INTERVAL
Nobody can ban you, patch you, or switch you off.
It is a shared island you walk around, one second at a time. You pick a trade and get good at it, slowly. It has been running since the day it was founded, and there is no company behind it.
Every other world
Interval
Somebody decides what counts as cheating, and it changes when it suits them. Third-party clients were bannable until the day they were not.
There is no somebody. You cannot make the world lie, and everything else is just playing. Botting is not cheating here. It is another way to play.
A patch turns the thing you spent a year building into something else, and there is no appeal.
The rules cannot change. They were fixed when the world was founded and no one, including us, can alter them now.
One day it shuts down. Every hour anybody ever spent in it goes at the same moment.
There is nothing to shut down. The world is computed by the machines of the people in it. If every one of them stops, the clock stops, and the hours do not go: your citizen is a file you hold, and anybody at all can found the world that continues this one.
Your account is theirs. They can take it back.
Nobody holds anything of yours. There is no account, because there is nobody to keep one.
Somebody moderates you, by rules they wrote about people like you.
No moderator, no appeal, and no one above you. Only the rules, and they are the same for everybody.
The picture is theirs as well. You see the world through the client they wrote, and you are not allowed to write another.
Nobody owns the picture either. The world knows who is where and what they are holding; drawing it is not in the rules. If you do not like our window, write your own and it counts exactly the same.
What it is not
It is not fast. The world moves one interval a second whether or not you are watching, and a walk across the island takes as long as walking across an island should.
It is not generous. Ore is where ore is. Tools are far from where you need them. Nothing scales to make your evening go well.
It is not safe. Nothing is moderated. Nobody is coming to help you, and there is no undo.
It is not finished, and it will not be. There is no ending, no level cap worth the name, and no one deciding what happens next.
You get ninety minutes a day. That is in the rules, not in our hands, and every window obeys it.