If you’re one of those late 90’s or early 2000’s kids who loved playing online virtual world games, there’s a great chance you might’ve played, or at least heard of Fantage. It was a renowned MMORPG that took place inside a massive virtual world with so many games for you to play and tons of other activities for its players to indulge in. There wasn’t an exact number to keep track of its members when the game got shut down, but near the end of 2014, Fantage had almost 30 million registered users. That’s quite a number, isn’t it? Then what happened exactly> Why did the game has to shut down all of a sudden? We’ll be answering all these questions by discussing all that led to the Fantage servers shutting down.

Fantage Shop issue

It all started back in October 2012 when Fantage introduced a shop named “Trade and Sell” in the virtual world. Through this shop, players had the chance to buy new items, sell their items, and trade items with each other. The in-game currency used for purchasing and selling was known as Stars, and if you had enough of them, you could buy anything depending on the price and number of stars you had. Once the shop got operational and people started trading, scamming became a considerable part of the game as people started scamming people for products and in-game currency. With the ongoing scamming issues, the value of the Stars inflated, and eventually, the store got shut down. This showed one of the dark sides of the gaming community, a side where people would do almost anything for profit.

This whole issue with the Trade and Sell store started Fantage's demise. Another huge reason why this game went downhill is that the upper management didn’t have much regard for their subordinates. It has been reported by many of the company’s employees that the upper-level administration used to treat their staff rudely, and the work environment was toxic. People have complained about how the management wouldn’t even listen to new ideas from their subordinates. It was later established that the manager at the time was a huge problem; if they had been replaced, a lot would’ve changed.

DDoS Attack and hacking

Other virtual game options