more like echospam

This past week, the English version of the Liar! app finally closed service after seven years, and I won't lie - I'm definitely sad about it.

( Cut for me being overly invested in a goofy mobile app game. Also some nostalgia screenshots. )

I've recently taken up the task of checking in on my old gaming profiles, and it appears that ten years ago today, I made my first League of Legends account.

Unfortunately, I lost my summoner name due to inactivity, and my longtime handle got swiped. :( It was a reference to a favorite food item, and I was sad to be without it. I picked a new one that is hopefully lulzy enough to make up for the loss.

Anyway, me of a decade ago would never have believed that LoL would have taken off the way it did. I'd always just thought of it as a way to reconnect with the people who were leaving DotA. (Part of me refused to believe that all that time spent learning how to creep deny was for nothing). Yet here we are.

It put me in mind of other online games that have come and gone over the years, many of which I will miss dearly. Time to reminisce.

In memoriam:

Liar!:
Anyone who's ever looked at one of my exchange signups knows about my dire obsession with this app. XD There are now 5(!) games in the main series, and no sign that Voltage will ever localize content for it every again. ;_; At least the first three games are still available? Their monetization model could've used some tweaking (ranking events for once-in-a-lifetime data files were a really bad fit for the English version, imo. Am I still butthurt about missing out on the second half of the Tokyo Game Show story because of that one time I overslept? You bet!) In any case, thank yous forever to fluffybun for letting me hold their Yuletide experience hostage and writing me fic for THREE!!! CONSECUTIVE!!! YEARS!!! omg.

Master X Master:
Has it really been two years since this game officially died? Literally unplayable in the true sense. :( I started playing this for the free Blade & Soul outfit, but I came to really enjoy it for its own sake as a different take on the MOBA genre. I got into this and the King's Avatar at around the same time, and my friend was legit in a guild called Tyrannical Ambition, lol. Then of course the publisher decided it wasn't doing well enough and decided to shut it down and cut their losses. Textbook NCSoft - I really shouldn't have been surprised (Tabula Rasa, man). City of Heroes and WildStar fans have my sympathies as well.

The Secret World:
An amazing game that died and came back so, so wrong. I don't hate Legends itself so much as I hate everything it represents. More grinding, more RNG loot boxes, and shallow reticle-based combat that feels just as clunky as the original system. Wiping the progress of the whole playerbase so that everyone has to start from zero?!?! smh Still, I will happily take a grossly defaced game over no game at all. (And I just checked today, and the vanilla servers are still up and running \o/ At least I can still play it...by myself...)

I was going to go on a tangent about China's growing dominance in online gaming and how we are living in the times of All Your Base Are Belong to Tencent, and today's news of Funcom's likely acquisition has just added to that pile. More on that some other time.

Writing this reminds me that I really want to put together that big King's Avatar infodump that I've been wanting to finish since uh, last summer. >_>;; I have a lot of feelings about that series, and I really want to talk about how relevant it is - not just to my own tastes but to the current gaming era.

...I may come back and add to this list in the future if I'm in a eulogizing sort of mood. I'm not at a loss for titles to choose from, sadly. :'D