Yah. A deal-breaker for you. And we are pay-for-play.
But as I said before, try it out with the free 1 month trial. I'm very serious about us trying to organize for the game to go free. We finished our proposal for going free today(!) and are ready to send it to the parent company. They requested that we make the proposal, so it's pretty lightly that it'll be accepted.
So unofficially, yeah, it should be free for you.
We don't have a huge playerbase, but we tend to have 10 to 25 people online at most times. Less (down to 3 to 5) during weird hours, like 4am US time.
There's usually at least a few people to roleplay with.
As I mentioned, custom codebase - so flexibility there is good
The genre is a renaissance setting in a magic-light world, a political game where noble houses fight over the future of a trading city, while the commoners try to push for rights and power.
Think Florence in the 1500s. If you like history.
If you don't, you can just jump in, see it as a "medieval fantasy" setting with muskets, and ignore the rest.
That's exactly what I was intending to build when I started. I wanted a game where the first priority was the roleplaying, not the game mechanics. But where game mechanics would support the roleplay.
And I wanted roleplay to mean something. Having a conversation with another character should lead to a different outcome for my character. Not a game like WoW where the roleplay doesn't matter as much as "playing the game mechanics" matters.
So... I'd love to know your opinion on how well I succeeded at that goal.
And apologies for shilling my game. If it's not what you're after, let me know why, and I'll try to come up with another recommendation.
