A random quote I saw buried in the comments on the MMORPG subreddit a while ago really hit hard. Extra_Midnight wrote,
“Some of my most treasured MMO memories would similarly probably make me quit nowadays.”
I felt this comment in my bones. There are so many experiences that I had in the early classic MMOs that I am so glad I had and also you couldn’t pay me to do them again. I bet if you’ve been around long enough in this genre, you feel the same way about something.
So let’s talk about them in Massively Overthinking this week! Tell me about about some of your most treasured early MMO experiences that you never, ever want to repeat.
​Andrew Ross (@dengarsw): In the original Darkfall, I was able to solo craft a ship. It was just the smallest one, but it was so much work, and I was so proud of it. I rarely wore good gear because as a crafter I didn’t have the combat skills to do much, and I mostly was just holding gathered materials, but to be able to launch and defend my boat, I geared to the nines. I went out to the coast, popped my ship, quickly took it out to deep waters, and almost as soon as I lost sight of land, crashed.
It took me several minutes to realize the cable at my house was out because my dad had once again forgotten to pay the cable bill. In most MMOs, your stuff is bind on equip. No one can take your mounts. Darkfall was a full item-drop-on-death game, but your items also existed in the game world, as in many old school MMOs. That means that when I got disconnected, while my character left the world, my ship was sitting in the water and could be taken by any player who found it. No joke, as soon as I realized the situation, I packed up my laptop and drove a few miles to the nearest Starbucks with free Wi-Fi. The thing is, I had forgotten that in DF, if you DC in open water, you get sent back to your rez spot. So I had to run all the way back to the coast and then swim out to where I thought my ship was. I don’t know how much time passed, but right before I gave up, I found it. It took several hours, but I had rescued my ship.
Back in the day, I used to tell this story to MMO newbies about how intense MMOs can be. I loved that ship even though I only took it out two more times, once as part of a guild mission, but if this happened again today, I’d probably just stay at home and quit that game, oof.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog):Â I absolutely treasure things like running a huge guild, putting together a community website for an MMO server, putting on massive roleplaying events, and doing big raids with my best buds. I’ll always remember staying up half the night to play with friends, writing reams of fanfic for my characters, recruiting ceremonies, and endless drama.
But I don’t really want to do any of it again! And yet, without all of that insanity and that complete lack of perspective when the genre was young, I wouldn’t be here right now doing this.
Tangent: This is one of the reasons I reject the idea that nostalgia drives everyone’s play. Most people seem to be pretty capable of distinguishing what they used to like from what they currently like when they care to.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes, blog):Â Playing all of Final Fantasy XI. And I should know; I tried that again for our column, and it aged like sun-dried milk.
Look, I’m always going to feel a deep affection for the game but that’s because I genuinely never knew better until City of Heroes came to my doorstep. I didn’t know anything but leveling by spamming for a party in chat, staring at a chocobo’s butt for real-world hours to earn a rental license, hoping to God someone didn’t start a Goby train in Valkurm because of boredom, or dying on a quest to earn one pair of gloves.
And you know what? The moment I did learn that better was possible, I jumped ship so damned fast, y’all. I’m not going to ever hate that those years happened, but those are also well past me.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): Sometimes those “walking uphill 20 miles through snow when I was a kid” moments do leave the strongest — and sometimes weirdly nostalgic — impressions. So I’ll never, ever forget back in vanilla World of Warcraft spending a solid month grinding out Furblong reputation in Winterspring because I wanted, so very badly, this item that would let me summon a furblong combat pet. Getting it was such a headrush of achievement that I still remember it powerfully, as I did the letdown of the weakness of the item, the long cooldown, and how it didn’t scale when the expansion came out.
Sam Kash (@thesamkash): I know I’ve talked about this many times before, but the way I played Travian and Earth 202x was insane. Actually I did the same thing when I played a season of Starbourne. Totally insane. Setting clocks to get up to schedule my armies to go here or harvest this it that. I was getting up at like 4 a.m. for 5 minutes just to make sure I was fully utilizing all the build times I could! That’s madness. It’s really not something I could do now, but the epic moments I had in battling some others players is something I’ll never forget. But it’s crazy to spend time doing junk like that.
Tyler Edwards (blog): Suramar from WoW’s Legion expansion. Suramar is one of the most detailed, well thought out cities I’ve seen in a video game, with spectacular art design and an excellent story, but getting through said story involved a weeks-long reputation grind that left me utterly exhausted by the end. It embodies all the best and worst of World of Warcraft.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
