The Mana World seems to be in a somewhat fractured state at the moment; for what it’s worth, it has a pretty interesting history. Several years back, the game

The Mana World seems to be in a somewhat fractured state at the moment; for what it’s worth, it has a pretty interesting history. Several years back, the game still used to have a single server (The Mana World) and a single client (ManaPlus); both were being developed by different people, but they pretty much existed as a single community. There were some other projects using some of the same software, but developed by different teams with different ambitions; notably Land of Fire [1] or Evol Online [2]. TMW was by far the biggest, most active, and possibly the only one with a considerable (if still modest) player base. It was the game you’d stumble upon in your repository and stick around since there were actually people playing it. At some point the developers announced the server software they were currently using was a huge mess and no one was up to maintain it, so they’d be moving to better and more actively maintained software. It was also decided the project would merge with Evol Online and build on their content and art direction instead, donning the name ‘TMW rEvolt’. (What little content Evol did have certainly felt more polished than that of TMW.) The main server was to remain on-line but see no active development from then on. Since then, the new server seems to remain in sporadic development. Everyone has kind of accepted that the legacy server has no long-term perspective, yet it’s received several updates entailing new content and events to keep the players entertained in some way. But if you look at the wiki [3], you’ll see that some developers have instead diverged their focus to create even more TMW-themed projects. You now have: • ‘TMW Classic’, the abandoned-but-not-really legacy server. • ‘TMW rEvolt’, the supposed successor. • ‘TMW 2: Moubootaur Legends’, which is actually a separate project bearing a somewhat misleading name and pretty ghastly terms of use. • ‘Source of Mana’, which according to the description is a new MMORPG made with Godot. It seems like some of the branding for rEvolt has been used there, and some of the developers are working on it, too, but I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a replacement for rEvolt or not. • ‘ManaVerse’, a fork of ManaPlus created after the developer of the latter broke ties with TMW due to them wanting the option of ‘other’ gender in the game. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s always been there, but it was probably called ‘unspecified’ or something.) I used to be somewhat active in the community and have contributed a little; unlike some other commenters, I found the people were reasonably nice to me. But ultimately I left since the project leads insisted on using non-libre platforms for development and refused to even consider a libre alternative (which was readily available at the time), showing that freedom wasn’t really even a factor for them. (They also moved the hosting over to Microsoft and introduced Discord as a platform for chat, which was a bit meh…) [1] https://www.landoffire.org/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180726040023/https://evolonline.org/ [3] https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/The_Mana_World:Home