MMO Reminisce

I think it will be fun to talk and share stories of the past and present MMOs.

And too kick things off I'm going to share a screen shot of a raid gone wrong, see if you can spot why.

IMAGE(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p286/zooomzoomguy/EQ000001_zpsba5de71b.png)

Wish I had some pics of it, but here's a fun EQ story:

I had a group of friends over and we had an "EQ" game day at my house. Another group in our guild did one at their house on the same day. Anyway sometime in the evening we were deep in a dungeon. Somewhere in Kunark, but I don't remember the dungeon name. We hit a room full of goblins and I think a named one. It took everything we had , but we cleared the room. All of us down on health and mana we step back to rest up and replenish. Suddenly everyone of us disconnects. My DSL had gone down.

The other group calls us to find out what happened. We're panicked because we know that room is going to respawn while we're logged out. We're all so low on mana / health we figure there's no way we will survive logging back in. The other group gets to our location. Once my DSL is back up we make a very good plan on exactly who will do what. We even time our logins so the people with slower computers will come into the game at the same time as the rest of us. With all the careful planning we log back in. We survived the fight by the skin of our teeth and got the hell out of there.

It's funny to me, EQ was punishingly brutal and I don't think I would want a lot of those gameplay elements to come back into MMOs. The exp loss at death, dropping all your items, the extreme grinding. BUT I have more memories from it that have stuck with me than anything I ever did in WoW in the last 10 years. Most of it having to do with that crazy difficulty.

faide wrote:

It's funny to me, EQ was punishingly brutal and I don't think I would want a lot of those gameplay elements to come back into MMOs. The exp loss at death, dropping all your items, the extreme grinding. BUT I have more memories from it that have stuck with me than anything I ever did in WoW in the last 10 years. Most of it having to do with that crazy difficulty.

Totally agree with you, to this day I can name every single guild I was in back in EQ, but I can't remember a single one from the more reset games I've played. I played a rogue and even raid geared I couldn't solo a mob 25 levels below me. I spent alot of my time retrieving others corpses from the dangerous areas.

I feel that parties and raids in eq where more on a personal level then todays MMOs. Nowdays people don't care about what others think about them in game.

I think the downtime in that game really helped the community. I played a monk and was the group puller. I would pull mobs until the DPS or healer ran out of mana. Then we'd have 10 minutes of nothing to do while they mana'd back up. So we chatted. Raids were similar.

Now you rush through a dungeon with a group and never even have to communicate with one another. Again, not sure I want forced downtime but I'm not sure what the solution would be to get people to communicate together.

Top tier VOIP in game.

faide wrote:

I think the downtime in that game really helped the community. I played a monk and was the group puller. I would pull mobs until the DPS or healer ran out of mana. Then we'd have 10 minutes of nothing to do while they mana'd back up. So we chatted. Raids were similar.

Now you rush through a dungeon with a group and never even have to communicate with one another. Again, not sure I want forced downtime but I'm not sure what the solution would be to get people to communicate together.

Everquest 2 had internal voice chat, it wasn't great but it did work when people used it in pick up groups.

I guess I should clarify, by communicate I meant: get to know one another. That happened in EQ out of necessity due to the downtime.

Definitely made a lot of life long friends in EQ. It was all about that pace and having time to actually talk to each other. I've been hooked on MMOs ever since, but nothing will ever recapture those times. It's something I definitely miss, but it's also something I have no idea how I could fit into present day life.

I remember the first time I saw an advertisement for EQ in Electronics Boutique! I was drawn in instantly and was absolutely hooked when they flashed a scene of a group fighting a sand giant in what turned out to be the Oasis of Marr. I still remember seeing the monk doing a spin-kick and thinking "this is a game I have to buy".

I also remember, very vividly, the first time I entered Norrath. It was June of 1999. I created a Wood Elf Bard, which in those days, had a nasty experience penalty that I had no clue about. I dropped into the game in front of the Bard's Guild, walked to the lift, and fell to my death. Hell of a game.

Leer_Dayne wrote:

I remember the first time I saw an advertisement for EQ in Electronics Boutique! I was drawn in instantly and was absolutely hooked when they flashed a scene of a group fighting a sand giant in what turned out to be the Oasis of Marr. I still remember seeing the monk doing a spin-kick and thinking "this is a game I have to buy".

I also remember, very vividly, the first time I entered Norrath. It was June of 1999. I created a Wood Elf Bard, which in those days, had a nasty experience penalty that I had no clue about. I dropped into the game in front of the Bard's Guild, walked to the lift, and fell to my death. Hell of a game.

I first started playing when Luchlin expansion came out not sure what year, but my first character was a human ranger. That started me off in a small town of Surefall Glade, too bad it was night time and humans had no nightvision, so I got lost in the tunnel between the town and the area outside as there was no moon light inside the tunnel. I gave up and made a wood elf, walked 10 feet and fell to my death. Eventually I got the human out of the tunnel by blind luck and bought a torch. Played that guy for a bit and then switched to gnome rogue and never looked back.

My first EQ character was a wood elf ranger and so I started in Kelethin. Fortunately, I'm the type of player who must figure out the interface and buttons and windows and get all that sorted out before I do anything else, so I didn't start running anywhere right off the bat and so didn't run off the platforms. However, as I "sat" there, I began to notice wood elf after wood elf logging in, start running in some direction, and boom...right over the edge they would go! The trees were raining wood elves big time that day!

My first EQ character was a half elf rogue. To name her I threw a dart at a map of the world, it hit Turkey, then I randomly picked a name of a town in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Turkey. Kilyari. That is the name I've gone with for pretty much every female main toon in an MMO since. Thanks random dart!

Oh yeah - my first 5 minutes in an MMO ever: Oooh! Look! Each one of those people is someone playing the game somewhere else! A city in the trees! Kelethin is *falls off ledge and dies*.

faide wrote:

I guess I should clarify, by communicate I meant: get to know one another. That happened in EQ out of necessity due to the downtime.

It was a combination of the downtime and the lack of tools for forming a group. So, reputation mattered, people would remember who they liked grouping with, who they didn't, and word would spread. Different world back then. Today, I loathe the lack of a LFG tool in a MMO, but it made the difference back then.

**

EQ Pre-Luclin. 3am. I don't have to work the next day, but the significant other does, so she is sound asleep. I wake her, bug her for her EQ password. When she gets up in the morning, she's understandably annoyed until I point at her computer screen.

She had a cleric, I had a druid (both max level at the time, level 50, I think). I was wandering by Kedge Keep, stuck my head into the zone just long enough to check tracking. And I noticed 'a frenzied bull shark' had spawned.

Kedge Keep was an odd zone, all underwater, lots of nasty sh*t which tended to hit very hard, bad pathing, some seriously deadly glitches and bugs, and of course you needed water breathing all the time or you died. So very few people went there, and even fewer came back.

At the time, the game had almost nothing that went in the neck slot that had +wisdom. The shark (a damn rare spawn, level 49?) had a damn rare loot drop of the legendary Abalone Gorget, which had both armor value (plate armor) and a goodly amount of +wisdom. You couldn't buy this item for love or money, paladins and clerics went full out gaga over it, but no one went to Kedge Keep because nearly everyone hated the place. No one saw that shark up, and if you did and you could get a group in to kill it before it despawned or got killed, it dropped a lousy cold resist cape no one wanted. Oh, and the sharks of Kedge Keep would bug and despawn if they got knocked into a wall during combat, making it even more unlikely that anyone could get their hands on this item.

I didn't have a group. I went in solo, because, well, lets just go with crazy and stubborn and leave it at that. Fortunately, I had been to Kedge Keep, I did know my way around, and knew most of the monsters there well enough. Unfortunately, there was a little bitty fish that did trivial damage but could see through my invis to animals. Damn thing kept finding me as I was waiting for patrols to sync so I could slip into the area with the shark and ambush it. It would nip me, the invis would drop, and a feeding frenzy would happen with me as the main course. Then I would have to sneak in, drag my corpse out through the zone then up to shore to where I parked her cleric. At the time, dying and getting a rez was serious business, EQ's death penalties then would drive any modern MMO out of business.

I died three times killing that shark. That damn fish nearly got me killed a few more times, too.

Looting the Abalone Gorget off that shark was the best damn loot drop I've ever gotten in any MMO. Couldn't use it, druids can't use plate, but she could. Okay, I was wrong, you couldn't buy it for money, but if your boyfriend was a druid with the right skillset, a bit of luck and a lot of crazy and stubborn? Then you could buy it for love.

I just realized NCSoft destroyed the 2 MMOs I miss most: City of Heroes and Auto Assault.

I never learned the Korean for "f*ck you," but I would learn it if I ever got the chance to talk to their higher-ups.

Countless nights lost in Asheron's Call.

We were killing some kind of giants woodcutters, but I just love the chatting with others.

I was like level 188, and others were like level 255... Was crazy grinding nights.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

I just realized NCSoft destroyed the 2 MMOs I miss most: City of Heroes and Auto Assault.

I never learned the Korean for "f*ck you," but I would learn it if I ever got the chance to talk to their higher-ups.

You ever played Champions Online? It's not as good as COH, but it has improved and is underrated.

Oh the stories from Ultima Online... just some of the most {ableist slur} fun a person could have.

Played EQ, but the patience to level was for me was just terrible. I made it to level 20 on the PvP server. Played a roleplaying 'good' guy in Freeport of all places..

In truth, my favorites were DAoC, simply because the PvP was done pretty well, even though everyone seemed to play everything but Midgaard.. Having the largest guild of whiners and kicking them all out in one day? Priceless for me.

The other favorite was Shadowbane, but only because the Thief class was the coolest thing I've ever seen implemented. Getting to rob people and run for my life were exciting and different. Heck, getting to rob the 'mobs' was fun as hell too. Nothing like waiting for a group to attack a monster with a seal on them, waiting until they were all involved in combat and then slipping in and stealing what they wanted from the mob, immediately becoming visible and then running like hell, hoping that they didn't notice you too fast.

We crashed a WoW server about 8 years ago. It was a role-play/pvp event on the Steamwheedle Cartel server, involving the Horde's cruel experiments on King Varian Wrynn in his underground island prison. Our Horde rp/pvp group was trying to drum up interest in a massive war on the island, and when the day for the event arrived, the Alliance made a massive show of support for their king. There were over 100 of us on each side, honestly, but just as we engaged the enemy on the island everything slowed to a crawl and then the server crashed. It was pretty damn funny.

When I finally got signed on to UO at launch, I was attacked at the graveyard within 2 minutes by someone with a bow that chased me into the nearby town. It was very frustrating with the horrible rubberbanding and I didn't know where I was going so it took me a lot longer to find the town. Oh and the first time a friend and me tried to make it to Brittania... Good grief that was an hour and a half long trek of 3 steps forward, 2 steps back with the occasional 6 steps back and 10 second stalls thrown in for good measure.

Looking back, I do think it is funny in EQ how everyone who has created a wood elf has fallen off of Kelethin. I don't look forward to revisiting that in a modern mmo, but it certainly added significantly to the character of the city.

DAOC had some great nights as the Ava Tarati, a group of 8-10 pre-gwjers (including Sean and Shawn, Gaald, Sway, etc) before GWJ was conceived. I remember not having a healer in our group so me, as a kobold spirit master, used my pet to pull (valiantly but not more than averagely effective) and healed with bubbles and reverse life taps (damaged me to heal group members). In between fights, the healer in the other group could top me off if necessary. It was great fun for sure and one of my fondest mmo memories.

Forget EQ and UO, anyone remember the great-gand-daddy of MMOs, The Realm Online? It used to look like this:
IMAGE(http://cdn.mmohuts.com/wp-content/gallery/news-images/the-realm-online-old-mmorpg.jpg)

Thankfully, they modernized the interface (yup, it's still active today), and it looks like this:
IMAGE(http://www5.pcmag.com/media/images/235916-the-realm-online.jpg)

I remember my main character quite fondly, a level 1k AIEW (all intel elf wizard) named Ghani. And I'd run the big Anvil dungeon all by myself with my second account's Eleima, a level 1k ASGW (all strength giant warrior). Ah, those were the days... Any other goodjer who used to play this?

Is that guy wearing boots and underwear as armor?

Why yes. Yes he is.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that he isn't wearing any armor aside from his boots, but I'm nitpicking.

Looking at the name of one of those characters in chat I'd say MMO's haven't changed much at all aside from implementing some rudimentary language filters.

As for me, I have tons of fond memories from DAoC and EQ2, both of which pretty much forced me to group with people. Coincidence? I think not. Of course I also have a lot of good memories from SWG and CoH, both of which I generally solo'd. Of course a lot of my best CoH memories also include a game centric radio station (Paragon Radio, later MMO Radio) before everyone got all sensitive about royalties. Come to think of it, there were several Australian dj's on that station, aside from the two owners, DJ Buddha and Radiowave. Wonder if that has anything to do with my affection for the Australian accent? Hmmm...

I would have fallen off my chair if one of the characters in your screenshot was named ErymGarc - that was the character ( yes, Cragmyre backwards ) that I used in The Realm.

/nitpick

Island of Kesmai is the real granddaddy of MMORPG's