Birthday thread: MMO Stories

[pac0master]

Ok, so this happened many years ago so I do not remember the details very well.

 

Around 2009 I was playing with my father and a couple of friend on an Online Game called "DarkOrbit"

We played on the Server North America 1

 

Back then, there was a Free ship called the "Phoenix"

The ship is very weak and usually only taken by the new players when they don't have the credits to buy a better one.

Whenever you're killed, you have to repair your ship and it cost credits.

 

 

 

The great thing though is that When players kill this ship, they get a penalty

 

So we exploited that.

Note, we were all End-game level player and bored. (Lvl 17-20)

 

We exploited the game mechanic by filling 8 or 9 Drones with Laser turrets (the most powerful ones) (total of about 12 Gun or so)

No Shield, so we could get killed in like 1 hit.

 

Our entire Clan bought the Phoenix, (we were like 15-20 people)

And we went into enemy territories gunning down players

 

Whenever they killed us, they received a Penalty and we came back with a Free ship while they had to pay.

so we went to the hunt of the highest rated players

 

The strongest ship at the time was known as the Goliath, They were pretty heavy, but 20 Phoenix full guns full power etc, would kill them fairly easily,

Especially that you had to click on the enemy to lock them to start firing at them.

Since we tend to die in one or two hit, they constantly had to click on our ships while we were shooting them.

 

2x-3x Damage multiplayer lasers and Missiles were enough to kill most of them.

 

Our clan had enough money to buy the Goliath back whenever we were done hunting.

However, we only did it once.

 

It was an idea of my Father.

We had a plan to go on the hunt with more people but it never happened.

 

Stupid as it sounds, it allowed my father to get in the top 10 players then got bored and left the game.

[Templar Knight]

Hey Ross, for some reason my mind completely blanked on this subject when you sent out your Birthday request a few years back, but better late than never, I have an MMO story for you. This one comes from Lord of the Rings Online, and is essentially a story of shady activity within a Clan and possibly even between Clans.

 

To set the stage, this all happened I'd say about 8-9 years ago when the game was relatively new in terms of MMORPGs. I was a fairly low level Dwarf Guardian who just got into his first Clan via a fairly odd set of circumstances of my own doing (but that's another story and doesn't really fit what you're asking for). We're an up and coming Clan without that many members at the time but we're growing daily. I made such good friends with the leader that I became an Officer within a few days of joining, and basically helped him out and followed him around on stuff as we played.

 

Well, at one point he tells me we gotta make a detour into Bree to meet somebody from his old clan who PM'd him, turns out our leader had split off from another clan to form his own, and the former clan wasn't too keen on the idea. From my understanding they were very secretive for whatever reason, if I remember correctly they weren't even an official clan you could find registered, more like a secret society of various players, something I'd never heard of taking place within an MMO. So we go into town, we head down into one of the back alleys where you can enter a house, and my leader tells me to wait outside while he and another guy who's waiting for him go in for privacy. I'm waiting out there for a while before I step in out of curiosity, and the other guy is basically making mafia-style threats to my leader. I have no idea what the hell I walked into or how the heck they'd even plan to enforce such in-game mafia-style extortion threats, but man did it feel strange at the time. The other guy leaves, and my leader fills me on who he was, what "clan" he used to run with, and what the situation was. The end result being that we just keep working on building the clan and try to avoid them.

 

Nothing that I know of came of any of it, but a while later after they implemented Clan Halls or Houses to the game and our Clan had expanded quite a bit, one day our leader literally just up and vanished from the game. Literally. He also took most of the clan's coffers, a lot of our materials or loot from various activities, and sold off the house and took the money, and we never even saw him online again. Hundreds of gold worth of cash, stuff, and in-game property gone.

 

IDK what to make it of all after all this time. Our next leader (who had been an Officer along with me for a while) theorized that our last one was screwing with us from the beginning, and that if the hidden player group existed, he likely never actually left and was basically just building up our trust and such to rip the rug out from under us later, or that he left and took all the shit and transferred it over to another character. But IDK, it all felt really shady to me at the time, either we'd all be played by an in-game Fraudster with a very good facade, or something more sinister had happened that I cannot even begin to try and guess at with an in-game player-mafia pulling the strings on its former members for profits.

 

All I know is that we never saw him, or heard a damn thing about whatever hidden society of players, if such a group actually existed, again. And then life went on like any other Clan.

 

To me, that has to be the most interesting story I have from an MMO. And none of it involves most of the mechanics of the game, it was almost purely player-driven machinations, and I never thought I'd have seen in it in a game like LOTRO.

[crispydiesel]

A couple of memorable stories from when I used to play ARMA 2 wasteland - not really an MMO, but you got 80 people per server in multiple factions with access to high grade military hardware that acted close-ish to real life.

 

The basic premise of the game is that you are in 1 of 3 factions - Blufor, Opfor or Independent. There's little difference between Blufor and Opfor in reality, independent are just a load of bandits who kill everyone.

 

You spawn in a random location, find/buy guns and link up with your teammates to complete objectives (which reward you with guns, RPGs, tanks, helicopters), make/fortify a base and assault the enemy base.

 

The first of these events was where Opfor (who I joined) heavily fortified a village around a trader in the centre of the map and put a spawning beacon on it. This had the advantage that we had a near infinite supply of money from re-spawning players, so we could keep buying guns as people died en mass. Blufor assaulted the base for 3 hours in real time, with infantry and armored vehicles to no avail. They eventually won when they crashed a Chinook into the base and wiped it out. There were so many knocked out vehicles and bodies from both sides by the end that the server had to be reset due to frame-rate issues.

 

The second one had two parts - I was on Blufor and was part of two separate assaults in the one day. First one, where we found Opfor's base in a stone tower on a hill in the woods. No-one had really any money and we resembled a rabble at this stage, but we really wanted the loot. We only had enough guns for half the "conscripts", so it was really similar to Enemy at the Gates, right down to where people were telling each other to pick up the guns of the guys in front once they got shot. This worked surprisingly well, and we captured the base in under 20 mins through sheer numbers and persistence.

 

The second assault happened 2 hours later, when we had gotten really well equipped and organised. Too well organised. The assault on the enemy airfield was delayed multiple times (to a total of 30 mins) to let everyone get set up in IFVs and assault at the same time. We even had our own squads, which was crazy for such a large group of random players. And after all this preparation, we were massacred in the first 2 minutes by LMG fire and RPGs from entrenched positions.

 

I have never encountered a battle in an online game that failed due to too much organization, it was weird.

 

I should also give a mention to DayZ, back in the ARMA 2 Mod days. There are several great stories online, but my favorites have to be the saga of the DayZ psychopath, where a guy named PartyPomcer kept stalking and murdering a livestreamer whilst screaming incoherently and threatening to skin him.

 

 

I also loved JackFrags back when he did his DayZ hive bandits series. The highlight would have to be this episode where they kidnap players to fight in gladiatorial combat armed with hatchets.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87YIHdEa6W4

[crispydiesel]

As far as more proper MMOs go, I would have to talk about Minecraft and Elite Dangerous as two interesting sources of stories.

 

Minecraft's best stories would probably be the griefing ones, since the only other noteworthy aspect to read about are the massive works of art/architecture. Which are best just looked at, though the fully functioning calculator someone built using in-game redstone circuits was impressive conceptually.

 

The best griefers would have to be Team Avolition, back in the day. They were professional dicks and their shit only got more damaging as they got better at programming. Their greatest achievement would have to be the Chaoscraft raid, where they turned a server with very outspoken christian admins/owners into a literal hell, complete with Satan worship. (the link is to a re-upload with better sound syncing than the one on their channel).

 

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

 

I also found the episode where they stole several thousand torches and crashed a server in preparation for Earth hour classy as well.

 

 

 

As for Elite Dangerous, there was an interesting cluster-fuck caused by a player baiting a Farragut-Class battlecruiser into shooting at him whilst next to the Hudson Dock Space-station. For reference, these are both 1-2 kilometer long structures that have infinite health and ridiculous amounts of firepower, which were never intended to engage one another. I also believe they were part of the same faction. The development team had to step in so the system could function again, and managed to turn the whole thing into a player event where supplies were provided by players to repair the station.

 

Whilst this may not count as a large/important story, the economy and missions of the game in a universe that can be a little too organic for it's own good can have some very.... interesting results. Usually as a result of a single player (sometimes me) finding a trade-route that can upset the economy and social fabric of a system via the number of trades happening. Such as when I traded so many slaves along a particular route in the Ngaliba system that there was a civil war and the entire market dried up. The new ship I bought with the profits was more combat-capable and I proceeded to make even more money on combat contracts in the ensuing chaos.

 

I'm still not sure how to feel about what I did, other than wealthier.

 

Another system had a major civil war and I made around 20 million credits supplying body armor and highly restricted weapons to both sides till the war ended. The funny thing was, it was probably due to the "stability" stat increasing for both sides increasing as I supplied them with more hardware.

 

I realize this is probably for balance reasons, but this was effectively the equivalent of a civil war in Africa being shortened by an arms dealer supplying each side with more and more AK-47s, kevlar, and artillery.

 

This was a true NRA lesson of social stability.

[wowplayer00]

if you still are looking for MMO stories. look up Preach gameing on youtube and look for something called drama time all the stuff in there is crazy

[Comic-Sams]

No Man's Sky is great for MMO stories, its also a good road-trip game, you do have play a quite bit to be able to travel freely though (or have a friend to help you out), I visited the Galactic Hub and still wanna visit Cafe 42 for some space coffee. The expedition events are literally a space road-trip with other players too. 

[PancakesGuy]

Hi I just registered here to post this MMO story because I remember Ross wanted good MMO stories. It's in a YouTube video so you don't even have to waste time reading. Hope you enjoy.

 

https://www.youtube.com/live/PYSCPbsZFWg?feature=share&t=5524

 

Link is already time stamped.

Edited January 19, 2023 by PancakesGuy (see edit history)

[ScumCoder]

On 1/19/2023 at 6:03 PM, PancakesGuy said:

 

I cracked up, thanks for sharing.