MMO Nostalgia...

[skaterger]

World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade: getting stomped on by a Fel Reaver as a fresh level 60 (or 58).

For something so big, they were surprisingly sneaky.

Haha, from the horrible screeching sounds it made to the whole screen shaking, it was epic. I disagree they were sneaky though, you could hear them from a mile away, the problem is that sometimes you can't outrun them by the time you know where they are

[Baneus]

World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade: getting stomped on by a Fel Reaver as a fresh level 60 (or 58).

For something so big, they were surprisingly sneaky.

The Ravasours in Un'Goro in Classic had the same sneakiness, and were often used as an example when people pointed out that Tauren couldn't be rogues because of their size and awkwardness

I had many wow moments in WoW and in EQ2. Until FFXIV:ARR came along, they were my reference to the best things in MMOs (and I have played every major MMO in the last 10 years except AoC and Tera).

[Teirshin]

Those were the days. I remember Plane of Fear raids, where you wipe trying to "break" the spawn at the zone in. Then you spend the next 4-5 hours trying to get everyone's equipment back. It was stressful, but I miss the challenge of those types of zones.

I know right???

Planar raids took days sometimes, and if you got a drop, you seriously earned it.

I remember getting the chest piece of my purple cleric set..... last piece of the set. Felt like I'd been through a war to get it.

[Euramon]

I was a Magician and finished the 1.0 epic quest.. Getting people to do a raid all the way to the last island of Plane of Air. OMG that was a pain, but it was so cool to have that rod and the pet.

I know right???

Planar raids took days sometimes, and if you got a drop, you seriously earned it.

I remember getting the chest piece of my purple cleric set..... last piece of the set. Felt like I'd been through a war to get it.

[DenariusJay]

In Star Wars Galaxies, graping someones bounty, planet hoping and tracking them all the way to the middle of fookin' nowhere and finding them role-playing with 3 other people in there house, and proceeding to lay down the law while his 2 friends sent me hate tells Greatest MMO moment ever. Loved SWG, the game had alot of element of surprise moments, it was so fun, good amount of danger and force pvp via Bounty Hunter system was so much fun. R.I.P

[Aegis]

In Star Wars Galaxies, graping someones bounty, planet hoping and tracking them all the way to the middle of fookin' nowhere and finding them role-playing with 3 other people in there house, and proceeding to lay down the law while his 2 friends sent me hate tells Greatest MMO moment ever. Loved SWG, the game had alot of element of surprise moments, it was so fun, good amount of danger and force pvp via Bounty Hunter system was so much fun. R.I.P

SWG remains, to me, the epitome of a great Sandbox game. There were no raids, no real dungeons but goddamn if it didn't feel like a real world (well, worlds).

Your average group activity:
-Go to the cantina to watch the dancers and entertainers (PCs) and get buffed and your battle fatigue from yesterday's run healed.
-Go visit the hospital to have a doctor (also PCs) give you stims (buffs).
-All set out via landspeeders (player crafted) or speederbikes (player crafted) or tamed /bio engineered animal mounts (also player tamed/created - Goddamn I miss my Dewback mount) to your waypoint.
-At waypoint your Scout or Ranger sets up a base camp for players to come back to if they need healing/buffing from Doctors or Entertainers/Dancers)
-Group sets out together to slice/blast/harvest their way through the indiginent fauna to the prize (Kraytt Dragon or whatever). The scout then harvests the resources you were looking for who passes it to the crafters.
-Crafters make what they can out of it and pass it to the smugglers who enhance it to fire faster/harder or whatever
-Group sells gear and uses it to upgrade their own (player made/run/owned) cities with (player made) hospitals, shuttleports turrets etc.

This isn't even mentioning the job system (amongst the widest, most flexible I have seen) or the perma-death jedi, or the player bounty system, or the droid crafting system, or the creature taming/bio engineering system or the factional conflict or....


Anyway, as for XI the two memories that stick out most in my mind were

1: Duo'ing Charybdis for my Joyeuse. An NM that spawned every 8 hours, always had 3-4 people camping it. He hit between 2-6 times per attack round and he hit very hard. His TP moves were lethal too.
The trick to killing him was taking few people (two to three was ideal) so you didn't feed him TP (hitting mobs gave them TP) otherwise he would overwhelm your tank with TP-moves.
You needed damn high evasion so most of his attacks would miss, which meant you needed to be a Thief or a Ninja. Thief had higher evasion, but ninja had native access to Utsusemi (shadows that absorb hits for you).
You needed haste and to keep on top of your shadow rotation or you would die. One round of attacks that weren't evaded would kill you.
It was such a tense fight, watching your shadow counter, timing your debuffs, making sure that your healer wasn't going to draw agggro, hoping Charybdis wouldn't get a lucky round of hits in. Struggling to recover when all your shadows were down and Charby was interrupting all your attempts to get them back.

That's what an NM was, not this current zerg-fest.

2: Dynamis (any)
-Gathering up 30+ people at a scheduled time (twice per week) for a 3hr+ raid.
-Seperating people into groups: BLM party for controlling adds and sleep nuking or timed-nuking others. Tank party with a couple of tanks, a couple of support (back when true support classes were a thing) and healers. And the DD parties where you had a healer or two, a support class (if you were very lucky) and the rest DPS.
-Then it was co-ordinating pulls and kill orders to make sure whatever you pulled didn't melt your face (pulls not controlled properly, adds not slept, DD waking adds out of turn).
-Add to this Thief sac pulls, MGS'ing past the house of death in Windy (you try getting 40 people to walk past a bunch of mobs without aggro), killing the relic weapon precursors in Xarcabard.

It was an example of a skill missing in modern MMOs: Group organisation. In modern MMOs, if you know your role and can react quickly, that's all you need. It didn't used to be this way.

Long Everquest post

Never played it myself, but I recognise behaviours from the early generation of MMO (back when they were MMORPG) players. We've fallen far.

[atomicdeath]

SWG remains, to me, the epitome of a great Sandbox game. There were no raids, no real dungeons but goddamn if it didn't feel like a real world (well, worlds).

http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php

SWG emulator, built as the patch right before the CU

[Aegis]

http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php

SWG emulator, built as the patch right before the CU

Lol, I still have the pre-CU emu installed somewhere, I think...

[Kaethra]

Never played it myself, but I recognise behaviours from the early generation of MMO (back when they were MMORPG) players. We've fallen far.

I think we can come back. There's still some of us with those values and even newer players that have them as well. Alot of the vets are rather jaded and get a bit introverted. I see that quite a bit. They're helpful, they're nice. But only to those in their circles and guilds (FCs). They have the desire and capability of being more outgoing to strangers, but don't wish to be burned.

I just have the attitude of 'everyone gets one' when in Duty Finder or with strangers. I give them the benefit of the doubt. If things go sour, I ask what is wrong. Its only when someone ignores me and makes the same mistake over and over, or acts like a jerk to me that I turn my 'nice mode' off. And I definitely do not like people picking on my newbies as I call it :P Newbies can learn, jerks can't.

[Rizzo_]

I think we can come back. There's still some of us with those values and even newer players that have them as well. Alot of the vets are rather jaded and get a bit introverted. I see that quite a bit. They're helpful, they're nice. But only to those in their circles and guilds (FCs). They have the desire and capability of being more outgoing to strangers, but don't wish to be burned.

I just have the attitude of 'everyone gets one' when in Duty Finder or with strangers. I give them the benefit of the doubt. If things go sour, I ask what is wrong. Its only when someone ignores me and makes the same mistake over and over, or acts like a jerk to me that I turn my 'nice mode' off. And I definitely do not like people picking on my newbies as I call it :P Newbies can learn, jerks can't.

Yup, theres deffo ALOT more jerks that usual