The Daily Grind: Looking back on the good old days
by Elizabeth Harper 
on Dec 15th 2008 8:00AM
MMO industry, Opinion, The Daily Grind
12
Reader Comments (12)
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 8:28AM Stanzig said
I had a high level friend come to Kelethin and give my ranger a centi short sword right after the release of luclin. EQ was the first online game I had played other than Delta Force so I was a total newb. I wandered all over Greater Faydark and was slaughtering mobs with my uber sword when I found a little entrance in the zone wall so I zoned over.
I pop through the other side and run up to this unicorn and start attacking. I instantly died... and met the pained unicorn for the first time. I could not find that zone in afterward and some friendly high level vah'shir bards helped me. I think at that time the corpse could rot after a given time and the rare sword was on my corpse. After they dragged 5 or 6 corpses to me from the new zone I explained I traveled to the next zone over but wasn't sure where I was. So they spent all this time going from zone to zone with me until we found my corpse and I had nothing to offer them in return. One of the bards did offer to buy the sword off me but my bud wouldn't have been happy.
If you bards are still out there and played on Quellios, thanks a ton! 8)
I pop through the other side and run up to this unicorn and start attacking. I instantly died... and met the pained unicorn for the first time. I could not find that zone in afterward and some friendly high level vah'shir bards helped me. I think at that time the corpse could rot after a given time and the rare sword was on my corpse. After they dragged 5 or 6 corpses to me from the new zone I explained I traveled to the next zone over but wasn't sure where I was. So they spent all this time going from zone to zone with me until we found my corpse and I had nothing to offer them in return. One of the bards did offer to buy the sword off me but my bud wouldn't have been happy.
If you bards are still out there and played on Quellios, thanks a ton! 8)
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 8:29AM Idle said
Anyone else remember dialing into the local BBS and playing Trade Wars 2002 or Legend of the Red Dragon?
Text-based MUDs also took up a good bit of my time in the early days. You can still find some good ones out there if you're in the mood for a bit of nostalgia.
While not an MMO, I also played a ton of Bard's Tale on the PC. The other day, I found all of my graph paper maps I painstakingly made while trying to crawl through all those levels. Anyone remember what ZZGO is? 8)
Text-based MUDs also took up a good bit of my time in the early days. You can still find some good ones out there if you're in the mood for a bit of nostalgia.
While not an MMO, I also played a ton of Bard's Tale on the PC. The other day, I found all of my graph paper maps I painstakingly made while trying to crawl through all those levels. Anyone remember what ZZGO is? 8)
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 9:10AM (Unverified) said
Had some great times playing EQ but when you look back, it was a bit of a pain, really. I'm amazed at how much time I spent with a mate in Karnor's pulling Gnolls, wash, rinse, repeat...
SWG also has some fond memories for me: I loved the whole open world/sandbox of that game. It's too bad they listened to the 12-year olds GIEF JEDIZ PLX
SWG also has some fond memories for me: I loved the whole open world/sandbox of that game. It's too bad they listened to the 12-year olds GIEF JEDIZ PLX
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 9:33AM Boruk said
Everquest of course. I remember my very first "WTF!" moment too. It was being a level 10 Wood Elf Druid and running into Lesser Faydark..a few moment later I got horse kicked in the face by that stupid Unicorn..not a good place for new players.
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 10:11AM Deryk said
Thanks for sharing those moments. Very similar ones for EQ especially!
My very first moments with an MMO were on UO. Wow the first day that launched it was a lagfest! I rolled in that town to the NE (don't recall the name atm) and could barely move! There were SO many people on that game when it launched.
And well, after a few months it didn't take long for the servers to thin out due to the PvP gankers. That really killed that game more than anything imho.
Was nice to have EQ come out...a breath of fresh air at the time! (non-PvP servers)
Ah the good old days...wait that was only 11 years ago! (UO launch).
My very first moments with an MMO were on UO. Wow the first day that launched it was a lagfest! I rolled in that town to the NE (don't recall the name atm) and could barely move! There were SO many people on that game when it launched.
And well, after a few months it didn't take long for the servers to thin out due to the PvP gankers. That really killed that game more than anything imho.
Was nice to have EQ come out...a breath of fresh air at the time! (non-PvP servers)
Ah the good old days...wait that was only 11 years ago! (UO launch).
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 12:50PM Heraclea said
I remember getting my first $125 AOL bill and wondering, "I wasn't really playing Neverwinter Nights that long, was I?"
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 2:48PM Jeromai said
Ahh. Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon. Those were the days. I'd be calling up BBS after BBS trying to see if they had LORD so I could keep playing after running out of turns. And trying to look for those who actually bothered registering TW2002, which was rare in my locale.
I'd say my first exposure to real 'massive' multiplayer was the SMAUG MUD Realms of Despair. Easily 300 people online in its prime. Diku-based, so corpse retrievals were the order of the day. Global channels and helpful people rescuing newbies really helped out the sense of community. You don't get that so easily now in MMOs because chat channels tend to get split up by region.
Another thing that I wish more MMOs would learn from ancient MUDs: funneling new people into automatic guilds. On RoD (as we called it), the guilds were divided up by class, and anyone would have a shot at entry as long as they passed a few simple tasks.
1) Posting an application on a notice board, to see if they could master reading some help files and basic mud commands.
2) A live interview with some guild members (just to make sure they could handle conversation, and jibed with the spirit of the guild, some were serious, some more fun-loving.)
3) And a small item-hunt for things around the MUD - mostly to give entrants something to do, to train them in the lay of the land and using their class to fight some mobs, and to see if they sought help with nonmoronic behavior.
A very low key filter, but worked well, and most passed with flying colors and ended up with a special guild channel and a sense of belonging and people to do things with.
The hardcore would tend to break away into Orders (a variant of a guild), more clique-y, with more specific requirements. Some were meant for socializing, one was for roleplay, a few were dedicated cliques out to 'run' the ancestors of the raid mob (2-8 people usually.)
Things I don't miss: Item deterioration and loss. Mobs would scrap equipment off you if you didn't repair and spend money (aka goldsink!)
Deathtraps were feared, because they would eat every single piece of equipment off you if you typed the wrong direction and stumbled into one. It was just anathema because the rest of the MUD was focused onto an item-gaining item-improving race. Meanwhile, these DTs would serve arbitrary death sentences to those amibitions, trying to teach a contrary principle that gear was not important and should be interchangable/replaceable.
Make up your minds! What is the purpose of the game? Honestly, none, because it was built by volunteers and by committee, so different people had different ideas. One immortal (dev) loved deathtraps and would place them all over the areas he designed, in an attempt at schadenfreude, I suspect. :) It ended up punishing those who were keen to explore and encouraging people to stay home, grind the usual mobs and not give a damn about the new stuff.
Inventory and character management. Oh god, what a pain. Warriors could hold 999 weight because they had 25 pain. Everything else was 500 weight. Enter the creation and grind of 'storage' warrior mules, which HAD to get to level 50, or higher-leveled items would delete on log out. Talk about leveling burnout.
Characters would autodelete after 3 months. And that was high leveled ones. Low leveled ones deleted after 1 month or so. Every month, I would engage in an obligated frenzy of logging 124 variously named characters to make sure they didn't expire. (Did I mention this game encouraged making different characters as tools for different purposes?)
More burnout fodder. I hear they only changed this after 8 years, after it finally passed the trial of decision via commitee.
*hugs the stable of 150+ City of Heroes alts that will stay alive even if subscription paid stops - though they might lose their names, fair enough*
Speed of updates was glacier-like. Volunteer-run, remember? It was agonizing when you'd used up all the content and had nothing else to do but repeat the same activity, striving for more numerical increments of gear you already had dozens of.
I greatly appreciate the games that strive for regular fixes every month and updates of new stuff every half-year or so, hence why I drop money on games like LOTRO, CoX and WAR and am never going back to the 'good old days.'
I'd say my first exposure to real 'massive' multiplayer was the SMAUG MUD Realms of Despair. Easily 300 people online in its prime. Diku-based, so corpse retrievals were the order of the day. Global channels and helpful people rescuing newbies really helped out the sense of community. You don't get that so easily now in MMOs because chat channels tend to get split up by region.
Another thing that I wish more MMOs would learn from ancient MUDs: funneling new people into automatic guilds. On RoD (as we called it), the guilds were divided up by class, and anyone would have a shot at entry as long as they passed a few simple tasks.
1) Posting an application on a notice board, to see if they could master reading some help files and basic mud commands.
2) A live interview with some guild members (just to make sure they could handle conversation, and jibed with the spirit of the guild, some were serious, some more fun-loving.)
3) And a small item-hunt for things around the MUD - mostly to give entrants something to do, to train them in the lay of the land and using their class to fight some mobs, and to see if they sought help with nonmoronic behavior.
A very low key filter, but worked well, and most passed with flying colors and ended up with a special guild channel and a sense of belonging and people to do things with.
The hardcore would tend to break away into Orders (a variant of a guild), more clique-y, with more specific requirements. Some were meant for socializing, one was for roleplay, a few were dedicated cliques out to 'run' the ancestors of the raid mob (2-8 people usually.)
Things I don't miss: Item deterioration and loss. Mobs would scrap equipment off you if you didn't repair and spend money (aka goldsink!)
Deathtraps were feared, because they would eat every single piece of equipment off you if you typed the wrong direction and stumbled into one. It was just anathema because the rest of the MUD was focused onto an item-gaining item-improving race. Meanwhile, these DTs would serve arbitrary death sentences to those amibitions, trying to teach a contrary principle that gear was not important and should be interchangable/replaceable.
Make up your minds! What is the purpose of the game? Honestly, none, because it was built by volunteers and by committee, so different people had different ideas. One immortal (dev) loved deathtraps and would place them all over the areas he designed, in an attempt at schadenfreude, I suspect. :) It ended up punishing those who were keen to explore and encouraging people to stay home, grind the usual mobs and not give a damn about the new stuff.
Inventory and character management. Oh god, what a pain. Warriors could hold 999 weight because they had 25 pain. Everything else was 500 weight. Enter the creation and grind of 'storage' warrior mules, which HAD to get to level 50, or higher-leveled items would delete on log out. Talk about leveling burnout.
Characters would autodelete after 3 months. And that was high leveled ones. Low leveled ones deleted after 1 month or so. Every month, I would engage in an obligated frenzy of logging 124 variously named characters to make sure they didn't expire. (Did I mention this game encouraged making different characters as tools for different purposes?)
More burnout fodder. I hear they only changed this after 8 years, after it finally passed the trial of decision via commitee.
*hugs the stable of 150+ City of Heroes alts that will stay alive even if subscription paid stops - though they might lose their names, fair enough*
Speed of updates was glacier-like. Volunteer-run, remember? It was agonizing when you'd used up all the content and had nothing else to do but repeat the same activity, striving for more numerical increments of gear you already had dozens of.
I greatly appreciate the games that strive for regular fixes every month and updates of new stuff every half-year or so, hence why I drop money on games like LOTRO, CoX and WAR and am never going back to the 'good old days.'
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 2:56PM (Unverified) said
The goold old days for me was hiding in my room playing on my favorite MUD. I had the worst computer known to man and even then it couldn't keep up with all the text flashing on my screen.
It was a very common issue with my very old machine that bright flashing blinking text lagged my MUD client to hell. I tried very hard to keep the secret to myself as I pillaged the enemy clans of the MUD but my best friend happen to catch my disconnect when he saw me tagged by the evil magical lightning flag from this one weapon.
I of course could never get a fair fight with him after this as he would always wield magical forces (weapon in Fanatics Tower for the RoT guys) against me. Surely enough like clockwork, I would disconnect as my machine could not keep up with the blinking yellow text of the lightning flag. :(
How I miss those days of corpse looting and overpowering quest EQ that we would only dream about all day at school.
It was a very common issue with my very old machine that bright flashing blinking text lagged my MUD client to hell. I tried very hard to keep the secret to myself as I pillaged the enemy clans of the MUD but my best friend happen to catch my disconnect when he saw me tagged by the evil magical lightning flag from this one weapon.
I of course could never get a fair fight with him after this as he would always wield magical forces (weapon in Fanatics Tower for the RoT guys) against me. Surely enough like clockwork, I would disconnect as my machine could not keep up with the blinking yellow text of the lightning flag. :(
How I miss those days of corpse looting and overpowering quest EQ that we would only dream about all day at school.
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 3:45PM (Unverified) said
Nov. 1999-2001. Asheron's Call primetime.
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 3:46PM (Unverified) said
For me, the good old days were more a state of mind than any game. Back when everything was new. My fist big MMO was Ragnarok, one of the first succesful imports in the US. That was a great game, when it first came out, and noone knew where everything was and the best places to level.
Most areas were crazy hard, and impossible to solo unless you had real deep pockets and a near infinate supply of blue and white potions. You had to find a good team with a Priest or 2, a good knight, a good Crusader with sacrafice, and a wizard for real damage. Maybe even an assasian for the occation quick kill and scouting. You could get a team together with out to much dificulty then, since, as I said, no one really knew about uber leveling tricks, like that desert island region with the sand blobs. You would take your party and go real deep into a dungoun and you were never 100% certain if the area was right for your level or not. You just knew the look was good and you were having fun. Even if it was 20 levels to high for you, it was actually possible in a good party. Then you would get to the boss, and be totally layed flat, but you wouldn't care. You would laugh it off and all go find a new dungoun to explore.
It was sad when I eventually left. By that time, Transcendents were out and if your guild didn't 5 or 6 fo those, you were SooL when it came to War of Emperium. One of those guys could take on 2 or 3 equal level foes. By that point, everyone knew of the best places to go anyway, so those real crawler parties were fewer and much further between.
I suppose it is a certain game, to an extent. Many games these days are so linear and straight forward. The games are made to be soloed, aside from very specific areas. But thats all part of the mentality too. To make your game truelly successful, you have to go for that now. It makes me sort of sad, and is a good reason why I am feeling very jaded about the genre. I like being in a party. I like taking on something that is difficult for us, but where that added chalange actually comes with added reward. Now, even if you get a great part together and go some place 10+ levels to high for you, whats the point? You dont have quest or the rewards, and even if you find some epic weapon, it only seems epic to you since you can't even use it yet. By the time you can, you find its just trash and vendor quality.
Its pretty much all like that now. There is no reason to venture, because there is nothing to gain from doing so. Stick to the course, you get the best treats. Stray, and you get a rolled up news paper for your trouble. Sure, you can play together in a party, but whats the point? You could just as easily solo it for pretty much the same exp per minute and get all the loot to yourself. You have nothing to really gain from getting together, aside from the very few areas where you have to go together. Oh, but you also have to be THIS level, and have completed THESE quests to even enter. Also, you probably wont survive if you don't have THOSE equips. And your party has X THEM, Y THEM, and you are fucked if you don't have Z THOSE GUYS. Nothing fun about it. Nothing but limitations and rewards for not making a fuss about it. That is why WoW is terrible. That is why EQII is just as bad. That is why all of thier clones can just go to hell.
Most areas were crazy hard, and impossible to solo unless you had real deep pockets and a near infinate supply of blue and white potions. You had to find a good team with a Priest or 2, a good knight, a good Crusader with sacrafice, and a wizard for real damage. Maybe even an assasian for the occation quick kill and scouting. You could get a team together with out to much dificulty then, since, as I said, no one really knew about uber leveling tricks, like that desert island region with the sand blobs. You would take your party and go real deep into a dungoun and you were never 100% certain if the area was right for your level or not. You just knew the look was good and you were having fun. Even if it was 20 levels to high for you, it was actually possible in a good party. Then you would get to the boss, and be totally layed flat, but you wouldn't care. You would laugh it off and all go find a new dungoun to explore.
It was sad when I eventually left. By that time, Transcendents were out and if your guild didn't 5 or 6 fo those, you were SooL when it came to War of Emperium. One of those guys could take on 2 or 3 equal level foes. By that point, everyone knew of the best places to go anyway, so those real crawler parties were fewer and much further between.
I suppose it is a certain game, to an extent. Many games these days are so linear and straight forward. The games are made to be soloed, aside from very specific areas. But thats all part of the mentality too. To make your game truelly successful, you have to go for that now. It makes me sort of sad, and is a good reason why I am feeling very jaded about the genre. I like being in a party. I like taking on something that is difficult for us, but where that added chalange actually comes with added reward. Now, even if you get a great part together and go some place 10+ levels to high for you, whats the point? You dont have quest or the rewards, and even if you find some epic weapon, it only seems epic to you since you can't even use it yet. By the time you can, you find its just trash and vendor quality.
Its pretty much all like that now. There is no reason to venture, because there is nothing to gain from doing so. Stick to the course, you get the best treats. Stray, and you get a rolled up news paper for your trouble. Sure, you can play together in a party, but whats the point? You could just as easily solo it for pretty much the same exp per minute and get all the loot to yourself. You have nothing to really gain from getting together, aside from the very few areas where you have to go together. Oh, but you also have to be THIS level, and have completed THESE quests to even enter. Also, you probably wont survive if you don't have THOSE equips. And your party has X THEM, Y THEM, and you are fucked if you don't have Z THOSE GUYS. Nothing fun about it. Nothing but limitations and rewards for not making a fuss about it. That is why WoW is terrible. That is why EQII is just as bad. That is why all of thier clones can just go to hell.
Posted: Dec 15th 2008 4:03PM Justpotatoes said
My good old days were long hours spent MUDding in the basement of my university's engineering building during the early 90s, while my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) worked on his undergrad and then graduate degree in computer science. I played both Diku and LP muds, and still occasionally log in to my account on Lost Souls MUD.
When I wasn't mudding, I was hanging out in the rec.games.mud.* Usenet groups, arguing over things like the legal usage of the diku code.
Then when I started using the tintin client instead of raw telnet, I had to rename it "tin" so I wouldn't get in trouble for gaming if the campus computer usage people did a ps. Of course, they could still catch me (and they did suspend my unix account twice), but they generally didn't look that closely.
When I wasn't mudding, I was hanging out in the rec.games.mud.* Usenet groups, arguing over things like the legal usage of the diku code.
Then when I started using the tintin client instead of raw telnet, I had to rename it "tin" so I wouldn't get in trouble for gaming if the campus computer usage people did a ps. Of course, they could still catch me (and they did suspend my unix account twice), but they generally didn't look that closely.
