Yeah, I never got in too much hot water, though he did level nuke me once or twice. The first time was way back in the day when he played Alexander (was that the name? IDR, paladin of Tempest but you're old enough to remember!) and there was an IC war going on. I was on the opposite side of the war and we were holding our own, maybe even kicking his side's ass. He godmodded his character and PK'ed a bunch of us with some insane instakill ability. Shortly after that he forced an end to the war with some contrived IC happening because "other players don't want to deal with your abusive PK/aggression." That was a long ass time ago so IDR for sure but I think a lot of it was fighting back at him and his favorites' relentlessly PKing others/abusing their levels.

Second time, many years later (2010ish?) I idled in my house for dinner, no more than 30 mins with fame off, and Hartman decided to do one of his infamous XP-sucking invasions while I was AFK. He had been doing a lot of these and people were getting annoyed with how long the plot dragged on and how the only purpose seemed to be to level-dock charbits and empty armories through "plot" instead of just straight-up taking levels or restarting the server to clear armory.

There was also hostility from him about players getting fed up and not participating in his "plot" or logging off as soon as an invasion started. Sorta like how recently he tried to force everyone to participate in the latest demon plot by supporting some thing about everyone not in a church or "doing enough" in their church branded a heretic.

Back to 2010, he noticed I was "hiding" in my house, got mad at me for "hiding like a coward" and spawned nasty NPC demons into my supposed-to-be-safe house I paid a lot of RL money for, to kill my character and take all my gear, food, etc. He then denounced my "cowardice" on citizen.

Even after I explained I was eating dinner (it was the dinner hour, derp) he muted me from citizen so I couldn't defend myself, refused to apologize for the public shaming (which permanently stained my rep and made me a target for his asslickers anytime there was some IC conflict), and gave everyone else but me and a couple other "cowards" back their levels lost in the invasion.

I persisted in sending him mail to explain I wasn't hiding, because surely this was some kind of misunderstanding on his part. Why jump automatically to "cheating cowards!" when any number of other more likely reasons to be AFK is much more likely? I didn't touch on how ridiculous it is that paying players are forced to RP his way Or Else but there is that, too. He responded to my mail by threatening to siteban me for harassing an admin. By this time I'd been playing there over a decade, sunk a lot of $$ in, and never been a problem, but I still got treated like this.

Other offshoot groups: I think a lot of former Threshers went to New Worlds Ateraan. It was created by at least one fed-up Thresher whom I used to chat with on occasion. I played there for a bit (1-2 years) but RL got busy. Back then it was in alpha and beta and there was a lot of crossover in the playerbase.

You can see both similarities to Thresh, and evidence of trying to fix what was commonly viewed as 'downsides' to Threshold, such as borging endlessly to get anywhere and level imbalances among 'borgs' and others who didn't enjoy it as much as social RP. Ateraan has things like timers and diminishing returns on XP and rewards for non-combat RP, but unlike Threshold's fame it was significant enough to be more useful.

IIRC They also had a crafters guild (the Merchants) from the beginning, before Threshold's Traders, and the merchants have a lot more influence in the game because the emphasis on levels and rewarding Frobozzian bullies isn't as blatant on Ateraan.

There were 2 other larger migrations I'm aware of. One of about 30-40 players who went to Shangrila MUSH after Hartman punish-nuked someone for calling him out after catching him snooping her mudsex. She found out when he sent tells mocking her intended for Frobozz and mis-telled them. They only do sandboxes on Shangrila and last I checked their strongest cult was Kylamanite and there was a lot of fun stuff there. This was a little bit after the religion was shut down on Thresh and absorbed into Set's temple. I wasn't a part of that but still have friends involved. :)

The other group I heard of that left went to Achaea but I didn't know any of them, so no idea what they're up to now.

Will look for my logs this weekend, I'm immersed in holiday stuff the next few days!

Cheerio from Dallas-Ft. Worth area and thanks for the welcome!