Torchlight is officially live today. The ARPG made from Runic Games has a lot of similarities to the Diablo series since it was developed by some of the same guys.  You will definitely find they share the same music composer (Matt Uleman) so the first thing you notice is that the beginning town sounds eerily familiar.  The game plays practically the same as Diablo as you have similar mechanics as well as the usual skill trees, stat distribution, and a ton of loot. You are given the choice of three character classes as well as a choice of a pet.

  If you like Diablo, it's definitely worth checking out.  Plus, it's only $19.99

 You can purchase the game straight from Runic or from Perfect World.

 You can download a demo from Steam as well.

Intrigued? MFO have an alliance in the online, browser based nation building world of Cybernations. This game is suprisingly complex, while only requiring a minimal time input and we have a large bank of resources and infomation to help new players.

If you want to read more, and join me on my journey as I start my nation afresh, check out my open challenge to all MFO players, located in this #post

RTS games, which were given the prime spot in the menu, are moved back to Other Games.

Most active forums - Chess, Cyber Nations and AfterMath took their place.

I suspect many think that MFO's popularity goes down and down these years. "Maybe it happened when Fixit quit WoW and the MFO WoW forum died".

Maybe the readers hit MFO less often, but posters are always there, they are just moving from on hot forum from another. It used to be Age, the WOW, then F-Zero. Now it's AfterMath. Plus, there are always going forums like politics and chess.

The graph on the left shows number of post per month for the life span of new MFO.

Spammers were not a problem at first, but they came in droves soon enough. We use PHPBB2 forum software which is a big target. We had them in check by installing ANTISPAMBOT mod and some other measures. (This MFO's phpBB Modifications for details.) After that, bots still came, but were unable to post anything. The only little problem is that an average MFO user is a bot. They are easy to tell - most of the bots come, register, and leave to never come back.

I used to worry about that, and even did some manual deletions and that skews this graphs a little. The graph shows number of users registered at MFO per month. (Yes, new MFO is almost 4th year old!)

I wonder what caused the drop off? Is it that there are less people to pay the spammers? Is it that PHPBB2 is no longer a priority, and they attack PHPBB3 instead? Did they switch to attacking blogs?

I have no idea. What do you think?