Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Kriptini said:

FYI, shared bank slots were confirmed, they just haven't been implemented yet. As far as limited bank space goes, it's limited by the bags you purchase to fill your bank with. So while there is certainly a theoretical maximum, it's pretty large. I have about 100 slots of space on my main character. I believe there will also be storage crates you'll be able to place in housing to store more items.

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I wouldn't spend money on bags when I could double my bank space for free with a transfer mule, which I'm gonna need until shared bank slots are implemented anyway.

Like I said, I bet there are hundreds and hundreds of these accounts. Would be curious to see how many unique IPs connected vs unique accounts.

Sylas said:

They need to release on steam or they might as well just delete what they have and go back to their day jobs

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Steam takes like 30% of revenue though - they'd need ~40% more subs to break even if they moved to steam client, which seems bad. I feel like it's not hard to click a different button to open the game and give the devs more funding

*Also, I'm pretty sure most of the dev team already has day jobs so ideally any funding is just to accelerate the pace

Quaid said:

I wouldn't spend money on bags when I could double my bank space for free with a transfer mule.

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That's so... inefficient. You only get 10 bank slots without bags, and a bag that gives you 6 slots for items of medium size or smaller costs only 1 silver and some copper. You can get 60 bank slots for a measly 15 silver, and by the time you find yourself needing more, you'll be able to easily afford the bigger bags. I don't know anyone who was using multiple accounts to mule during the test, and I imagine the number of people who are doing it is less than what you're assuming.

Quaid said:

In a game with limited bank space, no shared bank slots, and a player base comprised of oldschool MMO players, an enormous percentage of those 7700 uniques will almost certainly be boxed mule/transfer accounts. That actually explains why there is such a massive number of accounts with less than 2h playtime over the course of the week, and why it was a similar percentage on the previous test. I did find that kind of churn pretty crazy, so this makes more sense to me.

Also, MNM's conversion rate of free-test players to paying subscribers being 100% is extremely unlikely.

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This exactly. I had a second account online almost the whole time I was playing.

I focused on trade skills primarily because sitting in one spot for more than a couple hours does not interest me anymore and I like making all my own gear. So I needed A LOT of bank space. As this test ended, I had 10 or so mules, some were chocked full of shit with no extra room, and some were somewhat empty (had an alt for each trades skill I was doing, plus overflow for mining/smithing). Of course all but one of them only had a starting trade skill bag, Shifties quest bag, and a few had some mining pouches full of various ore/gems.

I know most of the other high trade skill monkeys also had mules, because I would see them named the same, in the same guild, or I would get deliveries from the mule.

I doubt I will be paying for one account, let alone two. These tests are just limited nostalgia hits that I can pick up for the short amount of time, get my fill, and then move back to other other stuff.

...well, that's the duality of man in action, I guess.

Gravel said:

This is a wild one. I noticed someone brought it up to Shawn yesterday. Grouping with 1-2 extra players the exp feels much better. When you get to 5 or 6 though? It falls off a fucking cliff. Why would they design the experience curve to plummet as you add more people? Doesn't that discourage grouping? And yet, it was brought up to them and got a "we'll look into it" like it wasn't something they'd discussed.

Regardless, it's just another design decision someone made on their very small team to penalize the very thing they say they're designing the entire game around.

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Exactly. This is exactly the kind of counterintuitive design that kills the social loop these games claim to be building around. Developers seem to actively shy away from rewarding grouping in any meaningful way. It was a major element of EQ that stood out and why "quad-kiting" for Wizards and Druids was often even more EXP than grouping up.

In a game that's supposed to prioritize multiplayer, grouping should always be more efficient than soloing. Even if your group isn't perfectly coordinated, even if some players are slower or inexperienced, the pace of killing mobs and completing objectives should never make grouping a net loss. Early WoW stumbled here too. My friends and I routinely found it faster and more efficient to split off and solo quest, rather than try to group together while doing them, and that completely undermines the social design.

If the genre is supposed to revolve around multiplayer, then grouping has to be inherently rewarding, not some half-baked afterthought that pseudo punishes anyone who actually tries to play together.

Kriptini said:

I don't know anyone who was using multiple accounts to mule during the test, and I imagine the number of people who are doing it is less than what you're assuming.

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Out of curiosity, when was the last time you played classic era EQ with any regularity?

Quaid said:

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you played classic era EQ with any regularity?

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Never, but I was speaking with regards to M&M, not classic EQ.

Kriptini said:

Never, but I was speaking with regards to M&M, not classic EQ.

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Bro... you have no idea what you're gonna see. You think bank and transfer mules sound unlikely? This whole 'new world' thing is gonna last a few months tops. You're gonna find yourself in turbo-sweaty grind groups at level 35 and you'll have guys go "I have my 60 enchanter parked at entrance for buffs". Wipe? Don't worry, another group member has a Cleric parked in that popular leveling zone too. All that sense danger they made SO MANY risky design decisions to cultivate will be out the window before EA even ends. This whole imaginary idea of people playing 'permanent trader' outside dungeons so folks can sell to them instead of merchant runs? LOL not gonna happen. Guys are gonna box alt accounts and run their stuff to the nearest town on a second screen.

The oldschool MMO player of 2025 is nothing like the typical MMO player of 2000-2005, even though they may be the exact same people.

Sometimes I wonder if they've played an MMO in the last decade. For instance, they don't want an in game map, because, and I can't even count how many times I've heard, "they want players engaged in the world." Like a map somehow takes you out of it?

Apparently they don't realize that there will be maps of every zone within a week. And it's not 1999 where alt-tabbing to a web browser taxes your CPU too much, and searching for the map might take 10 minutes, plus the download of the image itself another 20. A world where people printed out the maps because that was easier. Do most gamers even own a printer anymore?

And then hilariously, they want to add a cartographer trade skill. Because trading for maps sounds like a blast. The problem is it's like a lot of things where it doesn't seem like they put much thought into how this works in current year. If the trade skill is trivial to do, why bother not providing a map in the first place? If it's a giant pain in the ass, which let's face it, it will be, then only the most hardcore completionists will do it, but no one is going to buy maps off them because it'd just be easier to look on the wiki. Not only that, but more than likely they're going to implement this in the most retarded way possible and each map will be its own item, so your already limited inventory space I guess will just be filled up with shitty maps?

We were talking about the "chat room" environment that Everquest had, which worked around super long med times, stationary camps, long respawn timers, and the like. Know what I was doing in MnM groups when we were staring at a wall medding, while the puller was off dicking around? Alt tabbed out doing other shit. Because staring at the wall, looking back at the screen when I hear a mob that needs me to press a couple hotkeys while I sit stationary auto-attacking, and then sitting back down waiting for the next one, isn't engaging gameplay. In 1999 it was, because the alternative was sitting on AIM staring at a white text prompt waiting for your friends to message you back. So doing it with cool 1990's colored pixels floating around it was a lot cooler.

Gravel said:

Sometimes I wonder if they've played an MMO in the last decade. For instance, they don't want an in game map, because, and I can't even count how many times I've heard, "they want players engaged in the world." Like a map somehow takes you out of it?

Apparently they don't realize that there will be maps of every zone within a week. And it's not 1999 where alt-tabbing to a web browser taxes your CPU too much, and searching for the map might take 10 minutes, plus the download of the image itself another 20. A world where people printed out the maps because that was easier. Do most gamers even own a printer anymore?

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At one point the other night, I was raiding Temple of Veeshan on my laptop, while watching Eurobasket on my TV, running Discord voice comms off my phone, and monitoring real time POS data from my restaurant on my iPad. If 1999 me saw what I was doing he'd look on in simultaneous awe and horror, his feeble 90s cerebrum contorting in futility to comprehend my absolute and terrible power.

Then, trembling, he'd whimper, "why the fuck are we still playing EverQuest?"

Gravel said:

It's funny, that person thinks it's just his own issue with being an adult and not being able to dedicate a solid 4+ hours to a group uninterrupted. The reality is the entire audience for this game is that person now. Which is why I asked a while back who they think their intended audience actually is.

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I think it is clear that there is a small % of very vocal people who played EQ that never got careers or families etc. who are hoping this game is “designed” for them.

See: the people saying they just want essentially a p99 remake but new content

Personally I think they’re completely delusional that there is any significant (7500 LOL) number of people who are interested in paying $15/mo for that but who knows

It is all exactly the problem with MnM's whole design philosophy - the devs are still designing like it's 1999, but the players of 2025 don't live in that world anymore. The entire foundation of their "immersion" systems crumbles the second you remember players aren't sitting in basements on dial-up anymore. Everyone's got Discord, dual monitors, wikis, YouTube, and a second account running on the side. All the friction that used to create "social moments" is now just busywork that people instantly route around.

"No maps because immersion"? Please. There will be high-res annotated maps on Reddit before early access even ends. The cartographer tradeskill is totally laughable. Nobody's going to clog their limited inventory with a pile of maps when alt-tabbing gives you everything faster and for free. It's almost like they're just pretending the internet doesn't exist.

I get what they're aiming for with these old-school design choices, but the problem is the context has completely changed since 1999. Back then, long med breaks or running without maps felt immersive because the alternatives were so limited. Sitting around chatting while waiting on mana ticks really did feel like a social hub because you weren't jumping between Discord, YouTube, and half a dozen other distractions. Even something as simple as finding your way around was different. Printing out maps or waiting ten minutes for one to load in a browser gave in-game solutions a real weight.

But fast forward to today and those same mechanics don't create the same kind of social interaction, they'll just get bypassed. Maps will be up on a wiki within days, and alt-tabbing to check them is effortless. Long downtime doesn't mean more chatter, it usually just means people check out until the next pull. Even the "hardcore" players they're targeting aren't playing in the same vacuum they were 20+ years ago, so they're not going to engage with these systems the same way.

I don't doubt the intent. They clearly want to slow players down and build a sense of community, ignorantly. But I think there are better ways to do that in 2025 that don't rely on re-creating limitations that players simply don't live with anymore. That's why these decisions feel less like "immersion" and more like tedium. It's not that players don’t want community, they just don't want to be forced into artificial dependence through mechanics that waste their time. And it's not even that the vision is necessarily wrong, it's that the tools they’re choosing to execute it are outdated for the modern audience they're trying to serve.

If the cartography skill is convenient enough, I can see people engaging with it. It can take a lot of work to design an aesthetic, useful, and accurate map when you don't have access to the game development environment. If the cartography skill is convenient enough to allow you to uncover a map by walking around, then I can see it playing.