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blatman posted:what was the leveling process like in EQOA? It was very similar to what you’d expect from an Everquest game in general but broadly more forgiving and with a slightly different cadence, since everything was theoretically built around people using controllers for abilities and zoning not really being a thing, as most of the world was contiguous. So unsurprisingly the main mechanism was camping, but levels were quicker than on PC and death was a lot more forgiving, so people could afford to be cavalier in ways had you couldn’t EQ. I think group sizes were also slightly smaller with five or six people? Either way the basic dynamics were the same. Classes were pretty much the same as EQ but with streamlined spells and abilities, in that stuff was cheaper to learn, less complicated to acquire, and generally a little different. I played a Shaman and they were still offhealers, buffer/debuffer, super valued for SOW after level 27, wolf/bear form, wolf/bear pets, it was a really fun class that was a bit less restricted than the PC equivalent but also lacked some of the more sophisticated mana tools like cannibalize. I played a Shaman on P1999 and on EQMac back in the day and EQOA’s version of the class was like a pastiche of everything EQ had done or considered up to that point. Importantly even though it came out a bit later, it was still pre-WoW enough for the classes that don’t fit into the holy trinity modern model like Enchanter were still built around their unique utility and backup DPS functions. I remember spending a lot of time camping at Castle Lightwolf - I think - a big mountain castle that’s also a major camp in EQ. Ditto with places in Antonica. EQOA was a lot more solo friendly though, leveling alone was viable for most classes all the way up to like level 40, and it was positively encouraged with smaller quests that kind of presaged what WoW would do, but grinding was still the main mechanism, solo or in a camp/dungeon. It was also pretty clearly signposted and had a more straightforward material progression ladder in that every class had a series of armor sets that would help guide you towards the right leveling areas and ensure you’d have access to a decent gear baseline. There was better stuff ofc but the class armor quest lines were well tuned to be just complex enough to encourage cooperation but not outrageously long or punishing. It also did a great job, imo, of making the world traversible from all the starting cities despite having almost as intricate a faction and good/evil system as EQ. The fast travel system was a precursor to WoW’s flight paths where you had to get a “carriage route” by visiting a place and, subsequently, you could fast travel along the network one stop at a time to connected places. It had the effect of encouraging exploration but making it easy to return to particularly relevant camps or dungeons. They were also one of the few loading screens as the world was otherwise without zone lines outside of continent transitions The most important thing though I think is the way the combat incentives and punishments worked. Unlike EQ you couldn’t level down or lose your equipment. A lost corpse only meant incurring EXP debt and a resurrection only meant not incurring EXP debt. If a player died and wasn’t resurrected, they’d be given a little overlay on their EXP bar equivalent to a certain percentage of the level. Any EXP earned after that is docked by like 50% until the “debt” is paid off, and you go back to leveling like usual. Death and wipes were still hella punishing when you’re deep in a dungeon, but a wipe didn’t mean leveling down out of EXP range or losing all your poo poo, so it wasn’t catastrophic. Obviously this had a major impact on the basic dynamics at play and so things could be a bit more casual, especially combined with the faster - but still preposterously long by today’s standards leveling speed - pace, it seemed to cultivate its own niche of people who wanted to play EQ but didn’t have a PC/didn’t have the time/(like me) were 12 years old I have really fond memories of EQOA that I think aren’t entirely nostalgia. Objectively remembering the systems in the context of the genre today only reinforces my opinion that it was characterized by a bunch of design decisions that could have been a new standard and should at least have merited a long life and a PC port but it was forgotten in the wake of WoW and the small population of people into Everquest that also had an online capable PS2 with a keyboard willing to pay a monthly fee when most PS2 games were free to play online. It did last like ten years, though, and M&M seems explicitly inspired by it .
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Nov 5, 2023 23:33
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jokes posted:Every MMO is better when nobody knows what they're doing. It's why FFXI is still pretty fun: you simply cannot play that game and know what the gently caress you're doing. This is why i liked Archeage, didn't know what the gently caress i was doing for about half the game...
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Nov 6, 2023 05:48
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FreeWifi!! posted:This is why i liked Archeage, didn't know what the gently caress i was doing for about half the game... Neither did the developers or publishers
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Nov 6, 2023 05:51
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kirbysuperstar posted:Neither did the developers or publishers please.... the publisher knew it was a ponzi scheme and played into that hard.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:55
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everwake posted:WotLK is when class balance in raids started to settle down and every class had at least one viable spec it could bring to the table. Hey, class imbalance was how I got into my first raid since the guild I was friendly with didn't have enough Warlocks for Garr. Mainly because for the first six months Warlocks were total poo poo and were suddenly the bees knees when they got their first balance pass in April 05.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:35
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Hey, class imbalance was how I got into my first raid since the guild I was friendly with didn't have enough Warlocks for Garr. I played a warlock on a pvp server at launch and the experience was so horrible I quit WoW for I think 2 years and played EQ2 instead. Finding out that warlocks got godlike as soon as I left was a punch in the nuts.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:18
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Quitting it for EQ2 was already a punch in the nuts.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:37
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I had a lot more fun in EQ2 than I ever did in WoW. And almost all of it was during the leveling process, just hanging out doing heritage quests and non-instanced dungeons with people. I barely played at the endgame in EQ2.
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Nov 9, 2023 01:42
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Mustang posted:I had a lot more fun in EQ2 than I ever did in WoW. And almost all of it was during the leveling process, just hanging out doing heritage quests and non-instanced dungeons with people. I barely played at the endgame in EQ2. I've enjoyed EQ2 immensely over the years. I don't think I've ever been at the actual current end game at any point.
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Nov 9, 2023 04:59
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I also had a great time with EQ2 even when it ran like dogshit on my laptop. I never did much raiding or "endgame" but I have many fond memories of exploring and leveling with some friends. I married one of them! We were actually on Unrest with WHAT but that was in my pre goon days...
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Nov 9, 2023 05:07
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I also played with WHAT, and I'd honestly play it more if EQ2 still had an active goon population. I still log in sometimes with F2P just to run around and check out the world for nostalgia's sake. I also always liked EQ2's art style for whatever reason, it's definitely not a pretty game, but I think it works for it.
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Nov 9, 2023 06:01
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I always thought EQ2 was hideous looked like Poser models at the time to me.
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Nov 9, 2023 16:47
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I think the character faces are ghoulish, especially when SOEmote was in the game. Just deep uncanny valley vibes. But I think the gear models and the environments are really charming. The UI is probably very ... rustic ... to anyone who hasn't been used to it since the mid-2000s.
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Nov 9, 2023 17:18
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i played EQ2 recently and quite enjoyed the F2P up to level 20ish with a static leveling group. then it got kinda samey and boring. not nearly challenging enough, and I guess that's probably intentional to push you toward the latest expack where you'll spend some drat $ ya freeloader 
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Nov 9, 2023 18:34
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What are everyone’s thoughts on seasons in MMOs? This includes obvious stuff like TLPs but I’m intentionally phrasing it to be more widely encompassing than that. What MMOs do this well/poorly? Is there some form of season you wish an MMO did? For context, this came up in a random Discord I’m in and I’m curious what others think.
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Nov 9, 2023 19:20
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Shards of Dalaya had a good (on paper, I never played it) season system where seasonal players were mixed with regular players on the same server. So you could only group/trade/be buffed by/etc with other seasonal players. And then IIRC you were mixed into the regular pool of players after the season was over? I wish more MMOs had remort systems to let you officially retire a character and get some tangible benefit for your next toon to keep the grind going forever 
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Nov 9, 2023 19:24
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I like seasons when they give some structure as to what the hell I'm supposed to be doing. Trying to deal with any MMO I haven't been playing for 10+ years always feels overwhelming. Seasons usually give me some sort of tangible goal right out of the gate.
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Nov 9, 2023 19:34
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It's funny, I remember one of the biggest positive that MMOs had back in the day for me was a persistent world that lasted forever. These days, I think I lean more towards seasons. With games like PoE, you can try new stuff in a "vacuum" and anything that works can be added to the base game that will continue into future seasons. WoW is doing a fun experiment with Season of Discovery this month where they will cap the level at 25 and make a traditional dungeon into a 10 man raid. Over time, they will increase the cap another 10 levels and continue the process. There will also be runes that give you crazy abilities that can allow a Rogue to tank or a Mage to heal. It just sounds fun.
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Nov 9, 2023 19:41
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Yo that actually sounds pretty cool and actually makes me want to try playing WoW for the first time in years.
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Nov 9, 2023 19:46
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Groovelord Neato posted:I always thought EQ2 was hideous looked like Poser models at the time to me. It was It still is It ran like poo poo and still kinda does but was fun
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Nov 9, 2023 19:48
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was it eq2 that had a planned feature to rig player models so they could animate while you used voice chat
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Nov 9, 2023 20:01
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Mustang posted:Yo that actually sounds pretty cool and actually makes me want to try playing WoW for the first time in years. It does sound suspiciously fun and cool
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Nov 9, 2023 20:04
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:was it eq2 that had a planned feature to rig player models so they could animate while you used voice chat i thought they pushed that feature live and it was horrible
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Nov 9, 2023 20:25
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:was it eq2 that had a planned feature to rig player models so they could animate while you used voice chat yep I don't know if it ever happened or not but it was so weird at the time and I am gonna say stillw eird
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Nov 9, 2023 20:35
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG6GK6Oo58c
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Nov 9, 2023 20:36
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blatman posted:i thought they pushed that feature live and it was horrible I believe the tech was implemented and eventually found to be unworkable due to the poor quality of consumer facial tracking software and webcams in general for the era. EQ2 is an oddball time capsule of tech enthusiasm in the early 2000s: they were either too ahead of their time (facial tracking for digital avatars did eventually become big business once the tech was there) or wildly, wildly off the mark (building the entire engine off the assumption that the CPU would continue to be the workhorse for graphics processing and that GPUs would only ever be their partner). Vermain fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 20:37
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setting up this frog as my vtuber rig
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Nov 9, 2023 20:43
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Frog Act posted:People on the subreddit have been comparing it to EQOA a lot, and EQOA was my favorite MMO ever. Apparently the gameplay, world, and progression are closer to EQOA than EQ and the graphics feel like they were almost definitely inspired by EQOA. Which is awesome, ps2 Everquest was a bigtime niche but I’ve been telling random passers by and uninterested girlfriends that now is the time to bring it back for years Friends I made playing SOCOM1 on PS2 when I was really young, were the first to hit lvl 50 on EQOA (server Castle Lightwolf but I am pretty positive they were first across all the servers); Remedy the cleric & forget the rogue's name. I believe they quit not too long after that as there wasn't that much content at the time, but EQOA being my first MMO I've always looked back on it super fondly.
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Nov 9, 2023 20:55
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The facial animation stuff was the SOEmote thing I mentioned earlier. It was removed from the game a couple of years ago.
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Nov 9, 2023 22:47
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knox posted:Friends I made playing SOCOM1 on PS2 when I was really young, were the first to hit lvl 50 on EQOA (server Castle Lightwolf but I am pretty positive they were first across all the servers); Remedy the cleric & forget the rogue's name. I believe they quit not too long after that as there wasn't that much content at the time, but EQOA being my first MMO I've always looked back on it super fondly. Lol, I also got into via SOCOM1, which was revelatory to my young mind and opened up worlds of possibilities re: online gaming, since my family had a Mac at the time. Iirc eventually EQOA had a good amount of content and was supported for a long time even after it’s only expansion came out I asked the M&M devs on Reddit if they had any particular nostalgia for EQOA informing their design choices and one of the developers worked at SOE at the time and was tangentially involved in EQOA, and while they said it wasn’t an explicit thing a lot of their decisions have kind of intersected with where it ended up, since they’re trying to amalgamate the best parts of that era and it was uniquely good for pre-WoW MMOs
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Nov 10, 2023 00:00
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Cardboard Fox posted:
So Blizz is just ripping off ideas from private servers?
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Nov 10, 2023 00:02
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MH Knights posted:So Blizz is just ripping off ideas from private servers? What, no, of course not! This is an original idea from the company that brought you completely original IPs like Starcraft and Warcraft. They would never Ascend into the private server space to see how they are doing things better.
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Nov 10, 2023 00:47
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Reading about parallels between M&M and EQOA has me so intrigued by M&M. I loved EQOA, I got into it through RuneScape, way back when it was still a tiny Java game. I was probably 14 and the furthest I made it was like 34 on an elf Paladin on CLW. I spent so much of my time in that game in Darvar Manor. Out of nowhere, I was sent a Frontiers beta disc in the mail. I had no idea what it was and never signed up for anything, but I just remember checking it out with my buddy and we were floored once music started actually playing in cities and zones. I jumped back into EQOA in college and played it out until the end. This when they had the Hagley potion permanently available on the non-test servers. I had a sweet human forester (ranger) that I basically played as a tank for easier mobs. I paired up with a bard and monk and we chewed through light blues and blues so fast, it was a ton of fun. I popped my foraged berries like a madman to keep myself healed. It was such a strange game but it felt so rich and dense. A few years in, I tried EQ on PC to see what the original was about and I couldn’t believe how different the two games actually were. I would give so much to play EQOA again.
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Nov 10, 2023 05:54
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Oh man I also got one of those Frontier beta disks. The beta was right at the beginning of summer and I was in like sixth grade, the whole thing felt like a quantum leap in graphics and mechanics though I’m sure in retrospect it was a fairly typical MMO expansion. I was so into it at the time my friends snuck into my house and flipped the breakers (really pissing off my parents) to get me to come back outside
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Nov 10, 2023 15:25
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EQOA as controller MMO was definitely super fun as the young teen I was. Also got my first experience with MMO scamfuckery by like, lesser-SOCOM friends. After kid gave me his 30 bard which I leveled almost to max level he changed the password and took it back. I just remember the elf starting zone and being super mesmerized by it. Frontiers definitely added cool classes, Alchemist as an actual class instead of tradeskill, just throwing potions on mutherfuckers was awesome.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:44
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knox posted:After kid gave me his 30 bard which I leveled almost to max level he changed the password and took it back. I had a very similar experience on UO when I was a kid. My parents wouldn't pay for an account but my friend had two accounts (his parents were divorced and they didn't speak, so he convinced both parents he wanted an account), and he let me use one for about a year during which time I made a GM mage/bard character which was a great moneymaker. After my friend realized the usefulness of the character, his parents mysteriously "closed" that account and my password stopped working. Thankfully around that time I was able to get my first credit card and could start paying for my own account. He confessed years later that he just kept playing the character when I was offline which explained why he always had so much money on hand in game.
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Nov 10, 2023 17:06
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LOL I once shared my Asheron's Call account with a classmate in like 9th grade and then changed the password on him when I saw he had filled an entire server's character slots
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Nov 11, 2023 00:04
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Cardboard Fox posted:What, no, of course not! This is an original idea from the company that brought you completely original IPs like Starcraft and Warcraft. They would never Ascend into the private server space to see how they are doing things better. wow, those private servers should sue
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Nov 12, 2023 20:51
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With Pantheon fully making GBS threads the bed, MNM is the best hope for retro mmo folk. (Embers adrift being the other, but it seems to be missing the high fantasy aspect, but I haven't looked into it much). I've been all over the p99 and eq threads for... I dunno, forever, played a ton of both, so I'm like.. insanely the target audience. I feel like I gotta say that to be critical or you get flooded with "tHe GaMe iS nOt FoR yOu" nonsense. The stress test was several hours of frustration. Not from a technical aspect, but how they've implemented their design. - you spend the first 5 minutes scribing and memming spells/skills. Low level poo poo should scribe fast. - your newbie note gives very insufficient directions, and says to just ask guards if you get lost But the guards only give cardinal directions, and there is no compass/sense heading. And the main city is large and very organic feeling, which is cool, but very frustrating to learn with zero tools. - the two newbie quests I tried both boiled down to "literally run all over town looking for random poo poo". Rogue one gave info on finding stuff at least. Ele one though is literally "go all over the city until you see emotes". And one of the objectives is in an area filled with red con kos mobs. This is the newbie intro quest. Thanks to server lag I could explore it, but searched everywhere and could not find the last bit. I got the "getting close" emote, but not the final. Then eventually you get killed, and it's a five minute run back, mem poo poo again, get your corpse, although you're likely to just die again. - the ele one also requires doing weird mud poo poo, which I'm down with, but the game did nothing to really indicate or teach me what was required. I'm worried that will lead to this being a "read the wiki" game - the level one trash in the newbie yard was likely to kill you solo. I like grouping, but let me get a feel for the class first. And if you did kill it, the exp was miniscule. - you can sell your equipped gear, lol. Accidentally sold my weapon because of the laggy ui. I love quests that aren't bear rear end. I like it being not only valuable, but required to read quests. No ! markers everywhere. I love navigating by landmark and learning the area. I don't like minimaps. I like not having a main map that shows my dot, which means you can't just play the map, which keeps you in the world. The good news is that all of this is so freaking early. It's not like any of this overly matters. I was excited though, and got let down. I just wanted to do a trip report on what I experienced. My plan for the December test is to find a group to run with. I bet that'll be a lot more fun than dying to level 1 mobs or "not really player tested newbie quests". Although the extra bonus test today did let me progress the rogue quest, and I'm curious to what the next step will bring.
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Nov 13, 2023 07:39
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xZAOx posted:With Pantheon fully making GBS threads the bed, MNM is the best hope for retro mmo folk. (Embers adrift being the other, but it seems to be missing the high fantasy aspect, but I haven't looked into it much). EverCraft Online https://discord.gg/evercraftonline
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Nov 13, 2023 08:22
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