Leaving my Childhood Game Behind

Let me preface this entire thing by mentioning that leaving behind the game(s) that I’ve played for years is beyond difficult. Years ago I would’ve never pictured that I would make this thread. Regardless, let the stories and memories commence.


Star Legends


Beginning
Back around late 2011 I was introduced to Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles by one of my cousins. He’d played the game about 2 weeks or so prior to introducing it to me and obviously began with a level advantage. I’d never played an mmorpg so I quickly let myself get addicted and play countless hours a day. The game was perfect and kept me entertained to no avail. I would notice all of these players in the blackstar base with crazy expensive vanities like xrays, squids, and devourer skulls. My hope at the time was to someday be able to merch my way up to be able to somehow obtain at least one of the mentioned vanity. I wanted to be like those insanely cool-looking players in Phoenix, and be able to hang around with the best people. I quickly came to the realization that I was terrible at merchant and extremely impatient. This lead me down the path of pvp.


Twink PvP
I had no idea how PvP worked or even what it was. I was completely lost witnessing how these “pro” twinks would keep demolishing my character after numerous attempts of attacking them. I quickly noticed specific combos that good players would use and began copying the trends that good players would do. It was strange now that I think back about how kind people were to me. A player that I met that was also a twink pvper gave me his build and even showed me how to use it. I had a very high success rate with it and grinded some gold in order to get the best shield to combo with it to maximize my effectiveness. I’m not going to lie and say that I was the best player, but I definitely won most of my fights. Around 2012 I began to get more involved into the PvP community and met this player that wanted to start this player killer guild. I cofounded the guild together with this player and we began to bring the old-style PvP back. Players were rushing others, but most were pretty unhappy. I quickly left and just soloed PvP from there on. As I was growing older and getting more used to the game I was getting better and better. At the same time though, the player base was steadily declining and lots of players were leaving the PvP scene and the game as a whole. This was something that happened over several years, not just 2012. Despite that I’ve still had several pleasant moments in the game.


Memories
I can accurately recall the first time I held over 1 million gold in my inventory. Seoratrek, a moderator at the time, was in blackstar holding a giveaway with the “quiz” style format where the first person to answer the question he asked correctly would get a prize. It was the last round of the giveaway and he was giving away 1 million in gold which at the time was a lot. He asked a question regarding the deadliest war in American history, the civil war, and I answered first. My emotions were running rampant and I literally started cheering. I had my 1 million gold and was the happiest Star Legends player in the game. Much like my joy for the giveaway I’ve also had joy for the guilds that I was in.

I never did end up getting into Phoenix, but I was apart of several really awesome guilds. Most noteably: Rampage, League of Assassinz, Castle of Glass, Ruckus, and PK. The guilds that I’ve been apart of have had their ups and downs, but all I mostly remember are the good times. There were times in different guilds where I would giveaway vanity despite having little to nothing simply because I enjoyed seeing my guild-mates happy. At the end of the day, I had hoped that I had made someone’s day by giving them a shot at winning a prize. Guilds at the time felt real, while now they feel like they’re simply for monetary gain. Nothing compares though to the blackstar discourse.

The blackstar base would often be filled and players would enjoy discussing several topics both relevant and irrelevant to the game. I enjoyed just talking about whatever with random people in the base to the point that I would be occupied for hours on end talking to people while listening to music on my old Apple headphones. Things were great and the community was extremely friendly. Of course as time passed, there was a deterioration of full blackstars and soon only one blackstar would be open at a time with few players in it.


The End
For a while now there’s been something missing from Star Legends. The player base has died down, maps and mobs have become stale, content has run dry, and the economy is on its’ last legs. Additionally you notice more and more players quitting by the day (including myself). There are several deep rooted issues with Star Legends that are very difficult to identify and resolve. Star Legends could still be thriving to this day if several different decisions were made by Spacetime Studios and were done at an appropriate time. Regardless, I’ll discuss where Star Legends went wrong and why I think it went that direction further down. Here I’d like to basically just thank all of those that were along for the trip and helped me out immensely. To the good friends: you guys taught me how to identify what a good friend does. To the bad friends: you guys also taught me how to identify what a good friend does. Star Legends has always meant a great deal for me, but it’s time to say goodbye. Thanks Star Legends for being a great part of my childhood!


PT 2-Where I Think SL Went Wrong:
This whole entire section is just my opinion and is not meant to be taken as fact. I’m going to try to keep this brief for my fingers’ sake.

Star Legends seemed to be prospering a lot during the time period before Spacetime started pouring resources into Arcane Legends. To me it is very coincidental that at the time that Arcane Legends started up, the updates to Star Legends began to have bigger gaps. Obviously more resources were being allocated to Arcane Legends and perhaps attention was taken off of all the previous legends games in order to work on side-projects like: Pocket Legends Adventures, Call of Champions, Battle Command, Battle Dragons, and Arcane Battlegrounds. I think that early-on Spacetime took the challenge of making Arcane legends and then got ambitious and began to expand to form multiple games. Of course, doing this would spread the work a little more to more games and would result in little individual attention, thus more gap-time between updates. Around 2018 Spacetime notices that Legends players are getting somewhat furious that updates are not coming as often as before and the other side-projects aren’t profiting much. From there Spacetime chooses to cancel the side-project games and focus more on their big titles. Although, it’s a tad too late; Star Legends and Dark Legends have already seen heavy decreases in their player base and many are quitting. Spacetime adds a few updates here and there, but mostly updates Arcane Legends. This is just my speculation, so I could totally be wrong. Either way, I enjoyed the game long enough that it’s time to move on.

Later community!