Birthday thread: MMO Stories

[Pcow]

Runescape:

I was a normal Runescaper. I had one friend in runescape and he had his cooking/baking skill very high. He had the ability to make chocolate cake. He always wore a chef hat. He was my idol. One day, he gave me a chocolate cake to remember him by because he was going to quit runescape forever. Before I met him, all I wanted to do was kill people and do quests. Now all I wanted to do was make chocolate cake. I started leveling up my cooking skill. I didn't even have the level requirements to wear a chef hat. So I started making as many pies as I could. This required some serious grinding. I went into some dwarf mine somewhere northwest of varrock. Here, I could find pie plates. I got pie plates and made more pies than I could count. Unfortunately, half of these pies got burnt due to my low level. I wouldn't let that bother me. I kept making more and more and more. I wouldn't even eat these pies. All my pies went to the stray dog in Varrock. One day, I just looked at myself and thought, "What am I doing with my life?" I eventually quit playing all together. I was such an amatuer. I couldn't even wear a chef hat. Years later, I log back on and see that chocolate cake in my bank. I will never eat this cake. I will die before anyone dare touches my cake. I still go on every year or so just to check on it.

 

Runescape. What a sad sad pointless and cruel world. But I miss it very much.

 

 

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Edit: I've also got a Minecraft story if you're interested:

Context: All you really need to know is that a server Admin can create any amount if any block/item at any given time. They are basically god.

 

So me and my friends found a server hosted by a guy named Fawf. He was a real asshole towards me in particular. But he had a friend who was also a server Admin. He was nice to me. He even gave me an enchanted sword with Looting 10. (Impossible to get without Admin commands. It allowed me to get a LOT more loot from killing mobs.) Anyways, we all made houses near each other. However, when none of my friends were on, I started trying to make as much TNT as possible to destroy Fawf's house. He didn't protect it with his Admin powers or anything so he was just asking for it. So I had about 64 gunpowder at this point and was about to make what I thought was a lot of TNT. So at around 3AM, I try to contact my friend. I want him on the server. I want him to see the "mass destruction." I got no response from him. Eventually I got tired and was about to just blow it up myself. Suddenly I get a Skype message. It's the other Admin. He was in that Skype chat. He saw everything I tried to say to my friend. "What?" he replied. "You really wanna blow it up?" I had no response. I just wanted to blow up his house ASAP! Suddenly, he joins the server. "I can help you out with this." he tells me. So I sent a teleport request to him and I see an ungodly amount of TNT all in one huge cube. It stretched all through the spawn area. And I thought I was going to make a huge explosion. I immediately placed down a Redstone torch, igniting the TNT. It was a great fireworks display. Soon after, my framerate drops significantly. I'm down to about 2-3 fps and then the whole server shuts down. I never saw Fawf or his server ever again.

Edited December 29, 2015 by Guest (see edit history)

[Cache Monet]

Stories:

Can’t think of any currently, will update/post if I do.

Soundtrack:

The Legend of Dragoon: Very interesting turn based RPG from back in the PS1 days. Soundtrack is a really varied from relaxing and heart pumping. Since its '99 PS1 RPG its music is a weird mix of modern sounds and almost midi sounding effects so its got some nice charm to it.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SnF9-hCmZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sghh8HURjU , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdky4NDCmqA .

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne : Again quite varied but with more of a mellow overtone to a lot of the tracks and some great heart pumping action music. Again a turn based RPG but PS2 era so the music is a bit more advanced. Also has Dante from DMC in the EU/US release.

,

,

.

Nitronic Rush: A pretty neat game, but the soundtrack blows the game out of the water frankly, absolutely amazing.

Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Perhaps one of the most comfy games out there, its soundtrack is probably some of the best ambiet music stuff out there and its Town/Race music is breathtaking

,

,

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Hitman series: I assume you have probably heard of the hitman series, but if you have not listened to some of the early music you really are missing out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4ossube1m4&list=PL2FFBF7F57F314930 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ltm4I5mEVc&index=6&list=PL2FFBF7F57F314930 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOjytp_YyQM&index=5&list=PL2FFBF7F57F314930 .

[obcapers]

this story isn't really from one of the mainstream mmo's like the clan based games but I think that I should talk about it anyway.

I used to be as paranoid as most people are who play DAYZ, the arma 2 mod, not the re-released version, as I remember item drops were a lot more scarce and this meant that more people resorted to raiding and taking other people's equipment to stay alive for as long as possible and the very second that you get your first gun is when you make the progression from being a sitting duck to the game being you against the world

 

my story starts in one of the small towns further inland, because the coastal towns are where all the new players spawn, I always chose to go further up into the hills where there's less chance of raiders. I found a barn on the outskirts of this town and scouted it out just to be sure that there wasn't any zombies, or worse, raiders inside and after finding neither, I went in and ransacked the place for anything I could find, but there was absolutely nothing which is when I started to panic, if there was no loot it usually meant that it had been raided recently, which meant that the raiders could still be close by. I wanted to get out of that barn and run as fast as I could because if it was a raider I wouldn't last two minutes and in a fit of panic I leaped from the top of the inside section of the barn and broke both my legs. It was the most stupid and humiliating thing I could have done and I had to crawl to get out. Then, even worse. I hear the sound of footsteps nearby and I had no way of telling where they were coming from but I knew it meant death, even a non-raider with a melee weapon could kill me easily since i couldn't stand up, so I waited behind one of the haystacks to either not be found, or for him to put me out of my misery.

When I saw the guy it almost scared me to death, although he was only armed with one of the lower class melee weapons it was still intimidating as I was so wounded. He then did something quite unexpected, he used his mic, it wasn't very good quality and I don't think he was fluent English but I could understand enough and he asked why I was laying down, trying not to be seen, so I explained that I had broken both my legs trying to make an escape plan the could have gone better an he laughed about it, I was still expecting him to bludgeon me with his fire extinguisher, so I gave up and just asked him to finish me off, saying "I'm not going anywhere with my broken legs" but it was then that he told me that he didn't want to kill me and that he would go to find splints to heal my legs, I told him where he could find them but it was too dangerous, the only town near enough by that had a medical center where he could find splints was in one of the major cities, Elektro, which was notorious for being full of raiders and bandits, but he went off anyway and I was left alone in the barn.

I half expected that he wouldn't return at all, that he'd get killed by a bandit or just forget about me completely and as time went on I was getting bored of waiting to find out and my character was getting hungry, if I didn't find food I would starve but I was in no condition to go out and find some, being incapacitated, so my only choice was to wait.

It seemed like an eternity, and it was just as i considered logging off that my friend had returned and had found the splints that I needed to walk again, of course I couldn't run, but it was enough, it was a miracle.

After finding food and supplies I went everywhere with this guy, doing raids on various towns and each getting a good amount of loot, if one was running low on food or water, we shared it, it was the first time that I did co-op on DAYZ and it was great. In one of the buildings we searched I found a crossbow with some ammo still left in, it wasn't the best weapon since crossbow bolts were harder to find than bullets but it was a firearm, so, to show my trust and partly to repay my friend, I gave it to him.

The last time that we were together was when we decided to go into the outskirts of one of the large cities and we decided to head for a shopping center across the road from some houses, while I hid behind some fencing, my friend scouted the place and found some supplies inside and it was just outside the front of the shop the he was shot, I heard the noise of the gun and my friend said some things though the mic but I wasn't close enough to hear what he was saying and a few seconds later, sure enough, a raider wearing a black motorcycle helmet and some kind of military uniform came out and gunned down some zombies that were attracted by the noise, I remained out of sight and backed away a bit to make sure that I wasn't seen. Some time later I think that he must have decided that my friend's loot wasn't good as he left a lot of it, but when I had the chance, I went up to my dead friend's body and took the crossbow. I then tracked down his killer by following behind just out of sight but that's not something that you can do forever and he did eventually spot me in one of the smaller towns, I wish that it could have been more dramatic, like some kind of melee duel to end my vendetta against the raider but it really just surmounted to me being lucky enough to spring out from behind cover and shoot first.

I never met my friend again, who had risked his in-game life to get me splints, even though we had exchanged steam names all I found was an incomplete account that I couldn't add but for a long while I searched around the coastal towns to see if he had re-spawned but I ended up logging out and losing my data on the server

[Stomphoof]

MMO Story: The day Shattrah Fell

 

During the WoW Burning Crusade expansion my wife and I, and our friend, discovered there was a Mob in Shadowmoon Valley who was completely immune to damage without having a specfic item from a quest. We decided to repeat the Kazzak experiment by kiting (leading) this guy to Shattrath city and letting him loose.

 

Took about an hour with me on my Shaman and my wife on her Warrior, and our buddy on his Druid, just slowly walking our way to Shattrath City (The capital in the expansion) with this guy trying to kill us. My wife was the aggro holder, my buddy kept making it mad, and I kept everyone alive.

 

He lasted a good few hours in Shattrath, murdering people and causing trouble, before someone showed up with the item needed to kill him. It. Was. Hilarious. We did this on the Kirin Tor server.

 

We did it a few more times too. HEHE

 

GOOD TIMES

[Hunch]

Back in Ultima Online it was common practice for people to create portals at populated areas with macros advertising their shop on the other side. So one day I was browsing around, seeing what people had to offer, when the portal I stepped through disappeared. I was in a desert with no-one around but another player whose name was in red text, meaning he had killed enough players in cold blood that the game recognised him as a murderer.

It seemed like the advertiser had set up his portal to lure people to a desert to get murdered, and because you could loot players in Ultima Online, reach a tidy profit from their corpses.

[coredumperror]

Hey Ross. Saw your birthday video, and figured I'd give you my "favorite" MMO story. So here's how I spent several hundred thousand gold and nearly every waking hour for three consecutive weeks to get a WoW achievement.

 

So there's an achievement in WoW called Insane in the Membrane, which (when I did it during Burning Crusade) required you to max out your reputation with the Bloodsail Buccaneers, The Steamwheedle Cartel, the Darkmoon Fair, Ravenholdt, and the Shen'dralar. Non-rogues start with 0 reputation for all of these factions (rouges earn a few thousand for Ravenholdt as part of their class quests), and you need to earn 42,999 reputation to max them out. There are several major obstacles in your way for this, though, including trifling problems like earned rep for the Bloodsail Buccaneers being subtracted (times five!) from your rep for Steamwheedle Cartel.

 

Darkmoon Faire is the most isolated rep, as nothing affected it back then besides turning in Darkmoon Decks to the fairmaster. However, Darkmoon decks only dropped as individual cards (I believe it was 8 cards to a deck), and those cards were exceedingly rare. Thus, the only way to earn enough reputation from them was buying the cards off the player-controlled Auction House, at whatever cost the players were asking.

 

Each card could go for anywhere from 20 gold to 2000 gold, depending on its rarity (Aces were more rare than Fours) and the greediness of the player (the cards were so rare that finding a single Ace meant you'd essentially cornered the market on Aces for a couple days). Since I needed 8 specific cards to build each deck (there were four different kinds of decks, each with Ace through Eight), and you needed 43 decks to bring yourself to max rep (1000 rep per deck), I needed to spend a LOT of gold for this. I can't remember the exact amount, but I would peg it at around 200,000 gold. That was a HELL of a lot back in the Burning Crusade days.

 

The next straightforward reputation is Ravenholdt, but straightforward is not the same as "easy". First, I slaughtered 4200 Syndicate Rogues (mobs who belong to Ravenholdt's rival faction). They're all low level, so it simply took about 11 hours of tedious grinding. Once I got to a certain reputation threshold, though, the Syndicate Rouges no longer counted, and I had to start collecting Heavy Junkboxes to further raise my rep with Ravenholdt. I needed 1405 of them, but here's the tricky part: ONLY rogues can actually acquire them. You see, when the Ravenholdt faction was created back in Vanilla WoW, the devs never intended anyone besides Rogues to interact with the faction at all. So they didn't bother to make it possible to max out their rep as a non-Rogue. Fortunately, Heavy Junkboxes are white items, and are thus tradable (and mailable), which is what made this achievement possible for me, being a Druid and all.

 

In order to do this, I had to create a brand new character, level him up high enough to be capable of stealing Heavy Junkboxes from the mobs that carry them (they're all in the high 50s), and then spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing but pickpocketing Junkboxes all day long (I also occasionally raided, ate, and slept). Mobs capable of carrying the Junkboxes had about a 20% chance of actually carrying one, so I had to do a LOT of pickpocketing.

 

OK, so I'm now 200,000 gold poorer and have spent a full week on nothing but killing and pickpocketing. Now it's time for the hard rep grinds.

 

I started with the Booty Bay Buccaneers (human pirates), since I knew that there was one way to gain rep with their rivals, the Steamwheedle Cartel (goblin merchants), without losing rep with the Bucs. So I planned to exploit that after maxing out the Buccaneers. Unfortunately, the Buccaneers are another one of those factions added in Vanilla WoW that the devs never really expected anyone to ever max out. So the quests I'd done for the Cartel while leveling had caused me to lose enough reputation with Bucs to be at around -34,000 before I'd even started. This made it kinda hard to gain their favor, because they hated my guts and wouldn't even think of giving me quests until I appeased their lust for my blood.

 

So, I initiated a goblin genocide. I spent several hours doing nothing but killing the guards in Booty Bay, one of the Cartel's strongholds. That got me enough reputation to bring me up out of the hole I'd dug for myself with the Bucs... but it obviously tanked my reputation with the goblins. I would not be welcome in Cartel territory again until I'd made significant reparations. And that was a serious problem, because it made it both impossible to use any goblin vendor anywhere in the game, AND caused elite guards to constantly spawn any time I stepped foot in a goblin-controlled town. I needed to remedy this ASAP.

 

Eventually, I'd killed enough goblins to get in good with the Bucs, and they gave me a quest that rewarded me with a sweet hat. Yup, I'd just murdered countless hundreds of goblins (men with families) for a HAT. Activating the hat's special feature spawned a parrot, though, so it was totally worth it.

 

We're nearing the home stretch now. Just two reps left to max: goblins (who I'd just tanked to -42000) and the mysterious Shen'dralar. Thankfully, these can be farmed up simultaneously by clearing out Dire Maul, an old level 55 dungeon added near the end of Vanilla WoW, over and over. Unthankfully, this is the longest, most complicated, AND most annoying grind one can execute anywhere in the World of Warcraft. So let's get started.

 

Farming Dire Maul assists your goblin reputation through a quest you can turn in repeatedly that involves freeing a goblin who's been captured by the Ogres in the dungeon. The ogres occasionally drop a key to his shackles when killed, and freeing him gives you 350 reputation with all four goblin factions. Since you need 82,999 reputation with them, that's 238 completions of the quest. Which means no less than 238 clears of the instance. But it's not just 238 clears, because the key is not guaranteed to drop on each clear. It usually does, but not always.

 

Fortunately, while you're spending several dozen hours executing 238+ clears of Dire Maul (I developed an efficient route that made a clear take only about 10 minutes), you're also going to be collecting the rarest of the group items required for raising your Shen'dralar reputation: Librams. Librams are extremely annoying, because there are three different types, but each individual type is unique (for some unknown reason), meaning you can't have more than one of each type in your bags (or your bank!) at any one time. Thus, every time you find a Libram, you need to either leave the instance to mail it to your alt (any number of them can be in a mailbox all at once), or take the risk that the next Libram that drops is the same kind you already have, thus making it impossible to pick up. I ended up living on the wild side, and only took the time to mail them once I'd found two different Librams. This caused me to waste maybe a dozen Librams over the two weeks I spent doing this. I got fairly lucky.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have precise memories on the total number of Librams I needed, and they've been removed from the game since I did this, so the WoW databases don't seem to have those numbers either. Suffice it to say that, even with buying Librams off the AH whenever they appeared (very rarely), I actually finished maxing my Goblin rep before I got enough Librams for Shen'Dralar. That's how bloody rare those fucking books are.

 

Oh, but that's not all, folks! Now that I had enough Librams, I had to go out and farm the other materials needed for the Shen'dralar reputation quest. That included Blood of Heroes, Skin of Shadow, and Frayed Abomination Stitchings: special quest items only obtainable in the Plaguelands (which is on the other side of the planet from the Shen'Dralar stronghold, so why the hell did they want this stuff?). It also required Pristine Black Diamonds and Large Brilliant Shards, but those dropped in Dire Maul pretty frequently, so I had most of what I needed already (bought the rest off the auction house for yet more precious gold).

 

The Stitchings were relatively easy, if annoyingly time consuming, because they only drop off of the fat, lumbering Abomination enemies that appear at the very end of the Stratholm dungeon. There are about 15 of the things on each run, and you'd usually get 1 or 2 stitchings from killing all of them. The Skin of Shadow was similarly annoying, spawning as a pickup at the back of another dungeon. But it wasn't always there every time you ran it. The Blood of Heroes, though, was the worst. This crap was only obtainable from special pools of blood that would spawn in only a handful of seemingly random locations throughout the entire Plaguelands (the largest zone in the game).

 

Gathering all of this garbage was another several-day-long chore, because you need 2 of each of them for their associated Libram. But since I'd already gathered the number of Librams I'd need, I knew exactly how many Stitchings, Skins, and Bloods I would have to farm. So at least I didn't waste any more time than was absolutely necessary to waste.

 

Finally, FINALLY, I was ready to turn in all hundred and fifty or so Librams (and associated garbage) I'd farmed for Shen'dralar reputation. But here, on the last lap of the race toward insanity, the game found yet another way to annoy the crap out of me. Remember how Librams are unique? That meant I could only carry 3 Librams at a time into the Shen'dralar stronghold from the closest mailbox. Well, see, the closest mailbox is a TEN MINUTE ROUND TRIP FROM THERE. I spent an hour just turning in the first 10% of my Librams, then said FUCK THIS and paid an engineer in my guild to bring a portable mailbox to the stronghold. Even with that, I still needed the engineer to stick around and re-deploy a new one after the first expired, since it took more than 5 minutes to turn in all the damn Librams.

 

 

And that was it. After three solid weeks of non-stop grinding (as only the unemployed can truly accomplish), more than 200,000 gold of expenditures, and a SHITLOAD of Mountain Dew, I'd finally completed the Insane in the Membrane achievement, earning the much-desired "Insane" title to apply to the nameplate that hovers over my head for all to see. I become "Hibernicus, the Insane", and boy was that an apt fucking title. Did I also mention that it took me almost 3 hours to create this writeup? And I started writing at 3am... hah.. hahah.... help me...

 

 

Aaaanyway... Here's a guide that explains how to do the new version of the achievement, which is many dozens of hours faster since they removed the Shen'dralar requirement a few months after I completed it (yeah, that pissed me off something fierce). The guide also mentions some things that make it even EASIER to complete, due to recent additions to the game (reputation modifiers) which were added after I quit back in 2011.

http://www.wowhead.com/guides/achievements/reputation/a-guide-for-the-insane

 

 

TL;DR: My name was Hibernicus, I hailed from Bloodscalp, and I went Insane the hard way.

[Texin]

I don't have any really crazy MMO stories, I've never been too far into them, but there is one recent experience that I'll never forget.

 

I had only started playing Archeage for a while when I decided I'd join up with a clan and start really getting into it all. I found one group that seemed fun, made an application on their site and just waited to see what I'd get back. A couple hours after that I was exploring along the edges of the map, to see if I find any interesting stuff, or illegal farms with anything worth stealing. Lo and behold I found a massive tree farm just sitting there with a couple of minutes left before it was ready to harvest, so I decided to just wait it out and take it all for myself. Once it was ready I was about to get to work on it when suddenly I see a good 10 people rushing up my way and crowding up on me. They started talking to me and asking what I was doing there and I tried to play it off when I went a realized they were the same group I had applied to earlier. Decided to try and use that to get away with it and they laughed it all off.

Ended up joining with them and becoming somewhat of a specialist, finding how far you could push map boundaries and where best to hide clandestine crops and not get found. Fun times, though the game ended up being a flop for most of us with the way game progressed.

[Bronislav]

Big Privet from Sunny Russia!

I got a little story, but it's not quite MMORPG. I bet you know about Ark:Survival Evolved, but if you don't, long story short it is game about surviving on dinosour island. Man, it's a hard game at first time, but gives you great emotions, then you achive something.

Well the story begins (for me at least) from point, then i built my own house, from shit'n'sticks, i decided that it was time for little rest from 5-hour run in game, and left for rest in my bed in game, and irl. then there is an aspekt of game that i didn't know at that time, that then you leave the game, body of your char is left sleeping in game, free to kill, eat, etc.

I was lucky and awake alive at house, but it was all pink. At first i thought, that it was texture bug, and restarted the game, but it was still pink. Well i don't hate pink as colour, and gone for my own buisnes, but after 4-5 minutes chat went crazy about some dude paiting houses pink. After about 15 minutes 5-6 players asembled and gone for hunting this prankster.

I saw with my own eyes them with spears, bows and torches, riding on T-Rexses. At first i almost shit myself, as thouse giants came by, but it was fast over as they go. This party was about 2 days long. And the funny part is, that they didn't found him or them. But let's step aside.

I'm was totaly on painter side, see you can some times bring some anarchy and chaos in game, where it's possible, but at that point of time i was worried more about my own shelter. Well what was hillarius case of anarchy, becouse nobody was hurt, as i know, pranks was mostly harmles, and it's brings frendship, i don't know if it's was the point.

I was little envy of this guy, he wasn't worried about survival, he was just pissing people off. I think it's mean, that he achived everything he wanted.

 

So, i wish you Ross to achive everything you want. Happy Birthday and upcomming New Year!

(P.S. Bronislav is a real name, and it's have nothing in common with brony)

[incorrectdigit]

Having been one of those people with no life and too much time, ThANkS foR SINGlING us out Ross, we're not crazy, NOT CRAZY. Anyway onto:

 

STORY TIME WITH DIGIT.

 

To give a little background, I was one of those rare flowers who was actually in the World of Warcraft beta, playing on the only realm Argent something or other. I remember Captain Placeholder (a fun story with a silly song, look it up!) and when Warcraft had no exclamation points, they actually added that in shortly after launch. I was in a guild running for world first Onyxia kill as the heal lead. We were 3rd to take her down ever, and second our realm by 15 bloody minutes.

 

So that's kind of my pedigree for the story, started super hardcore and gotten less hardcore with every expansion, that guild fell apart shortly after that onyxia thing destroyed our spirits. So we fast forward to Wrath of the Lich King, where my 3 best stories happen.

 

Story 1: That retarded horse.

 

It was at this time that World of Warcraft was starting to experiment with supplementing the subscription with microtransactions, their first grand experiment? A purchasable mount, purely cosmetic, in fact looked weird when it first launched. They took the most difficult mount to get at the time (Invincible, a wing-a-ling undead horsey from the Lich King himeslf) used the texture off the hard mode only boss of ulduar that had become a bit of a legend by then (Algalon) a made made of stars, mashed them together, and created the celestial steed. (They later cleaned up the texture and his animations, so he looks better now than he did) All for the low low price of $25, or $10 more than you pay for a month of gametime.

 

Anyway, at the time, my guildies and I saw the writing on the wall, if this thing did well, it was going to meanhttp://a lot more negative things to come later. So we started the 3 month campaign of TRH-Free benefits. We farmed the rarest materials, and in bulk, we offered services for super cheap, ran people through raids, etc. . .if they let us look at their account achievements and confirm there was no TRH achievement.

 

So we sold rare materials, gave free runs, etc. . . for 3 months to discourage paying $25 for an in game item. Sadly, it was incredibly successful and our guilds attempt to slow the rush, was only a paper holding back the ocean.

 

Storytime 2: The Questining!

 

After the failed campaign, our guild decided to spice things up even more! We were bored, the last raid was the only content we had seen in ages, and we needed...something to do before the new expansion came out.

 

So we ran the longest quest chain in Warcraft history for 3 weeks. We had players around the world in specific slots 24/h a day (on multiple shifts so everybody's schedule worked) but always somebody there, offering you a quest, in the low level zones it was to kill 20 bears and get us greys, and then they point you to the next questgiver with the 'quest item' (usually a vanity item, so we could confirm they'd done or at least really knew about the quest.) so, you do the quest in the lowbie region, and slowly go through ~60 something quests to the Final Quest, defeat 3 completely deranged madmen in LIVE FINITELY COMBAT *Awesome Music Plays* (This was done in Dire Maul Arena, an area that forced pvp, even for same faction, even on non-pvp servers.) So we had 3 jibbering mad-men attacking the quest taker and each other, and the reward was 50,000 gold, a 2 mounts worth about 25k. The first person to clear it ever got a vanilla wow collector edition code, to claim one of those super rare pets. It was feel good times.

 

STORY TIME the 3RD: Undergeared

 

So, while my main guild was getting bored enough to make a game with-in a game, I was reading blogs, lots of blogs, writing in blogs, creating a blog, blogs blogs and blogs. I ran into one, ye olde Greedy Goblin. A blog mostly dedicated to discussing the economics of WoW and how to make money fastest/easiest with the auction house. He was starting an initiative though, Undergeared. A raid group designed to clear Wrath of the Lich content in only blue quality items.

 

To explain, there had kind of become this odd requirement for random groups, you had to have a 'gear score' (item level of your gear, as calculated by a mod, and later added to the normal game) of ____ (usually higher than what the dungeon even dropped) to get into the group. This practice eventually got so crazy, this goblin decided to prove that this expansion, unlike Vanilla and TBC was more about good gameplay than the gear you wore.

 

So we became Undergeared. For a little background in Wrath of the Lich King, the normal 5 man dungeons drop blue items, with the final boss dropping a purple (epic) item. All raids drop only purples etc. . . And our mission statement to clear all the content in Wrath of the Lich King on normal without any epic items, epic gems (stat boosting items that were added a little bit into the expansion) or enchants that used materials -from- epic items. We would also do as much heroic content as we could.

 

So we started, we cleared the first dungeons (Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity, and the Obsidian Sanctum) easily, even the hard mode of Obsidian Sanctum. KILL GET.

 

Then we travelled to Ulduar, a raid kind of notoriously difficult. Designed around having purples from Naxxramas, but we cleared this too, easily, and all of the hard modes (save for Algalon)

 

So then us mighty adventurers headed to Trial of the Crusader. This was a bad raid, designed badly, with badness, and was easily thwarted in normal by Undergeared. We didn't do heroic here, because we couldn't bring ourselves to do this raid anymore. ONTO ICECROWN.

 

We entered Icecrown Citadel, home of the Lich King, with a little trepidation. This was the final raid (or so we thought) of the expansion. A multi-winged behemoth of a raid, and we were running with the blues of so long ago. Many people commented to Greedy Goblin's blog about how what we were doing was mathematically impossible to do in ICC. One boss inparticular (Rotface) had a mini-rage that everybody said would one shot our tank. But persevere we did. After 3 weeks of attempts we cleared the first wing. Then the blood wing (a coordinated fight called the 3 princes was best for our style, smart play greatly reduces damage taken by everybody, there's even an achievement for it!) and the boss, a vampire lady bites a person in the raid and gives them super damage! Then they have to bite a person, and then both of them have to bite a person later, etc. . .

 

Then we went for the plague wing, where the dreaded Rotface lie. We cleared the first one, Festergut, and made our way over. We took our highest HP tank (a druid) and prayed, the mighty blow came down and left our druid with 7 hp, from 32,000. But he lived, well, he immediately died after, but he lived the hit! This meant we could do it, if we were awesome!

 

So the weeks began.

 

So the month happened.

 

So the month and a half happened.

 

WE WON, with only 1 person up, who fell over dead immediately.

 

Then we slogged, and battled, weary, worn, tired. We got to the Lich King. We had proved ourselves so clearly, so cleanly. We had taken dungeon blues, and pretty much beaten the expansion. Gear score be damned! This expansion was about skill. But, all these weeks of tough fight after tough fight. Of the expansion of boring (not everybody was in my other guild, who was working to entertain themselves.) and we just had members dropping...we got to the Lich King, and impotently had to bow out, because we couldn't even get 10 people on to try.

 

The rise and fall of undergeared.

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________

 

So, those are my WoW stories.

 

Some bigger MMO stories I was not involved directly in but know about or was part of the community at the time:

 

Angwe, Ganker God of Warcraft. Many moons ago a force of nature rose from the ranks of the horde. Angwe, a rogue born to kill innocent people leaving Menethil harbor (level 30 zone) for the alliance. He became such an unstoppable force of nature that there were guides written on how to avoid him on the road (dive into the water and swim to shore, use certain cooldowns to hearth/teleport/stealth past him.) etc. . . It seemed this person never slept, never stopped staying there and killing for months. Good times Angwe, good times.

 

 

The death of Lord British (Ultima Online) during Ultima Online's beta test, Richard Garriot came to visit his game and his people in a big event to see what was happening. A peasant used a very low level spell on him, and...he just died. The guy had forgotten to turn his invulnerability back on. So the godking of the game, who crafted a world full of lore and love, assassinated by his people just because they could. THANKS PLAYERBASE.

Thistledown defense (Asheron's Call) - This is one of the stories I really feel should be out there more. Asheron's call held an event to defend these shards that would summon a great evil boss. Some players would try to destroy the shards, others would defend it, but in the end every shard would fall.

 

Or so the developers thought. On thistledown server, players took the defense seriously, they levelled the shard up by killing themselves, making it more difficult to kill, and held on so well and so long the developers actually had to intervene to destroy the shard (I guess they never planned the content to extend to 'players defended the shard.' The last stand was so ridiculous and so great that a monument was actually created on the server engraved with the names of the people who defended it.

 

Asheron's Call is kind of awesome. The dev's also plan to provide players with abilities to host their own servers when theirs shut down....this is cool.

[GhostSamurai]

Hello Ross this is one of my stories from eve online

When i was still getting on my feet in eve, i had my mining and mining support ships. I was out mining and was talking to two guys that wanted to join my Corp/guild, me still been the trusting and naive person i was, i let them join and from that point my ship was doomed they/him happen to be a troll soon after they joined they came to where i was mining with combat ships then poped my mining ship and started to chew on my support, it when pop too and i got told "welcome to eve" and i got them out the corp after that i started to plan my revenge, i wanted there accounts useless they only cost me money so i was gona make them lose the time they put in to them accounts

 

I followed there activity, Every corp that they/he joined to do the same thing they did to me i let the leader know one of two of them set up ambushes other just kicked them, i did this for 5-6 months everyday checking to see what they was up to slowly making money to give to a gank squad to harasses them sadly after 6 month mark the accounts went dark and to my knowledge having been used again, after 4 more months they still had not used they accounts so i muttered to myself "welcome to eve" , awesome thing is i got my ship back with in a day of it going boom as i had just enough money and some good friends.

 

Happy birthday.

[yodaman888]

snip

Edited December 29, 2015 by Guest (see edit history)

[khyradon]

I don't know if this counts because it hasn't actually happened, yet. Basically its a revenge plot I've been toying with for a while now, and if I don't ever do it maybe I can inspire someone crazier than me to pull it off.

 

Here's some backstory.

A while ago I was in class and some people were talking about how exited they were for Star Citizen I ended up joining in talking about how I plan on being a smuggler or something. This one really flamboyant guy who I'll just call N suddenly starts mocking me because he's joining this peace keeping crime fighting organization, which shall remain unnamed if I actually try to do it, with a lot of members and resources at their disposal. I try to retort but he ends up outright insult me claiming I'll be cowering in my ship pissing my pants as members of his organization surround and descend upon me.

 

Ever since then I've been ruminating how to knock this guy down a few pegs but here's what I got so far.

I plan on creating an unofficial shadow organization meant for fighting the law keeping organizations like N's. How we'll recruit manage and identify each other the logistics of which I have yet to figure out. Next I'll have my organization infiltrate N's as honest members, and I'm talking deep infiltration. I'm talking captains of flagships, fighter pilots and whole crews, all secretly loyal to me. When I feel the time is right I'll let myself get captured by N for some petty crime, and on this day I will be sure that whatever ship N is flying will have some of my men crewing it. He'll think that he has me but I will just order that they capture N and kill everyone else on board. At this point I will order a full scale attack and I'm hoping for complete mayhem. Dogfights erupting between allies, crews getting slaughtered by bullets to the back, capital ships firing on their own convoys, assets supposedly under the organization's protection getting destroyed by said organization, in general a bunch of Order 66 Hail Hydra kind of stuff. All the while, I'm making N watch as I crush his precious organization from the inside, however I won't completely destroy them, there needs to be survivors for the final stage of my plan. Before the attack is ordered my inside men will place incriminating evidence on N making him appear to be the orchestrator. When its all over I'll maroon him on a ship and broadcast his location and watch as he cowers as whats left of his organization descends upon him in righteous fury.

 

That's how it goes in my head at least, anyway happy birthday Ross.

[Pawkeshup]

Happy birthday Ross, and greetings from a 10 year vet of FFXI!

 

You've entertained me for years, so I'm more than happy to return the favour. Here's a selection of stories and anecdotes from my time in one of the more punishing MMOs out there.

 

 

Story One - Griefing was an art

 

FFXI has changed from years and years ago. When the game first launched, it was before the concept of WoW's "rubberbanding mobs" really caught on. If you don't know, the concept is that when a player gets attacked by an enemy, it will only travel just so far before losing all aggression and rapidly returning to it's roaming area.

 

FFXI had no concept of this, and really still doesn't. In its place, initially, if you ran from a mob, it followed you. Forever. Unless you had some way to lose hate like crossing a zone line (yea, it had zone lines, no contiguous world for console peasants!), or using some ability to shed hate, the enemy would keep on coming until either you or it was dead. Also, often enemies of the same type would join forces and chase you en mass. You could link a whole zone of enemies and train them all over the place, if you had enough healing or hit points to survive. And the worst/best part? When you did lose hate, the mobs didn't exactly rush back to their starting point. Oh no, they took their sweet ass time about it. They'd slowly meander back, and, if they were aggressive, well hell more heads to chop. Also, one other item of note, even though you could reach a level where enemies wouldn't attack you on sight or when they heard you, the moment you rested anything aggressive would attack you.

 

Zone lines. Endless trains of mobs. Slow, meandering returns to spawn. Can you see where this is going?

 

Griefing in this game at one time was an absolute art. There were several forms of it. Sometimes it was totally unintended, as was the case in many a Valkurm Dunes zone line massacre. FFXI was an extremely group-oriented MMO in the day. Leveling past 10 meant partying up. And Valkurm Dunes was the first place people learned to party. It was also the first place people learned how some other players sucked, Hard. And since dying meant losing precious EXP back then, yea death was not your friend. Often, a fleeing party would cross over a zone line... and lead a train of deadly enemies to rest there, murdering anyone hapless enough to step over the threshold.

 

But then there was also intentional griefing. Since you could level multiple jobs, sometimes you would wind up angering someone leveling an alternate job. And then suddenly they show up as their high level, maybe even offer to powerlevel by healing from outside the group, Then, suddenly, they bring a train of pain on your face. You run, but there's no escape from the train... Camp spots for parties were also at a premium, especially in the Dunes. That first bit of EXP, that need to get beyond that hellhole... It drove people mad.

 

The Dunes was populated by Goblins, a foul little critter in the MMO. You see, these Goblins all have a unique ability, the Goblin Bomb. All of them can use it. It's an AoE that can do a little damage... or land a critical strike doing MASSIVE damage, enough to wipe an entire party. Oh, and did I mention there was a mild glitch back in the day? Yea, you see, the game was kind of special when mobs had an AoE attack that wasn't magic. Often, these AoE attacks would be able to hit anyone, whether in party or not, of the intended target. So, in the war for camps, sometimes you'd see the tank from one party charge another, and unleash hell with a volley of Goblin Bombs. Sure, the tank might die, but so would the entire party.

 

But, by far, the king of the griefer, and my favourite class to play, was Beastmaster. Now, I rarely griefed. But Beastmaster was an anomaly. In a game that was party-centric, the Beastmaster was the lone class capable of soloing. With the ability to charm local creatures, you could fight toe-to-toe, utilizing the enemy mob you have charmed as a massive tank. Since mobs did far more damage than most players, and had vast pools of HP, this worked incredibly well. And there were several places where the Beastmaster shone, able to reap unheard of amounts of EXP for a solo player.

 

And at level 35, you obtained the ultimate ability: Leave. You see, up until then, you could charm an enemy. And depending on their relative level to you, they stayed your friend... for a time. Then they would turn aggressive and attack you! The only way to safely disposed of a heavily injured pet was either to let it die in combat, or make it stay, and run very, very, VERY far away to use magic or an item to hide your presence. But with Leave, now the pet returned to a temporarily docile critter that you could leave.

 

Anywhere.

 

An interesting quirk of FFXI's zoning system is, often, there were several tiers of mob in a single zone. At one section, you'd find those mobs appropriate for level 10, another level 15, still another for 20's. The one zone with the broadest range was Crawler's Nest. An underground set of tunnels, this maze-like structure had a very vast range of levels, as well as several, spawnable, Notorious Monsters. These were for a quest, but they also happen the share the same family as one of the primary leveling targets, crawlers. Crawlers are basically caterpillar like enemies. They can be both docile and hostile, depending on type. And they link with one another. Since they were more or less HP sponges with limited damaging abilities, they were also a favourite type of mob for parties to level on.

 

Did I also mention that Crawler's Nest was where Beastmasters liked leveling too? I didn't? Oh my... well seems there's a problem.

 

Many a good Beastmaster gave into the dark side in there. Even me, a normally helpful hero in disguise, wound up being angered when some party muscled in on my EXP. I often leveled at the bottom of the nest. It was a relatively dangerous area for parties, and fairly unpopular unless the party was prepared for lots of AoE damage and possible linkage of mobs. But parties did go down there more often than not, as the EXP could rack up quickly.

 

One day, I was leveling quite contently on the off hours for EST prime time. There was a gap between Japanese prime time and American prime time, the two biggest early demographics in the game. And I happened to have time to play then most days. I was leveling along, quite content, when a party showed up. I didn't think much of it at first. We co-habitated well. Then they started getting greedy.

 

They started following me, and taking the mobs I was sending my pet after. So I moved. And they followed. Then, they started randomly putting some enemies to sleep out of my sight, but close enough that I might try to use them as a pet. Of course, a sleeping mob cannot move or attack, so I'd have to flee from my mob to survive. This went on for some time, with my character nearly dying multiple times. The final straw was when they deliberately waited while I tried to swap pets. They took the one I needed to live. I ran for my life, and wound up dying.

 

Oh now I was angry.

 

So I returned to the nest. I used items to make myself invisible. I knew they could still see me if they targeted me, so I waited until they were resting to slip by them. I snuck, ever so quietly, to one side far from them. The room I was in like a donut. The middle was a large room blocked off and full of nasty, deadly enemies. I grabbed a crawler. I tossed it into the room. And then I ran. I ran to their party, now engaged in a fight. I called my mob to my side, and ran past them.

 

I kept running. Up a narrow tunnel they'd have to cross through to escape the deadly enemies I was leading to them. I hit Leave, knowing the crawler would be right there, and they would be surrounded by deadly enemies. This tunnel I was in, it was the only way out. The zone line was past it. They would exit this tunnel, into another room full of passive enemies. Or so they thought. You see, I knew of another place that had aggressive mobs. Sure, they weren't as strong, but for a battered group of adventurers? Fatal enough. So I darted down another tunnel, quickly grabbed one and others linked and followed, knowing it would shortly kill me, then I ran back down the tunnel. As I was going down, sure enough they were running up. One was dead already, their healer, obviously mauled by the enemies. Another still was being chased, and the others running to not die themselves.

 

And as if the fates ordained it, as I met them, the aggressive enemies killed me.... and turned to chase them.

 

So, as I lay there dead, two deaths of EXP lost, I heard a glorious sound. You see, when you died, there was a chance you lost enough experience to actually lose a level. And it made the most depressing sound. I got to hear it three times in a row. I sighed, content to have been killed. I homepointed, and returned to see a dead healer, the last person left down there aside from me. I did a laugh emote over his corpse, waved and returned to leveling.

 

Yea, you never screwed with a Beastmaster. We were a vengeful god of the game back in the day.

 

I have other stories for other days, Ross.

[yodaman888]

Sorry for double post this revision is much better

 

 

This story is from a little-known MMO called Shores of Hazeron, to truly appreciate this tale some background information is required

 

Shores of Hazeron is what a deranged madman might get if they combined Sim City, Freelancer, and Spore all in a first person perspective in which you build the cities, you have to walk around the cities. You design your space ships (which only a madman would fly) which includes the shape, room designation, and equipment placement such as capacitor banks and last but not least the consoles which include helm, sensors, fire control, engineering, teleporter, and med bay. To actually fly the ship you have to walk to the helm and pilot it (if you are some kind of peon) or you can order your crew (read: expendable) which can be bots or other players (Jolly Cooperation!).

 

When you start the game you can found your own empire or join an existing one. I chose to found my own

empire because the existing empires at the time were all extremely xenophobic and the master race won't conquer the stars by itself.

 

The galaxies, yes galaxies are proceduraly generated and no two planets are exactly alike. The tech tree of the game requires certain quality resources to get any decent ship into production.

 

AND SO OUR TALE BEGINS:

 

I had recently stabilized the current region on my planet, the local carnivorous fauna (giant centipedes with human faces twisted into grotesque grins, Emperor save us) were finally put down thanks to the Kalashnikovs and shotguns (The Emperor protects.) and the recent peasant revolt was stopped after I had lowered taxes to a mere 50% of my populaces total income (and killed the dissidents. GLORIOUS GENEROSITY!)

 

Even so, as the situation stood, things were still dire, I lacked a critical resource in a decent quality. Oil, sweet black gold, without oil my inferior plastics were holding back the production of components necessary to build circuits or computers advanced enough to create energy weapons.

 

 

So I did what and (In)sane Emperor would do and began construction on a space ship that could take myself to the moon, surely rich in oil.

 

There were casualties of course, several failed prototype spaceships were made. Some never made it off the ground and some ran out of fuel to be left drifting in space, some even flew right into the sun.

 

Eventually a successful space "ferry" was made and loaded with all the things necessary to create a self-sustained colony, (concubines and ammo, a true tyrant needs nothing else) and with their finest pilot at the helm, non other than the God-Emperor myself. I took to the stars.

 

Unfortunalty on my way to the moon I came under attack by space pirates (AI-controlled hooligans.) I guess throwing all those ships into the sun alerted them somehow.(who knew?)

 

My expeditionary ship was of course unarmed. The entire point of this expedition was to obtain weapons grade oil. So I commanded another lesser man than I (AI crew member) to take the helm and line up with the enemy ship, unfazed that alien life did indeed exist. I loaded my trusty Kalashnikov with a fresh clip and opened the airlock (explosive decompression be damned) and opened fire, what choice did I have?

 

After emptying many clips and sustaining heavy damage to my ship (flying coffin.) The enemy ship was obliterated (reports indicate the craft was LEGO in origin) and we continued our doomed voyage towards the moon.

 

I still remember that day enough weapons grade oil was found to supply the entire solar system and my conquest of the cosmos could finally begin.

 

*Additional editing and parentheses (REMEMBER MY SACRIFICES) provided by the empire's late centauric chief-advisor and part-time presidential mount. (You read that correctly.)*

* Editor was executed at dawn for "Failure to execute the Emperor's 'sick tactical maneuvers'"*

[Princess Luna]

I got a good one.

 

I played an MMO called Tibia for about 10 years. It looks a lot like Ultima back in the day and has a top down perspective. The Point of the game is to kill monsters to gain exp and loot and do quests and what not basic RPG stuff. One of the cool things about Tibia though is that you can rent houses to display all your loot. All items can be placed on the ground in a 1x1sqm pattern because the game is run on a grid map where you can move up down left right etc. So anyway, super rich players can display really rare and valuable things in there houses, and the only way in is to be invited by them through a game mechanic so you cant just walk in and steal everything.

 

So, now that you know all that, my friend in RL, just happend to be invited to this one guys house who happend to be a huger botter, meaning he used unoffical software to play the game and level up. My friend had access to this guys house. There were 3 Really rare items in it, Golden boots, Rainbow Shield, and Demon Legs. All together total about 15 million gold. Not to mention he had about another 10 million laying on the ground as well as other various items. Anyway we pretend that my friends account gets hacked and I log on to it and run into this guys house and take every single item he has and mail it to my other character. In total we stole about 27 million in gold (a huge amount back then) which in real dollars is about $700. It was the craziest thing ive ever done in an MMO to date and ill never regret screwing that botter over lol

[Elsias_79]

Okay so this story comes from a friend of a friend so the detail are iffy at best.

 

It was in one of the old less played mmo of before WOW. I think it was either anarchy online, Ultima online or Everquest. Their was this boss that everybody liked that looked like a giant crystal D8 that would Level up as it killed player becoming stronger and stronger.

 

So this guild learn that in the next update that boss might be removed so they decided to honor it one last time, they gathered around it and fed it as many player as it would take making it basically impossible to kill. They then proceeded to lure it out of his area and into the starter zone where it wrecked pure havoc on the hapless new player for several days until admin steeped in. The server went down and everyone was kicked, only to find that in the new update the boss was indeed no longer in the game but that at the location where he was usually encountered a statue of the boss had been erected with the name of the guild that broke the game with it.

 

That was an awesome accomplishment in my book.

[ShinWitty]

Ok, so I don't really have a good MMO story that hasn't already been mentioned. But, I do have a good RPG story. One that while I wasn't there for, has become something of a folk legend. The kind of story told around camp fires to inspire people to greater acts. Something bards sing of to this day. The myth that is Old Man Henderson.

 

Now some of you are probably either nodding with nostalgic serenity or scratching your heads. I'm going to do my best to give the cliff notes version. For the full version, see this link: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson

 

Now, this is a story about how one man's quest for vengeance awakened a psychotic nightmare character. The kind of character so out of his mind that even in a game ABOUT people going out of their mind he was crazy. The game, was Call of Cthulhu

 

Now for those who don't know, Call of Cthulhu has an insanity system, you may have heard the phrase "roll for san loss"? That's where it comes from. Essentially, when dealing with stuff like Shogoths and over creatures like that, you see stuff the mortal mind just isn't prepared for. If you see a tentacle fly out of a man's eye socket you're not gonna come out of it sane. So, the game takes this into account and adds psychological damage into it. The problem with this is after a while this stacks up to the point where you're in the corner gibbering like a lunatic, while not killing you it makes your character unplayable.

 

The story of OMH starts with a killer DM. The kind who likes to throw impossible shit at you just because the rules say he can. And Call of Cthulhu is the perfect game for this you can imagine. The player of OMH likes a good story and all facets of one. Roll a dice and it comes up bad? Well shit, but alright. Make a bad call? Fair enough. Screwed over by circumstance? Eh. "LOL you died because you disagreed with Darkblade von Sephiroth"? He will choke you, for real. In fairness we're all like this to an extent. It sucks to lose a character but sometimes you have to understand that the dice don't roll your way. When it REALLY pisses you off is when the DM does it for the fuck of it. In this case, the player had lost 3 characters already to stupid stuff.

 

The DM left the room, and the air grew cold. The player didn't change expression, but you could tell the wheels were turning. He turns to the other players and says, "I know you're thinking about leaving, but I want you to stay. I want you to watch what I'm going to do."

 

A week goes by and they reconvene. He gives another player a ride (for the sake of storytelling, I'll call Henderson's player WMH like the original thread). WMH looks like he hasn't slept in days, his beard is stubbly like he hasn't shaved at all. For this part, I have to directly quote as I can't put it any better.

 

"I've done something. I'm not sure it's a good thing yet." he says as he hands me the little binder thing he keeps his character sheets and notes in.

 

"You've done something?" I ask, as I take the folder from him.

 

"I.... created? No, created is the wrong term. I feel like it was already there, waiting for me to give it life. I put a thing on paper, and I'm bringing it down on that fat fuck like the wrath of god."

 

"Uh huh." I say, as I look at the sheet. "Is Henderson his first or last name?"

 

"I don't even fucking know." So then I look at the stack of paper he called a backstory. I start reading it, and I'm immediately fascinated by what can only be called a tome of madness.

 

It switched perspectives and tone wildly, at one point it's written with stage directions in the form of a script. At one point it went to GERMAN.

 

I know for fact he only knows like two words in German, while I'm kinda fluent.

 

The German was in his hand, and it was grammatically flawless.

 

I find my voice.

 

"What?"

 

"Been asking that myself. All fucking day."

 

I'm gonna stop there for now though I might continue if there's interest. I heartily recommend reading it yourself. It's real, and it really makes you question the fabric of reality. Again, it's not an MMO story but it fits what Ross wanted. Absolute psychotic vendetta.

[mtomato]

In 2008, a World of Warcraft guild Goon Squad kited Jaina Proudmoore all the way to Thrall.

Now I have barely played WoW, so it's difficult for me to grasp the scale of this achievement, but I can see that there is quite a distance between Theramore Island and Orgrimmar, so it must have taken a while.

Apparently she killed and teleported a lot of players and NPCs, and the teleport's destination was back at Theramore.

 

This silent video shows some footage of this, and has some text explaining what happened: youtu.be/-hkJX1mspSU

[Rutskarn]

So here's the time I turned a WoW server into my own personal mechanical squirrel peddling territory.

 

Back when I was 17 I got a copy of the game for my birthday. I didn't end up digging the questing mechanics for the same reason I don't do illuminated manuscripts: it takes forever, it's tedious, some guy hiding in a cloister somewhere is already a thousand times better than you are, and at the end of the day all your accomplishments end up in a file somewhere. I did a raid just about one time and one time only, and through a stroke of luck, ended up getting a schematic to make mechanical squirrels.

 

They're pets. They follow you around and look kinda cute. You make them out of copper and malachite, and like everything else in WoW's busted-ass inverse colonialist economy they cost way more to make than they do to buy. But I wanted to sell them, because that sounded like more fun than farming human lives for wool, so I went into business anyway. The key was, I didn't use the auction house, which would have got me bus fare--I hawked them in the general chat as a sleazy traveling salesman for an explicit 400% markup. What made my squirrels worth it? Patriotic spirit, proprietary engineering processes that meant they WOULDN'T burgle the player's stash and sell it to gold farmers during holiday weekends, the special instructions that came with each unit (I'd mail them a letter with stuff like "1.) Do not light on fire" "3.) Do not feed after midnight or at any time" "5.) Do not play cards with the squirrel, it is an inveterate cheater") and the prestige of owning a Rutskarn Original. When I got cheated by one crooked customer, a brouhaha broke out over Trade chat that didn't end until I was paid a hefty reparation.

 

It got to the point where even engineers twice my level were special ordering them, plus a couple for their alts. I got richer hawking overpriced vanity squirrels than I'd ever gotten playing the game legitimately. Eventually I parleyed my financial success and recognition into a guild, Chocolate Hammer (the name was taken from my one of my early pitches which described them as being exactly that useful). I only quit when after a few months of trying, I was unable to obtain a schematic for any other kinds of mechanical beasts to pick things up.

 

One question I was always stuck with: should I have been on an RP server? On the one hand, I was absolutely playing a character. On the other hand, that wasn't a diagetic character, it was a persona I played the game through. I guess it raises the questions of what an RP server is really for. Is it there to provide an immersive roleplaying environment? Or is it there to segregate people like me from GenPop?

 

Anyway, happy birthday, Ross! I've been following your work pretty much since the beginning, and it's always been worth waiting for. Keep it up!

[ArchStanton]

So, War Thunder is a WWII semi-simulator game that I used to play a lot of. Here are two crazy stories I participated in in this game that stood out to me:

 

1. Insta-kill KV-2s

The KV-2 was an experimental heavy tank with a 152mm (that's big) gun. In War Thunder, the gun destroys pretty much anything in one hit, but is normally very hard to aim because the large shells have a lot of drop. However, there is a game mode where you have a drop indicator, which means that on a wide open map, all you have to do is find someone standing still and BOOM, they're dead. In one round, I killed 20+ enemy tanks by just staying behind cover near an open field, popping out every time the gun was loaded, murdering someone across the map, rinse, lather, repeat.

 

 

2. PBY land on enemy airfield

This is the dumbest thing I've done in an MMO: with a squad of 6 PBY heavy bombers (meaning we had only one other teammate), my squad and I flew across the map to the enemy airbase, bombed the anti-aircraft guns, and then landed. The enemy fighters all wasted their ammo attacking our ground units, and when they returned to base, we killed them one-by-one with our defensive turrets as they tried to land. The game chat was amazing. My favorite moment:

Me: "Hey, isn't this a terrible idea? Won't they just kill us?"

Squad leader: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"