Trace/ALTER is a multiplayer collaborative turn-based roleplaying game based in a cyberpunk, near-future Japan.
Very fun game. Great community outside of a few loud salt lords.
Head admin ruins entire game experience in the long run. If new to byond, try a different game. And don't waste money here<3
Having never played a BYOND roleplaying game outside of the occasional Space Station 13, I really enjoy Trace/Alter, but I cannot recommend it to anyone who is looking for a serious roleplay experience. While the main dev, Crazah, is very responsive, level-headed and well intentioned, the community lead / story lead Sovereign is anything but. If anything goes wrong (the game is a beta, bugs are expected) prepare to wait in the online equivalent of the DMV after submitting your ticket to the sole admin, Sovereign. Sometimes it takes days or weeks for him to reply, and will often gaslight you into 'rolling with the punches' instead of him lifting his fingers to do any work.
Not to mention, the coolest abilities and power fantasies are locked behind in-game factions, which are gatekept by - you guessed it - Sovereign's "event characters", which function to NPCs in a typical DND / MUD setting. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if there was any semblance of respect for the player's time, as often times these event characters will suddenly go inactive / AFK in the middle of conversations. If you've so much as ridiculed Sovereign in the public Discord, he will have no problem translating this to in-character slights, or otherwise just ignore you entirely. If you bring up complaints in their public Discord server, you'll be muted / kicked for "dooming" because they are unable to handle valid criticism.
Now, you don't *need* to join these in game factions to have in game power. There is an alternative method. You can install special bionics which can grant you similar levels of power. However... the only reliable way of unlocking these bionics is through microtransactions. For $60 you can get 100 credits which translates into 50 geodes. Of these 50 geodes you'll likely get around 5 legendary geodes which have a chance of containing bionics. You can also grind missions to get these items, but the drop late is insanely low and there's only one drop per dungeon. Each mission takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour.
Overall, I think the game has the potential to be a good, serious roleplay setting, but Crazah needs to hire someone who isn't so massively abrasive and bullheaded to run the game. I cannot recommend it in it's current state, however.
Great game, Great mechanics.
Community likes to start arguments over stupid **** then cry when they are punished.
Terrible community management, weird way of handling out-of-character situations that tends to put everyone off in favor of punishing bad actors days after the offense, and the owner recently spread a lie about being threatened irl to get an excuse to ban someone from their game they didn't like. Watch out for this game!