List the MMOs youve played, with comments if you feel like it.

[Rasterburn]

EverQuest
Started in January 2000, after getting EQ classic as a Christmas present a week before. Quit in April or May of 2003, after I became so disgusted with the ways that SOE had raped my favorite game that I just couldn't justify playing it anymore. Everything up through Luclin was fine. Everything from PoP onwards was pure kiddie crap. WTG, Smedley..!!!

Anarchy Online
Hated it -- way too many bugs and the community sucked. Very clunky gameplay. Weak lore.

World Of Warcraft
I was in the open beta; started "officially" on launch day and then quit in August of 2006. It's a miserably dumbed-down craptastic, best suited for little kids and slackers.

Earth And Beyond
A neat little space-based MMO which could have been decent, had EA and AOL done a better job of holding up their end. But it was released prematurely and a lot of its players ended up leaving, due to a serious lack of content. E&B was shut down about a year after its release.

Vanguard -- Saga Of Heroes
Was involved in the beta. Was shocked when Brad McQuaid made the insanely stupid decision to form a partnership with SOE late in the beta phase. Gave it a try anyway, on launch day. Quit three months later in disgust. A buggy, broken, pointless game that -could- have been great.

Age Of Conan
Was likewise in the beta and started on Launch day. I quit about a year later, when I realized that absolutely everything that Funcom had promised us about AoC during the beta phase was utter and complete bullshit. That game is nothing more or less than WoW with tits.

[Estu]

EQ: Played it starting in 8th grade, at which point I think Kunark was out. Played off and on until around LDoN, but had long since been disgusted by things like the in-game compass, maps, and the plane of knowledge dumbing down the game. Had severe altitis and never got a character past 20 or so (this is incidentally the level of my highest character on p99 right now).

MapleStory: Played it a few times to kill time in the more boring periods of my life. This game is free and it has cute 2D graphics, but it plays like a parody of an MMO. Really just an endless, senseless, super-long grind, and much less rewarding than other MMOs. Good to kill a little time until you get to level 13 or so and get completely sick of it.

WoW: Played it from a little before Burning Crusade came out to a while after Wrath of the Lich King came out. Actually got a couple of characters past 60, though I also played some on a private server so my memory's a bit confused. I did get a character to 70 in legit WoW.

This game gets a bad rap, especially from bitter EQers who idolize their hardcore game and condescend to people who enjoy the more casual WoW. EQ's big advantages over WoW are atmosphere and difficulty: I still have a ton of fun getting lost or exploring in EQ, and I still enjoy the music a lot; WoW never really evoked much emotion in me in that regard. Between the uninteresting music, the uninspiring art direction, and the in-game maps, it didn't really hold atmospheric appeal to me. WoW is also obviously a lot more forgiving than EQ, whether it's less penalty for dying (just repair bills and having to run as a ghost to your corpse), faster leveling, the ability for any class to effectively solo, the quest system, the maps, etc. etc. etc. But I enjoy these things about WoW just like I enjoy EQ's difficulty, and while I prefer EQ's difficulty and the rush it gives me trying to avoid danger or discovering a quest or exploring a zone or whatnot, I can see the appeal in the flip side of it as well.

On the other hand, WoW does some things better than EQ. Its character customization is much more advanced: you have more unique racial abilities, and you have a very cool and enjoyable talent system to play with your character's various abilities and spells and fine-tune the character into what you want it to be. Its PvP is far more balanced and you really see every class participating effectively in PvP, and the various PvP games it has are a great alternative to straight ganking-style and city raiding-style PvP. Speaking of which, city raiding PvP is much more of an actual thing in WoW; you can really take down some big names, and the cities are more clearly developed with PvP in mind. Its quests have a lot more fun and interesting features in them, especially come WotLK, and you can actually level up all the way to the maximum level purely by doing quests rather than straight grinding, which is a great advantage, even with the caveat that a lot of the quests are similar to each other. It's just a lot more fun to have little goals you need to accomplish in a zone instead of just "kill monsters at this camp for level 20-23, move on to this other camp for 24-26, etc.". Granted EQ has camp diversity, but WoW has quest diversity. And there are just a lot of little things about WoW that are nice, thoughtful features. Oh, and achievements were a lot of fun.

So I enjoyed WoW a lot when I played it. But a while before I discovered P99 I finally got bored with it and put it down, if not forever then probably for years. I had been playing off-and-on as it was, having periods of intense activity followed by periods of no activity, but after being at the maximum level for a while I got pretty bored in an ultimate kind of way. This isn't to say that the game didn't provide me with many hours of entertainment, or that it's not a great game.

[Reiker]

EverQuest - Started late 99 / early 00. My first MMO, obviously awesome. Eventually raided in a semi-casual guild on Tunare through Velious / Luclin, and then later in PoP after my DAoC break.

Dark Age of Camelot - Played on release day, my second MMO and just as awesome as EQ. In ways, better. I had never been a PvP player, but the added excitement of fighting other players got me addicted in a whole other way. Eventually the addition of the really lame raid content and impending expansion caused me to quit and play EQ from PoP -> GoD.

After this I don't really remember the order I played other MMOs and I'm too lazy to look up release dates. Throughout all of this I'm playing EQEmu servers off and on, the first being Winter's Roar where I eventually became a quest designer and left during the C&D.

Shadowbane - I was hoping for another epic PvP game like DAoC but I was very disappointed. Quit after a month or two.

Final Fantasy XI - Bad UI, no one wanted to group with my class which I made specifically to get groups (White Mage). Apparently Japs preferred Red Mages or Bards or something... couldn't solo, gave it up after a month or two. I was very impressed by some things like the airships but the actual gameplay was awful.

Long period of not playing MMOs / dicking around with free shit like RO after this.

EverQuest Progression - Brought me back into MMOs, played a shaman in the top Sleeper guild (Insidious Vision) and then later in Realm of Insanity after the merge.

Vanguard - Initially loved this game for a few months; although it had some very obvious issues I had a lot of fun. I was playing with my room mates. One was a cleric, and during one of those "this game is a sinking ship" patch messages after the 2nd month or so, clerics became the best tanks/healers/dps in the game and I was like meh fuck this. I always say the same thing about Vanguard: it was 50% the best game ever and 50% the worst game ever.

World of Warcraft - Some friends from EQ Progression dragged me in, I had avoided it until then. Played very casually as I had a lot going on irl. Had fun for a few months raiding after work and shit, until I got really bored around Sunwell. We were stagnant after Vashj as our members' few brain cells couldn't combine to make it through Hyjal or the last boss in that space ship instance.

Age of Conan - Originally I didn't care about this game and was looking forward to the new game by Mythic, the developers of DAoC (Warhammer). A guy from work got me to play the open beta and I had a lot of fun. It was capped to level 13 or something and I was playing a kinda OP class (Tempest). I had a lot of abilities and running the PvP matches was fun as hell. Unfortunately I bought the game and realized that the open beta was capped because the game sucked after Tortage. The open beta with the low level cap and instant PvP matchmaking was the pinnacle of this game.

Warhammer - Was so very similar to Age of Conan. I played the open beta which was capped at about 20. Most players were around this level, so there was constant PvP battles around the 2nd tier keeps. Had a blast in open beta, until the game released with no cap and no meaningful PvP. Everything that was right about DAoC was wrong about this game. In 2001 I was playing DAoC on a shitty Dell and dial up and never lagged even in massive 100+ man RvR fights. DAoC was also much more advanced in relation to when it was released than Warhammer. However in Warhammer you couldn't put 20 people in the same keep without crippling lag, and I had a ridiculous gaming rig I just built and cable internet. An abomination that severely dropped my opinion of one of my favorite game developers.

Afterwards... lots of emus (EQ/DAoC) and free shit. A truly great MMO hasn't been made since DAoC.

Probably forgot some stuff. I played some other games here and there that I didn't mention like Eve - did the free trial and decided the game was cool but not for me.

[Ocaevia]

Originally Posted by Reiker [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

World of Warcraft - Some friends from EQ Progression dragged me in, I had avoided it until then. Played very casually as I had a lot going on irl. Had fun for a few months raiding after work and shit, until I got really bored around Sunwell. We were stagnant after Vashj as our members' few brain cells couldn't combine to make it through Hyjal or the last boss in that space ship instance.

Archimonde - one of the worst bosses.

[Lazortag]

I've played EQ and once I played a free MMO called perfect world. It's hands down probably the worst MMO ever made.

[Estu]

Originally Posted by Lazortag [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've played EQ and once I played a free MMO called perfect world. It's hands down probably the worst MMO ever made.

Oh yeah, I actually played this one a bit too. I don't remember having that much distaste for it, though my memory's pretty hazy since I played it very briefly - what didn't you like about it?

[Lazortag]

Originally Posted by Estu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh yeah, I actually played this one a bit too. I don't remember having that much distaste for it, though my memory's pretty hazy since I played it very briefly - what didn't you like about it?

It's horrendously unchallenging (no crowd control, every class can solo, etc.) and has way too much of an emphasis on questing for exp. Very little grouping is encouraged and even then, the community is so illiterate and braindead that you wouldn't want to group with them. If you complete a quest with a much higher level character in your group, even if it's a quest intended for a much higher level, you still get all of the exp which is insanely unbalanced. Also, the classes were very unbalanced, and poorly fleshed out, and to be honest kind of boring.

Certain bosses HAD to be taken down with certain combinations of classes, which was lame and made all of the other classes feel unneeded at a certain level, further exacerbating the balance issues. Some of these bosses needed to be killed so that you could get your next level spells too - and so if you were a Wizard, it was super unfair that you absolutely needed to group with a cleric and a "barbarian" (the "tanking" class) to help you out (the DPS from the other classes was usually negligibly higher than the tank anyway, so it was normally more desirable to just have two clerics and four "barbarians"). Getting people to help you out was also nearly impossible because there was no "OOC" or anything like that - just global chat, which was only accessible to people who paid money (keep in mind this was a "free to play" game, with benefits to people who paid money). There were such obvious and insanely broken advantages given to the people who paid money, including pretty much being immune from being banned, since the company didn't want to lose money from disruptive idiots with deep pockets. Also, there was absolutely no GM presence in the game. I mean, I used to get frustrated about Live EQ, and even sometimes about p99, but this game was REALLY bad - there was no "petition" system, you just had to go to some stupid chat room where a GM might be there to listen to you, but it was unlikely they'd be there. You also couldn't run this chat room parallel to actually playing the game, making it very unpractical to report really egregious offenses. Also, the GM's weren't required to have any knowledge of the game, so GM's, for instance, might ban people randomly for appearing to hack their attack speed or other shit like that, when in fact they just had items that made their attack speed faster. They were also powerless to help people in normal situations since they didn't know anything about the game or how to fix certain problems, which is hilarious since they were paid to do their job. Also, no bugs were ever fixed. The community was never listened to.

The game heavily emphasized cosmetics and other trivial shit, when the gameplay was just piss poor all around and never got interesting. Probably the most fun I had in the game was in making money, because it was so easy to rip people off and play the market, so watching my gold go up by a million in less than a day was sorta fun.

I searched for a classic EQ server when I looked at a video on youtube and someone made a comment about how awesome classic EQ was when it would take minutes to kill mobs and corpse runs were brutal, etc. I started remembering the things I loved and was frustrated about in this game that I hadn't played or even thought about for years. When I found project 1999 I stopped playing "Perfect World".

[ShadowWulf]

EQ
EQ2
WoW
Age Of Conal
Ultima Online
Vanguard
Lord Of The Rings
DarkFall
ShadowBane
Mortal Online
Anarchy Online
Warhammer Online

And most everything else in the industry by this time....except I habitually avoid oriental themed or produced games.

EvE Online - What, nobody else here was a serious EvE player? WTF from all the PVP talk I see around here I figured more people would be into a total loss pvp game but I guess not. After playing for several years I more or less became a scumbag, but a well liked one at that. Pirate and dedicated griefer my life was dedicated to espionage, tearing apart my own alliances from the inside, hunting and making every Goonswarm member I met regret logging in that day, and in general making life miserable for anything I ran across. Ive been on hiatus from the game for awhile now though, after several years ive been at a lack of a "goal" for myself to keep playing. Most everything I sought as a little nooblet when I started in 06' ive now accomplished for myself, and in a game like EvE you NEED long term goals to keep you going. Maybe something will occur to me again to drag me back into the life-sucking game again, but for the life of me I have no idea what...

Another thing people who never really got "INTO" the game do not understand is how utterly paranoid, and dead fucking SERIOUS this game is taken. No other game evokes this kind passion, and dirty deeds from their players. Espionage goes far beyond "lol gank" of other MMO's to being utterly capable to devastating not just one but possibly hundreds of players enjoyment of the game in ANY way shape or form, and its all allowed. From scamming to outright theft its not just condoned but encouraged on all levels. This promotes a level of paranoia akin to the McCartney era and the damn red scare, add to that rife nationalism within the game with many corps being divided by country of origin. Joining a serious Alliance involves background checks, financial checks, and a dedicated investigator poking through your characters history past looking for obscure links to prove that "Hey maybe this guy is really THIS guy and a threat to us?". The game does not end IN the game, it often carry s out to real life. As communication systems become compromised by spys other forms are used among the higher echelons of command to pass on orders to each other (Yea...ive received 3am phone calls from London telling me to log on...there was a time I ran a corp and had singular control over a string of not only deathstar POSes but several of the alliance POSes, so being asked to get up at 3 or 4 am was NOT uncommon in my position at the time.)

People like to say that PvP gamers are a little sociopathic. EvE takes this behavior and lets you run with it, with a fucking RPG chainsaw. Im a nice guy. But in game I sold out two alliances to the highest bidder, dismantled my OWN pos network to drop an alliances SOV and drop a station (haha good morning fuckers! Surprise!), ive killed many many MANY blues (aka friendlys) out of either spite or to prove a point (Broke comm silence? Primary him. Warped before FC gave the order? Primary him. General twat in a fleet? Primary him.) The joy of ruining carebears days was glorious, even in high sec we were capable (and yes ive always been -10 sec status) of suprising the hell out of people in so called "safe space" and in general making them want to quit the game. Many of which actually WOULD. Bring enough guns to bear and you can make corps and droves of people start quitting the game in mass.

This "trust no one" policy and lifestyle makes it hard to really work with many others in any deep way. However, I did have several great friends that I could ALWAYS count on to watch my ass no matter what side of the lines we might find ourselves flying for (even against eachother, which itself leads to the best mole operations). In a game where reputation is everything knowing who you can REALLY trust was worth more than any titan fleet. So if I do go back to eve, it will be for my old comrades in crime and fellow yet trust worthy scumbags and not the lure of glittery space or riches that I will be flying for.