Cantr II

Short description:

Cantr II is a society simulator/rpg/pbbg with 473 players. Each player is allowed up to 15 characters at a time, so there's a bit over 3100 characters currently. The game has been translated into multiple languages. While it's originally in English, for several years there have been more Polish players than English players. Each language group exists in the same world, but most people stick to the islands that speak their own language. The game has a long history since it was started back in 2003. The external appearance hasn't been updated much, so it looks rather old-fashioned.

The things I like about this game:

- It has a wide world that hasn't been fully mapped, so it leaves room for exploring.
- I like trading between characters. There is no built-in money system, so most trading is bartering. Some regions have their own coin systems, but they only work if the money is backed up by resources. One of my characters created one of the only respectable coin systems in the world, and even though she died, it appears that the economy still hasn't crashed.
- There are rare resources that are not available to everybody. The commonness of resources depends on the region. For example where my Finnish characters live, cucumbers, curly kale, olives and raspberries are common, while there is no wheat anywhere nearby, nor oil to make petrol with. Whereas on the English region, there are no berries of any kind, the only vegetables are potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, spinach and asparagus, and the latter three are relatively rare. There are only 2 or 4 locations in the world that have sapphire, and only one of them has been found as far as I know. Pearls are also rare.
- The skills are randomized, so a character is likely to be expert at some things from spawning. This makes them more fitting for some occupations than others. The fact that some characters are good at one thing and bad at another makes them need other people to function efficiently. Yet it's possible to become just about anything through training. (The only exception is fighting. It is trained so slowly that you're pretty much stuck within your starting category.)
- There are no classes, so your character can be anything you imagine them to be. I have played a courtisan who later became a respected town leader; a hemp processing shop worker who became awkward at his job when skills got implemented, but he worked hard to raise his tailoring level to efficient, then became the most famous traveling trader on a 3 island region; a half-witted town guard who became awkward at fighting when skills got implemented; a blind dancer; a tailor who snapped and terrorized a region by driving around on a stolen bicycle and attacking strangers; a village idiot who became a respected town elder; two fashion designers and one regular tailor; and a developmentally delayed woman who had a pet alpaca and rp'ed gluten sensitivity that gave her diarrhea.
- The ability to customize most items allows expressing yourself creatively through writing.
- Steeds are very fast, so getting a horse, a zebra or an ostrich can greatly improve the traveling experience.

The things I don't like:

- Sometimes a town can go several days without anything happening. People just work on their projects without saying a word, or only saying trivial things like good morning.
- It's possible to get too emotionally attached, so if your character gets attacked physically or verbally, it can make you very upset in real life.
- There are some people vocally complaining about the mods punishing them unfairly, so that you can't play a pirate these days because you can't attack towns that have one of your other characters in them or one of your crew members' players' other characters, so if you have a crew of 4 people then the chance is most towns are going to have a character played by one of you.
- I got kicked out of staff for saying that being in staff has ruined my life, and complaining that there were no domesticated dogs and cats.
- Some people do things that are technically against the rules and get away with it. For example describing clothings as having zippers or buttons when such a thing wasn't part of the ingredients, or even velcro which doesn't exist in the whole game. Or describing that a harbor is full of merchants and coils of rope when it's in fact empty.
- Many characters have no purpose in life, so they just eat and sleep.
- In some places it's hard to prove your worth as a new character, and you might be 30 or 40 years old without being trusted with a single key.

The bottom line:

If you have any interest in this game, you should try it out now rather than next year because at this rate, it might not be around anymore next year. Since it's a free game, the creator is making a financial loss every month that the donations cannot cover, so eventually he might decide it's no longer worth it.

 

Thanks. Let me know if you need any help getting into it.

 

I'm a fast typer. I took two classes on it in high school so I can spit out a lot of paragraphs in a matter of minutes.

 

It would be really ironic if the player count suddenly jumped up as I'm on my way out. But there's still 5 months before I quit, so plenty of things have time to happen. I wonder if any of you spawned in towns where I have characters.

 

I wonder if some people I've run into ingame have been from this site. One casually mentioned ogres and that stood out. Does anybody confess?