Memoirs of a MMPOG player

[Gurnsey]

I don't remember a lot but I do remember being power leveled.  I was put in a dungeon behind a wall and I just cast a certain spell at the lugians on the other side to level myself mostly safely.  If something got around I was screwed.  I also got in trouble when I ran out of spell conponents.
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Worse than power-levelling was the Experience Chain. The first player to get to level 126 (the maximum) took over a year of no-life-unwashed-hardcore play. By the time I left, an experience chain-gang could get you there in a month or less.

The other things I liked about the game was the evolving story and patches.  Generally a patch would change something in the world. 
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Unfortunately, players found out how to read the world-file and find out where changes were made - within hours of the patch, most of the new content would be done.

And since the players interacted with the major patch events, certain servers could have slightly different outcomes.  I remember hearing about the PvP server where the one hated guild protected a major introduced world boss.  There were apparently statues put up about it in a later patch.
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Ah, you are talking about 'Harry' the Herald Shard. Relating to the Bael-zheron that I mentioned in my post: he was trapped in some off-dimension and held there by several (four? I don't remember) living crystal shards. The dungeons holding the shards were slowly discovered (read: patched in). At first, we were not aware that the shards were holding this enemy imprisoned, but after the purpose was discovered, people still rushed to destroy the shards for the uber-loot that they dropped.

The last shard, the Herald Shard, was located inside a PVP only dungeon. Players organized a defense against other players around the shard, but all were betrayed or crushed, except on one server. There, the defenders succeeded in keeping Harry safe by any means possible, including sacrificing themselves to him (mosters in AC gain xp, levels, and skills from kills, the same as players). Finally, the developers, in the guise of Bael'zheron's Shadow Generals, enlisted and helped a player (the monarch of a guild) who had previously sworn allegiance to Bael finally destroy the defenders and the final shard.

Epic!

The other thing I really liked about AC was the information given to the players.  In every patch there was a HUGE patch notes which included reasons for many changes.  There also was a letter from the developers and a chapter in the story written by authors in the group.  That was always a good thing to see.  They had one of the best interactions with the community concerning patches.
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The communication was great, but I can't say that the decisions were always the best.