Did you know the game is now so different it's basically a new game?
Can you imagine trying to play this game with no ooc medding, with a rusty sword - saving up plat to finish your set of mega-uber banded armor??
You were so weak that for the most part you had to group to kill blues!
That's how this game was! See how you med while sitting in combat? That's about how you medded ooc (or slower) - so in fast respawn hotspots like HHK you could get pops before you were ready!
We talked about all sorts of stuff during those long slow meds between fights.
For instance, a bard I was grouped with (in - amazingly - all bronze armor - with a couple of pieces of npc-bought steel plate!!!). He told me about (sorry if you read the other thread where I posted this one) a quest you could repeat over and over in Qeynos - and amazingly you could make like 8 to 12 plat a run!
I didn't believe him. But a day later I was in So Qeynos near the mage guild, and I heard a couple of people say "who Neclo?" So I looked into this, and it was REAL. OMG! TEN WHOLE PLAT A RUN??????? Amazing! What you did was, you said "who Neclo" to a guy at the mage guild, and he asked you to run a note out to Neclo at the tower in Q hills. Neclo then gave you some lvl 40-something spell (like arc shielding) - which you could sell for about 10 plat!
Then you ran it again! And again! Barbs and others w/ bad faction (dubious) were ticked off, so I'd always drop a few notes on the ground for them. They'd run out to neclo - as long as they had the note, they could get the spell to sell, too.
Well, for a few months those of us who knew about this quest used it here and there to get money we needed - a few exploited it to the hilt - but most of us got bored doing it too much. We just upgraded our armor and weaps - and had money to pay for binds and sows - and the occasional teleport (high lvl porters were kind of rare). We didn't feel bad - hey, we suddenly had that 80 or 120 plat it took to buy a Flowing Black Robe (ooooooooo!) or whatever. Of course we started to worry if it was against the rules to do it - cuz it seemed like way too much money for just running out to Q Hills.
Some of us still did the quest, cuz plat was SO hard to come by, and they used to put out a "list" of bannable offenses - and this quest was never on it - and other people found where verant/Sony said that doing any "working quest" was not bannable unless you hacked it or something - and we weren't hacking it. Well, after months of this, it came to pass that dozens of people were doing the Neclo quest, 24/7, and they had to act. I mean, the air in Qeynos was thick with "who Neclo" - and people who could bind affinity were binding either right next to the quest giver or Neclo - and those who couldn't do that were screaming UNFAIR - and - it was funny. But, as I said, the ax had to fall - and it did.
On the Nameless, which was fairly new (I'd moved there cuz my old server was WAY too crowded), an actual GM showed up (a barbarian) and started KILLING Neclo everytime he spawned! EEP! Some of hte players got SO MAD they attacked the GM, and he got VERY PISSED and threatened us for attacking him. They didn't care, and claimed to be calling down a RAID on the GM! He got VERY pissed and really threatened us ... and we chickened out for the most part (people did cast at him and run (edit - one high lvl guy did attack the GM (or talked him into dueling) - we didn't know GMs could fight us - it was WEIRD - and I forget what happened, but ... man, I think the GM actually did get killed once - and he came back pretty fast and maybe that was what made him so pissed - dang, I wish my memory wasn't so fuzzy - this was maybe seven years ago - I do remember something very 'eventful' like a player killing a GM happening - that or he made the GM gate out)). Then, finally they tweaked some code so Neclo wouldn't spawn any more. I saw it happen - there was no reset or anything...
...but I think Neclo had his revenge, cuz a few weeks later the Nameless had a MASSIVE shutdown and rollback - it was painful - but - Neclo was back! And the developers were so busy fixing what was really broken that we were able to hit Neclo for his plats for a few more months! Hah! That was funny.
Well, seeing that GM get so mad was interesting. I wonder if we could have hurt him *(edit, now that I think about this, someone did hurt the GM - he was HOPPING MAD (and that was pretty funny, cuz the GMs on Nameless were a bit abusive at that time - we enjoyed watching him fume!)). There were rumors that GMs had "no drop" items that made them uber (some of us talked about hoping they weren't no drop and looting them!), like a ring of 10k hp or mega-regen. I wish we had swarmed the guy just to see what would have happened.
Anyway, it was a totally different game. Eventually Neclo got fixed so he only gave a lvl 4 spell and not a 46 spell. So I made a chanter to run the Stein of Moggok Quest. But more on that and discovering "HOLES in the WORLD" - yes, real holes! Coming soon....
Edited, Dec 18th 2007 5:49pm by IponemaGirl