IgnobleDemise

His writing style is so bizzare that I doubt anyone could replicate it so Im pretty sure its him, but yeah that was a really quick response.

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What sort of person responds that quickly or energetically to getting unbanned from a forum?

 ...I know a* guy...

*I know two guys. Dammit, why does April fool's only happen once a year. I want Garbad back for a day for the lulz.

It's like he sat there for weeks hitting refresh constantly waiting to be unbanned

I remember aeriagames would have tiered spenders where you basically got broken in-game goods for spending $100s during a specific time-frame.

I believe it.  Aeria does like their tiered spenders and has no reservations about screwing you over.  I played SB, EOS, and Shaiya under them, and the way they do things seems to be pretty much the same across the board.

Just adding some notes about the state of SB in case anyone stumbles across this in the future and is curious about where it's at, now that I've spent some more time with it's new server host:

It takes, at minimum, about $25-$30 worth of cash shop items per character (prem bike, prem pet, & pet chips) to be competitive at end-game, which is comprised mostly of faction brawls of up to ~30-50 people on a side in the lev 50+ range where nearly all of the current server population is. 

And then, of course, those items need to be boosted and upgraded to be effective and there are plenty of cash shop items to make that easier, etc.

The whole "sell cash shop items for in-game currency to buy gear" template is also in full force.  Established players with lots of gold are willing to pay well for stuff they don't want to buy with real cash. 

Storage expansions (for warehouse or backpack) are temporary, bought in 30-day intervals, and sort of pass for a monthly subscription cost at a few dollars per month.  They're not mandatory, but default inventory sizes are quite small.  Making alts or alt guilds just to have more free storage is very much a thing.

PvP in the low-to-mid levels is underpopulated and comically imbalanced, as new players with trash gear get thrown into 1v1s or 2v2s with highly geared alts farming battlegrounds for rare drops from chests and/or rank points from the NPC guards.  (These maps were originally designed for 50vs50 or 80vs80 brawls, so playing them with just a few people is really odd.)  Occasionally you get a fight that's close enough to balanced to be interesting, but usually it's not. 

The farmers aren't generally interested in fighting you, though, as they get nothing for killing a player with too low of a PvP ranking. A few "battles" end up with everyone sitting around in the middle of the map throwing socials at each other if the match was clearly imbalanced from the start.  It's kinda weird.

The game is cheaper to play than it was on Aeria and they've added things like guaranteed rare drops from cash-shop random loot boxes if you buy a certain number of them, so the cases where people spent hundreds of dollars for no return are apparently not an issue with Vendetta.  The cost is not removed entirely, though, which makes sense -- renting server space is not free and the monthly subscriber model is almost entirely dead.

xp rates are much higher than they were with Aeria (maybe 1.5x base, plus free daily xp potions for logging in that provide massive boosts of 5x-10x experience, depending on level of the login quest), and gift boxes every 10 levels provide minimal-grade gear per level range (it's pretty rubbish, but functional enough to fill temporary holes in your kit), making 90% of the old quest-grind unnecessarily, though I've still been running through a lot of them for nostalgia's sake.  The quest text pokes a lot of fun at standard RPG tropes among many other things, and is unusually well written for a modern MMORPG.  I know that sounds like "reading Playboy for the articles", but... it's true.  Some of them are pretty entertaining.

There are a few quest chains should be run to get extra skill points or unlock certain areas, but that's it. Basically the 1-20 quest line and about half a dozen others after that.

The original developer went bankrupt (which is why Aeria dropped the game) and Vendetta doesn't have access to the source code so they can't make any sweeping changes, though they've been tweaking and modding what they can.  Mostly they seem to be working on more challenging end-game content.  They can't add new maps, but they've added harder-er mode versions of some existing maps.

And that's about all that comes to mind -- except that the Free Knight faction is currently underpopulated at US time zones and needs more people, if anyone happens to read this and decides to try it out.