Why I play a text based game in 2020

So I get a lot of comments when people learn that I’ve been playing a bland looking RPG for the past 10 years. Well, today, I plan to take a trip down memory lane.

The Game: Torn City

To give you an idea of what the game is like, let’s look at the description: “Torn is a text-based online RPG set in Torn City, a dark, murky underworld where only the sharpest survive. In Torn City you can be anyone and do anything. Build your character to infinite strengths and play it.”

Now, how can such a bland looking game manage to keep my attention for the past 10 years, you may ask? Well, it’s actually a very feature rich text-based game that has many people around the globe addicted. I’ve known of several people who tried to quit the game, only to come back to it in a few years full circle. What could possibly be the reason for this?

The Community

Torn is a very diverse community attracting player sfrom all over the world. x`

Gameplay

Most of your time consists of hitting the gym.

doing missions

travelling for money

trading items

faction wars / chaining

trolling on forums

signature making

doing crimes / making money

Some interesting links: Game creator becomes a millionare , Torn City news Eps 32

The Older Past(10 yrs ago)

I’m about 3900 days old today, which means I made my account around May 2009. My first encounter with the game was a few years back on a school computer (2007-2008).

When I first encountered the game, I didn’t think much of it. I mean, the grey colour is not all that appealing to the eye. And honestly I have forgotten the password/username/email associated with that account. It wasn’t until a few years later that I found my cousin playing Torn and this caught my interest again.

Back in those days the only popular games I knew of were playing with fire, and newgrounds. I also had a pretty slow computer so I couldn’t really play any intensive games like runescape.

While I was playing these games I met a lot of cool people from around the world, who resided in: UK, Scotland, UAE, and from the US. I learned a lot about their cultures, and I remember spending nights on messengers talking about hunting the wild haggis. Most of these people were from a different game I played at the time called city struggle, however that game was shut down sometime around 2011, due to unforeseen reasons. So a lot of us migrated to torn city, and the few who didn’t remain a mystery (like ViralVengeance, leader of Deviance).

So, since CS was a pretty big part of my life, I stayed in contact with the few people still on torn. But over the next year those people became less active. This lonesome year resulted in me taking a three year hiatus (around the time highschool started).

The Old Past (6 yrs ago)

During my final year of highschool around the time I was stressing about getting into University, I decided to take a break from it all and play a little bit of torn. One thing led to another and I found myself now trying to reach the “stat cap” milestone in each category. I thought to myself if I was gonna get serious at any point in this game, having reached the stat cap would be useful.

It was around this time I made a new group of friends in a faction called Sadistic which was run by a business student in Myanmar, and US veteran. While I was there I learned about “chaining” attacks feature which involved users staying up to make attacks on other users in 5 min windows, to raise a hit counter. This was pretty fun since it required a lot of communication and grit to be able to get some longer chains going like the 500 ones. Unfortunately this experience didn’t last long when the team disbanded, so I joined a bigger faction at the time called Momento Mori (M†M).

I started getting more involved in the scene since M†M was a top 20 faction at the time. They weren’t pushovers either, and they frequently did much longer chains than the ones in Sadistic (in the realm of 1000-5000) since they had a larger active userbase. I leanrned a fair bit of warring and chaining from that faction which I’m very grateful for. Unfortunately this faction didn’t last long either once the leader Tascon decided to sell it.

The Somewhat Present - Now (2 yrs ago)

At this point I managed to reach the goal I wanted but I wasn’t really fully set on the game, so I decided to join another top 20 faction called destructive angels (sister faction of destructive anomoly [top 5 faction]). I thought, “maybe I could move up to the top faction”. Unfortunately, this faction ended up disbanding disbanding. And at the time I remember how difficult it would be to have 10k chains.

So I decided I wanted to join a really active faction where I could basically be lazy asf and just throw in my hits during the exam season without worrying to keep the chain alive. So at the time I remember seeing 39th Street Killers X (X stands for elite) they were doing 25k chains effortlessly over weekends and pulling in a lot of money through organised crimes. Keep in mind a 10k chain might take me a week to do in my old factions, so I was very impressed. I talked with the faction leader, told him about my history and I mentioned the points above, and just like that I was in. After years of not being sure if I’d play legitimately I was now in a top 5 faction, and my overall in game stats were starting to look a lot better.

I’ve been in the faction for a year now and moved up to main faction (39th Street Killers), and honestly I feel like my decision back then was right. There are lots of smart and dedicated people here, and I feel like I keep meeting new intersting people. Well let’s see how long this will last :)