Support NeoGAF

[Mamesj]

that's the one.

man, this makes me wanna play an mmo again. I need to find one I really enjoy...I've only very briefly played WoW and GW.

 

[Open Source]

MMOs are 95% tedium and 5% awesome.

Also, notice that many of the stuff that people really liked was unintended or even specifically undesired by the designer. The 5% awesome is in most cases accidental.

 

[Mamesj]

MMOs are 95% tedium and 5% awesome.

Also, notice that many of the stuff that people really liked was unintended or even specifically undesired by the designer. The 5% awesome is in most cases accidental.

true. they sound so awesome on paper and whenever people talk about great moments in mmos, it makes me wanna play.


but then I log on, go on a quest with some random dude who tries to guilt trip me when I wanna sign off after killing the same enemies for 2 hours straight in a quest that didn't really yield a whole lot of loot :\ :lol

 

[Zilch]

MMOs are 95% tedium and 5% awesome.

Also, notice that many of the stuff that people really liked was unintended or even specifically undesired by the designer. The 5% awesome is in most cases accidental.

That's the point. That's what makes it so incredible and enjoyable to remember.

 

[RubberJohnny]

The best thing about MMOs is the people, and the worst thing about MMOs is the people.

 

[Windu]

I didn't experience it, as I don't play WoW, but when that giant dragon got lured into that town Stormwind, and got stronger with every kill it made, it became nigh-indestructible. That looked awesome.

Video with crappy song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl0VWJdE01M

I think that may have been when the beta for burning crusade was over and they were closing the servers. The GMs had a little fun by doing shit like this.

edit: well nm looks like a guild actually did pull him in there, but I do remember videos of the beta end event of where the GMs spawned him or something like him in Stormwind.

 

[DEAD RABBIT]

I don't play MMO games, but that EVE Online story made me look for more EVE heist stories.

Pretty damn sick, 790 Billion ISK (at the time, equivalent to $170.000) stolen by one single dude: http://mmorpg.qj.net/Biggest-scam-in-EVE-Online-history/pg/49/aid/62826

Now the community has barely had time to calm down and here it is, the next incident that easily surpasses the numbers GHSC achieved with their heist. It's the story of a guy named "cally", who ran a corporation, a player-operated bank called "Eve Intergalactic Bank". Over the course of four months, hundreds of players deposited money in his bank, which offered interest, loans and insurance like every other ordinary bank. Except for the fact that one day, cally decided to grab all the money that was deposited and fly off to space with an alleged total sum of 790 billion Isk. In real life, this would translate to $170,000 - quite possibly the biggest MMO scam ever conducted.

 

[Shoho]

I agree with the Planetside story.

Visually planetside played and controlled like a bit slower version of Halo with bigger recoil. In essence it was a FPS. A MMO-FPS. It was a real FPS. No smoke and mirrors. Sometimes it would lag tho!

And exactly like Halo, BF and UT and all that, it had a crazy ton of vehicles.

There are not levels. you progress through ranks by killing and doing stuff like hacking and sniping, and reviving and all that. then you customize your man with a gun and abillities.


I remember once I was with a Squad. We where about 10 guys, so we where just enough for the dropship. god the dropship rocked. every single player had a turrent. we where 10 people flying through the air. then we got to the base, where around 50-100 others of our guys was in the process of hacking the base. The base had shown little resisdence, and since this was at release not many people really understood the game.

then it got f**ked up. I remember when we had just finished hacking, and I remember just walking outside the base. This massive base. And.. and... I swear to god. I saw like 500 motherf**King enemies going against me in tanks. i remember taking cover behind a large rock, while i freakin screamed in the chat channel: "OMG. Many enemies west of here. OMG OMG OMG"!

God that was unbeliveable. that felt like a real war. it felt like... I have never seen anything like that since. Nothing of that scope. Nothing that gives the same feeling of being a little dude in a massive war. we where around 1000 people in that battle. incredible. really was.
Planetside is special.



So was SWG. I remember making my entire city with my guild. we controlled the economy of the server. we could take the hole economy hostage. we had the most talented crafters and the best materials to make all the items. everything in SWG was built by players! there was no uber loot. it was awesome!

 

[Diablohead]

I agree with the Planetside story.

Visually planetside played and controlled like a bit slower version of Halo with bigger recoil. In essence it was a FPS. A MMO-FPS. It was a real FPS. No smoke and mirrors. Sometimes it would lag tho!

And exactly like Halo, BF and UT and all that, it had a crazy ton of vehicles.

There are not levels. you progress through ranks by killing and doing stuff like hacking and sniping, and reviving and all that. then you customize your man with a gun and abillities.


I remember once I was with a Squad. We where about 10 guys, so we where just enough for the dropship. god the dropship rocked. every single player had a turrent. we where 10 people flying through the air. then we got to the base, where around 50-100 others of our guys was in the process of hacking the base. The base had shown little resisdence, and since this was at release not many people really understood the game.

then it got f**ked up. I remember when we had just finished hacking, and I remember just walking outside the base. This massive base. And.. and... I swear to god. I saw like 500 motherf**King enemies going against me in tanks. i remember taking cover behind a large rock, while i freakin screamed in the chat channel: "OMG. Many enemies west of here. OMG OMG OMG"!

God that was unbeliveable. that felt like a real war. it felt like... I have never seen anything like that since. Nothing of that scope. Nothing that gives the same feeling of being a little dude in a massive war. we where around 1000 people in that battle. incredible. really was.
Planetside is special.



So was SWG. I remember making my entire city with my guild. we controlled the economy of the server. we could take the hole economy hostage. we had the most talented crafters and the best materials to make all the items. everything in SWG was built by players! there was no uber loot. it was awesome!

I owned the game in its opening months too, there was so many epic battles when taking over key buildings, no game will top this for a long time yet.

 

[wayward archer]

Eve online, perhaps because of the nature of how they put every player on the same server, is full of epic events. The heist mentioned was huge but has been surpassed many times in the history of that game.

To me one of the most fascinating stories was how Red Alliance (a russian guild) was nearly obliterated by a massive mixed alliance fleet but somehow managed to hold them off in their home system in a last ditch stalingrad type defense and then eventually win back all of their territory.

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=564

One of the oldest surviving groups in EVE, Red Alliance has always been known as a fearsome, cold-blooded outfit. Possessing modest numbers, but a will to use any means necessary to win--including tactics deemed dishonorable by much of the EVE community--RA soon became one of the most hated organizations in the game.

This lead to a steady verbal attack by their enemies, who used the EVE forums and in-game chat channels to spread anti-Russian propaganda. "For two years, Lotka Volterra and the Southern Coalition fighting RA would basically fling every racist stereotype about Russians onto the forums that you could imagine," says GoonSwarm's Mittani. "Really over-the-top, obvious racist stuff, like 'They're feeding their families by selling isk for money over Ebay,' jokes about buying Russian brides, calling them 'Russian Dogs.'

"RA gets very offended about attacks on their ethnicity... Even today, RA leaders will be able to tell you which LV individual pilots smack-talked them in local and made racist jokes. They'll drop anything to go kill them or hurt them in-game."

Sure enough, with no prompting, UAxDeath recalled the harassment in a separate interview: "Russian dogs. Feed our children. I still have those screenshots."

With this bad blood in mind, the two space navies readied for a showdown. The battle-lines were pathetically mismatched from the beginning: the Southern Coalition fronted over 300 ships, including 60 siege-deployable dreadnought-class capital ships and 30 fighter-carriers. In response, Red Alliance could only scrape together around 50 ships, total. More than a mismatch, the forthcoming assault was shaping up to be a massacre.

On a Friday morning, the combined Coalition fleet calmly jumped into C-J6. After enemy dreadnoughts quickly put one Red Alliance station into its reinforced mode, the rag-tag Red Alliance gang entered the fray, and began the fight for its life.

Even going on right now, the war between the Band of Brother's alliance and the Southern Coalition is just epic in scale, thousands of players contributing in an all out economic/military/political war that has lasted for more than a year. Lot of bad blood brewing in that game, but it's fun to follow.

 

[Momar]

The Opening of Ahn'Quiraj was unbelievably epic. I was on Mannoroth in Macabre; we were the first in the world to get the scepter, but horde pwned us in opening the gate. We were second overall behind Medivh.

 

[MrPing1000]

Planetside was awesome back in the day. It's a shadow of it's former self now, too few players for epic battles and a load of crap the devs added messed things up.

Oh and the 3 sides have never been balanced propertly. (Jackhammer lol)

 

[Gowans]

great thread, I love hearing about this sort of stuf, EVE seems to be a gold mine for it, I love hearing about whats going on their (tho I didnt get past the epic tutorial) as its such a soap and real hatred is going on in their war.

 

[rollingstart]

Here's one I thought was awesome, posted without permission.



Link

that sounds awesome.

 

[Grayman]

It sucks how the great experiences of MMOs will die because of the developers adding to the game.

 

[Concept17]

MMOs are 95% tedium and 5% awesome.

Also, notice that many of the stuff that people really liked was unintended or even specifically undesired by the designer. The 5% awesome is in most cases accidental.

I disagree. Many MMOs are. Asheron's Call was always fun. I would say 95% awesome, 5% tedium. Even when it came to grinding... .nothing compared to taking out hoard after hoard of tuskers or lugians. So great, so perfect, so fun.

 

[Concept17]

It sucks how the great experiences of MMOs will die because of the developers adding to the game.

Yeah, like when Trials of Atlantis was released for DAoC. That game went to absolutely awesome to suck in about 3 months.

 

[DieH@rd]

Here's one I thought was awesome, posted without permission.



Link

Whoa, amazing. To bad there is no video of that.... As Roy Batty saed on the end of Blade Runner: "...all those moments are lost in the time, like tears in the rain."

 

[BuddhaRockstar]

The only MMORPG I've played was Everquest Online Adventures for PS2, but I do have to say, when an epic MMORPG moment arises, it surpasses anything in any other type of game, it's as close to virtual reality as it gets. You and a team of 20 or 30 people, standing 100 feet away from a three headed dragon, knowing one misstep from anyone can kill everyone almost instantly.

I think these moments are so epic because MMORPGs are actually really hard compared to most games, death means something, in Splinter Cell, if you mess up when trying to be stealthy you can just reload your game, in a MMORPG, if you have to get around a mob without it seeing you, it's damn intense, because the stakes are actually high. It's a shame you have to spend so much time in these games doing space monkey level gameplay to reach these epic moments, but in the end, I would say it's worth it.

 

[Grayman]

The only MMORPG I've played was Everquest Online Adventures for PS2, but I do have to say, when an epic MMORPG moment arises, it surpasses anything in any other type of game, it's as close to virtual reality as it gets. You and a team of 20 or 30 people, standing 100 feet away from a three headed dragon, knowing one misstep from anyone can kill everyone almost instantly.

I think these moments are so epic because MMORPGs are actually really hard compared to most games, death means something, in Splinter Cell, if you mess up when trying to be stealthy you can just reload your game, in a MMORPG, if you have to get around a mob without it seeing you, it's damn intense, because the stakes are actually high. It's a shame you have to spend so much time in these games doing space monkey level gameplay to reach these epic moments, but in the end, I would say it's worth it.

The stakes are higher but imo the games are never hard.

I only had a challenge in asheron's call pve when i went out and did stuff i shouldn't have been at that level or with too few people. that was only doable because of features in asheron's call that aren't in other fantasy mmos. Being able to force spells out later and avoid projectiles(arrows, rocks, and spells) was the challenge.

Once characters are fully setup it is just spreadsheet vs spreadsheet and managing your vitals. It used to be dangerous when I first started but the game got made easier and easier.

 

[ManaByte]

the first jedi ever in SWG was a global phenomena. fans had speculated for years(way before the game came out) how exactly one would unlock the path to jedi.

there was this woman who was the first... I think she was on the bloodfin server, not sure! eventually it would be jedi who killed the game.

We applauded our own funeral.

RIP SWG.

That person who claimed to be the first Jedi was not actually the first Jedi in the game. The first Jedi stayed quiet and basically crafted in one room of his house and ground out exp out in the wild in secluded areas. He never went public and the only people who know he was the first is him, some of his close gaming friends, and the development team who saw him trigger Jedi for the first time in their logs.

 

[Open Source]

I disagree. Many MMOs are. Asheron's Call was always fun. I would say 95% awesome, 5% tedium. Even when it came to grinding... .nothing compared to taking out hoard after hoard of tuskers or lugians. So great, so perfect, so fun.

No way. I played it for 4 months on release. After 3 months I figured out that as a melee character I should have taken item magic (there was nothing in the character creation advice that even remotely suggested this), specialized in one weapon instead of being proficient in 2, not specialized in healing, etc. Basically, I was gimped even though I made my skill selections in an intuitive manner. At around level 26, leveling was just so slow that I got frustrated and stopped playing. The same monsters I had trouble killing, characters half my level were cutting through monsters like swiss cheese. I went linkdead once (server's fault) while running and ended up with a several of my best items on a corpse that I had no way to locate and recover (believe me, I looked). Lots of similar stuff happened and I got sick of it.

Camping was a big problem--not as big as in EQ, but still annoying to go through a dungeon and find your reward is to find the worthwhile part is occupied. (side note: anyone who thinks that the joy of seeing other people existing in the world makes up for this kind of stuff is insane. Also, a crappy thing about mmos is that one of the few ways for people to affect your game world is by removing rewards from it.) Also disliked the stress of maintaining all my mana-powered items. Made me feel like I had to keep killing stuff so that manastone costs didn't outweigh profits from the loot I was getting. And the monster design was weird but also boring. And the game was ugly even by the standards of the time.

 

[Darkpen]

I recall talk of some sort of uber-dragon in FFXI, who, once upon defeat, changed the entire server's world, changed the color of the sky, and some other bullshit rumor mongering, lol.

It was probably Vrtra, but eh.

 

[Grayman]

No way. I played it for 4 months on release. After 3 months I figured out that as a melee character I should have taken item magic (there was nothing in the character creation advice that even remotely suggested this), specialized in one weapon instead of being proficient in 2, not specialized in healing, etc. Basically, I was gimped even though I made my skill selections in an intuitive manner. At around level 26, leveling was just so slow that I got frustrated and stopped playing. The same monsters I had trouble killing, characters half my level were cutting through monsters like swiss cheese. I went linkdead once (server's fault) while running and ended up with a several of my best items on a corpse that I had no way to locate and recover (believe me, I looked). Lots of similar stuff happened and I got sick of it.

Camping was a big problem--not as big as in EQ, but still annoying to go through a dungeon and find your reward is to find the worthwhile part is occupied. (side note: anyone who thinks that the joy of seeing other people existing in the world makes up for this kind of stuff is insane. Also, a crappy thing about mmos is that one of the few ways for people to affect your game world is by removing rewards from it.) Also disliked the stress of maintaining all my mana-powered items. Made me feel like I had to keep killing stuff so that manastone costs didn't outweigh profits from the loot I was getting. And the monster design was weird but also boring. And the game was ugly even by the standards of the time.

Combining the character problems you had with the lack of death items you didn't know a lot about the game. It was a very complex game that knowledge was rewarded in. A lot of it took a long time to pick up especially early on when it wasn't dumbed down at all. Everyone had to reroll or out level their mistakes at one point or another.

The camping wasn't really bad(hundreds of places to level) but the amount of time it took to level gets bad(comparatively you never got to this point)

I don't know when the good mana charges were added to the game, they dropped in loot and took the mana out of items so you could charge up others.

 

[creativity]

That awesome EVE heist story, coupled with the recent announcement of a Linux client, is going to make me try it out, I think.

 

[Grayman]

I am definitely going to try out eve but I am waiting until I am done the semester at school.

Whether I stick with it will probably depend on how hard starting over is if I do something bad

 

[Deputy Moonman]

Where are the DAoC players? While it's not like a specific event, the level 20-24 battleground in Dark Age of Camelot was awesome. There are a lot of people who would argue that the PvP system and battleground system in DAoC are both a lot better than WoW's system. I've played both and enjoy both games, but the battlegrounds in DAoC are epic fun.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Eve online, perhaps because of the nature of how they put every player on the same server, is full of epic events. The heist mentioned was huge but has been surpassed many times in the history of that game.

To me one of the most fascinating stories was how Red Alliance (a russian guild) was nearly obliterated by a massive mixed alliance fleet but somehow managed to hold them off in their home system in a last ditch stalingrad type defense and then eventually win back all of their territory.

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=564


Even going on right now, the war between the Band of Brother's alliance and the Southern Coalition is just epic in scale, thousands of players contributing in an all out economic/military/political war that has lasted for more than a year. Lot of bad blood brewing in that game, but it's fun to follow.

Shadowbane had those...sorta. Far too often some leet kiddies go on a salt-the-earth campaign against fallen foes, though, and run opponents off the server/game.

 

[Stuggernaut]

I was part of that Thistledown AC Event....A lot of us were very upset that Turbine stepped in and ruined it by making an "event" out of it. We didn't like that we were forced to play the game their way. Eventually enough people could have banded together to overtake the defenders but Turbine didn't want to wait and stepped in.

Either way, was very fun and the only time I have ever seen something like that in an online game.

Side note...personal.

Game : Meridian 59

When : Dec. 97 (or there abouts)

What?

I had a GM character supplied by 3DO called "SageGleeman" (SrBardGleeman on server 107) that allowed me to teleport myself, other players, create/alter items, generate monsters, etc...

Well one night I generated a swarm of undead from the Tos GY that eventually wiped out the entire server as they tried to stop the invasion. I was told "NOT" to do that much anymore as it cause some peopel to lag out and die, but was fun for those with good computers and connections ;P

 

[ThePeter]

Blart is my new hero. seriously ZOMG.

 

[KyanMehwulfe]

The Ahn'Qiraj campaign has a well deserved place on the list.

Not only because of the event itself but because of it being in WoW, a game that made no effort and has since made little effort to hold such epic and impactful world events. I'm skeptical if we'll ever see one again on the same scale, but rather safer and less forceful events like what they did for the Burning Crusade launch or the small Naxxramas event.

The Ahn'Qiraj events:

Eranikus in Moonglade was my favorite part in terms of the story or scale. The open PvP warfare of Silithus in the first weeks of the Scepter quest is by far the best world PvP that WoW has seen, though.

Few other great moments in WoW:

End of the original beta:

End of first expansion betaand shameless gloating)

Nurd's classic Redridge gank: (fresh off the PvP server after it was first added to beta)

 

[Fafnir]

Planetside was awesome back in the day. It's a shadow of it's former self now, too few players for epic battles and a load of crap the devs added messed things up.

Oh and the 3 sides have never been balanced propertly. (Jackhammer lol)

I remember Planetside at the beginning, every faction had something overpowered:

VS - Magrider
NC - Noobhammer
TR - that crazy Reaver pilot Ash on Emerald

Once the devs started to try and balance everything it just went downhill. My last time playing Planetside I organized a VS Max(?) armor raid, it was right after the devs beefed up the VS Max armors. I think the whole VS on Emerald recerted to Max armors and eventually we crashed the server. I never logged on again after that.

Still can't believe Planetside is still going. :lol