Out of Pod Experience

Leveling? Ah you mean via skill points? So back then we had 100 points for every skill, and it would incrementally increase by decimal factors, which meant you needed about 1000 points to max/GM out the skill from 0.0, if you chose to max that skill compared to more hybrid mixed skills. And all that was done by actually using the skill and a little random luck. Warrior builds were usually the fastest to train, while Tamer was agonizingly slow (up to a year of training). It's a lot like here in some ways, but you did have an overall cap and you used your skills while you trained up the points in it. Ah, skill based sandbox games, good times, e.g. UO, SWG, EVE etc.


So, we quite probably spent time together online a decade ago debating over Diablo "Diablo is an mmorpg" "no it isn't" "yes it is" "no it's not" "yes it is" lol. Yeah that was a good game, played about a year from launch until UO released. About half my UO guild came from Diablo battlenet. Played 2 a little bit. Never played 3. I still have a rare PS version of Diablo1, but no PS any longer.


Yeah, I've done that. Not so much in recent years, just too many f2p and wow cones saturating the market for my liking, but I've played enough various mmo's to bend my brain trying to list them all. yes, CoH, AO, DAoC, many more I've played just a few months or so. Many long-term too though. Then a lot of indie mmo's known and unknown.

Tabula Rasa I wanted to play, but more after some expansions and more polishing. Sadly they shut it down before I got around to a sub. Same with MxO, wanted to see it more polished out before I played, but it was taken down too.

Ultima Online.

Kal Vas Flam
Corp Por
Corp Por!

What did you guys enjoy about UO?

earth and beyond

I am reading about what's happened in UO over the years. It seems like PVP everywhere was stopped and items took precendence of over skill (not sure how items/skills compare in EVE context). The first part certainly sounds like some of the whining we see in GD.

Well, EQ1 launched, UO started hemorrhaging accounts to it. so the UO devs decided to change plans from "player justice" which sorta failed from their early pre-launch concept, to mirroring the map to a new area and making it more safe there, the fel/tram split. But no, PvP didn't stop there, it was just more painful for unorganized solo type pvpers. Many of us joined into huge RP/PvP guild alliances, had huge wars and such. The split was sort of like highsec vs lowsec here, and yes with many of the same problems and forum arguments and all that.

The item based stuff came years later. That did do a lot of damage to the existing PvP groups left in the game. Then all the mini-game type stuff, bulk order deeds, insurance and other weird stuff that fractured the community further. Increased the skill cap over 100 (per skill) by decreasing the strength on the skills, but then sacrificing the more diverse builds for more cookie cutter builds where everyone had a more common skill set/power builds. They put the game in shackles.

I think somewhere in -96 I found a web page that had list of thousands of different MUD's categorized by their type of genre.
Once printed that list took 50 pages...

So with the dawn of internet my experiment with MUD's began and soon after became the first MMO's and by -00 the internet had suddenly exploded and become available everywhere.

So my first MMO was Anarchy Online, game where everything was decided by "he who could exploit the most" from millions of undocumented features and bugs that have plagued the game ever since.
Even then the game was already free to play and man did we had a blast with my "froobie account" friends but that joy didn't last that long because WOW was looming on the horizon and like a siren's call it sucked everyone from other MMO's to it.

So two years of WOW and I was pretty much done with all the raiding and arena crap and several promising new MMO's had appeared but first I tried Shadow Bane for a while but frankly that game was so half finished that there was literally no game play to it at all unless you did PvP so you grinded to max levels with help of a bot ...
Then I found EVE and I have stayed with EVE for 7 years now, no I haven't been entirely faithful to my harsh mistress and i must confess that I have tried several other MMO's such as LOTRO (that had a fascinating concept in monster PvP if not in execution), AOC that fell flat on it's face, Warhammer that was abandoned to milk us dry with empty promises.

My only regret is that I didn't buy that 'life time' subscription to LOTRO for 150€ when I had the chance.

I have a signed copy of that game.

£100 you can have it :P

Nobody played Jumpgate? It and EVE came out in beta about the same time. They were the two space MMOs in development, so people were watching and comparing. I had a great time in Jumpgate, but got busy with a newborn kid and had to quit.

Waaay the hell back in Everquest (aka EverCamp, EverCrack, etc etc etc...) popped my MMO cherry.