Fondest Memory of MMOs

Anarchy online, the first MMO I ever played, had lots of moments. The one that sticks out in my mind is when I was a total nooblet on my first ever character, seeing my orgs towers get attacked and being the only one online. Ported to the tower site to try to defend and ended up getting totally railed by some uber twink and his group (my gear was total shit and I had no idea what I was doing). Resigned myself to the fact that we were losing our towers when all of a sudden some random hero turns up and invites me to his group, tells me not to worry and that his friends were coming too. Ended up slaughtering them and sucessfully defending our towers, though I did very little ;p Totally blew my mind at the time that random people who didn't know me/my org would show up to defend, wasn't even a high level tower and there was no quick access (involved lots of flying on their part to get there), let alone form a group to defend. From then on I was hooked.

Fucking my EQ guild leader's girlfriend/future wife at a guild get together. She later got him/his dad to pay off all her debt and for her to move to somewhere in the Scandinavian Peninsula and pay for her visa/work permit.

EQ- My first raid ever. Going in with a huge raid to fight Naggy on my druid. Raid wipes, my druid's corpse is like the piece of toilet paper stuck to Naggy's foot, can't get it. Some dude logs to his Monk twink that is the highest level you can be and not get booted from the zone. Guy basically 2 mans Naggy. Was an amazing moment.

Planet Side- 2 moments. Playing a galaxy tail gunner or maybe it was belly, not sure, been a long time little fuzzy. Go almost an hour without getting shot down over a giant base stalemate, our Galaxy single handly locking down air space. We finally get shot down, bail out with a couple squad mates, our squad then captures said base, setting off a giant push that was just epic and awesome.

Second moment, finding the weak spot on one of the big ass Mech's and getting the kill shot, on foot, with an underslung grenade launcher shot.

EQ2- Too many to count really. In general my first MMO where I was really truly part of a guild and did end game. I made friends that have lasted to present day and it was my go to game home for so long. One of my favorites would be kiting one of the Drakotas, back before they nerfed Rangers and snare etc. The raid had wiped and another Ranger and myself kept the thing snared and hate swap kited the thing 2 or 3 times till our raid force basically zerged it down. That same Ranger and I did so much crazy crap in that game, duo'd everything, till we had our dicks nerfed into the dirt lol.



EQ and Planet Side really take the cake for having some of the best emergent game play I've experienced. Eq2 had it, then lost it, then had it, then lost it. Vanguard had some, but I never got immersed enough in that one to really have it get to my feels, like some of the others. SWTOR has been hitting that spot for me a lot lately. Some of my fondest memories revolve around small bugs, or temporary acceptable sploits that worked around them. Don't get as many of those anymore, since every class/role is balanced/tuned/nerfed/tweaked that you don't get the random moments of amazing. Combined with the new car shiny wearing off, is why I think you don't see as many "omg" moments from newer stuff. At least for me. They are there, just don't have as much of an impact, because been there done that syndrome.

Several come to mind... getting stuck in a death loop on a Vox raid. Getting my Epic. But one that really sticks out in my mind was the time one of the raiding guilds needed some extra healers to clear PoSky. At that time, I had a decent reputation but I hadn't jumped in the raid scene yet but I was dependable in a group I guess. I was just amazed how something like this worked as I never really did this outside of being a gun for hire on a raid here and there. Anyway, we get pretty far into the zone and I think the final mob pulled and no one thought we could do it and it came down to me, a dps, and the mob. Dps lands the kill blow, somehow dies, and I am the last man standing. I completely expected to die all night and be over my head. From there on I just needed that rush and because a full-time raiding cleric and never turned back.



Looking through the screenshots really makes me miss the simplicity of EQ. I liked the classic look and feel to this day. I have no idea why MMO's have become so complicated and in-depth.

More memories, I ended up quitting EQ about the time FoH started entering Elemental Planes....

Popping Avatar of War, and going WTF as he chewed thru the tanks, like paper.

North Temple, had so much fun, and entering Plane of Mischief thru there was the biggest dick move I'd ever seen SoE pull at the time.(and unfinished was so lame)

The 2-day release of Luclin, and all the people who got there money back at the time because of the, DirectX update. (hah)

The biggest thing i remember about luclin is only the Shissar temple. the last zone of the expansion was so bad, and the key quest was just stupid.

Planes of Power, I remmeber doing Bertox event, and enjoying the whole event, the tower climb up too Saryrn, Terris Thule, Mith Marr, Bastion of Thunder, we started doing Rallos Zek at the time I quit.

I did come back for the free 3 months that SoE gave out after the hacking, I enjoyed House of Thule alot(and holy shit was leveling a cake walk), did go up thru Terris Thule, in Erudin in that expansion but that was as far as I got.

Rhanin_sl said:

Some of my fondest memories revolve around small bugs, or temporary acceptable sploits that worked around them. Don't get as many of those anymore, since every class/role is balanced/tuned/nerfed/tweaked that you don't get the random moments of amazing. Combined with the new car shiny wearing off, is why I think you don't see as many "omg" moments from newer stuff. At least for me. They are there, just don't have as much of an impact, because been there done that syndrome.

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I recognize this. The things I tried were never the exploits that would make you rich or give you a huge advantage, but were about beating the game mechanics and finding loopholes to do otherwise impossible stuff.

I remember two that kept me busy for many hours (and yielded zero xp or loot btw).

First one was in Akanon with my level 35 druid. You could jump your way onto the roof of the Gnome Rogue Guildhouse (near the water) and there was a sweet spot there, where you could not get hit. There was this one level 40 Clockwork spider(red to me, would have owned me) sitting on a small island in the water near there, and I nuked that one. It often just stayed on its spot, and I could kill it in like 20 minutes or so (lots of resists), or it would run to the house, aggro everything and there would be a whole bunch of aggro red mobs buzzing around the house. Exiting, and very useless for XP off course. But the fact that your puny level 35 druid could kill anything red in Akanon was exiting.

The other was getting on the rock ledge in Erudin, in the area where the Erudin Library was. I forgot how to get up there ( a lot of jumping, I think you had to get up back at the area where the teleporter into Erudin Palace is). Once you got there, you could nuke the Sentinels, and eventually kill them. They could not get to you. They dropped a staff that was also part of a Quest that had its origin in East Karana (and involved Highpas Keep too ) so figuring out if that staff could be used for that quest or in other ways was fun too. Back when we figured there were still a zillion mysteries in EQ, and not just a bunch of broken and unfinished quests.

I spent an entire night with some random dude in Qeynos Harbor on EQ2, doing nothing but trying to glitch our way out of the map and get to places your weren't suppose to be. I was notoriously bad at get stuck in a fucking retarded ass loop, where I just jumped around Qeynos Harbor while I waited for a guildie to log on and give me something to do. Doing this one night, noticed a guy scaling the outer harbor wall, and became intrigued. We didn't speak a fucking word to each other, but began taking turns trying to get to harder and harder spots, until one of us got it. 5 hours and a few deaths later, we parted ways having scaled, what I'm confident in saying was, everything you could possibly fucking climb in that zone, even up onto the Bayle Castle, on top arena, etc. Use to have a ton of screenshots from doing it, and began the laborious task of passing on my exceedingly useless and random as fuck knowledge to any other late night/odd hour guildie that found themselves trapped in "jumping around the Harbor purgatory."

Thinking EQ's combat was having to time melee swings by pressing attack on & off. Figured it out after 3 fire beetles to the freeport guards.

My first real Everquest guild. Order of Elder Dragons.

Not a hardcore guild. Never in on any world first. Most of us never reached level cap. But goddamn did we have fun. I even remember some of their names. Windam. Deyorra. Arawak. Cresida. Ynaphit. Munz. Minz. Hardail.

Toss up between my first Hate zone-in and fucking around in Unrest basement with close friends seeing who could pull the largest (survivable) trains.

Also ending our first AoW kill swinging a sword naked except for a pair of hastily-looted boots.

Justin chillin' in Kelethin...

Getting my prismatic weapon in EQ2
Seeing Kelethin for the first time in EQ
Finishing the year long achievement 'What a long strange trip it's been' in WoW

8manning Alb zergs in DAOC and the duels we used to have 8v8 with mid guilds.

Unfortunately there was a lot of drama and deadspace in maintaining a healthy 8man but it was still so much easier than doing it in EQ.

EQ- fondest memory? Everything..... Played from day 1, and that shit still haunts me till today.

There was really nothing like it at the time other then text based shit, and Isometric games like UO.

As mentioned before, one of the many problem with EQ was that the penalty for failure was so harsh (and I don't mean losing corpses, that was the stuff of legend, but simply the lost time) that it was very difficult to find people motivated in doing anything other than the most secure grindy stuff. The rare spawn/rare drop system also encouraged people to stay at 'camps'. At the other end of the spectrum, you had lethal chaos. The train, the boss pulled on an unprepared raid, etc. So 99.9% of the time was spent waiting, travelling, grinding stuff or getting wiped. The remaining 0.1% (and I am being generous) are my fond memories.

Unusual group compositions (bard monk monk rogue in Sebilis' kitchen using AoE fear, group haste and single target snare!), dungeon crawling (Kaesora! Charasis aka The Howling Stones!), barely controlled fights (Hands room in Karnor with a greek guy who was 5 boxing that turned into an almost endless battle with the repops! Killing a mega train in PoFear with our chanter Crowde throwing the whole book at the sea of mobs! Intentional PoFear trains party when zoning out from PoTime!). Then there were moments of fun with other people, moment of awe when discovering new zones or new foes (the first time I saw Trakanon, peeling the pulls of another monk from the ledge leading to Trak's area!), the tingly feeling or maybe discovering something no one else before you did (something that was very possible in EQ thanks to the volume of broken quests that drove most players away from questing altogether) and then achievements like completing quests, finding neat pulling tricks, having epiphanies about the game mechanics, elaborating strats to kill bosses (or more like being the witness of such elaborations by Itzlegend and Iamthep) and of course killing bosses (all the better if it was a server first or a world first - when there started to be a lot of buzz about WoW, because its numbers brought a far broader audience than other MMOs, it was fun to realize that I was not even part of the top 1%, but the top 0.01%!)

A lot of EQ in there, but being in WoW's beta and discovering the polish of this world as well as some of the early encounters (Majordomo! I love that fight - the warping to the pit creates punctual chaos that insures that the fight always remain in the 0.1%) are also up there before it became a mix between magic the gathering (which was a fatal blow to most EQ raiders in WoW I would guess) and Simon Says. I am almost certain I will never play another MMORPG again though.


Also, dev Frizznik raiding Uqua with us as he was probably asked to fix the zone:

First meeting with Trak:

The more I try to play MMO's, the more I come closer at this realization. I really may never play a MMO again. I try time to time but it just doesn't last. I would love for a classic EQ server to pop up just to play around in with some of the grind taken out of it just so I could get 2-3 friends together to just relive a Lower Guk camp or kite some Hill Giants. You can never really get back to full experience as the people are gone and they made it. You need to have every aspect of the game both socially and from the game perspective as well.

Wish I had the time to build a classic EQ server just to have out there for those who want 1-50, classic camps, raid the planes and the original dragons. I would be willing to bet that people would probably come and go but every now and then people would want that fix, that feel every month or two for "old times sake". Would be cool just to have a classic server up just to schedule get togethers or whatever with no expectation of day to day healthy population. Just get friends or events together to do a given camp or raid.

Can't forget the hill giants and Lake of Rathe. Man we spent a lot of time around there too.

The first time I ran Deadmines in the WoW open beta. That shit came shortly after GoD had destroyed Everquest, and City of Heroes wasn't scratching the itch.

Deadmines was fuckin amazing compared to shit that had come before.