[Coldsaturn]

I first got into it because it was advertised as a MMO that you could solo entirely, and it was technically right. It was way harder and took much much longer, but one could solo the entire storyline and all the maps. So I started to do that, and I was lucky enough to have a few online friends who also played it, so we occasionally met and burned through difficult missions in teams. Then I continued alone for quite a while, and then I was recruited for a huge cabal in game and I decided to join them. That gave me access to their discord server where they organized daily dungeons and raids and farming sessions, and while I'm not too keen on the social part of MMOs (can't spare the energy to deal with assholes or people in general most of the time), that community was largely very friendly, and it got me through end game content farming repeatedly.
When funcom decided to drop tsw for swl, I was peaking at tsw lol I had just completed my entire skill wheel (it was something like 536 skills), and was now pretty good at switching between builds to play different roles in dungeons. I kinda loved how complicated making up builds was, and how you had near endless options to synergize with passives and actives.

Then came swl, and so many people from that cabal straight up said fuck it and left. swl largely penalized old-time players (even paying players) by clearing the slate and making everyone start again from 0 and eliminating pvp, rendering hundreds of hours of playing time and hundreds of -insert money currency- spent now useless. I still jumped to swl because I loved the game too much, but it was a different feeling altogether.

I was a paying player in tsw, and I stayed a patron player for a long time in swl (mostly because they made it impossible to grind up levels without paying; the timeout between missions is ridiculously long f2p), and I still hop in when there are big annual events just to breathe a bit of the magic again where you see 50 players waiting with you to kill a superboss. But it's a dying game and only a handful of die-hard fans are still there. It kills me a bit, because in terms of vibes that game is one of the best I played.