Memorable Moments

[Stephen Zepp]

What made this event, and all that led up to it for me so signifigant is that all games set up lore and background stories for their worlds, but very few actually do anything with these stories within the actual game play. The Shadowbane staff at that time spent lots of time and effort keeping their stories alive, and giving us an incredibly immersive storyline to play within...and that is what gaming is all about to me. Anyone can read an incredible book and feel as if they are a part of it, but when you can play in a game with other people and build the story yourself based on what you do, now that is an experience that is memorable when playing a game.

Sounds expensive. I wonder how much people would pay to play in a game that did this all the time. 

My recollection of events in SB, most people just participated in the hopes of getting uber loot, just like EQ.  And the event caused people unhappiness more than anything else.  But it was as interesting change to the normal school yard politics of SB.

There was both a lot of resistance from the server, as well as a lot of interest, and after the event we pushed the lore concept even deeper into the politics of Fear (just ask Shockeye!), which of course was met with a ton of resistance. Ultimately, the idea died off, but I agree, for a lot of people I knew it gave the game a whole new dimension...you weren't just fighting against bullies and gankers, but actually making statements about your world.

There are thousands and thousands of posts about how lore can/cannot work within a MMOG, and this probably isn't the place to discuss it (didn't want to hijack the thread), but in no small part that experience is why I now work at GG, and why I'm building a MMOG myself.

[Hoax]

If you read SB's lore board you would be amazed how far some people have taken it.  This new lore server is going to be a damn interesting study in the interactions of RPK and RPers.  Now if I only I could find a guild that didn't sound like hardcore rp or pk catass' talking about their initial PL or gold farming characters then using a template that requires 3 in-game stat runes.

[Vosx]

Taxi to victory...

and

Leeeerooooy!

Holy shit, I thought you died at the hands of Shadowbane fanboys or the french.

I've switched nationalities again and joined up with the Koreans at Webzen =) Now I've got Seoul, brother.

[Hoax]

That is the Huxley/APB guys right?  If so you picked the right korean people unless you judge them by the one game they've actually released.  Which is a terrible gfx lineage clone that is just so awful its almost funny.

[Sky]

Please to not fuck up Huxley. Planetside is getting long in the tooth.

[sinij]

..playing to enhance the game fiction instead of just roving the map as a non-rp gank squad and annoying players will do that..

Why do role-players always assume that their play style is in any way better than alternatives and that they deserve special reward just for what they do? In all years of playing UO I never participated in any seer quests and not for the lack of trying – it just you had to be ‘in’ and for that you had to ‘grease’ right people with something worthwhile to a player that has handouts left and right.

[Strazos]

9This could be one or two "Moments", depending on how you break it up.)

Way back in my senior year of high school, I started to play EQ (Between Velious and the release of Luclin). It was the first true MMO I had played, and it was actually fresh, new, and fun.

Anyway, I had been playing for maybe a week or two, when my buddy has he wants to show me a new zone he had been exploring before I had logged in. This would be the first time I had ever been to the area known as the West Commonlands. I had seen most of the East Commonlands, but their Western counterparts looked much different to me. First of all, the monsters were a lot tougher. I found this out the hard way when I saw a giant tarantula for the first time. I came to attack me, and after trying to briefly fight it off, realised I was overmatched. In my haste, I thought I could escape by going into a nearby pond, thinking that a spider that cannot swim would not follow me.

Oh, but I was wrong...Not only did it follow me, but it quickly killed me in that pond.

After getting my belongings back, my friend and I continued to explore for a bit, and happened upon the entrance to another zone, called Kithicor Forest. Now, being newcomers, we had no idea what to expect in this zone, but figured it couldn't be that much worse than East Commonlands, so in we went. As we are walking along the road, nightfall was quickly approaching. This normally would not be a problem, except that Kithicor changes at night; During the day, it's a lower-end zone, with giant bees and other wildlife. But at night, these same-time animals vanish, and are replaced by extremely powerful undead creatures. Unfortunately, we found this out the hard way, as we were both promptly killed by the first undead being we saw. Later, in an attempt to recover our belongings and get out of the forest, we see another undead minion, but it had no seen us yet. Searching for safety, we decided to duck into a house along the road, and try to wait for morning to come.

Unfortunately, Everquest did not have great collision detection in those days, as our undead aggressor simply walked through the walls and slayed us.

We died a lot that day, but it was exciting and suspensful nonetheless, especially as we huddled in that house, listening to the undead move about outside, hoping they would let us be.

[ClydeJr]

One of the most memorable times I had was in Planetside. We (the Vanu) were slowly losing bases on Oshur and eventually it came to one final base in the middle of the continent. We had the New Conglomerate hitting us from the west and the Terrain Repulic hitting us from the southeast. The strategic thing to do was to just bail out of the base and let either the NC or the TR have it. However, everyone in the base developed an Alamo mentality about this base. I ended up bringing both my main characters to the base: one was an assault grunt and the other was a support skill stealther. I ended up defending that single base for over 4 hours. It was pretty impossible to get any vehicles out of that base so everything had to be done by foot soldiers. Some of the highlights included:

• Dancing all over the walls lobbing plasma grenades with my thumper while avoiding sniper fire
• Defending the back door from mobs of invading MAXs
• Sneaking out of the base to take out lines of snipers
• Long range devestator shots at cloaked AMS
• Hacking 10+ vehicles, including 3 cloaked AMSs
• Using an Anti-Air MAX to defend the incoming galaxy which carried an ANT for the base
• Hacking the tower near the base right out from under the Terran's noses
• Repaired over 50 bases turrets

After 4 hours, I eventually had to log. I found out the next day that we outlasted the other two and started pushing out from that base.

[Sky]

Why do role-players always assume that their play style is in any way better than alternatives and that they deserve special reward just for what they do? In all years of playing UO I never participated in any seer quests and not for the lack of trying – it just you had to be ‘in’ and for that you had to ‘grease’ right people with something worthwhile to a player that has handouts left and right.

Really? You're really asking me that?

Yeah, I can see how it can be tough to understand why a company would reward players who put in time to make the game richer vs players who gank people and emote assrapes and "lol looser stfu!".

I'm not saying there weren't pvp players that really added to the game, I'm just saying that if they roleplayed it as some death cult instead of playing quake in britannia, they'd have gotten skull thrones. It's just that simple, man.

mmoRPg. C'mon, man, don't be dense.

[Arnold]

..playing to enhance the game fiction instead of just roving the map as a non-rp gank squad and annoying players will do that..

Why do role-players always assume that their play style is in any way better than alternatives and that they deserve special reward just for what they do? In all years of playing UO I never participated in any seer quests and not for the lack of trying – it just you had to be ‘in’ and for that you had to ‘grease’ right people with something worthwhile to a player that has handouts left and right.

It's not like it's handed to you; you have to seek that sort of thing out.  People who just go out fighting or monster bashing all day generally aren't going to find it.  The seers tended to spend their time (often incognito or invisible) around areas that were known to be magnets or hotspots for RP, because that's, you know, their thing!

I worked my way into a guild that was involved in that scene, but we played bad guys, and the seers on the shard often tapped us to put up a resistance for certain quests.  We were all red, and I got to kill so many people!  You know what kind of shitty fighters RPers are, and we would take 4-6 people and fight 20+ (and we weren't on horseback).  It was a blast because we got to RP, cause mass mayhem and destruction, but people would go for it because there were so few of us that it looked like an easy fight.

There were consequences though.  Sure we had the basic RP agreements of no counts or looting, but we always got looted, unless a buddy grabbed the stuff first, and we got lots ofcounts.  Some of us were perma red, but the rest were so deep on the 40 hour counter that were were basically "perma" too.  We were also often in statloss.   The character that I used was my main, and I didn't have any alts, so I suffered accordingly in some ways.  I didn't believe in mules, but I did have to make myself one so I could buy reagents, horses, and other equipment.

[sinij]

[WindupAtheist]

In all my years playing UO, I only ever encountered a Seer once.  I was just outside Delucia on Siege Perilous, when a purple-named cat ran up to me and said "Meow!"  I dropped some cooked ribs, which they picked up while emoting *eats*.  Then they ran off.  I followed them, thinking this was leading somewhere.  No.  They ditched me, and I got ganked on my way back to town for good measure.

The Seers never had an impact on the gameplay of more than 2% of UO's customers, and in my opinion were nothing but a waste of resources.  Furthermore, one can only attempt to justify their existence by claiming that roleplayers somehow have greater value to the community than any other Joe Breadbaker, which is horseshit of the highest caliber.  Roleplayers in general are catty, elitist, xenophobic snobs, and make no real contribution to the game's community.  Unless you count bullshit drama and cybersex scandals as contributions.

Yes, I roleplay.  Hell, it's a large part of the reason I'm still playing UO.  But much as playing any MMORPG is a matter of wading through the unwashed masses to find a few cool people to play with, roleplaying is a matter of sifting through Drow-speaking manginas to find a few folk who know how to improv a story.

There's a dried-up little shell of a "roleplay community" which, to this day, thinks it's shit doesn't stink because it's members used to play with the Seers.  Dead guilds with two active members, ever so proud of the grotty little house in the backwaters of Felucca where some GM placed a special statue in the late 1990's.  One of my fondest UO memories was when we rounded some of those fuckers up and killed them.  I'll just quote myself here:

I was in an RP guild in UO, and we had some "allies" that were right up this asshole's alley.  They roleplayed Drow (of course) and considered themselves "gatekeepers" of the incestuous little roleplay community on that shard.  Their RP appeared to consist entirely of standing around acting like arrogant asshats at every meeting, being as obstructionist as possible when anyone outside of their clique wanted to do anything, never showing their faces anywhere outside of a meeting (certainly never helping us fight in the wars that were going on) and conspiring to split up our guild.

I'm normally a huge carebear, but I was the first to suggest the course of action we took once we'd had enough.  We were having another meeting in one of our Drow "friends" houses.  The house was in Felucca.  It was set to public access, but the doors and teleporters were friends-only for some reason.  So our GM cast a gate to a pre-marked location outside, and all two dozen of us rushed in.  The much smaller number of Drow were hacked to pieces and drylooted before getting off more than one or two house bans.

It's one of my fondest UO memories.  I gave away several pieces of armor with their crafters tag on them to guildmates, as souveneirs, but I still have one of their gorgets.

[sinij]

The Seers never had an impact on the gameplay of more than 2% of UO's customers, and in my opinion were nothing but a waste of resources.  Furthermore, one can only attempt to justify their existence by claiming that roleplayers somehow have greater value to the community than any other Joe Breadbaker, which is horseshit of the highest caliber.  Roleplayers in general are catty, elitist, xenophobic snobs, and make no real contribution to the game's community.  Unless you count bullshit drama and cybersex scandals as contributions.

True story. You also earn extra irony points for calling others "catty, elitist, xenophobic snobs".

[WindupAtheist]

If you really want to have another PK debate, I can just point out that I was in Trammel with all the people, while the PKs sat alone in Felucca, convinced of their own superiority and killing anyone who came near.  Who's elitist and xenophobic?

[sinij]

I am broken.

True story.

[WindupAtheist]

(My troll pic quit working, so we get a new one.)

[Sky]

Gee, I wonder why nobody is interested in playing UO, if it's inhabited by such wonderful people as WUA, with cobbled and dated graphics. I can't think of anything I'd rather spend my free time doing.

[Surlyboi]

One of the most memorable times I had was in Planetside. We (the Vanu) were slowly losing bases on Oshur and eventually it came to one final base in the middle of the continent. We had the New Conglomerate hitting us from the west and the Terrain Repulic hitting us from the southeast. The strategic thing to do was to just bail out of the base and let either the NC or the TR have it. However, everyone in the base developed an Alamo mentality about this base. I ended up bringing both my main characters to the base: one was an assault grunt and the other was a support skill stealther. I ended up defending that single base for over 4 hours. It was pretty impossible to get any vehicles out of that base so everything had to be done by foot soldiers. Some of the highlights included:

• Dancing all over the walls lobbing plasma grenades with my thumper while avoiding sniper fire
• Defending the back door from mobs of invading MAXs
• Sneaking out of the base to take out lines of snipers
• Long range devestator shots at cloaked AMS
• Hacking 10+ vehicles, including 3 cloaked AMSs
• Using an Anti-Air MAX to defend the incoming galaxy which carried an ANT for the base
• Hacking the tower near the base right out from under the Terran's noses
• Repaired over 50 bases turrets

After 4 hours, I eventually had to log. I found out the next day that we outlasted the other two and started pushing out from that base.

I have a similar PS story, only it was as a member of the New Conglomerate and the sliver of real estate we held for hours was a tower, we didn't even have a base.

We would line up a phalanx of MAX exoskelton armor suits at key positions, and set a group of engineers and medics behind them to heal and repair them ans they were damaged by the Vanu Sovereignty attacking from the South and the Terran Republic attacking from the north. We had a constant stream of other troops with anti vehicle and anti air weapons ducking out of doors and launching rockets at the vehicles and aircraft that came at us. We had snipers ducking into and out of doors to counter snipe their counterparts outside the tower.

The tower itself was in the lee of a hill, so we had a bit of an advantage as the TR tanks couldn't get to the top of the hill to rain artillery on us and it served as a bit of a backstop from time to time against the VS who couldn't do overflights in their fighters for fear of being shot down by the TR on the other side of the hill. We had a good 30-some-odd people in that tower and we held it for four hours before both of the other factions gave up and started retreating to tend to assaults on thier respective flanks by each other. I must have died a hundred times in that four hours, but it was so worth it.

[WindupAtheist]

Gee, I wonder why nobody is interested in playing UO, if it's inhabited by such wonderful people as WUA, with cobbled and dated graphics. I can't think of anything I'd rather spend my free time doing.