French wizs might have heard of this.
Despite the english name, Slayers Online (SO) is a french-speaking amateur MMO that was created in 2002 by a certain "frostfall" using RPG Maker 2K assets.
It was the poor man's WoW for kids with slow internet or parents who didn't want to pay a sub.
Yes, the MMO was entirely free. NOT freemium, free. You couldn't interact financially with the game even with donations. Obviously because it ripped many assets from RM2K or other games like FF1-6.
The gameplay itself sucked. You had one key to attack, one key to defend, 3 classes that were not balanced at all, and thats about it.
But we liked it because it was an era when online games weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. They were mostly for introverted kids like me who didn't partake in IRL activities.
At its peak (2007-2008 id say) the server averaged 400 online players.
The game admins gave you the possibility to make your own skin (RM2K style). Doing one takes some training but it was accessible. At some point, "skinneurs" as we called them had the possibility to sell access to their skin. This led to the game economy being ruined as the richest people in the game were making too much gold.
I myself created skins and was shocked by how much gold normalfags were willing to put into them, but I didn't complain and exploited this lol.
I also learned HTML4 at 13 just to make a cool description for my character. Didn't have any programming knowledge before that.
The game slowly died out as f2p online games became mainstream, but also because it was hacked so much times as the game's infosec also stayed in the 2000s era (passwords hashed with MD5 etc).
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