Peniko177

Happy birthday, Ross! Now, this story is going to be a little different from most of the other ones, since it's not about your usual WOW type MMOs. This story is about Fallen London, which you might know as the "parent game" to Sunless Sea. Fallen London, being story driven, has quite a few popular storylines, but no storyline has achieved the same fame (or, rather, infamy) as the so-called Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name line, or SMEN for short. Now, this is content for those relentless psychos, who are willing to do anything for even the most minuscule piece of lore. Without getting too deep into story itself, Mr. is a title used by the masters of the bazaar, the new overlords of London, who are quite heavily implied to be something other than human, and every master's name reflects it's domain. Mr. Fires deals with coal, Mr. Veils with fabrics, Mr Hearts with meat, and so on. The only problem, is that there is no master by the name of Mr. Eaten, and apparently there is something horribly wrong with this "individual". What makes this story utterly unique however, is that it is made entirely out of "press X to die" challenges. Your character indulging in ghastly activities like self-harm, trying to drown themselves in beer, or irreversibly staining their souls is just the VERY beginning. Needless to say, every one of these actions is accompanied by hefty stat drops. At the start of your descent into madness, you'll only lose one or two levels, which takes mere hours to get back, once your character embraces the madness of their quest however, and start rendering candles out of their own body fat and such, penalties, like giving up extremely valuable items, or HALVING your stats become extremely common. Just to put that into perspective, that can result in you losing up to 100 levels in each of the four stats. This damage can take months, if not a whole year to regrind. And the best part? There is no reward, no achievement, nothing, except knowledge and bragging rights. In fact, the game itself tells you, that there is nothing to be gained at the end of the road, and you shouldn't even begin this quest. If you do decide, that these tiny scraps of lore are worth more than years of grinding and your sanity, the game will offer you relatively painless and easy ways out of this madness literally every step of the way, up to a certain point. That's right, in the story, your character is drawn towards the titular Name, by an inexplicaple force. Namely, your, as in, the player's curiosity, and your curiosity alone. Now THAT is hardcore, knocking-on-the-fouth-wall kinda crap. Everything I've written up until now fell under the "extremely determined players doing nasty things to themselves" category. Now comes the "Royal screwup on an epic scale via bugs" portion of the story. This whole deal about Mr. Eaten and the Seekers is a thing of the past, as this content is now in stasis. SMEN is currently suspended, and for a very good reason. Basically, around 2 years ago a new feature was introduced to Fallen London. The ability to send calling cards to one another. Some particularily unwise seeker by the name of Alexander Feld (who is now a major member of the community as the self proclaimed "king of Seekers") found Mr. Eaten on his contact list, and sent him a card, asking himself the, admittedly foolish question of "What's the worst that could happen?". Well, turns out, he got a card in return, a unique item, which entitled the bearer to visit a brand new endgame-level Mr. Eaten themed location, and progress in the story. (Here's the full story, for anyone who is interested in what that place was like, though it won't mean much to those unfamiliar with Seeking: http://nightmarethrenody.tumblr.com) The card was supposed to circulate around the Seeker community, granting access to one person at a time. A unique situation arose from this. Due to the actions of the second person to visit this place, Nitebrite, another fairly important community member, and quite possibly the queen of Seekers, various misunderstandings happened. (Nitebrite would deserve another post just like this. Basically, she delevelled herself all the way from the level cap to early-game levels, just to find a bit of lore! And then took up Seeking, because even Mr. Eaten couldn't do anything to her, that she hadn't done to herself already!) Rumours about time-limits started causing panic in the Seeker community, putting immense peer pressure on everyone to finish the content and pass the card along as soon as possible, even if that mean using the game's premium currency for action refreshes. Seekers with 4+ years worth of resources began expending their supplies to breeze through the new area as soon as possible. To complicate matters, the first two visitors, Feld and Nitebrite formulated a plan to test the card's properties, and ended up duplicating it. Sadly, with Mr. Eaten content, it is fairly hard to tell bugs and intended features apart. For all they knew, this was all intentional. And so dozens of people began exploring the new content, until admins got involved, and decided to spontaneously kick everyone from the new area. One rather notorious player, by the name of Dolan, then demanded a full refund for all the money and resources he had lost, and even threatened the devs with legal action. As a result, he was given a full refund, and the devs made the decision to suspend the content, until it could be reworked. Long story short: There was once a story meant exclusively for extreme masochists in Fallen London. Then, some of said masochists managed to break this story in such a spectacularly catastrophic way, that the story had to be suspended.