Birthday thread: MMO Stories

[Peniko177]

Happy birthday, Ross!

 

Now, this story is going to be a little different from most of the other ones, since it's not about your usual WOW type MMOs. This story is about Fallen London, which you might know as the "parent game" to Sunless Sea.

 

Fallen London, being story driven, has quite a few popular storylines, but no storyline has achieved the same fame (or, rather, infamy) as the so-called Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name line, or SMEN for short. Now, this is content for those relentless psychos, who are willing to do anything for even the most minuscule piece of lore. Without getting too deep into story itself, Mr. is a title used by the masters of the bazaar, the new overlords of London, who are quite heavily implied to be something other than human, and every master's name reflects it's domain. Mr. Fires deals with coal, Mr. Veils with fabrics, Mr Hearts with meat, and so on. The only problem, is that there is no master by the name of Mr. Eaten, and apparently there is something horribly wrong with this "individual". What makes this story utterly unique however, is that it is made entirely out of "press X to die" challenges. Your character indulging in ghastly activities like self-harm, trying to drown themselves in beer, or irreversibly staining their souls is just the VERY beginning. Needless to say, every one of these actions is accompanied by hefty stat drops. At the start of your descent into madness, you'll only lose one or two levels, which takes mere hours to get back, once your character embraces the madness of their quest however, and start rendering candles out of their own body fat and such, penalties, like giving up extremely valuable items, or HALVING your stats become extremely common. Just to put that into perspective, that can result in you losing up to 100 levels in each of the four stats. This damage can take months, if not a whole year to regrind. And the best part? There is no reward, no achievement, nothing, except knowledge and bragging rights. In fact, the game itself tells you, that there is nothing to be gained at the end of the road, and you shouldn't even begin this quest. If you do decide, that these tiny scraps of lore are worth more than years of grinding and your sanity, the game will offer you relatively painless and easy ways out of this madness literally every step of the way, up to a certain point. That's right, in the story, your character is drawn towards the titular Name, by an inexplicaple force. Namely, your, as in, the player's curiosity, and your curiosity alone. Now THAT is hardcore, knocking-on-the-fouth-wall kinda crap.

 

Everything I've written up until now fell under the "extremely determined players doing nasty things to themselves" category. Now comes the "Royal screwup on an epic scale via bugs" portion of the story. This whole deal about Mr. Eaten and the Seekers is a thing of the past, as this content is now in stasis. SMEN is currently suspended, and for a very good reason.

 

Basically, around 2 years ago a new feature was introduced to Fallen London. The ability to send calling cards to one another. Some particularily unwise seeker by the name of Alexander Feld (who is now a major member of the community as the self proclaimed "king of Seekers") found Mr. Eaten on his contact list, and sent him a card, asking himself the, admittedly foolish question of "What's the worst that could happen?". Well, turns out, he got a card in return, a unique item, which entitled the bearer to visit a brand new endgame-level Mr. Eaten themed location, and progress in the story. (Here's the full story, for anyone who is interested in what that place was like, though it won't mean much to those unfamiliar with Seeking: http://nightmarethrenody.tumblr.com)

 

The card was supposed to circulate around the Seeker community, granting access to one person at a time. A unique situation arose from this. Due to the actions of the second person to visit this place, Nitebrite, another fairly important community member, and quite possibly the queen of Seekers, various misunderstandings happened. (Nitebrite would deserve another post just like this. Basically, she delevelled herself all the way from the level cap to early-game levels, just to find a bit of lore! And then took up Seeking, because even Mr. Eaten couldn't do anything to her, that she hadn't done to herself already!) Rumours about time-limits started causing panic in the Seeker community, putting immense peer pressure on everyone to finish the content and pass the card along as soon as possible, even if that mean using the game's premium currency for action refreshes. Seekers with 4+ years worth of resources began expending their supplies to breeze through the new area as soon as possible. To complicate matters, the first two visitors, Feld and Nitebrite formulated a plan to test the card's properties, and ended up duplicating it. Sadly, with Mr. Eaten content, it is fairly hard to tell bugs and intended features apart. For all they knew, this was all intentional. And so dozens of people began exploring the new content, until admins got involved, and decided to spontaneously kick everyone from the new area. One rather notorious player, by the name of Dolan, then demanded a full refund for all the money and resources he had lost, and even threatened the devs with legal action. As a result, he was given a full refund, and the devs made the decision to suspend the content, until it could be reworked.

 

 

 

Long story short: There was once a story meant exclusively for extreme masochists in Fallen London. Then, some of said masochists managed to break this story in such a spectacularly catastrophic way, that the story had to be suspended.

[BTGBullseye]

I have two from the old days of Wow... (before Burning Crusade for the first, and just after BC for the second)

 

Here's a map for reference for the first story: http://quashnick.net/blog/media/2/20080506-azeroth.jpg

 

I was a level 34 Dwarf Hunter, (could only really access about 1/2 of the world without instant death) and just had a random idea to swim around the entire Eastern Kingdoms continent... Now, at that time, I was a rather big name on the server due to my philanthropic nature. (started a guild, and then paid for over half of the level 40 mounts and rider training in the guild before I even had the levels to get my own, even ran low level people through dungeons in innovative ways for a very low price and in record time) So I got a few of my guildmates to broadcast what I was planning on doing in all of the major cities. Leaving from Menethil Bay, I swam east, and actually got 30 people following me... They made it to the Thandol Span bridge before giving up. (it took 10-15 minutes to get that far, and they bored easily) So I ended up soloing for about an hour and a half, risking the deep waters of rapid death to make it past some sections. Considering that about 3/4 of the continent was inaccessible from the water back then, I was boldly (I decided to swim 'naked') going where no one had gone before... Anyways, so I finally get to the Swamp of Sorrows, an area I am around 10 levels too low to even consider looking at from a distance, and I see over 50 of the highest level players on the server clearing a path for me. I made it almost halfway through the area, and the server crashes. I log in the next day in the middle of a large mob of things that 1-hit kill me, and promptly try to swim to safety, but die instead. At least I came up with a way to get 50 of the top 75 players on the server to kill things for me. lol

 

To my knowledge, I am the only player to ever see that entire coastline. (and since it no longer exists, that is mine alone) I also have absolute confidence that my character has more time swimming than any other two characters ever to grace the pre-Cataclysm environment. (and I'm fairly sure it still has more, even though it's been sitting untouched for 3 years)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

So I had just gotten my flying mount at level 60, along with about half of my guild... I start playing around with it, and figured out that unmounting from high enough kills you on impact, so that gives me an idea. I got everyone I knew that had flying mounts, and was willing to do this with me, and assembled over the highest populated outdoor area I could find. We then flew as high as possible, and spaced ourselves randomly apart over a rather large area. Think what it must've been like, standing there, minding your own business, turning in quests, and then WHAM! It starts raining naked people of various races and levels. We actually had someone freak out and call a GM about it. (he laughed like crazy when he saw the carnage, and heard what happened, and all participants got a special 10x boost to XP gain for a week) I lost my last remaining screenshot of it with my former last HDD crash, but it leaves an impact on people when 113 'naked' bodies fall out of the sky in a game that is relatively family-friendly. (there was someone who was still playing from back then that remembered it almost 8 years later)

[Abendschein]

Happy birthday, Sir Ross Scott!

 

Here's a story in a nutshell(of which there are many, many more);

 

I played WoW since vanilla release in 2004. I've got a ton of stories, but one I can share without feeling like I butchered it is the story of Popsicles, the guild/raid leader of Nerve on Chromaggus-US East. Highest end guild on the server, and top like 25 in the world in vanilla, maybe top 10 (I know in BC they were for one full raid tier).

 

Anyway - They were in Naxxaramus and they had issues trying to kill Thaddius, who's mechanic is putting a positive or negative charge on players (like voltage charges), and it requires them to group accordingly WITHOUT crossing paths with other players who have the opposite charge.

 

One night, after a full 8 hour raid, this happened.

 

http://angrypopsicles.ytmnd.com/

 

Do enjoy.

 

I've also got a story about a woman who tore apart a marriage in my raid guild in Wrath (World 68 HLK25 kill), and then tore apart the officers, then left to join Vodka, and then destroyed a relationship and guild over there. Long story short: Titties.

 

Edit: I also used to play Conquer Online 2.0 a TON before WoW. The power struggles, Kill on Sight tags, server black lists, and rage events are pretty amazing too. If you want anything specific, I might have it. Let me know, Ross! You may have to force an email to come my way, I feel this post may get buried and I won't know if someone responded to it.

[Zucadragon]

Happy Birthday, I made an account just to share a small story.

 

I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online for ages now and at one point I figured out an exploit with a certain quests where you have to fish up turtles and kill them, these turtles at that point in the game were pretty strong, but 1 on 1 was pretty easy to do...

 

BUT, through this exploit, I was able to fish up those turtles and put them in my inventory, basically giving me the option of just dropping mean, angry turtles down at any which rate that I could... So I started collecting turtles, a long, slow going task until my whole inventory was filled up, and then just started dropping them in the area, filling it up more and more, anyone going to the area would suddenly be faced by an army of turtles ready to attack anyone who ever dared to get close. I'd be in stealth, watching people stand there, struggle and go "Uhhhh, fuck this shit!" and flee, I would run around and drop them around people as well to hilarious effect, shame I couldn't drop them in a town, or I totally would have filled one of the town houses up.

 

A small story, but it was hella fun and I hope you have a fantastic birthday!

[Soldi]

Hey i have a story.

In 2011 i started playing a somewhat now popular mmo called Elsword(2.5D beat 'em up), i made some friends and by 2012 i dediced to play the hispanic version of the game as i am from south america (mainly because NA servers decided to ip-ban everyone but later in 2013 they opened a latin america server(which they closed in late 2013)) by the time we were top 1-10 in the pvp ladderboard and that's when shit went wrong. Nobody likes you, people stalk you in social media and in game.

Later as life went on i started to study and learned cryptography and programming so i decided to run some tests to the game, only to discover that the game i played for years was just some code and not protected files. So we started abusing a lot of exploits to our benefits from modifing stats to even making our own spawners and get absolutely everything. server-sided stuff was only detected via logs that they would only check when you get reported.

 

 

https://gyazo.com/15ec33f42496f348bb8dfffd26dab7f0 some proof of the spawner (being the purple text the rare drop(by that time it was somewhat rare)) we tested it on NA server

 

 

 

And i guess there are some videos of people that recorded some of our test characters (low level) winning pvp when we deleted our character models and still played the game(notice our hp(bottom right) doesn't go down and their(top left) does)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySWypYiXKlU (friend is typing in random shit in japanese and they think is korean)

 

 

In 2013 the North American company of the game decided to open a Latin American server of the game and letting us enter again to the NA servers. So we decided to do our stuff in the latin server. By that time a popular "hacking" forum found out the exploits of the game and public posted it making the game more protected every patch. So when everyone was exploiting the game we still had to make our own version of the game files so they acted different to the forum ones and didn't modify the server-sided things (like dmg). By that time we all knew how the forum hacks were made and recognized people using them so we decided to report them and they actually got banned. So we were making our own mod and reporting and succesfully banning people. Every succesfull report was taking us more closer to the GM's to the point of actually having them on skype and talk to them like you would to a friend. So every time we reported someone we PM them "Pasticho" and then they would get banned. We actually got to make lists of people to report them, From top ladderboard people to random people we saw hacking and to all we PM them "Pasticho". So as the "hackers" were growing so our reports. This continued for almost a year untill the Latin team of the North American company gave up on the server saying they did not get to the company goal as for people and money and everyone on the Latin server got transfered to NA server so we decided to move to the korean server of the game. Since we barely understand korean we stopped modding the game.

 

I thought i wont ever tell the story but since it happened much time ago i don't even care.

It was really fun

[Resident Wumbologist]

Made an account for your birthday video.

 

I have played only one MMO in-depth. It was S-Zone online. Basically a bootleg S.T.A.L.K.E.R. knockoff made into a third-person FTP MMO by some greedy 3-rd rate Russian devs. The game was vastly incomplete, most of the quests were broken, the landscape empty and past the first couple levels the NPCs were absolutely broken making 90% of the content that did exist completely unplayable. To my knowledge in the years this MMO has been online none of these issues were ever fixed.

 

That said, combat was competent, there were anomalies, artifacts and of course player made and run factions with bases they could capture.

I mostly played as a loner picking up artifacts and gradually upgrading my equipment until I joined the 4chan /VG/ group which was very /K/ inspired called the Cheeki Breeki aka 7th Rhodesian Rangers. We were in a constant war with Last Light which were a bunch of pay2win scrubs abusing the built in Golden Ruble system that allowed you to buy endgame-level equipment virtually at the beginning of the game with real money.

 

Things got really dramatic because we were fighting the people who were effectively supporting the game devs. At one point, they started cheating. At first it was aimbotting. They'd be able to snipe us with pistols the second they could establish line of sight up to 8km away (the levels are that large and yes you have to run across them all the way on foot to recover your loot when you go down). Then they became magically invincible. Shots fired towards them wouldn't register. LL did some housekeeping because although they did like crushing people with somewhat unfairly acquired equipment actually hacking the game was a bit unsporting.

 

The people they kicked out retaliated by forming their own clan and basically wrecking the game.

Not only would they aimbot and run around in effective god mode, they managed to hack the safe zones where you couldn't fire weapons or register incoming hits around trading posts/NPC quest hubs. They started killing everyone the second they spawned and running through the spawns collecting all their stuff. We told the devs. Devs sneered and said that nothing of the sort was happening. Apparently one of the devs was in this clan actively providing hacks/exploits for the bandits. They did however start banning LL, CB and 7RR accounts left and right. Basically, if you could somehow evade the gods running around raining death with sniper rifles 16 hours out of every day and actually make some game progress they would assume you're hacking/exploiting and ban you outright.

 

Eventually I along with just about every other player gave all my items away, logged off and uninstalled the game having never paid a single dollar. It was fun having big 100+ pitched battles/firefights between clans but once cheating because virtually ubiquotous (and unavoidable, since there were really only 2 big levels to play in, the 2nd being about 70% uninhabitable due to broken 1 hit kill NPCs) what little fun gameplay existed was ruined.

[John Karmacke]

The entire history of mythology is unrelenting douchebaggery, from heroes deciding that murder is cool as long as they're a different race to gods bending cosmic forces to screw over someone who forgot to say thanks once. And on the Thistledown server one group transcended this divine dickishness to become legend. Turbine ran a year-long story triggered by players shattering precious crystals, because chasing shiny objects and killing things are all MMO gamers ever do. Unless you want them to in which case they'll do the exact opposite.

 

 

The "Defenders of the Shard" set up camp around the sixth and final crystal, the Shard of the Herald, the prison of Bael' Zhaeron, Hopeslayer, and nicknamed it Harry. Twenty-four hours a day they defended it against other players and sacrificed themselves to it, because Asheron's Call monsters can level up by killing players. The Harry Krishnas impaled themselves on His Spikiness until He was practically invincible. This one group was holding up the next update for every server of the entire game. The developers had to step in, and in the awesome manner of movie bad guys they stepped down to fight the players on their own level. Instead of simply rewriting the crystal as gone, they appeared in-game as mythical characters and called two high-level players to join their attack. These players had completed an earlier quest making them indebted to the story's cause but, brilliantly, one had already defected and was now a Disciple of Harry.

 

 

Emases street, working together to make sure NOBODY plays.

 

The admins donned their epic weapons, sallied forth and got their asses kicked. They were killed by their own players in a world they'd built, making this officially a science-fiction movie. Twenty Turbine staff watching on a break-room screen were treated to players jumping up and down on the admin's corpses. Because Asheron's Call doesn't have a crouch button. Worse, Harry had resisted command level instructions to power down. The staff joked that He had attained sentience. Understand: If a computer program ever escapes and kills us it won't be because of the military, it'll be because gamers trained it to. The staff tried again. And again. They got third time lucky in their own game, and instead of banning people they paid tribute to their valiant foes. The Thistledown server got a unique monument, the "Shard Vigil Memorial," honoring the players who had kicked the company's ass for so long.

[cutiepyro]

I can't remember how long ago this was, maybe it was in 2012 or 2013 when pointless stupid microtransactions were being added to $60 because it was popular among f2p games, but something gigantic happened when EVE online decided to do this.

 

Here's what went on. EVE online's developers thought it would be a funny idea to add a monocle that you can only get through microtransactions, for $100

 

yes, I'm serious. A monocle that's $100, a misc that you won't even be able to see for 99% of the time that you play.

 

Everyone was furious about this. So the community decided to protest against this in the best way possible: with violence!

 

I think this is how it went. This popular clan decided to attack this station, because you can basically attack anything you wanted in the game but non hostile NPC stations only took 1% of the damage and also had massive health.

 

So after this clan started attacking that station, a lot of people were asking why they were doing that. The clan later explained that they were attacking the place because of the monocle, and everyone joined in immediately. It turned into this giant massive coordinated attack that ended with that station eventually getting destroyed. It was awesome.

 

You know how you included that video of EVE online about that massive war that lagged that guys computer? well image it 4 times the size of what you saw.

 

The developers got the message and removed the monocle. Freedom of speech at its finest.

[CaptainPainbow]

First off, I hope you had an uncomprehendably outstanding birthday, Ross.

 

So my mmo story takes place in modded minecraft. I understand that a lot of people think it's a childish game, however my friends and I liked to get together on the weekends and play on a fairly large anarchy server. The first time I logged on to this anarchy server, someone had made a portal to the moon using an Apeture Science mod and was sucking all of the newly spawned players in, so I logged off and came back about 10 minutes later. At this point the portal to the moon was gone but was replaced by a new terror: witches. Now when I say witches, I'm not talking about the minecraft entity witch, I'm talking about players who will find you, take your skin (an act known as taglocking) and bind your soul to a puppet using a mod called "Witchery". After creating a voodoo doll, they could teleport you anywhere at will, or throw you around or drown you at any time. After spawning for the first time after the moon portal, I had been taglocked about 8 times before I ran off into whatever direction was most opposite of the witch until I was safe. Eventually I found my friends and made base, then it started. The witch after obtaining a taglock would wait a while sometimes real life days before teleporting someone, this was so the victim would develop a false sense of security and fill their inventory with loot. I was teleported to a space station and killed by an electrical force field with no chance of fighting back. As annoying as this was, my friends and I pressed on as this was the only anarchy server for our chosen mod pack skip ahead about a month and I had been teleported to my spacy electric doom roughly 15 times all of them being insanley inconvenient. One night, after a mass killing by a witch, many players and myself had had enough. Seemingly unanimously we banded together, so began the witch hunts. We gave out flying potions and jet packs and waited. Eventually it happened, a witch had teleported several of us at a time over an electrified force field but we flew instead of falling to our deaths. We raided every last block of the witches base and destroyed what couldn't be taken. We must have destroyed about half a years worth of work. Their base was is space, in the certain mod that has space travel, space is considered a different dimension than the over world, and it was unique per person, so if someone made a space station, they cannot make another. We had destroyed everything, even the floors in the witches base, excluding the force field, meaning every time they spawned in their base, they would be dropped to a death that their victims were all to familiar with.

But this was just the first witch, we didn't stop there. We massacred the witches, destroyed and stole everything they own, and when we were done, it was common practice to antimatter-bomb a raided base, and so we did, leaving holes in the earth 100+ blocks wide and 50+ down. We became such a nuisance to the witches that they eventually stopped playing entirely. The witch hunters had won.

 

I apologize for any spelling and/or grammatical errors that I failed to correct, or if my story was underwhelming.

[thedarkfate216]

the few mmo games I've played give me boring stories, but this one might be a crazy one (depending on your perspective).

 

game: dead frontier outbreak

I have been playing this game for 3 years now, and i have seen average stuff for that game, rookies biting off more they can chew, players getting shitty loot like band-aids and dog food, to even someone trying to fight a boss infected, but this one takes the cake for me. i just found a highlander shotgun and some Kevlar in a parking lot and i decided to head back to the biker stronghold since that was the closest stronghold and the area around it was a great place to loot at level 10 to 20. i saw this one guy trying so hard to find decent loot, that he was willing to get ripped apart by the zombie horde. i asked my friends if they've seen this guy, he was apparently a new member of the group and he was desperate to prove he wasn't useless. when we talked to him all he would do is give us food and ammo. when asked why he simply said "I'm not a useless rookie to be shrugged off. this loot almost cost me my life." after a year or so we never saw him again.

 

this is like a story about how desperate some people can be to try and stay alive.

[BTGBullseye]

In 2013 the North American company of the game decided to open a Latin American server of the game and letting us enter again to the NA servers. So we decided to do our stuff in the latin server. By that time a popular "hacking" forum found out the exploits of the game and public posted it making the game more protected every patch. So when everyone was exploiting the game we still had to make our own version of the game files so they acted different to the forum ones and didn't modify the server-sided things (like dmg). By that time we all knew how the forum hacks were made and recognized people using them so we decided to report them and they actually got banned. So we were making our own mod and reporting and succesfully banning people. Every succesfull report was taking us more closer to the GM's to the point of actually having them on skype and talk to them like you would to a friend. So every time we reported someone we PM them "Pasticho" and then they would get banned. We actually got to make lists of people to report them, From top ladderboard people to random people we saw hacking and to all we PM them "Pasticho". So as the "hackers" were growing so our reports. This continued for almost a year untill the Latin team of the North American company gave up on the server saying they did not get to the company goal as for people and money and everyone on the Latin server got transfered to NA server so we decided to move to the korean server of the game. Since we barely understand korean we stopped modding the game.

 

I thought i wont ever tell the story but since it happened much time ago i don't even care.

It was really fun

That reminds me of when I first started playing a F2P Online FPS called "KOS: Kill On Sight". It was the first attempt to make a US server, and it had just gone into open beta. I was a part of a hack site that made a nice free hack for the game, and about 15 of us from that site started beta testing. We were actually all really good players even without the hacks, but we made sure and made it fun for everyone in the matches we were in, even to the point of sitting out just so that it would be a close match. (we would of course make sure we got a good score first) Anyways, about 2 months into the beta, another site made a hack very similar to ours, except with an aimbot. Now that made all of us (we were all in the top 30 players) rather pissed off, since they were all about griefing and trolling. Fortunately, I was an epic counter to their aimbot. I had figured out how to use ping times to my advantage rather early on, and started camping corners waiting for their aimbotters to be alongside the buildings, then I'd pop out for an extremely short time, and headshot them. (I had learned how to compensate for spread and recoil quite well) This pissed them off to no end, because I got much higher killcounts and KDR than their best aimbots. It also got me in good with the entire rest of the playerbase, and the devs. (I would report anyone I saw hacking that wasn't being nice about it) I actually started off by telling the devs that I knew they were aimbotting because I was using a hack myself, and exactly what hack I was using. I even went so far as to say that I didn't care if I got banned, I just wanted these aimbotters gone. The devs immediately started kicking anyone I pointed out as hackers, and publicly acknowledged that they recognized I was a hacker, but that they had no intention whatsoever of banning me. Then another 6 months down the road, some idiot came on with a new aimbot, and I creamed him while the entire rest of both teams just spectated. He got banned very quickly, then went and spammed to the forums that I was hacking, and he demanded I get banned too. I posted a direct response to him... "Of course I'm hacking too, why do you think I kicked your aimbotting ass so easily? The devs know this, but since I'm not a dick about it, they don't care." I then got a supporting response from the two english speaking GMs, and 1 dev. Aimbotters were never a problem after that.

 

Oh, after about 6 months of time when they were in open beta, they moved to 'open beta 2' which moved the game core from the Japanese version to the Korean version. This effectively killed the game. It went from smooth, responsive, and balanced progression, (and not that huge a difference in killing efficiency between the starter weapons, and the top-tier weapons) to low framerates, laggy, and every gun being identically sucky and almost identical in performance. They effectively pushed out all their top players by moving to a sucky core game, but that wasn't really their fault. The company they were licencing from said they had to use the Korean code and couldn't use any of the Japanese code, even though they tried everything to keep the better and more fun Jap code. Last I heard, the game was overrun by hackers, and died less than 2 years after release, but the Jap version is still going.

[Queen Raidne]

Elsie Dawkins vs. The Blob

 

This is a Space Station 13 story. It takes place on Yogstation. If that means nothing to you, don't panic, I'll write this as if nobody's ever heard of it. It's not quite an MMO, but it's close enough. What follows is, as best I can remember, the truth. The parts I couldn't remember I filled in with logical (if mildly embellished) events.

 

(Super-long story alert!)

 

So, there's this marvelous little game called Space Station 13 (oft shortened to SS13), which is best described as sort-of a multiplayer Dwarf Fortress set in space. To give you some context, this game only currently exists because someone stole the source code from someone else during a house visit. It's one of those games that someone started coding in their basement and then never stopped coding, except now it's mostly open source, so imagine how complicated something gets after differing teams of people add whatever strikes them as necessary continuously for years. The interface is convoluted to say the least. The game itself can be shortened to one of two goals: either survive to escape on the shuttle, or accomplish a series of objectives that are usually disruptive to space-station life. Everyone has a specific job to fulfill, from janitor to security to chief engineer all the way up to captain. If your character gets hungry and you decide to pop by the bar and grab some food, and heck, why not, a drink - both the bartender and chef are players. There are no NPC's.

 

One of the round types is, as alluded to by the title, blob. Blob rounds are among the most controversial, because either the Blob eats the station and the crew anemically fails to kill it, or the crew contains the blob threat rapidly. The blob is, of course, controlled by a player. Generally, it takes at least 2/3rds the crew, working together, for the poor humans to have a chance. This round, however, was different.

 

An average SS13 round lasts about 45 minutes, from spawning somewhere on the station to the inevitable shuttle call. This round, however, lasted two hours.

 

So I spawn as a security guard in the Science department security outpost. I swipe my ID on my locker, grab my SECHUDglasses, don my sec-belt, load up on handcuffs, slot my stunbaton in my belt, ensure my pepper spray is full, close my locker, and relock it. I check in over the security frequency on my radio headset, with the reassuring response of the Head of Security (HoS) - "Ok." Then I announce my presence on the science frequency, and reassuringly get no response. Science is happening. I start my patrol - Research Director is screwing about in his office, nobody's in telescience, xenobiologist is mucking about with the slimes (an alien life form with some practical and wildly impractical applications), a roboticist, replacing the station's engineering borg's (i.e., robot's) battery, and three scientists are doing competent-seeming things in research and development.

 

"All clear in Science," I report over the security frequency. The HoS is busy apprehending the clown for repeatedly throwing the bartender on the table, stealing the bartender's ID, and impersonating the mime. Actually, from radio chatter, so is most of the rest of Security. Looks like I missed out on excitement already. I decide to patrol the dimly-lit maintenance tunnels to look for evildoers.

 

I'm deep in the tunnels behind the Medbay when I hear the station-wide announcement: "Confirmed outbreak of level 7 biohazard aboard the station. All personnel must contain the outbreak." Holy Hannah, it's a blob! No wonder the round's been so quiet.

 

The AI helpfully announces over the general radio channel that there's a blob coming up from maintenance into cargo. Blobs are nasty, awful things - green slime-beings that spread out from a central node, consuming anything in their path. If they get big enough, they spawn secondary nodes, which spawn spores that take over dead bodies, making blob zombies in much the same way as headcrabs make headcrab zombies. Blobs are weak to energy weapons, fire, explosives, and heat, in roughly that order. It's security's wet dream - we get to shoot things that aren't fellow crew members!

 

The HoS immediately recalls all security officers to the Security department. The Captain orders Cargo to order laser rifles and Science to start researching weapons.

 

I race up from maintenance toward Security, change my mind, race back to Science and give them my taser to research, and then race back to Security. I get through the double airlock to the main lobby. My fellow officers and I are gathered around the Warden's office - through which lies the Armory. The HoS distributes laser rifles and riot gear, but I got there pretty late thanks to my detour to Science, so I only got a laser rifle. Carrying the entire armory between us, we rush to Cargo in a chorus of "Move out!"'s and "Go, go, go!"'s.

 

It's pretty early in the round, so the crew has a decent chance against the Blob, especially if we remain this organized.

 

We get to Cargo, and it's already a little chaotic. The blob has broken through into the receiving warehouse from the Quartermaster's office, through the mining dock lobby. Every department is represented here. There's us Security members, collectively firing at the blob (until we shortly run out of ammo and realize the only nearby recharger is past the blob). There's a couple of engineers in the Cargo lobby, setting up an emitter (think laser turret). There's the Captain, wielding his unlimited-ammo antique laser pistol and fancy armor. There's a few doctors, traiging patients near the rear. There's half a dozen assistants, wielding everything from welding torches to lighters to crowbars. Even the clown, recently released, is trying to help cargo open their freshly-arrived laser rifle crates.

 

Despite the chaos, we manage to beat back the blob to the mining dock, which is when most of Security has recharged our laser rifles, and we push it into maintenance. Things are looking up - we can see the core! The engineer's emitter is finally online, too, which is when everything goes to hell.

 

There are three usually unrelated facts that are important here:

1) Maintenance tunnels are narrow

2) Welders need to be refueled from welding tanks periodically

3) Assistants are idiots

 

The maintenance tunnel is limiting our effectiveness, because we can only have one person meleeing the blob from the side with the emitter firing straight down the tunnel. The cadre of assistants, needing welding fuel to refill their welders, had brought a tank into the Cargo lobby from somewhere. The Cargo lobby was now inconveniently far, so an assistant decided to move the tank of welderfuel closer. At least half the crew is concentrated near the maintenance access at this point, with the Chief Engineer and a few of his engineers working desperately to tear apart the maintenance tunnel walls so we've got more room. The assistant finally decides to drag the tank over to the other side of the mining dock, right in front of the emitter. I'm up in the Cargo security outpost, innocently recharging my rifle, when the welding fuel tank explodes violently, taking out the mining dock, half the crew, and all of engineering in one fell swoop.

 

There's now a hole in the station with nobody to repair it. Viscera and random objects fly past me outside the security outpost door, only to be sucked back to the massive hole in the station. People who aren't killed by the explosion are quickly killed by the cold and lack of oxygen, which is now spreading into the central station corridor. 90% of the laser rifles were obliterated - I now was in possession of a rare commodity.

 

I don my oxygen mask and emergency tank, pray the cold doesn't kill me, pray I don't slip and drift off into space forever, pray the blob spores don't kill me, and venture out of the sec outpost. I grab the nearest person, who may or may not be dead, on my way to the remains of the Cargo lobby. Unhelpfully, the emitter is still merrily firing away, but that's also holding the blob back. I make it to the central corridor, which is slowly venting atmosphere toward Cargo, only for the blob spores to make it to the sudden influx of bodies that the medical team had in their triage center. I tried my best, but with my laser rifle at half charge, and my movement restricted from the cold, the medical team didn't have a chance. I barely escape, limping toward the Medbay. That's when the blob finally accomplished its goal, having been focused on stretching its mass to Engineering this entire time, where it killed the power by eating the giant superconducting batteries.

 

The emitter's down, not that I'm near it; the lights are out; the airlocks are now stuck shut (or open); and, most importantly, Medical no longer has power. The Chief Medical Officer, however, is helpfully in the Medbay lobby, and manages to patch me up. I notify her that there's a heck of a lot of dead bodies in Cargo, and she crowbars her way into Medical, mumbling something about defibrillators. It's the last I ever see her.

 

Knowing a thing or two about engineering, I decide to make my way there to see if I can help restore power. When I get there, I discover, to my horror, there is a second blob, growing out of the telecomms satellite, which now has taken over 90% of engineering. I can see it through the empty Chief Engineer's office, glowing green and ominous. While I wait for my laser rifle to recharge in the Engineering security outpost, I stupidly try to report this second blob over the radio before I remember the power is out. I'm just about to unleash my puny lone fury on this blob as a hopeless last stand, when the Chief Engineer comes out of nowhere in his shiny white spacesuit.

 

He's wielding a plasma cutter, R&D's latest in infinite-fuel rock cutting technology. I discover, to my embarrassment, that he's actually a she. Her name is Elsie Dawkins.

 

She and I make a go of it, her cutting the blob in close range, me using my laser rifle with a secondary weapon of a welder raided from Engineering. It's, as I said, hopeless.

 

Which is when the inevitable happens.

 

The station, you see, is powered by a man-made singularity. It's created by a particle accelerator, contained by a containment field which is powered by emitters, and gives off a massive amount of radiation. Collectors, in turn, grab this radiation and feed it to the SMES's (the supercapacitive batteries I'd mentioned earlier), which feed power to the station. Between the two blobs, however, they'd eaten the collectors, which meant no power, which meant containment failed, and now Lord Singuloth was eating its way straight up through the blobs.

 

Elsie and I notice this when we're suddenly exposed to hard vacuum, radiation, and the gravitational pull of the singularity. Elsie was fine; she was in the very spacesuit designed for this sort of thing. I however, was pulled into the blob, stunned from the blob attacking me, too cold to effectively move away from the blob, and then, shortly, dead.

 

When you die, you become a ghost. If Medical is competent, they can clone you, and you can get back in the game. This, unfortunately, requires power. I explore the station as a ghost, and realize that, yes, Elsie is the only living person. It's now 45 minutes into the round, about 10 minutes longer than an average blob round goes.

 

Elsie manages to escape the singularity's clutches, which, after eating 85% of the Telecomms blob, decides to wander off into space thanks to the random number generator. Suddenly the crew had an (incredibly slim) chance.

 

Elsie goes after the second blob with her plasma cutter. She's doing remarkably well until blob zombies swarm her in space, and then she goes down. It's all over.

 

Or so I thought. Elsie Dawkins wasn't the Chief Engineer. It turned out that she was a virologist that had stolen the Chief Engineer's trademark white spacesuit when the station's atmosphere merrily rushed out the hole in Cargo.

 

As virologist, she'd managed to make a cure-all virus that turned all damage into toxin damage, and then healed toxin damage. The virus also removed the need to breathe, meaning oxygen damage did nothing. In SS13, when you go down (into "crit"), you are immobile and gradually take damage until you reach -100 hp and die. Oxygen damage, specifically. In short, unless Elsie took 200 points of damage in a time shorter than it took her virus to heal her, she would get back up and fight another day.

 

The developers, of course, didn't specifically anticipate this, and so the blob zombies were programmed to attack only people who weren't in crit. As long as Elsie avoided getting enveloped by one of the blobs, she was effectively immortal.

 

The average blob round is 35 minutes.

 

This round lasted two hours.

 

For a solid hour-and-a-half, Elsie Dawkins singlehandedly fought two blobs. Normally the crew consists of fifty to seventy-five people. Thanks to the singularity, she even managed to kill one of the blobs. Finally, after an hour and a half of the entire server cheering on either Elsie or the Blob as a horde of ghosts, until the server admins had to step in and finally called it a draw. Then a new round started.

 

Although not many know her tale, Elsie Dawkins will now and forevermore be my hero.

 

Edited December 30, 2015 by Guest (see edit history)

[GeekyGamerGavin]

So there was this now closed MMO called Toontown I used to play. It was a very basic MMO and didn't have a lot of lore, since it was made for children in mind. Well anyway, the game was written in python and was very easy to latch on to and execute code into. On top of that, there were many inefficient client-to-server methods in the game, so you could basically heal yourself to 100% and the server wouldn't bat an eye. Anyhow an exploit was made that was basically a textbox that latched onto the process any you could execute code into the game. Now, one code people programmed was a clone code. This would make a clone of your character. This clone had no animations, it was in its T-pose, and did not move. It stayed where ever you were standing when you executed the code. Now these clones were actually refereed to by the server as players. So one day, a couple of exploiters decided to place clones all over the game. They would block doorways to different areas, and write out words with the clones. Every district (Districts were basically separate instances of the game) was full, and you couldn't log into the game because of the massive load. If you managed to log in, the game would instantly crash due to the amount of geometry the game had loaded for the clones. Now it took Disney (They ran the game) a while to fix the issue since they had to restart the servers and re-write the in-game code. I think they made it so that each "real" player must have an account, so the clones would be rejected by the server.

 

Videos:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?start=75&v=OrAtuUZsmAU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nm6Dezl02E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKswCbWpmM4

 

 

This happened again in 2013, this time the clones would be congested in a single area in the sky. They appeared in all areas in the game, and all were doing random animations, like swimming or dancing. This time, it took 3 days for Disney to fix the issue.

 

Videos:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9dtvT63m2k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISFMbRNorc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMNe9BhB_N0 (Explicit language)

 

Both times the exploiters claimed to be trying to make Disney fix the program that latched onto the game. On a non-clone note, one hacker by the name of "Magic Cat" was able to bypass the client entirely and execute code directly to the server. He was able to make bots that could teleport you anywhere in the game, move objects in the game around, and change his head to an animated image that was not in the game's files.

 

Videos:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hleKCcAGHYs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwrKDVuv2M

[Dave Rapp]

The only MMO I ever played for more than like a week is Dungeons and Dragons Online. Saying that I played it is probably an understatement. DDO consumed my life for most of the time that I was an active player. There were several occasions where I played the game for 48 to 72 hours straight, stopping only for food and a few hours of sleep every afternoon. I'm sure this comes as no surprise - MMO's are addictive by design, so, yeah.

 

On the server I played on there was a guy named Sto. Seems like a weird name for a character, right? Well his last name was Rage. Sto Rage. Storage. Get it? The name comes from the common practice of having a "storage toon," which is an alternate character that you keep around only to hold on to your loot and other vaulables so that your main character's inventory is freed up to collect more treasure. I never really knew the guy personally, I only met him in passing once or twice. But I saw the guy in the marketplace a lot.

 

See the way DDO works is really different from what you expect from an MMO. If you're picturing WoW, you have the wrong impression. Instead of the world being a huge expansive landscape with cities here and there and tons of wilderness and dungeons full of enemies in between, DDO basically only has one city. There is no wilderness like you have in WoW and its clones. Every single quest and raid in DDO takes place inside a dungeon, and when you and your party go into a dungeon you enter your own private instance of said dungeon, with no other random passers by interfering or PVP'ing you or something. (DDO has no PVP) In many cases a "dungeon" will be a forest or a jungle area or something, but the important thing is that everything in the game is instanced.

 

Because of this design, DDO only has one city. It's called Stormreach, and at any given time a hunge chunk of the server's population will be there. The city is made up of several different areas and each area has its own public chat channel. But the biggest section of Stormreach, and the most populated, is the Marketplace. If you type something in public chat in the marketplace, your message will be read by a LOT of people.

 

So back to Sto. Like I said I never really knew the guy so I don't know the full story behind this, but at some point Sto must decided he wanted to make money. A lot of money. He was already somewhat rich, but not really rich enough. He didn't want to do the usual grinding/crafting rigamarole that you're supposed to do to get rich. Instead, Sto decided to set up a lottery.

 

Here's how it would work. Sto would post in public chat in the marketplace, bascally advertising his lottery. You could buy any number of tickets, at a cost of 1 platinum per ticket. (DDO uses platinum instead of gold. Long story.) Sto would then give you a block of numbers. For example, if you bought 1000 tickets, you might get 12,300 through 13,300. Sto told you what numbers you got and he also kept track of it himself.

 

Every saturday at a predetermined time, Sto would roll randomly to determine what the winning lottery number was. DDO has a system where you can roll "dice" in chat by typing /roll and then some amount of dice (1d4 to roll a single four-sided dice, 10d10 to roll 10 ten-sided dice, or whatever) Sto would roll a one million sided die, and whoever had the ticket with the matching number won the lottery.

 

You might be thinking, "Obviously this is a scam. He either doesn't roll and declares that nobody won, or he rolls in secret and says the number of some ticket that nobody actually has." Well, no. On Saturdays when it came time to roll for the lottery, Sto would start a public raid group, with the description in the "looking for more players" post explaining that this raid group is for the lottery. Once Sto had a full sized raid group (12 players is the most you can have in DDO) Sto would roll the d1000000 in the raid party's chat channel, so he'd have a dozen witnesses who could veirfy what the winning lottery number was. Sto would then announce who the winner was and send them a PM as well, telling them they had a week to claim their prize. Since the winning number is public knowledge and everyone knows what lottery number is theirs, as long as the person who bought the ticket was paying attention they'd be sure to know to claim their prize.

 

The prize was one million platinum. Now, if you've seen other MMO's, you might not think a million is a lot of money. It doesn't sound like much when you compare it to the insanely inflated economies you'll find in most games, where high-level loot sells for like ten billion gold in an auction house. But DDO's economy is actually fairly stable, all things considered, and a million platinum is a lot of money! Just for reference, the most amount of currency any one character could have is about 4.3 million platinum. (The game calculates the base unit of currency as being a copper piece, which is worth 1/1000 of a platinum. Technically your money cap is 4,294,967,296 copper pieces, which appears to be a 32 bit unsigned interger. I'm not sure why the game is programmed like this.)

 

The mods were aware of the lottery, and they let it go on. According to the game's official terms of service, as long as Sto's little project took place eneitrely within the game and used no outside means, it was fully acceptable within the rules. And Sto's lottery actually gave away a proper fortune, assuming people actually bought the tickets, and assuming the winner came to collect their prize. I talked to Sto one time, when I was in the marketplace trying to hock some cosmetic item. He said he actually made very little money off the lottery, and I can kind of see why. If he sold a million tickets or more, he'd be guaranteed someone will have a winning ticket. If he sold less than a million tickets and someone won, he'd be out a bunch of money. I think he mainly kept doing it as some kind of habit or tradition. Eventually Sto stopped showing up in the marketplace, so I assume he stopped playing. I don't play anymore either, so I have no idea what ever happened to him.

 

Sto also had some kind of casino slot machine setup, where someone could send him a private tell with three die rolls, and if they matched they'd win money. I'm not really sure how that worked because the player would have to put money in the slot machine first somehow. I don't think his slots were nearly as popular as his lottery.

[rampantjesus]

Well Ross, my story isn't as mind-blowing as some of the others here, but I thought you might like it anyway.

 

This happened in a game called Elite: Dangerous (big space mmo thing). A Federation battlecruiser called the FNS Nevermore was docked outside of a very large spaceport. A player flying by the cruiser got too close, and the ship began to fire at him. However, many of the rounds went right past the player, and directly into the spaceport, which immediately returned fire. Keep in mind, these are probably the only two things in the entire game you should probably not shoot, and here they are shooting at each other. The developers were able to step in before the battlecruiser was destroyed, and had about 20% hull integrity. Rather than simply dub this event a bug and more on, the devs actually turned it into a canonical event. As a result of this misfire incident, players were asked to bring raw materials for the repairs of the station. Also, relations between the faction in control of the station and the Federation severely decreased.

 

PC Gamer even wrote a wee article about it here:

http://www.pcgamer.com/elite-dangerous-bug-turned-into-community-event/

And here's a little gallery of the "fight" (the AI isn't the best lol)

http://imgur.com/gl7bZKR,myhnQUk,SR9NAoH,wraxwwr,4MJ64wQ,KZNMDVc,XHBSnP0,9pJMfvD,mADEzSV,A1e9wwk,uiHugiu#1

 

 

Take it easy man, and happy birthday.

[koopacrazy]

I made an account solely to tell this story mostly because I've had no where else to post this until now.

 

Our takes place in the first MMO i ever played called Sonic Works MMO, to give some context Sonic Works MMO was a 2D MMO that was based on Sonic the Hedgehog, and the game was very grind heavy.

 

There were generally two people who played this game the grinders who would embrace the grind and try to level up these people ranged in levels from the weak to the strong, i myself was part of this group, however on the other side lied the Role players, who were all people who were generally very high level,

 

And one more thing i should explain before the story really begins is the Player Killing in this game, there was only one place in the game where you could actively kill another player; others could even watch fights in this place from a map just above it. we called this place the PK Zone (Get it? It's a Sonic Joke....) Anyway when you killed someone in the PK Zone your name would turn red and anyone could kill you anywhere to take 1/3 of your current EXP, the problem with the PK Zone is that it was right next to the place where you respawn, so if you killed someone you'd generally be revenged killed almost instantly. and lastly there was a glitch that could be performed in the PK Zone in which you could prevent entry into it by standing in front of the entrance. Now the story.

 

One day i remember a bunch of the Guilds from the grinders wanted to hold a tournament, however there was one problem with this idea there was only one place in the game where you could kill other players. When the guilds were about to hold this tournament suddenly the Role players show up and wanted to Roleplay here for some reason or another; Naturally since everyone here was trying to have a fun tournament we tell the Role players to either join the tournament or get lost; Instead they challenge all of us to a fight, the first group to clear the other from the area and block everyone from entering would be the winner. This is when the war began.

 

We all lined up in our respective groups, and on a 3 count we rushed each other. Instantly people started dying left and right, and the instant they did they would rush back in the PK Zone and fight more, the battle was complete chaos since anyone could kill anyone people would kill there own allies thinking they were enemies and i'm sure some people just killed for the hell of it regardless of side. This went on for almost 30 minutes i had died more times than i could count. as the battle raged on more and more people from the grinders just dropped from the fight entirely for various reasons, as this happened the numbers advantage of the grinders started to fade away when suddenly the hero of the grinders showed up.

 

Dubbly was widely know as the clear strongest of all the players and wondered what the hell was going on after finding out Dubbly joined the fight for the grinders and it made an impact. Dubbly was able to kill multiple people at a time and never seemed to die unfortunately Dubbly had to leave for life related reasons at this point it was 3 Grinders vs 4 Role Players.

 

We quickly took out the weakest member to even the score to 3 on 3, however this was there strongest 3 who were at least level 70 against, me a level 55, and two more people Werksmith and Speeeed who were level 15 and 44 respectively. Werksmith instantly goes to block the entrance preventing anyone else from getting in while me and Speeeed try to stop 3 people who clearly out matched us, we worked together quick to take out one of the role players together by that point both of us were close to death and Speeeed then suicided himself to bring down the heath of the next one i was able to take out the 2nd one.

 

By this point it was 1 vs 1 me versus a level 70 who was likely at full health versus me a level 55 who was close to death. at this point i shit you not the guy starts roleplaying a monologue i heal up to full health while he doesn't notice and while he's trying to conclude his monologue of how Role players will rule the PK Zone i charge him and some how win the fight. afterward the role players left, and the tournament began. Me Speeeed and Werksmith even made our own guild called the R.P.K. (Role Player Killers).

 

To this day this was the most fun i ever had in an MMO

[Amazing Porpoise]

Hey, so I made an account specifically to post this. Although I personally have never played the game, there was a massive war in EvE online a few years back which is definitely a part of gaming history, and at this point in time holds the record for the biggest battle ever in a video game.

 

The war was full of alliances, betrayal, politics and deception. The scale of this was absolutely massive and honestly, comparing it to world war 2 would be pretty accurate in my opinion. Its something that really cant be explained as well in text but this video does a really great job at covering all sides of the war

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZQ4ejFq7BY Its over 20 minutes long, but its the only video I found that actually gives an accurate account of the war in both scale and how it effected the game at the time.

[stolengoods]

This is a good one.

 

[Tuliackbaev]

My story took place in a game that is not exactly an MMO, but it's wikipedia says it is one so here it is.

 

The game was World of Tanks. In case you are not familliar with it, it is a team based PvP shooter with no respawns, oh and you drive tanks. At the time i only played it for about a month and because of the match making system i played with others like me. So this is the story of a Noob that got lucky.

 

Weirdly enough the story starts not at the beginning of the match, but almost at it's end. I was left alone, all my teammates were dead, enemy team still had 5 players left. FIVE. When i saw this my first thought was to let them kill me to end this faster, i saw no hope. But then one word emerged in my mind. NO. If i'm going to lose i will not make it easy for them and if i'm lucky i will drag one of them with me. And so i went hunting, lucky for me they decided to "I think we should split up. We can cover more ground that way!". And just like in all the horror movies, it became their downfall. I started killing them one by one thinking that if not this one, then the next one definitely will kill me. And with each new kill this thought pumped more adrenaline in me making my hads shake a little. By the time there was only one of them left alive i had a weird mix of emotions, of previously described sense of dread and the feeling that nothing can stop me.

 

Sweetest victory i ever had in a video game.

[Finbee]

This story goes back years, and I don't mean this happened years ago, I mean this started years ago. Planetside 1, the first Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter, featuring 300 players per continent, 100 players per faction, around 12 continents in total, released in 2003. I didn't play back then, but The Enclave did, believe me, they were some of the biggest assholes in any game, they orchestrated THE first funeral raid in any MMO, they took to the skies in bombers and bombed THEIR OWN FACTIONS FUNERAL.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_WLbjNDcg - Here's a video of the funeral bombing.

 

Now games come and games go, so Planetside faded from peoples minds, but in 2010 a new game under the Planetside name was announced, Planetside 2, they even hired Malorn who was a top officer from The Enclave to help develop it. So by the games release in 2012 The Enclave was back in force, lead by BuzzCutPyscho, who is one of the most vulgar, disgusting, and racist individual I've played against. Now you might see this as something that would make people ragequit, but no, playing against this guy was like playing against an actual villian, it wasn't a "He's on the other team, i'm gonna shoot him" it was a "I hate that guys guts, i'm gonna shoot him" situation

 

My outfit, TEST outfit chose the Vanu, a faction that really has no redeeming traits, they don't hit hard like the New Conglomerate, nor do their weapons fire faster like the Terran Republic. We however, happened to be the best organized, we didn't really have any interoutfit drama, at least not to the point where somebody on our side would bomb a funeral. So, we managed to capture a continent, which means capturing EVERY base on the continent, it wasn't to difficult as we did it at 3 in the morning. But this managed to enrage the other factions, we held onto the capture for 43 days.

 

You might ask; "Wait, how does a faction with no redeeming traits Capture and hold an entire continent for 43 days." I lied to you, we have one redeeming trait, Disco.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKsTqdmTXX8 - Video of the disco party.

 

Vanu fired what amounted to explosive disco balls, it takes 6 shots for these disco balls to kill someone, the disco ball launcher fires incredibly slowly, but when you have all of a faction (which could go up to 1000 players) firing these weapons all firing down at ONE entrance, well you've won the fight. The disco party managed to crash the server, letting us hold onto the continent Capture just a little bit longer. This eventually lead to BuzzCutPyscho quitting the game, disbanding The Enclave, and Malorn being laid off after the Sony division that made Planetside got bought out by some Russian company.