Memoirs of a MMPOG player

[Gurnsey]

Since I've played quite a few...

Game: Asheron's Call
Type: 1st-generation Fantasy Adventure
Plusses: Great story and writing. Interesting skills and character-creation as there are no defined 'classes'.
Minuses: Long level-grind. Choices made at character creation are vital and (until very late in the game's life) unchangeable. Little to no concept of aggro or crowd control. Vulnerable to overpowering min/maxing - just because there are no defined classes doesn't mean that there is not a best skill set that everyone has to have. Worthless all-or-nothing PvP system means you have no defined allies.
Favorite Memory: Portal to Teth. A little background here: Fort Tethena was an outpost in the middle of a good hunting ground; however, it was a long run from anywhere. You'd often see tons of beggars asking for a 'pORTAL to tetH?!!?!?', which got highly annoying. The Big Bad Guy, Bael'Zheron (a GM controlled encounter during one of the monthly events) came to a spot near Fort Teth. In combat, he'd often cast a spell called 'Portal to Teth' which, true to it's name, did transport the target to the Fort. Unfortunately, it put them at an altitude of about 20,000 feet. Free fall! On a side note, he also cast a spell called 'Rain of Cows'. Let your imagination run...

Game: JumpGate
Type: Sci-Fi - Spaceship Piloting
Plusses: A skill-based MMPOG!? You actually fly the spaceship with your joystick (OK so Crimson Skies was first, but it wasn't quite a persistant world). Physics-based flight system (with added artifical 'drag' to keep ships from reaching mind-numbing speeds) leads to involved piloting experience and exciting circle/joust/strafe dogfights.
Minuses: Being based on personal skill, it's frustrating for people with shaky hands (read: me). XP and levelling idea seems inappropriate for this game and lead to a dull level-grind. Not much story and little support.
Favorite Memory: Cruentus Legio. I probably butchered the spelling, but some of the best pilots in our organization split off to form the Burning Legion (is that what it means? I forget). They role-played Octavian (one of the 3 races) nationalists and attacked the other two races relentlessly, calling them inferior. They dominated so thouroughly that people complained that Octavian ships were overpowered. In concert with the game designers, they whole legion was changed to be another race. They then roleplayed that they were mercenaries, hired by that race to crush their enemies. Now, Solarian ships are overpowered!! They change to the third race. It wasn't the ships that were overpowered - it was the skill and coordination of the Legion. Wow.

Game: Anarchy Online
Type: Sci-Fi Adventure
Plusses: Sniper-rifles and machine guns and robots and electro-vibro-swords and nano-magic! Well balanced classes that compliment each-other, yet still generally solo-able. All skills available to all classes (your class determines how expensive each skill is to raise). Instanced 'missions' means you don't have to compete for spawns. Land Control makes PvP actually mean something.
Minuses: Worst. Launch. Ever. Yes, worse than WoW. Crippling, unplayable lag, not due to hardware or server issues, but basic flaws in program design. Sometimes dramatic changes to classes in the name of balance turn the least-played classes into the most-played (see: fixer).
Favorite Memory: The Shadowlands. In the expansion, a new world, floating in an alternate dimension is discovered. There are 7 'layers', based on Dante, that are visually and thematically the most stunning and interesting I have ever seen. The rolling plains, the perfect Garden, the featureless gray stone of purgatory, the depths of the sea, the snowy wasteland, the fiery volcano, and finally, an insane maelstrom leading to nothingness. At the borders of all these lands is The Brink, filled with primal monsters that eat away the edges of the world. Breathtaking.

Game: Asheron's Call 2
Type: 2nd-gen Fantasy Adventure.
Plusses: 3 races: Humans (your stereotypical fantasy humans), Lugains (like dwarves, if dwarves were elephants), and Tumeroks (tribal lizard-people. Females: Sexiest. Walk animation. Ever). 3 unrelated factions: Order (your usual fantasy 'good guys'), Dominion (think communism to a 1984 degree, fantasy style), and the Other One With The Name I Can't Remember (anarchists, nobody has the right to tell you what to do). Some great and odd class ideas (see memories).
Minuses: Some terrible classes and bad balance. No vendors (you heard me right). Interesting crafting system, but sub-par crafted items.
Favorite Memory: Some classes are so out-of-the-box that you wonder how they came up with them: the Lugian Tactician creates walls and stone turrets, and can upgrade them with armor-piercing ammo and rapid-fire mechanisms; the Tumerok Hivekeeper flings bees and wasps at his enemy from a beehive on a rope. Other classes are standard fantasy types but are very well executed: the Lugain Berserker, for example, is your usual dual-wielding, hulking damage machine, but the hit-combo system leads to thrilling combat. There are a line of skills that do 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 hits in a row; each one requires that the one below it has been done recently. What happens in practice is that combat is started, and then turns quickly into a blender - 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6, 5, 6, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 6....

Game: EVE Online
Type: Sci-Fi - Spaceship piloting
Plusses: Robust player economy, including mining, manufacturing, shipping, and free-market selling. Improve-over-time skillset means that those with less time to play, or those who don't want to shoot pirates, don't get left behind. Great graphics and space-backgrounds, with amazing contrast between the largest Battleships and smallest Frigates. Interesting ship balance, with a wide variety of modules available; heavy battleship weapons will never hit a small frigate that is zipping around at high speed, but conversely, the frigate will never do enough damage on its own to destroy the battleship. Similarly to Homeworld, the best fleet consists of a mass of Frigates to destroy Battleships, Cruisers or anti-frigate Frigates to destroy Frigates, and Battleships to dominate Cruisers.
Minuses: Mining is boring! Distances are long, which is nice in that a certain area can 'belong' to a group of players, but it takes a long, long time to get between places. Lots of 'nothingness' out in space.
Favorite Memory: Our company had set up mining operations in a good but crowded area. A few of us got tired of mining and competing for asteroid belts, so we split off, created our own new company, and started blasting full caravans leaving towards central, populated space. In true pirate fashion, we'd grab the most valuable refined metals and scrap from the destroyed ships and run like mad. Eventually, most caravans were well protected with cruisers and battleships, but then we just shifted tactics and started hitting the miners directly and refining the minerals ourselves.

Game: World of Warcraft
Type: Fantasy Adventure
Plusses: Decent class balance. A quest for everything! Lots of places to explore. In-game Auction House to sell items (for in-game money, of course). Fun and familiar (to many) Warcraft basis. Capture-The-Flag and Base-Capture PvP battlegrounds (coming soon; I've tried the CTF, it's a blast).
Minuses: Unexplainable lag and sync issues sometimes. Not much to do when your level is maxed out (so I've heard, but I haven't made it there yet).
Favorite Memory: The spell that made 'sheep' a verb. sheep (v): to turn an enemy into a sheep with the Polymorph spell. Baaaaaa! Some underwater content is a clausterphobic but exciting experience - try not to hold your breath along with your character! The horde of zealots that come to avenge the death of Herod of the Scarlet Crusade is a moment of 'no way'. More memories to come, as I continue to play...

Do you share some of these same memories and impressions? Have you played different MMPOGs (I never played Evercrack, DAoC, Ultima Online, City of Heroes, etc.)?

[Xanthix]

Game: City of Heroes
Type: Urban Superhero Adventure

Plusses: Awesome genre, great setting, really fun powers! The best character-creation ever. No items (you got superpower enhancements instead) so you can design your own outfit. Create a superhero or mimic your favorite comic-book one. Use amazing powers with great special effects, learn to fly, teleport, summon forcefields, cause huge explosions, and oh yeah fight crime!

Minuses: Repetition and grinding! Nearly every mission was the same thing: Go to this instance and kill everything, or find X objects (by killing everything). And every instance seemed to used one of the same 5 instance templates. Task Forces were just a bunch of instances in a row. No items means no fun loot, and difficulty in getting upgrades. Very little to do other than grind or have dance parties. Both got old. No PvP (until City of Villians comes out).

Favorite Memory: In what other game can you create a level 1 character with an awesome superhero outfit, equipped with a machine gun or fireballs or a personal forcefield? However, this meant that there was less to achieve and look forward to down the line. I only got to level 14, and there was amazing stuff at level 40, but I just couldn't bear the grinding.

[Raelynn]

AC was the only other MMO I've really played. I mainly played it because my friends at the time were all into it. I enjoyed it somewhat but since I wasn't really into that type of game at the time, I remember not liking certain parts that I don't care so much about right now (i.e. grinding).

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.

The other things I liked about the game was the evolving story and patches. Generally a patch would change something in the world. 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.

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.

[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.

[Rhydderch Hael]

Red Baron 3D, Massive Multi-Player (MMP)
Type: WWI combat flight sim.

Server-client setup. A good server could hold as many as 30-40 players without going thermonuclear (but ping and lag can get a bit kinky). Historical theater maps of the Western Front are nice enough, but there's also a fictional island map with the Central Powers in control of the northern half and the Allies in the south.

Memories: the occassions that the really big battles would evolve. Thirty players in the server means 30 aircraft in the skies. Battle usually split up into different sections all along the front, but there were times when most of the forces present converged at No-Man's Land in one major effort. Tracer lines from multiple machines would converge on one target to form cones of glittering light, which in turn were intersected by other tracer lines as the attackers were attacked. Machines above you would weave and bob together, then smear each other across the sky in collisions, or a machine would come spiralling past your view in a flat spin, its tail control surfaces stripped away.

Specific fights: there was the time I was flying a Spad 13 over Verdun when me and this Fokker D7 ended up playing a little demolition derby. The thing about opening a dogfight with a head-on pass is that someone actually has to turn the hell out of the way in order to have it qualify as a "pass". *Crunch*. We hit, but my machine was still flyable. Looking around, I saw that the German was still in the air as well. We turned around to re-engage. Another head-on "pass". Another oversight. *Crunch*. Bye-bye, Spad wheels. And the Fokker? had a dent in his upper wing, but that didn't stop him. We turned around and continued to fight, as broken and ungainly as our machines had become after two collisions. How did the fight end? Both ran out of ammo, both went "RTB". Either it was a special incident of honorable combat that sticks in my mind, or it's a reminder of just how spectacularly sucky I can be at fighting in the air.

There was another time that I was flying a Spad 13 over the Flanders front. Battle raged far below in the mud, and I was flying all alone at 10,000 above the melee. Alone no longer when I sighted a dot at my height eastward of my position. A Pfalz D12. Spud-killers. Only German aircraft that could overtake a Spad 13 in a dive, thus making the energy fight a bit difficult. No matter. I suck at boom-n-zoom. So, it became a dogfight. In a Spad. Otherwise regarded by nearly everyone in the game as a turbo-charged brick with wings. Didn't matter. My head-on pass cracked into the P12's engine, weakening his power output. From there, our high-altiude circling fight began working its way down through the dusk sky, with me slowly getting the upper hand in position. Got a few bursts in on him, and the fight should have resolved in my favor. Then I heard the whir of new motors approaching. Then the chatter of gunfire. This had to be it: Germans pouncing in to save a wounded comrade...

...but they didn't sound like German guns... Two Camels and a Nieuport. Getting in my way, "saving" my helpless Spudly life from the big bad German, despite the fact that I was on the Pfalz's tail, not the other way around! One of the interlopers got the kill instead.

On the island map, the highest peak sat behind German lines near their forward airfield. The Allies had a tendency to carry the fight over to the Germans, and from the positioning of the respective airfields the battle was met over than small mountain. The fights took on a new element was planes circled the summit, trying to avoid the mountain as well as the enemy's bullets. One way or another, someone would end up crashing into the peak. When I re-drew the island map to a 17th century piratical motif (naming locations with a sea dogs theme) I marked out that peak on the map, named "Skeleton's Roost" (it wasn't me who named it that, though).

[Raelynn]

Every MMO has its problems. Experience chains were definitely a big problem in that game. I think the situation you mentioned was what had happened.

Probably the most stupid thing I had heard while playing that game happened along a period of time when item duping went rampant. Someone from the same guild that I had mentioned before on the PvP server duped a server unique item.

Of all the items to dupe, he duped one that only a single person on the server could ever have...

[Selby]

I played UO. You guys think WoW was a bad launch? Oh please guys. EQ, AO, & UO were all BAD (AO was in a league of it's own as far as bad launches go). UO was bad because broadband flat out didn't exist in 90% of the country in 1997 and when you combine a server architecture designed to handle 500 people but actually had to handle 5,000 people, it got ugly. Bad server architecture on that game.

VERY fun to play. It's one of the unique advancement systems, skills that can be toggled one way or the other (after being patched, it was random before that). No level grinds. A newbie character could make a difference in the world in no time.

The griefing. Oh make it stop! Player killings, the exploits, the lootings, the all around social experiment of what happens when you take 50,000 people and give them complete anonymity. The results? They become the jerks that real life won't let them be due to consequences.