid is practicing arithmetic with toontown!" - marketing angle expressly denied by god. the stealth edutainment was right there)

anyway! in theory, you have seven base combat options ("gag tracks"), which combine in a variety of ways:

toon-up, which restores your teammates' health;

trap, which does guaranteed high damage but only if someone uses lure;

lure, which stuns the cogs for a few turns and is the only way to make trap work

sound, which does low damage to every cog;

throw, which does medium-high-ish damage to one cog; multiple throws combined give percentage combo damage, and hitting a lured cog will also add percentage "knockback damage";

squirt, which is exactly like throw but less damage;

and drop, which does high damage but cannot hit lured cogs, and has low accuracy unless you hit the cog with something else first

each gag track has 6 levels, which you unlock by using that gag track a bunch. you can't carry as many of the high levels with you - i mean, putting one piano in your backpack makes perfect sense, but two is just silly, right

a few years into the game's lifespan, level 7s were added - these were huge AOE that you could regain with every 500 track EXP. there was also something called "organic gags" to promote the please-log-in-every-day gardening system

every player starts with throw and squirt, and throughout the game you slowly unlock four more gag tracks. your choices are permanent: once you have your six tracks, you're locked out of the seventh forever.

in theory, all of this opens up a huge variety of combat options!

in practice, the battle strategy looks something like this:

use sound

as mentioned, almost all of lategame will be 4v4 battles, which means sound will almost always outdamage everything on earth. you don't even need four foghorns (the highest normal sound gag) to break 200 AOE damage, and the highest health a cog EVER has is 200*. and two of the boss battles can reward you with gag restocks and heals that you can use mid-battle with no consequences (other than having to grind for those rewards a bunch). and failing THAT, you can just...ration your foghorns and take 2 turns to clear a set of cogs, interspersed with healing.

(*okay there was something called "v2.0 cogs" but they were...strange, and we just used sound anyway)

sure, once level 7s were added you could use those occasionally. and you could fall back on lure+throw if you didn't want to use your sound restocks. but even then, for most of tto's existence there was something called the "knockback bug" which. well. just look at it

(link for transcript. it's tvtropes sorry)

if you are a target-audience eight-year-old this translates to "lure + throw will only do enough damage if the cogs Feel like it." like it's really just insult to injury at this point. this was the result of One misplaced variable and was not fixed until the game closed

in the tto era, if you didn't have sound, you were kinda doomed to be kicked out of every fight forever

(bonus fun fact: there were Four entire battle themes and they were 40-second midi loops. let me out)

the bosses:

each of the four cog departments has a Boss Cog. to face off against them, you have to assemble a cog disguise and collect enough merits/stock options/whatever to be allowed into the boss's office.

(pictured: your convincing disguise)

when you enter, your disguise pops off due to Reasons, and you have to fight through...a bunch of waves of normal cogs. it's basically a really long normal battle. once the minions are dealt with, you have to, inexplicably, do a live-action battle against the boss themself:

youtube

(loose video description: four toons defeating the CFO by using magnet cranes to hit him in the face with safes for 32 seconds.)

the live-action rounds aren't supposed to go this quickly, but it's still...kinda strange? certain reoccurring game areas require Parkour, but there are no battles like this outside of the Four bosses. the CFO's room is the only place you see these cranes and they have A Lot Going On. the other 3 bosses have their own unique weird mechanics. before the first boss was added we neither had nor needed the ability to Jump. it's just weird

once you've defeated the boss, you're given a reward of varying usefulness (the best/most unbalanced reward type is Unites, which are a free heal or gag restock you can do inside or outside of battle. essentially lategame toons can simply choose not to die. riv2u etc.)

and, um. then you get some more merits/stock options/whatever and do it again. and again. and again. and again. and agai

the grind:

so the thing is that tto was a subscription mmo. every addition to the game had to be measured, above all, in terms of "how can we best get kids to beg their parents to give us money." this especially shows in the suit grind:

(source/source)

you have to defeat each boss 78 times in order to get all their laff points - and as you proceed, you have to defeat an increasing amount of cogs to even be allowed into the boss (although once you max you get in for free).

by far the easiest way is to run through the designated HQ facilities - basically, cog fights interspersed with some platforming or minigames. you only collect your merits/whatever at the Very End of the facility. the only way to increase what a facility gives you is if your last battle ends during an "invasion" - a timed period where One Specific Cog replaces all street cogs, usually summoned with boss rewards.

the sellbot HQ grind isn't so bad. bossbot HQ - the endest-game HQ - frequently requires you to do an hour-long facility and on six separate occasions you have to do seven of them. if the invasion ends before your final battle, you have to sit around until someone summons another. if you lose your internet connection because it's 2008, or if your parents make you come to dinner, or if hacking or the game's general bugginess cause a server reset because you're probably in the busiest district for the invasion bonus, you have spent that Entire Hour On Nothing. the CEO (bossbot cog boss) probably also takes an hour because you and your fellow players are 10

this shit, combined with laff points locked behind gardening (time-gated), racing and golfing (multiplayer minigames with absurd requirements), and fishing (RNG-based with some fish being absurdly rare. i watched my mom fish for one every day for a month), meant that maxing a toon took Years, if you managed it ever.

it wasn't, um. it wasn't good

ok so what else is wrong with this game:

i had "aged out of the game" (lol) by the early '10s, so i'm not the best person to do a writeup of the hacking/scripting situation of those days. that said, what i'm going to do is give you a few examples, and i want you to just...look at them

(source)

(source). early '10s youtube was funny i'm trying to decide if i miss it

(source). fun thing to note here is that other players had collision, so a swarm of t-posing toons could just barricade the gag shop if they wanted to

youtube

(video description: toon who has Replaced His Head Model With An Anime Logo throwing thousands of jellybeans at everyone) (cw mild flashing just in case? and also the feather headband accessory)

i should note that the Bring Me To Life vid i started with was client-side, meaning only the player could see their technicolor hellscape. this guy's face was server-side. i do Not Think you should be able to do that

youtube

(video description: a player demonstrating use of a bot to get into the nutty river district, followed by other players using it to go to different game areas)

the above video was posted on august 17th, 2013. if you don't want to watch an Unregistered Hypercam 3 recording at about 5 frames per second, what's going on here is:

the player goes to a specific location and says a specific speedchat phrase.

a bot toon teleports to their location and provides some prompts on how to use it

the player tells the bot, via speedchat, to teleport to the (currently closed from the outside) busiest district so the player can follow

these "taxi toons" were server-sided, persisted across server resets, were made by a future fanserver dev, had younger kids referring to them as a "glitch" as if this were something that could Accidentally Happen, and stayed functional until the game closed

like...a lot of the "hacking" was just baby's first script download. this one - afaict also created by the laughing man head guy - is like...the fact that after years of no substantial game updates, someone effectively programmed their own "QOL feature" (note: not actually good for the poor mid-00s server being turned into a clown car) into a silly disney MMO and it just fucking sat there for a year is just. it's just.

i don't know what this is. this is not Playing The Game Toontown Online. this is nothing. this is everything. there are comments from 2013 on some of these videos saying stuff like "hackers killed toontown", but your game cannot have this happen if it is not already dying

and, like...it was. i'm not sure how many moderators there were by this point, but at the very end of tto, the number of active devs was One. the original devteam recently brought this up at the 20th anniversary celebration: devs just...slowly started getting pulled from the game, one at a time. there were a few updates after bossbot HQ - Field Offices, which i've basically never heard anything good about in their tto form ever; the Silly Meter, a yearly event...thing whose main function was to add unskippable dancing-inanimate-object cutscenes to your street battles; Parties, which...yknow parties were okay actually. i accept parties. but they weren't exactly a Major Game Update like the ones that had come before. in 2011 we gained the ability to Wear Hats. in 2012 the test server got some actual QOL updates that never made it to the main game; the final test server update was some maintenance in february, and then nothing for 18 months. disney was not providing enough resources to address the scripting because disney was not providing enough resources to address toontown. imagine being the last dev standing on an MMO that was older than some of its players, was losing its business model to mobile gaming, and spent most of its life falling apart at the seams. just imagine it, for a second

it couldn't have kept going, not like this.

on august 20, 2013, the closing announcement came: we had a month left of toontown online. the test server shut immediately; subscription refunds went out, and the game became actually F2P for the month; the part of the announcement that went like "we're shifting our focus to other games!" made a bunch of twelve-year-olds hate club penguin as if club penguin wouldn't also close in a few years; all the holiday events went off at once; and...

there wasn't a "thanks for playing!" popup. everyone online just got kicked, all at once. it was finally over

hey wait.

#toontown #toontown online #tto #tft talks #tft stuff #<- this goes in that tag i think #this was like. enrichment. thank you

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kittymanya · 9 months

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Stupid little idiot toontown bastards. do not mind the fact that the toons do not have the typical tan mouths im sorry i cannot draw them it never looks correct in my art anyway back to the topic at hand. my gay little freaks. i love them. Actual info under the cut

Sam (he/him) lives in Ye Olde but similarly to 'hysterical harry' he is just a Normal Fucking Guy. He doesn't like living there but also at the same time he refuses to move anywhere else because he grew up in Ye Olde and he's too used to it to leave now. Meeting new people is a hassle he is not willing to confront. He isn't really very 'toony' and tends to act a bit more cog-like, which gets weird reactions from some people even outside of Ye Olde but most ignore it besides a comment or two. Very good friends with Pink but in that sort of 'this is the insane extrovert that just decided to adopt me' way. He loves phones and technology in general and will give you a 30 minute ramble on why smartphones are awesome and how he's customized his own tech if you even slightly give him the chance to, it's the only time he's talkative. 100% gets in creddit moderator fights with Brian/The Prethinker online

Pink (he/they) lives in Daffodil Gardens, he loves art of all sorts and is generally a 'jack of all trades master of none' sort of artist, he just does whatever the hell comes to mind regardless of whether it actually turns out any good or not, he just loves the process of creating. Sort of one of those 'live laugh love' type people, they're very optimistic about everything, even for toon standards, and also likes to be a little flirty every now and then. Very neutral on cogs, they still dislike all the antics they've been up to but otherwise is..generally pretty willing to just chat with them if given an opportunity. Their being a huge social butterfly outweighs their dislike of cogs. Friends with Sam because they met through another friend and he just decided that Sam's his buddy now. Levy (any pronouns but uses he/him most often) lives in Mezzo Melodyland. Loves trying to do magic tricks (both practical effects and attempting 'actual magic') but he is, alas, super fucking unlucky. Nearly all of his tricks backfire in some way, but he continues doing it anyway because he still enjoys it and sees no downside. Either he succeeds and people are impressed, or he fails and he gets other toons to have a laugh. Both outcomes make him happy. (Though it's still frustrating sometimes for him). His bad luck does not apply just to his magic shows, his legs are also invisible because of a mishap with vanishing cream, where, despite applying it to his whole body, the bottle was partly defective and only the portion he put onto his legs actually worked. He was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help about it, and continued to just pass it off as intentional because it themed well with his name. After awhile he just started reapplying it that way willingly, since it also made him more recognizable to others.

Nyte (she/her) is a boardbot cog that was... not meant to exist in the form she does. She was a prototype model and wasn't supposed to be able to think, but she did anyway, and so now just, exists. Since she was supposed to be a test run, a lot of 'typical cog features' are missing or absent with her. Her health indicator is only visible if a compartment in her chest is opened up, her sentences get mixed up often (usually resulting in either repeating whole sentences twice, or using awful grammar/sentence structure). She's basically permanently level 1, nearly any toon off the street could win a fight against her, so she usually tries to avoid situations where a battle could happen. She works two jobs, one at the Mezzo cashbot hq for 3 days of the week (she just comes over and assists with whatever little things people request of her) and the other at Alton/The LAA's office in the boatyard for the other 4 days. She admires Alton very much and wants to be a manager herself one day, even though she knows it's very unlikely to ever happen, so she usually just follows him around like a lost puppy and offers help constantly. The color of her lights changes based on emotion the most often, but she can manually control it too, and usually sticks to light blue. She's very excitable, and acts a bit more toony than most cogs, especially in comparison to other boardbots, but she's also extremely loyal to COGS Inc and will often be overly performative about her 'distaste' for toons, sometimes to the point of making herself crash temporarily. She's based on a silly little cat nightlight i have in my room irl :)

#my art #ocs #toontown corporate clash #Nyte L Amp (oc)#Pink E Hart (oc)#Sam Sung (oc)#Levy Tate (oc)

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lunathewafflelord · 1 year

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Decided to go onto JumpStart and look at the old stories I had posted there back in 2014 and share them here

Shame that nothing new has been added to the stories and photos and jokes and questions page in a loooooong time, I hope someday they update that again since it was so much fun seeing what people made and it’d be great if the game got popular again

I love how I just gave up on rhyming in the end and just said “I woke up back home. The end”

(censored out my cousin’s name for privacy reasons) “Magic” was the name I gave my character when talking about her online since I didn’t want to call her my irl name online. Her name was my real life name but her name is now Iris. And yes, I am still working on this story concept but the characters have new names and designs. It was initially sort of a Toontown fanfiction but later became its own thing.

Their names now:

Pixie Dust- Pixie Brooks, Big Books - Brianna Brooks, Crystal EyeJewel - Christine Gem, Fire Gem - Fiona Gem. Character with my cousin’s real name isn’t a character anymore and she was literally just my cousin but with magic powers, same with Magic who was just me with rainbow powers. Marissa’s name is likely Marissa Brooks now since she was Big Books’ cousin, but I haven’t written her into the current canon yet

For some reason for a while when new stories were added the endings got cut off, so this and several other stories I and other have made had the ending cut off and since this was almost ten years ago now I don’t remember what the intended ending was I don’t think we’ll ever know what the full story was, rip. I’m surprised the staff never tried to fix this, since MANY stories had gotten cut off. Also, “there” instead of “their” XP

“she a” SHE A WHAT I WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING. I’m going to assume those 3 girls were in game friends of mine or maybe they were names I made up for the game, I don’t know.

another cut off ending, which is a shame since I remember really liking this one when I made it. Going to assume the last sentence was supposed to end with “the baby was going to be a girl” but I don’t know.

This was a side profile of mine where my character was a boy and his name was Blake Feather to match my main character Alexandra PinkFeather (my name prior to becoming Maddy SilverDreamer) but I changed his name to Steve SilverDiamond after the dreaded character design update since I wanted to turn him into Steve from Minecraft and I changed Maddy to Alex SilverDiamond and I tried giving them white eyes to be like Herobrine to rebel against the change. Several years later and those ugly and poorly optimized character models are still being used, but the game is pretty fun. Shame not many people play anymore, my favorite part was chatting and exploring with my friends.

I was REALLY proud of this one when I made it!!! Btw, Vanessa Bear was my cousin’s character. If only we had more text space when submitting stories, there were more details I had wanted to add but I ran out of room.

What??? Did the ending get cut off since last time I read this one? The ending was different and I KNOW the ending was there since I had read it multiple times, it was something about the two sisters becoming famous in their town and being called the Magic Gems and when people saw them they’d say “There goes the Magic Gems”. Maybe I’m mixing it up with one of the other stories I wrote that all had very similar plots.

Was the same story posted twice somehow but the endings changed? The people approving stories must have accidentally posted it twice with alterations to the ending. I know the staff sometimes altered parts of posted stories, like some lines were different in the golden flower story than how I originally wrote it. Weird.

#JumpStart #Jump Start #JumpStart Online

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kieuecaprie · 11 months

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KieueCaprie's Games Finished List of 2023: Entry 7

#11: Pokémon Infinite Fusion

What's done? Kanto

What platform? PC

Started when? 20/3/23

Finished when? 22/3/23

Clear 2

What's done? Kanto, again, but randomized

Started when? 22/3/23

Finished when? 23/3/23

So, this fangame I picked up playing after seeing a couple of people playing through it and man, it's quite nice playing through Kanto yet again but this time it's with weird strange freaks you make with the fusions in a fangame.

Classic Mode was actually a little harder than Randomized but it may be because I was playing on the dumbest setting possible with Randomized, so it ended up with me seeing a million legendaries and getting to the point where I just wasn't really pleased to see a legendary or mythical anymore.

It was still fun, mind you, it was just really funny having a second playthrough be seeing previously rare Pokémon become exceedingly common.

#12: Sludge Life

What's done? All endings

What platform? PC, Steam

Started when? 26/3/23

Finished when? 27/3/23

This game was on my radar for a good while but I kind of forgot about it as though I had suffered a weird fever dream about cigarettes, cats with two buttholes (no, seriously), and graffiti. It did come back onto said radar later on when it released on Steam but was drowned out by the noise of other games at the time (I honestly forgot what was there at the time.)

Then it became free. So, I guess I took the opportunity to do so before the period of when it was free came to an end and it was an enjoyable walking sim of sorts, I like these kind of weird games where you do stuff and just generally explore an area without much lore to go off on.

Maybe now that the sequel is out, I'll probably grab it once my radar empties, sadly, I got Pikmin 4 and AC6 on the horizon so that may be a while...

#13: They Hunger

What's done? Full campaign

What platform? PC, Steam, Sven Co-Op

Multiplayer? Yes, with armoreddragon99 and Kaelynthegoat (I dunno if there was a fourth? Could be, please correct me.)

Finished when? 29/3/23

So, I think I remember trying to play They Hunger solo several times back in the day but I could never complete it because I was not very skilled or knowledgable about operating my own private listen server back then.

Either that or I lacked the motivation to play through it.

However, with Kaelyn and Armored in tow, we completed the campaign for They Hunger over two sessions, although we eventually had to use a walkthrough to figure out where to go next because there were times when conveyance was pretty bad.

It was very quaint and enjoyable for what it is, certainly not something to write home about in this day and age but the fact that this existed in the first place waaay back then, I can truly appreciate that.

#14: Dungeon Defenders

What's done? Base Campaign, Hardcore Hard mode

What platform? PC, Steam

Finished when? 5/4/23

Multiplayer? Yes, with Armoreddragon99

Now, I should iterate that this is the ORIGINAL version, not the remake, not the other branch, the ORIGINAL, with all of its flaws and issues on full display.

It's kinda fun and enjoyable still, feels loads better than its successor, Dungeon Defenders 2, which kind of... I dunno, there's something that's felt off about it.

No screenshots, again.

#15: Toontown Corporate Clash

What's done? The main taskline as of V1.3

Finished when? 6/5/23

Toontown Online is one of those games that kind of sit in my subconscious and only surfaces from time to time, much like stuff like Maplestory, Neopets, Kartrider (RIP OG), and maybe a few others I neglected to mention.

Now, Rewritten was the first private server I've played after TTO's servers had shut down and while I liked it for what it was, which was a nearly-pure vanilla gameplay, I felt like I had been spoiled by other more modern MMOs and it was a little rough trying to get into a groove with it. Couple that with my social anxiety and, well, I've never made much progress into Rewritten. Heck, I've yet to leave TTC there and the furthest I've gotten recently is my bear toon named Flint who is halfway through his Sound track training!

Enter: Corporate Clash. I've seen this private server variant float around for a while and thought the concept felt interesting but never really got into it until The First (Second? Third? I lost count...) Twitter Exodus and I came onto Tumblr.

You see that toon in the second screenshot, Loopy Lancelot? Yeah, that's a toon belonging to photondoesstuff, who I follow here on Tumblr, whose reblogs and likes kept putting TTCC content on my dashboard, most notably these stranger looking cogs that were classified as managers.

Combine that with the drive to see Sads the Skelecog (who is now gone from canon forever so I'll never see him now 😔), and I created my first proper toon on there, a non-binary deer who now joins the ranks of my OCs because god knows I need more of them. I'm still debating on whether I should change their name or not but this isn't the post for it.

I really loved how much they changed the game, they took the entire Toontown game, stripped it down to its components and basically said "How far can we push this game to its limits?" and they've largely succeeded.

The main taskline was an easy and clear goal, the manager fights were fun and not Sound Meta Sound Meta Sound Meta (Still have that in Cog Facilities and HQ Cog Waves (Up until Bossbot, at least)), there were more cosmetics to play around with, there's stickers, choosing your gag tracks was great and having them all levelled and KEEPING their experience if you respec was amazing, and there's still more to this if their teasers about 2.0 content is to be believed.

Sure, you get the Ship of Theseus problem with Corporate Clash where you ask if this is still Toontown even when it has been majorly reworked but I still think it has some Toontown Online DNA still in there, for better or worse, and I'm okay with that.

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#kieuecaprie gaming #kieuecaprie gamer list 2023

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madame-mozart · 2 years

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I was watching a Toontown YouTuber talk about some “awful” MMOs he found and played and one of them happened to be SecretBuilders! This game was such a nostalgia bomb for me; and I say “was” because the game unfortunately shut down this year due to Flash Player getting nuked.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the tag “SecretBuilders” here on Tumblr and there’s... not that many posts about it! I guess it’s because it was pretty obscure and granted, it really went down the drain during the last few years it was online. I’ll talk about some notable moments I experienced on the game, but let me just introduce you to my avatar, “Miyita14″!

(all my favorite outfits I owned)

(my player card)

(my join date)

Yeah, as you can see, I joined all the way back in 2010, over ten years ago! This makes SecretBuilders (I’ll call it “SB” for short) one of the VERY FIRST virtual worlds/MMOs I ever played. Don’t ask me what I was thinking with that username, though. I’m pretty sure I just mashed a bunch of letters together thinking I’d make something cute (I actually used this same username when I played PetPet Park, another nostalgic MMO from back in the day!).

I don’t know if it’d be worth it to explain what exactly SB was - it’s just basically like any other standard kids virtual world like Club Penguin, Fantage, etc. You’d customize an avatar, buy stuff for it, decorate your house, chat and trade with other players, and there was even a premium membership which gave you access to additional features, which................. well, I’ll get back to that soon.

For now, though, let me talk about some memorable moments I had in this game: - As I mentioned before, you could trade stuff with other players and even buy and sell stuff as well! SB had this feature called the “Flea Market” that would actually automatically add items you bought to your flea market for other players to buy (or haggle for a different price), and I didn’t find this out until much later as I’d always get pissed off when people tried to buy items that I didn’t intend to sell (and other people would in turn get mad at me for not selling those items to them). One day, I got a trade request from someone who wanted one of my cute dresses that I forgot to manually take out of my flea market in exchange for one of the most basic items in the game, a wooden chair (furniture item) that the game literally gave you for free as a new player. - One of my favorite dresses that I owned was called something like “Antonieta” - it’s the black dress with the roses in the seventh pic in the second row in that first image above. I remember saving a lot of the premium currency (gold coins) to get it and was so proud of myself that I wore it a lot... and then one day, like one or two players went up to me and called me “fat” and “ugly”. Luckily, I didn’t get too worked up about it and just dismissed them for the most part, calling them “rude” right back (and probably reporting/ignoring them). I think there was another person who actually came up and supported me and told the rude people off as well, which was nice, lol. - SB would sometimes host events where (I think) admins and famous historical figures (basically bots) would be at their houses or in a talk show area and people could come meet them and ask them questions. There was one time where I think an admin hosted a trivia show at their house, and the winner received a special item. I was part of that event, and ohhhhhh boy, was that house FLOODED with people. It was probably super laggy, too. I didn’t actually win anything, but I did enjoy hyping it up with people. I think the last time SB held an event like this was back in 2015. - SB had quite a few things that eventually became broken and no longer worked as the site went on. A few of these things included fashion shows (which you could participate in and win free items like clothing), a television on which you could watch YouTube videos from your home and free weekly/monthly items (they might have been rares as well). - SB had its own “newspaper” known as “The Crooked Pencil” in which users could submit stories and other kinds of writing (think of it kind of like a very basic/kiddy version of Wattpad/Quotev). Back when I first joined, users could type their own comments (I vividly remember sharing Shakespeare’s - yes, the poet - epitaph and I got a comment that funnily misspelled the word “plagiarism”, lol). Eventually, the comment system changed to where you could only select from pre-approved generic comments like “Nice story!” and stuff like that (kind of like a “safe chat”). My most popular post from the Crooked Pencil was submitted in around 2013 and was basically kind of a “get to know me” thing; it received over one thousand comments and over one hundred likes. You can actually read the stories I submitted to SB’s magazine here on my Wattpad!

Now remember how I mentioned something about the membership on SB? I have a theory that this is what drove much of the playerbase off the site, combined with the deteriorating and broken features that rendered a lot of things unplayable plus a lack of events. You see, things that used to be usable by all players like the Crooked Pencil were soon paywalled and accessible only by paying for a membership. I even remember the CHAT was paywalled and I made the mistake of clicking a strange new button on the chat bar that was revealed to be a membership plug! Then, when I tried to chat, it wouldn’t let me send anything without paying! Luckily, I think this was a bug, and it resolved itself a while later. NEVER CLICKED THAT BUTTON AGAIN, I SWEAR. Yeah, so I mean, obviously not a lot of people wanted to pay for the membership and were upset that things were buggy and the site was no longer hosting any big trivia/meetup events, so they quit playing. I was lowkey surprised the game survived for so long up until Flash Player stopped being supported - I mean obviously, that caused a lot of my childhood MMOs to shut down. I would have expected SB to be struggling financially hence why they implemented a membership, but it seemed like it held out until the end.

RIP Miyita14 and SecretBuilders, you will always have a place in my heart.

#rtt #maddy's musings #secretbuilders #mmo #nostalgia #nostalgic game #childhood game #virtual world #long post

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atlasllm · 6 years

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oh shit was tagged in a thing by @500sunstone :o!

rules are A) post how you discovered wizard101 B) what exactly this game means to you, and to post it in #wizbirthday

I actually got into Wiz in a pretty basic, weird way ;w;

I was arouund 2nd or 3rd grade at the time? My sister and I were into MMOs a LOT, we played Toontown and Pirates of the Carribean Online!

I forget if Pirates ever had any “pay to play” things, but I knew that we somehow needed to cut back on some of the things we played, so we had to quit that. Toontown was a HEAVY pay to play MMO, so we could barely progress.

My sister also tried out other MMOs, I know she signed up for Club Penguin, and then Wizard101 after seeing Wiz in a commercial!

Sad to say I was the type of kid who would go “y’all got games on your phone??” or “can i play??” a lot. My sister knew she couldn’t trust me to play on her OWN Wizard (a fire wizard named Melissa Dragondreamer), so she made me my main Wizard, Anna Blueblossom! (they didn’t have Angelica in the name creator, since I was at the phase at which I pretty much made myself in MMOs, Anna still has the ponytail haircut since I was into ponytails in 3rd grade ^^)

This game has been a huge part in my childhood in all honesty, and it’s even where I got my nickname, Mana! (if I hadn’t played wiz101, I probably would have still gone by the name “Queen Magical” o_o).

Wiz101′s been there since /3rd grade/ for me, and I can’t imagine being without all the things it’s shown me! My young self liked to draw parallels to my other interests, and ofc I connected Wiz101 to YuGiOh, aha-

Wiz got me my name Mana, it’s the one MMO I still consider myself playing (even though I’m less active since I’m in Zafaria -_-), and it’s the one game that I’m still able to play since I never grew up with any consoles or handheld gaming devices, and even though it’s just ONE game, I’m still happy to play it time and time again to have that Gamer Feel ^^.

Despite me not having grown up being able to play video games, Wizard101 is still in my top three favorite video games, and definitely number one in the games I’ve /actually/ played!

And hell, I even managed to complete my 3rd grade dreams in Wiz! I always wanted to have two “Nightmare” pets, one named Princess Roxy and one named Prince Max, and I’ve been able to do that after all these years! I’m sure 3rd grade me would be absolutely proud, especially since I’ve completed the first arc already :>!

I can’t believe it’s survived this long, and I hope it continues to thrive! I’m not too active in the Wiz community since my schedule’s always too busy to play as much as I want to, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still love this game to death!

#mana speaks;#wizbirthday #happy birthday wizard101 you're in 4th-5th grade now #wizard101;

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sirsnoinkers449 · 6 years

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Real Sadpig Hours

Popping out of the pigpen after a while to talk about five years ago. Disney Online, in a financial pickle, had to resort to their inner cog and shut down three of their online worlds. These were Pixie Hollow, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Toontown Online. Since it’s the five year anniversary of this tragedy and around ten years since I picked up the game, I might as well tell my story.

While I never played Pixie Hollow and hadn’t touched POTCO in a while, I had coincidentally logged into TTO for the first time in what was probably years. My membership had long been cancelled, so I just goofed around in playgrounds and fished and stuff. The next day, I opened the TTO launcher, wanting to do it all again. The dark red message box immediately grabbed my attention.

“Attention, Toons! Toontown Online will be closing on September 19th, 2013.”

When I saw it, I thought the game went down for an update. I thought this was something that already happened and the game would continue to exist as normal.

Then I realized it was August 20th.

One of the foundations of my childhood was on an unstoppable collision course with fate.

2008 was when I first got into the game. I had seen commercials for it on TV before, but I had never seen the game until my little brother’s friend came over and logged in. I still vividly remember my first glimpse of the game; his alternate toon looking out at Toontown Central, facing away from the trolley. My little brother picked up on the game, and I ultimately followed suit. His friend eventually remembered his old login information, leaving Crazy Cuckoo Crumblecrumbs to be picked up by my little brother.

This has begged a ten year question since then. If my brother made his own account, what would his first toon have been? He made a little yellow duck as an alternate toon, but that was around a year later. It’s a question not even he knows.

My first toon wasn’t Sir Snoinkers. It was a short, fat bear toon on my brother’s account named Fatty Bear. Yes, like the bear from Putt-Putt. I didn’t take the game seriously at first, but I eventually grew to like it so much I made my own account. I thought about making a pink pig toon simply named Snoinkers, but because Disney Online couldn’t comprehend the sheer manliness of the color pink, I had to settle for another color. I decided a red head, an orange body, and yellow legs would be lovely. One last-second Sir later, a new chapter of my childhood began.

You wanna know what happened after that? Just check out my bio. It sums everything up and saves me a lot of time typing. https://sirsnoinkers449.tumblr.com/bio

There were a few key parts I didn’t include, though, like the part where I got temp banned. Yeah, that happened. I said some inappropriate stuff without even realizing it and got suspended. I remember being terrified of all my friends leaving me because of what I did, even though none of it was in their presence. I was way too self conscious back then and didn’t realize friendship went past simple slip-ups. Of course, I gotta shout out Little Penny Fizzletwist for accepting it more than anyone else.

Honestly, I can’t remember a whole lot else I haven’t brought up before. I witnessed cat toons attempting to take over Toontown way back when, but my memory’s pretty foggy. All of this was more than five years ago.

When I found out the game was closing, I was in disbelief. However, I wasn’t devastated over it, as I hadn’t really been into the game over the past few years. Additionally, I was one of a very small minority to respect Disney Online’s choice to end the game, as sad as I was to see it go. Still, it was harrowing to see such a vital piece of my childhood coming to a close. If anything, my little brother was the devastated one, as he moved on to POTCO and played it non-stop. Nevertheless, there was no time like the present to give it one last sendoff.

I already talked about what I did, but what I didn’t talk about was the unhappy ending. While the last I ever saw of TTO was my estate and my doodle, I saw a scary sight before teleporting away. My little brother and I had finished our final cog building, and we stepped out to a dismal landscape. Daisy Gardens had been completely taken over by cog buildings, and the streets were overrun with cogs. In a sense, it was symbolic. Closing TTO was entirely a business decision, and we were losing our town to the cogs both ingame and in real life.

Of course, we know TTR happened. I got back into the game, made lots of friends, lost them all when Toonbook’s servers went down, and kinda stopped playing TTR. In fact, I haven’t touched it since I made this Tumblr, although writing this makes me at least want to check in. However, Toontown Online was a game that shaped my life unlike many others.

#toontown #toonblr #sir snoinkers' squealings #;_;7

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sellbotfactory · 6 years

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saw @emotoonal ‘s TT meme thingie and wanted to fill it out...

1: What’s your name? Do you have a few other names you go by, whether its your name IRL or an alias?

myyyy name is V! but ive also been known as Brownster/Brownie and Milkshake in the TT fandom. V stands for many things but its the initial of my legal middle name ~

2: What is your gender and/or the pronouns you use?

im nonbinary! i consider myself to have no gender and be null/void in that sense. i use they/them exclusively

3: What is your main toon you play as (or whatever your most developed is)? Is it an OC? A sona? Your toon from Toontown Online all those years ago? Where are you in the game? (playground,gag,suit-wise). What game do you play (Rewritten, Fellowship, Offline?) Feel free to tell as much about them as you want and even include pictures if you can/want!

my main toon i play on is Brownie Fudge Sundae on TTR! she was a combination of my two TTO toons (Brownie from the US server and Milkshake from the UK server). she’s become her own OC in my little toonworld. she’s currently 112 laff, dropless, and im working on maxing cash+sell. i hope to max her sometime as it was always my dream to max on TTO!

4: What type of blogger are you/do you consider yourself? Someone who makes fanworks of your ocs or others’? Someone who just reblogs what they think is interesting? Someone who posts fun/dumb screencaps? A person who develops entire stories/headcanons/lore with their own toontown characters/fan ideas? Or something else entirely?

i just draw haha. i love to create stories/lore w my characters too so i try to illustrate this! i also love drawing for other people. this blog is a bit of a break from my job which is freelance illustration, i draw a lot of complicated things so drawing TT helps me destress and keep my art loose and expressive.

5: What is your favorite toon species?

cats, im biased... but i also love crocs, rabbits, deer and mice.

6: Your favorite cog?

regular cog: LOAN SHARK and boss: it’s a tie between VP and CFO for me. i was obsessed with VP growing up but ive come to appreciate CFO in my older age. he’s hardcore, man.

7: Your favorite HQ and/or playground?

favourite HQ by design alone is LBHQ for sure... those marbled floors still amaze me. favourite playground by design.... probably TTC or DDL.

8: What about cog boss fight? Which one is the most fun to you?

CFO is my favourite boss fight! its really fun and not as grindy as the others. i enjoy the concept of CJ and CEO a lot but feel they drag on too much. VP is VP, i like taking little toons in VP so thats fun.

9: How long have you been playing? Have you been here all the way back from Toontown Online’s original release up until its closure? Did you just start playing recently?

i started playing in 2005, 2 years after TTO’s release! i couldnt play all the time due to money constraints but i played both the US and UK server.

10: What is your favorite gag?

probably birthday cake or TNT lmao...

11: What stuff do you like besides Toontown? Other fandoms you’re in? Hobbies? Bands/music artists? Whatever you can think of.

my main fandom is Transformers! i also have a great interest in other cartoon-based stuff like Disney, Cuphead and BATIM.

12: Do/Did you play any other MMO’s/MMORPG’s/Other Multiplayer games?

a LOT.... maplestory, latale, WoW, trickster online, and many others i cannot remember the names of

13: Do you consider yourself social?

im pretty social! im not the best with hardcore one-on-one communication and tend to reserve that for my fiance, but i like meeting new people and try to be as friendly as i can.

14: Do you play Toontown frequently?

at the moment as my health has improved tremendously (new meds boiz), i’m playing it daily!

15: What’s your favorite thing to do in Toontown? (try to max your toons, play trolley games, talk to people, do fashion shows/parties, help new users, ect. ect.)

im focusing on maxing right now but i love talking to people and helping new users... i also love making new outfits and trying new strategies!

16: What’s the funniest thing that’s happened to you in the game?

unfortunately my memory is too bad for this </3

17: Is there anything that really annoys you that happens/people do in the game?

greening always angers me, but that’s a given. i also can’t stand people who leave halfway through factories because they missed ONE battle. not many other things bother me though. im a very live and let live sort of toon.

18: Not Toontown related, but usually this tells a lot about a person- what’s your favorite fictional character(s), if any?

...............Starscream from... Transformers....

i have narcissistic personality disorder dont look at me

19: What’s your favorite thing about Toonblr?

honestly i love how friendly and communicative everyone is!!! almost everyone adds tags to my art and comments on my stuff and its super friendly, i adore it!

20: Anything else you’d like to share? Your main blog/other blogs you run? Fun facts about you? What you ate for breakfast? Go wild

i ate.........bagels for breakfast. also i want to make a million loan sharks someone stop me

#personal

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jennilah · 7 years

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s/o to the clearly more experienced player who watched me die like a dumbshit raiding a building, thx for your patience essentially holding my hand telling me what to do up, and then i dun went and fucked it up by attacking the wrong enemy and died, leaving you to fight alone...

in Toontown.

i realize now where you got the impression that i was prepared, approaching me asking if i played TTO. “TTO?” I asked. “Toontown Online,” they said. “Well that’s a silly question! We’re playing Toontown right now!” I thought. They didn’t give me time to answer, they just went straight into asking if I would like to accompany them into a cog building.

“Sounds fun!” said me, following close behind. I didn’t know what help I would be, considering my extremely low level compared to them, but they were experienced, surely they knew what they were doing.

Enter me, choosing all the wrong gags, and them pretty much telling me what to pick at each round and me still managing to screw up at every turn. I died an untimely death, the last I heard from them was a “Oh no!” as my screen faded into the playground.

Only now do I realize that they were asking if I played the original Toontown game before it was closed, assuming that if I did, then I must have some semblance of a battle strategy.....

but alas, today was the first time i played in maybe ten years or more, and when i did play way back when, all i did was fish and buy clothes and doodles....

im sorry lmfao now im googling battle strategy stuff and holy cow i had no idea

#they were extremely patient with me lmfao thank you ;_;#toontown #jennilargh

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forest-of-thought · 7 years

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Just a little vent. (sorry if it’s too long, I didn’t mean to write much)

You know that feeling when you play a game in your childhood that meant a lot to you and then you don’t play it for years, but when you eventually do you get hit with the nostalgia feels?

That happened to me with Toontown.

I played that game when I was about 6/7 years old back when it first came out in 2003 (it was my only online game I ever played along with Runescape). I had such amazing memories of that game, most of them were related to friendships I had made there.

I think I stopped playing it when I was about 11 (so 2008?) I can’t remember why but I think It was a mixture of things going on in my personal life. Anyway, a few years passed and I remember deciding “you know, I haven’t played Toontown in years” so I went to go find and IT FUCKING CLOSED. I was so heartbroken you have no idea.

So eventually I accepted the loss and left it behind for another year or 2 and then guess what?? I was reading a thread 3 days ago on Reddit where someone mentioned “Toontown Rewritten” and I was so fucking happy.

I don’t care if i’m now 20 years old and it probably looks weird me playing it now, I fucking downloaded that shit! and oh my god, I’m so happy I did.

Playing it again made me genuinely tear up. Part of it was happy tears because the game that used to mean so much to me is still going relatively strong and finally all those features you had to pay in the past are now free - I also remember so many things about the game despite it being years since I last played it.

But I also felt kind of sad? like I made a new character because I couldn’t remember my old one so It’s kinda like i’m starting new instead of continuing on (so i’ve lost a lot of stuff - but i’m pretty certain that I unintentionally made my character look the same as my old one, a blue cat). That and all my old friends are no longer there, almost like they never had a presence in my life to begin with.

And I know it’s silly to feel sad over people who you can’t even remember their usernames and who probably don’t even remember me. But it’s the memories I had with them that make it kinda hard to accept? I shared a lot with those people and I can’t help but wonder what they’re doing with their lives. I wonder if they play this game still? or started re-playing it? or maybe the game is just another memory and they’ve moved on with their lives.

I know they will probably never see this, and if they do they might not even know i’m referring to them - but I hope you all are living wonderful lives and I just want to thank you all for the wonderful memories we shared together <3 it was great while it lasted, and i’m glad I met you all.

#toontown #toontoown rewritten #online gaming #reflection #childhood #friends #online friends #memories

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translucio · 6 years

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unbeknownst to most except those very few friends i still have from my rping days, i used to skirt the edges of TONS of furry communities in various places on the web. it was nigh unavoidable back when “nerd” communities were kinda synonymous with other culturally alienated groups. and back when “nerds” were a culturally alienated group.

like....there was the main forum/pet collector/art website that i was on in periodic long episodes of activity which. a) i refuse to name and b) was HEAVILY populated by furries. it was and likely still is a majority furry site. but also lots of book nerds and anime fans. and also homestucks back when it was still updating and at its height. and there were a few other forum sites i frequented that were similar.

then there was also neopets, and to a lesser extent club penguin, which i was SUPER into for a while. and there were definitely furry groups on there, a few of whom i probably intersected with occasionally without fully realizing bc i was a wee lad.

but also i was on feralheart for a while, and that was pretty much by definition a furry roleplaying game, but i thought it was neat and i liked the custom maps and character creation. and wolfquest was a thing, which actually now that i think about it was a furry thing but also cool and at least somewhat realistic. there were a couple of other mmos where a notable portion of the playerbase were furries, like dizzywood and toontown (good GOD i loved toontown. whatever happened to toontown. apparently it was like shut down) and this weird anime-esque 2d mmo called wonderland online which i was very into

somehow through it all i managed to not become a furry but admittedly. there were some close calls

#im on my nonsense tonight lads. im in full blown ramble mode

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kaysta · 7 years

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MMOs I have played throughout the years

This is gonna be a long one, so I’m gonna put a read more to not eat a whole dash board. It’s gonna show my age a little ^^;

MUDs: I didn’t actually play these myself, but I vaguely remember my parents typing white letters onto the black screen. One of them let you add more description as you entered a room as you got higher level. I believe my mom had green light in the shapes of trees and my dad had cold wind and skulls.

Ultima Online: I made a blonde named Sarah, based on one of my classmates. She chopped wood, cooked food, and was told not to leave town. I got curious and followed my parents into the forest to watch their raid, and got attacked. I was very upset when they ate my corpse. I don’t think I played again.

Everquest: ah my first 3D MMO. I had a woodelf which meant my starting area was in the trees, where safety railings did not exist. You learned quickly to walk instead of run, or else you would have to wander around under the city to find your corpse to get your equipment back. Skeletons that were dead looked the same as when they were alive, so sometimes a pile of bones would jump up and start attacking you. I got as far as a keep that led to the desert, and boats that took a long time to get you places.

Anarchy Online: The rare SciFi MMO, but I unfortunately played during the beta. Starter quests could not complete and many other bugs prevented me from enjoying it. The idea of implants instead of armor was pretty freaking cool though. I heard it did pretty well once the bugs were ironed out.

Dark Age of Camelot: I technically played this, but all I remember is auto following in massive clumps where you couldn’t see your character (no collision detection lol) in order to fight at keeps. I think I mostly watched my parents play this one.

Rune Scape: How do I bury bones? TEACH ME YOUR DAMN GAME. Got bored in the first hour.

Adventure Quest: A browser/flash game that was pretty cool. I think I got decently far before I forgot about it. Animation was basic flash but the art was good.

Eve Online: I tried this recently and just.... it’s not fun. I was trying to do the basic missions and figure out what skills I should train eventually and like... I don’t like video game homework. And this is straight up a second job.

Horizons/Istaria: Vaguely recall requiring people to move around so that resources in an area could recover from depletion. Being able to play as a dragon is pretty cool. Looking it up, I’m surprised both that it is alive and that it changed game titles.

Maple Story: I played this with my brother and it was pretty fun. Many killing of slimes. Don’t even remember what class I played.

Star Wars Galaxies: All I remember is dancing in the Cantina, I don’t know if I did much else. My mom did not like the crafting system and the lack of ability to label same shaped storage crates.

Toontown Online: My brother played this far more than I did, but I had fun when I did play it. Don’t remember what the name of my yellow cat was. The revival (fanmade) server is doing pretty well, last I heard.

City of Heroes: <3 My favorite MMO, I was there when City of Villains was an UPCOMING release. Played both my main hero and main villain to approximately the same level. I would probably pay a good $40-60 to play with that character creator again, especially if powers were included. The villain became my default D&D character, and the hero became a wanderer in my never-finished Kingdom Hearts fan comic.

World of Warcraft: Probably the most amusing rogue I played, and actually got to feel useful in dungeons (assuming I remember correctly). The last quest I remember was titled “Snakes on the Plain”.

Club Penguin: Briefly wandered around, danced a bit.

Roblox: I vaguely remember being in a difficult to control fighting match with my brother. I think one of the people from the community is still on my Steam friends list?

Lord of the Rings Online: Very beautiful, but somehow failed to capture my interest. My sister had great fun fishing and wandering around the Shire.

Age of Conan: My mom knew whenever I got a critical because my cackle could be heard from across the room. Was very satisfying to playing the beginning 20 levels a few times, but never bothered leaving the first city.

Aion: Two races of winged flying people fighting against each other for holes in the sky. As a female you either were “good” (wore high heels) or “evil” (had clawed feet that JUST HAPPENDED to be like high heels). My mom theorized that everyone was actually only three inches tall, which is why we had leaves for umbrellas and could, ya know, fly.

Wizard 101: A simple but polished game, with a sense of incoming paywall surrounding it. Didn’t get very far, but it was a decent concept and execution.

Rift: Play as the magic jerks or the machine nerds, each blaming the other for causing the end of the world. I really enjoyed that rifts open up and everyone runs in together, fights a good fight, then go back to whatever they were doing. I still fire this up once in a great while.

Star Wars KOTR: Had a good story, just like the original single player games. It forgot to expand the walkable area, however, in it’s transition to MMO. You always rode an object to the next location, with no option to just hoof it and explore. With a strict Lightside/Darkside, sometimes you got lightside points for just.. being efficient. No Mr. Evil Science, putting different brains in the creatures is not helping our cause of domination you are just wasting money. I am going to report you so we can get a competent scientist instead. *lightside points granted*

TERA: I played this briefly with a housemate in college, but she and her boyfriend wouldn’t stop to read what the quests were saying. May have been more fun with different people.

Guild Wars 2: Currently trying to play this one again, haven’t played since it was first released so I have a lot to catch up on. I always enjoy their stories and active encouragement of exploration. Getting enough points to unlock the new toy (a glider) was a bit of a chore, but not enough to stop my enjoyment so far.

The Secret World: Started playing this with my group of friends, definitely enjoyed the atmosphere and themes. Keep thinking I should play it again, but I never seem to get around to it.

Archeage: I locked onto this game in an obsessive way after college, since it was great at making me feel useful. I love fishing, jumping onto other ships to invade them, and building houses. Over time it has become more focused on gear comparing, since it is PvP only servers. Everyone took the politics of not killing each other (mostly discussed in voice chat) very seriously. I’ve never enjoyed the homework involved in PvP builds or top level gear, so I saved it to be the very last thing I tried. The random chance for upgrading gear, and massive decline in player population, really lowered my interest in logging in.

Elder Scrolls Online: This had a worse time than Star Wars KOTR transitioning into an MMO. While the world is technically more open, it still follows the MMO logic of “things that direction will kill you until level XX”. The main thing that hurt it, for me, was that I was playing with my boyfriend. If you are on the same quest with someone and go ahead a step, or make a different choice, you can no longer help them fight because the monsters DO NOT EXIST on your screen.

Revelation Online: Tried to make my usual sexy thief (City of Villains character) and was thrown off by how GIRLY the female Blademaster is. I’m talking cute swinging of arms, softly cheering up people, and RIDING A HORSE SIDE SADDLE. I want to be the strong independent woman stereotype, not the polite flower stereotype. In general, I was surprised that your height was restricted by your class but happy with overall character customization. My mom gave up on this one because it was even more pay to win than she expected.

#mmorpg #me #huge list #this took me multiple edit to complete

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