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Funny how every time I get into tera it's around the USA elections, which always coincides with the enshittification of my favourite online spaces. It feels like everything turns into a sludge made up of bait, bad faith arguments, people losing their minds, conspiracies and other general cancer. I'm sOOOOO tired of this. Anyway, I just tune out...
On a similar note, for the first time I can say with certainty that tiktok started showing me ragebait consistently. So far I've managed to avoid it and I had a very nice fyp, and I even limit my usage to 30 mins a day of mindless browsing, with the purpose of having something to watch something for when I'm inbetween things so like when I'm commuting, cooking, waiting for queues in tera lmao and so on. I know, >tiktok but damn, I started to get like actual ragebait coupled with an equally annoying commenter audience to get you pissed off, which is something that never happened before. My sister actually quit tiktok a few months back and now I'm considering it as well. Perhaps I'll just limit it to 15 mins a day at first...
Going back to MMOs, it seems ArcheAge has closed its NA/EU servers on June 28th. It appears the KMMO era is really on its last legs, as ArcheAge was truly considered one of the greats in this genre. I watched a video of its last moments by a user called "Murasama". Reading the last moments of the chat made me teary eyed. I know that ArcheAge, much like TERA, had a specific type of playerbase and online culture that is very reminiscent of simpler times online and you can see it shine through that chat. I'm really glad private servers seem to nurture this same culture, as small as it is. One other thing caught my eye though, is that this user has an amazing blog in which he shares stories about TERA and the company that made it (BlueHole Studios) with really in depth details I've never seen before. I'll be sure to quote and include some of his blogposts on my history portion of the TERA shrine, as I never really went properly in-depth. Accidental gem!! And a really great blog you can check out here, if you're interested in KMMO's and why they died. I'm really grateful for the work he does in terms of archiving. He also speaks in a very matter of fact fashion that might seem kind of dry at first but it sent me into tears full stop, at least twice lmao. I guess it's because I am very emotionally attached to TERA... It seems I'm just in a very nostalgic mood today. It's generally really sad how most eastern MMOs in the west (well, in their home countries too) are known for just being awfully p2w, lacking in interest in their western audience and engaging in all kinds of shady practices to get you to spend money. I feel like mobile gacha games are exactly that but at the fraction of the cost with so much more profit involved, so it's no wonder MMOs are essentially dead. You can't even build good communities in mobile games due to chats usually being severely limited, which really sucks...