Rashermon

I want to say that I count MUDS not only as MMOs but the grandfather of MMOs. Dragonrealms was a very well crafted MUD back in the day and when it was an AOL sponsored game it boasted a good several thousand players, long before Brad Mcquaid and the Everquest team thought to make a "MUD with graphics". So depending on one's definition, I've been playing MMOs since 1995 on AOL or 1999 on Everquest :D

Amen, the original more polygonish models had a look that was more polished looking ironically. Darkelves got a huge shaft when they changed their look. And yes, the lower levels were quite dull, and involved many rat killings but it was a product of it's age.

46 hours, as part of a week long camp in Everquest. As part of the warrior epic weapon quest, I had to loot the scale off Severilous, the green dragon. Problem was, he spawned once a week and required a raid of at minimum 18 high level players. So it became a matter and debate of do I sit in a virtual world all week, periodically checking a spawn area for this one dragon, or do I go out and level or raid? I chose to sit.

And sat I did. I justified it as I could sit in game and do my homework but in reality I sat in game and pretended to read my books......for hours......and hours.....In the time I spent in this one session I could've finished my homework for the week, gone on two raids, leveled up from 61 to 62, not to mention any number of real life activities. Doing it as part of a week long wait was worse. In the end I did get the spawn and managed to beat out a competing raid, but would I do it again? No.

There was a GM in Everquest 1 named iPaw who was a friend with one of my guildmates. Even though he couldn't buff us or give us real items, he'd always drop in periodically to tell us we were awful terrible Norrathians before disappearing to answer a ticket. One time he gave us gnome sandwiches, which were essentially useless junk items since they gave no stat buffs or had any impact on gameplay whatsoever, they were just there to show off a sandwich icon and a description of "made with real gnome". Good times.

Oh man, I hope their MMO will allow me to finally play as fine SyFy characters such as MegaShark, Sharktopus, ManSquito, Cannibal Ant, Sharktodile, ManFly, FlyMan, WereBadger.....

We had a celebrity Druid on the Tunare server, his name was something like lilililililililililil ililililililili, but everyone referred to him as "barcode". He was actually a pretty good druid, but absolutely no one for the life of them could type in his name to add as a friend, and even if they did it was a pain to remember how many i's and l's were in his name so as it stood, you didn't befriend Barcode, he befriended you, and the same applied to grouping with him. Whenever I see people pull that name off in other MMOs I keep wondering if it's him or if a cult of Barcode formed.

WoW, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, Rift, easy peasy games! Try spending your spring break waiting in the middle of the ocean of tears for one spawn, ONE SPAWN!

In EQ, mobs wouldnt just chase you a little bit, they'd chase you to the freaking zone and ran faster than all players who didn't take a speed buff from Druids and Shamans. Train to Zone! became a common shout as people scrambled for their lives just trying to get from one zone to another. The only way a typical player could survive was to get Journeyman Boots which required killing the Ancient Cyclops. Problem was he spawned once every 24 hours, and was not soloable even at high levels, so it was a race and a waiting game as people sat in this island that you had to jump out of a boat and swim for 5 minutes to, wait for him to spawn, and hope they could get friends to come out and help kill him before someone else did (plus 15 minutes to swim to an island the boat stops at on the return).

Modern MMOs will never have anything that hard or patience destroying!

I'm looking forward to TOR and Rift as far as subscription MMOs go. But F2P ones like Divine Souls look fun too.