[Spikedude]

I started playing because I was young and not a lot of cool MMOs even existed and I had irl friends who played. I thought it was a cool concept; back then it was SO simple - you'd pick flowers or mine, you had an ak, uzi, shotgun, handgun, eventually neorifle and metal storm, and then some core electronics guns came later. Then you'd try desperately to avoid getting PK'd long enough to afford the 1k you'd need for like the second or third best guns.

But a lot of things kept the atmosphere fun then. People were more laid back in general and took it as just a video game - probably BECAUSE it was less complicated. Back then it was just part of the game if you got scammed. And people found staff abuse funny and entertaining. It's so different these days - now people think their items have real life value because of the gralat shop, and so many people are USDing, and everyone just gets so worked up about everything that happens.

Honestly, the death of the unofficial forums sort of coincided with the death of that atmosphere. That was where everyone went to say the things that the forum moderators here just delete. The staff -> player relationship used to be a lot less...serious and professional.

My interest in dev sort of grew out of my interest in the community, but it ended up keeping me around. graalscript was the first language I tried to learn, and now I'm a business software developer irl, so it definitely had an impact. But culture and community dissolve with more players, so that's not really an "expandable" asset of Graal.

I agree gangs are the main focal point of Era, but there's no such thing as fixing gangs without fixing our identity crisis.