Oh boy...
Ohhhhh booooooy...
This is a damn story.
So back in like 2012 I was obsessed with with monster collecting/training games. So I went on the app store and searched up "Monster" and the third result was a game called "Monster Kingdom".
Now, Monster Kingdom mind you was a game not deserving of its four start rating. It boasted to having over ninety collectible monsters but the monsters were categorized into species like dog monsters or cat monsters, each species had four sub categories of monsters with different builds, but the only difference was the fact that they had different colors. It was like saying a Pikachu and a Shiny Pikachu are different Pokemon. Ten monsters were actually unique.
The battles were awful too, you could do one of two moves per turn, that was it and so essentially you couldn't be strategic or anything, you just needed to pray for critical hits. The character designs for your "friends" were bad too, generic girl scout and stereotypical nerd. The girl scout was usually smiling but sometimes her portrait would turn into a sad face, the nerd wasn't given that treatment as the developers thought her design was too complex to change her facial expression.
I was about three weeks in to playing that game when I discovered a tab at the bottom of the screen "forums." The forums were divided into "News," "Questions," "Stories," and "Off Topic." The stories forum was full of roleplays. The people who frequented Off Topic hated the roleplayers for reasons they never went into but in all honesty, the roleplayers were obnoxious. No one knows why the Story forum was created, the forums weren't meant for roleplaying but the admins never gave us a straight answer.
I myself checked out thee first roleplay I saw "Warriors: The Fall of Starclan" which plot was "Starclan is dying we need to save them." I asked how Starclan was dying, for those unaware of the Warriors series when a cat dies in that their soul joins Starclan. Apparently the creator didn't like my asking and told me to either behave to be banned. Then she private messaged me and asked "no one knows you, why?" As if my early level monsters and status "I'm New!" didn't explain it enough. I never responded and stayed away from the toxic Warrior roleplays which were actually really common and poor quality and made me give up on reading the series.
Over the next three or four years I kept roleplaying and wound up being a very sarcastic writer and was often referred as a member of the "Council of Roleplayers" or something by both the writers and the off topic-ers. The writers liked if I joined their roleplays and the OTers hated me and what I stood for despite me being on relatively good terms with a lot of them.
Then one day Monster Kingdom Two was announced and everyone got excited to see what the future held.
Then Monster Kingdom Two was released and was a flop.
Then the developers, Zhurosoft went bankrupt and removed all their apps without telling us. I had a few of my Monster Kingdom friends on Kik so I have contact with them still but most people I never heard from again.
MK was a horrible game with a toxic community but it's what got me into writing and without it I don't think I would be writing my novel.
Also, if you are reading this, Tikashi, I still hate you.
(It's hours of adventure because once your stanima depletes, no matter how much you have it takes an hour to recharge. On some later levels a single battle took your whole bar away so it could take hours to beat a difficult battle. Of course, you could pay a doller to refill it.)