Sorry for the provocative title, but I want to hopefully start a discussion about this.
I've been involved off-and-on in this community for the past 15 years of my life, and I think as most here do, we like, or even love, the game.
But we mostly do because of a sense of nostalgia.
It was part of our youth, our formative years, I personally started learning English thanks to being daily exposed to it in ToP official servers
But I was too poor for them, so then I moved to private servers, met a lot of people, some smart, some stupid, some kind and some toxic.
I was a kid then, and I didn't have much to contribute, but I learned a lot, I started exploring the very basics of programming, overall I feel it has been a positive experience.
However, that's an experience, and I think that if you're here then yours is probably similar.
That doesn't change the fact that the base game, and here I refer to the vanilla v1 version, is a terrible game.
Now, some of us are attached to the "vanilla feel" (I'm part of that group) and some of us hate it, and play on more "customized" versions.
I think it's time to reconsider our preconceptions, identify the problems, and think how to approach them.
This isn't a "feature request", this isn't a "team search", this isn't me pitching an idea of mine as the solution to all problems there are.
My proposal is to discuss what is awful about the game, and to propose potential solutions.
A lot of work has been done already, but my superficial analysis is that a lot of it looks unfocused, or overly specific, useful, but it doesn't change the overall experience of the game.
Yeah, the offline stall is an amazing quality of life feature, and I love it.
But why do I like it the most? Well, the main reason honestly is that I can level up my pets while offline. It basically is a workaround for a terrible game mechanic.
Technical problems require technical solutions, however, I'm of the firm belief that this isn't a technical problem, this game was meant to have those problems so that the solution could be sold to the player.
What I feel like that I can give back to the community, is some insight of the economic context we are in.
This game was structured to do what it did in the old servers, have problems so that solutions could be sold to the players, we can't fix it because it's not broken.
We'd need to some degree re-define "vanilla" re-design core parts of the gameplay, make things worth doing, so we can finally enjoy the game.
But there's a very real problem, how do you finance people that manage a game when the community is very small?
That's not a technical problem, but it's a very big reason why there can't be a single server that doesn't sell power for dollars, and there is not much that can be done about it directly, we'd need a community 10 times the size to completely move to a different monetization method.
So, I'll leave this here, throw your opinions in the comments, please keep them constructive and write down what you feel is a problem and propose a solution, or what you think could be a first step in the direction of said solution.
Ask people you know to contribute, if you feel that it could help.
I'll summarize and add my own in a week or so, if this post catches enough momentum.
Have a good day.