Your first ever MMO experience

[thejackyl]

Runescape for about 3 hours, I got bored and never played it again.

WoW shortly before Wrath of the Lich King came out. (I wasn't ever going to play a game with a subscription fee, my friend gave me one of his accounts, and still payed for it.) I got addicted and into a nice guild, and started paying for it myself. Played it off and on until Panda Land was announced, about a week or so after my guild killed Deathwing.

Tried Dungeons and Dragons: Online, it was meh.
Tried City of Heroes (or whatever the one on Steam was): I liked the game, but it felt too much like WoW, and again I'm not paying a subscription fee again. (Locking out the 2 or 3 most interesting hero archetypes and getting rid of all the customization is a bit BS)

After those, I am never playing an MMO ever again.

 

[sagitel]

my only experience with MMOs is the gates of andaron (or 4story) i loved it at first. wasted a whole year on it like 4 years ago. then internet problems, school problems, blah blah blah. last summer when i got back to the game i saw it dying a slow death. the sense of lost glory were everywhere in the game. i saw hugely populated areas now empty. i saw great battle fields in which no one fights anymore. and i saw the HUGE number douches and assholes in the game and i quit. so i wont be playing another MMO in years

 

[Tiger Sora]

Back in 2002/2003 I started playing Runescape, just f2p. Played it about 2 years, had fun. Thinking back on it I don't know how the hell I could of played it, but that doesn't matter because I had fun.
Than came WoW in 2008. 3 years. Finally kicked it, been tempted to go back in the last week but I need to refrain.
GW2'ing right now, having fun but troubled to modivate myself in game since my first guild collapsed. (Alot of the guys are army and got deployed).

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

Runescape as well, during 2004-2007 I pretty much didn't play anything else, all my school friends were into it, really great fun, eventually went members (WOOOO MEMBERS!) and stayed that way for a year or two.
Obviously in retrospect it was nothing but an INCREDIBLY shallow/repetitive grind...but hey, part of the fun was locking yourself in a dungeon for 2 weeks and coming out with higher stats that you could test out in solo/group PvP or clan fights. Like a heroic warrior (or in my case ranger) who goes into the woods/dungeons to train and comes out a different man

To this day nothing has put the same kind of fear/anxiety into me as PK'ing (PvP) in Runescape during 2006...if you died you dropped all your gear/inventory on the spot, to be looted by the person who killed you. This is why you had banks to store all your stuff, you only took items/gear you were ready to risk losing into the PvP zone.
The better your gear the more likely you were at surviving/killing...but more people would also be looking to kill you for your shiny expensive gear, especially "backstabbers" who would pretend to team-up with you (working in small groups was very effective) only to lure you into a trap where 2-3 of their friends would be waiting in the trees to ambush you. You could be PK'ing in an awesome group for hours with your "friends" you met an hour ago, be full to the brim of loot you killed and then just before we all decide to bank I whisper to 2 other people "pssst, help me kill this guy now? We'll split his stuff"..."ok ok"...and then we would kill the poor sod who had come to trust us and take his stuff, later he would whisper to us "**** you guys, **** you all of you to **** *******" (haha Runescape chat filter). This could happen to almost anyone unless they were really tight friends. Also the deeper you went into the PvP zone the higher the stakes were since you could attack (and be attacked) by people of higher and higher level differences from you. At the start you could only fight against people within 1 level of you, and at the deepest end you could fight people within 56 levels of you (if someone more 15-20 levels higher than you attacked you died quickly), this is where the really huge clan groups or elite PvP'ers ventured.
To this day nothing has managed to replicate that INSANE level of tense feelings and danger in any game I have played.

After Runescape from 2007-2011 I was a WoW player through-and-through, was a blast. In 2012 I quit (didn't purchase MoP) and took on Guild Wars 2.

Currently I'm still playing GW2 but very casually, only a few hours a week at the most. I find multiplayer first person shooters (Crysis 2 and BF3) to be far more engaging and don't really have any friends who carried onto GW2, most of them left WoW for MOBA's like LoL/DotA.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

My first was Toon Town when I was like, 9 years old or so. Then I played Runescape. Then I went on to ConquerOnline and joined MapleStory shortly after that. I went back and forth between those two games, even played them together, for a good several years. Then I joined Guild Wars.

I've played a great many MMOs, but those are my most memorable ones.

 

[Sunrider]

Final Fantasy XI. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I only played until level 13 or so. I never really got the hang of it. I wanted to go back to it again after some years, with years of WoW experience in my bag, but I never did. Now it feels like it's too late.

 

[Blitsie]

The very first real life player I met ended up kneeling down straight into my character's crotch and started spamming orgasm sounds into the chatbox.

Twas my very first MMO experience too, truly left an impression on me.

(This happened in Guild Wars, for those interested)

 

[Lunar Templar]

City of Heroes (RIP)

got into it cause friends where playing it, and stuck with it more or less till it was killed

 

[Riptide1]

Started with Runescape, don't remember exactly when but, played that for a while free to play, finished everything you could do free to play and got a year of membership. I got extremely rich and powerful selling coal and lobsters and quickly got my account hacked. At the time at least the account recovery of Runescape was a joke because all you needed were a few old passwords to get your current password so any time i recovered it got hacked again so i quit.

My brother got WOW just before Burning crusade launched and got me to start playing too, been playing that off and on since then. Currently not plying it and hoping it sticks this time.

Got TOR at launch cause a bunch of my friends were gonna get it so we could all play and stay in touch, but i ended up being the only one with the game and quit playing when some other friends convinced me to go back to WOW.

 

[Kyr Knightbane]

The first MMO i ever played was Guild Wars. My buddy had an account and i created a toon on it, and not having played any MMO before that it was extremely hard to get used to. I got out of the starting area/tutorial zone with some dyes and a few silver, and hit the main area and was immediately scammed out of my dyes by a player saying the ones i had were worthless (Found out years later through googling, they were worth about 10-20g a piece.

Fast forward to the year 2008. My buddies at work were gabbing on non-stop about World of Warcraft, so in a bid to get them to shut up about it, i agreed to buy the 3 expansions (Lich King had come out rather recently if i remember correctly). It worked. I played it for a bit and found the experience to be kinda meh at first. I played for over 2 years and when it came time for my 2 max level toons to raid, My Gear Score was garbage and i never got to raid. Did one Lich King run, the pugs wiped us on Sindragosa probably 5 times in a row, and the raid leader got sick of it and never did it again. So i uninstalled and never looked back. Skill is more relevant than gear, and i never died on any of the fights because i paid attention and did research. But my gearscore wasn't high enough.

I recently started playing F2P mmo's and Guild Wars 2. Its much more enjoyable to play without the constraint of a monthly fee ticking down in the back of my head. Other than that, i'm really more of a Single player kinda dude.

 

[inklewert]

I remember dialing up to play a game called Tibia way back in the day. There was something about it that just made it so appealing. Like the trust based trading system.. which meant any time you wanted to buy something you actually had to safe up enough to buy it 10 times because only one in 10 would actually trade and not just steal your gold.

I actually went back to it for a couple of weeks in 2005 and it was still kicking around, bet it still is.

 

[zumbledum]

I was playing q2 almost exclusively at the time , a few friends had gotten into MUD's while at Uni but i never tried those then one of my clan mates left a message on the forum about this game coming out in a few days , said it was going to be like computerized D&D played in first person and looked really interesting.
So i bought everquest , made a monk wandered out into the newbie land and got kicked to death by a snake, 48 hours later i was sitting with a couple of guys i had met by the east commons first inn resting up after some orc slaying and chatting about "how amazing this all was" when the dehydration based headache and sickness got to such a point i had to log off and go eat/drink something. after a few hours sleep i was straight back but this time trying an elf mage that became my real main for the next 4 years.

its a real shame wow turned up and broke the genre.

 

[Jfswift]

My very first experience with MMOs was way back when Ultima Online came out. My cousin kept bugging me to play so I picked up a copy and hopped online to check it out. My initial impression was how cool and also dangerous this world was. There were no laws. You could literally do anything you wanted. You could start a trade, buy a house, explore any dungeon you wanted, or maybe you'd get robbed on some long forgotten back road and have all your gear stolen.. along with your head! It was awesome! I remember he grabbed his buddy and we all headed into some dungeon on an island, near his house I think. Anyway, at some point we all got split up and I wandered into a room with a glowing pentagram, filled with crazed monsters. The next thing I know I'm running for my life, fumbling for my spell book trying to find the warp spell. I managed to cast it but it misfired and my adventure ended there that day. Cool game though, very realistic if not a bit brutal. :3

(the weird thing is I never really got into Everquest when it came out shortly thereafter but I did hop on board with WoW when it was new. I unfortunately ran into alot of annoying people on my server and it kind of ruined what was otherwise a fun game for me.)

 

[purf]

the first one was EVE Online and I'd still firmly put it in a Top10(orsomething) list. Not a funnyfunfun game, not at all, but a truly remarkable one - and in many good ways. A nice moment I remember: I was out venturing deep into the fringes of the universe for the first time, the parts where nobody will hear you scream[footnote]there is Permadeath for your ship and all equipment it carries[/footnote]. I had just travelled through about a dozen or so solar systems with the system's channel being completely empty, my only company being the occasional mighty npc owned battleship roaming the asteroid belts when, after the next jump through a stargate, I saw activity in the local channel: actual ALIEN! gibberish. Well, no, it wasn't actual Alien gibberish, just two players typing cyrillic, but what a nicely fitting occurence this was!
Another moment I remember is when I realized how demanding EVE is, especially for a lone wolf type of player and how I should join a corporation. Which was the beginning of the end of my EVE career. From now on, read very slowly. Most of the corp activities consisted of waiting. And meeting. And waiting for meetings. And staring at asteroids. Even the one war we had with another corp was mainly staring at each other from safe distances.

I'm rather ambivalent about MMOs. When (having to deal with) social interaction is obligatory, I'm out. Otherwise they can offer nice and/or interesting moments.

I was trying to explore the lvl 75 map, which was devoid of any other player and there was nothing but events that required a massive group. And, trying to go around them was nigh impossible because every other mob pulled you, rooted you, or froze you. If you were spotted, you might as well starting looking for a respawn point.

Yup. Well, I think Orr is okay as overall difficulty - I mean, it's supposed to be a full-blown war zone. However, it is rather strange how suddenly, after the rest of the game, it very much insists on concentrated and possibly even coordinated group efforts. Out of the 4 (I think) Karma merchants in Malchor's Leap and Straits of Devastation, I've only ever seen one available. Which makes it impossible to get any of the exotic armour I have use for...

 

[RJ 17]

Up until now I've been very staunchly a single-player only kinda girl. I'm not ashamed of the fact that the main reason I play games is for the story rather than gameplay, and so my gaming history to date has been almost entirely made up of RPGs. However, over the last year I've been trying to broaden my gaming knowledge and gotten into FPSs, puzzle games, action/adventure games etc. The last big thing I wanted to avoid though was MMOs - I don't know why, but they just didn't appeal.

My favourite game of all time is Star Wars: KOTOR, and with The Old Republic going free-to-play I thought I'd finally get rid of my prejudice against MMOs. And when I realised that I could play without having to interact with anyone else I was even happier - sure, the other players running around stealing my kills was a mild annoyance at first, but I decided to ignore them.

During a particularly hard mission last night I was defeated, waiting for the countdown so I could get a medical probe to revive me, when another player runs up, revives me and invites me to join their group. AND IT WAS SO MUCH MORE FUN! Of course, that's what everyone else knew all along, but I couldn't believe how much fun it was to interact with other players in the game.

So, to the point: Tell us all about your first experience with MMOs - where you as prejudiced against them as me? Do you still hate them? or are they your favourite type of game, and why?

My first (and only) MMO experience came - unsurprisingly - with WoW. Got it when it first came out, stayed with it until the end of Burning Crusade, dropped it like a bad-habbit (literally), and haven't looked back.

For the beginning, though, it was just as you described: a lot of fun interacting with other players to take down a boss. Even if you're not in a guild and you just join up with some random people, as long as they're nice and have at least half an idea of what they're doing, it can be a lot of fun. Just the way that Secret of Mana is one of my favorite games of all times because "Holy crap! And RPG with co-op multiplayer?! Frickin' awesome!" That's how WoW was. Of course having a massive open world and seeing one of my favorite universes (Warcraft) brought to life was another big draw for me. But eventually, things just started getting stale, and I found myself playing less and less of it.

Despite the problems I had with the way Blizzard decided to handle StarCraft II (which is a completely different story for a completely different topic), I just got tired of it really. I reallized more and more how rinse-repeat it really was. You're paying a subscription to play Fantasy Dress-Up. Want to see all the great end-game content so you can get all the awesome end-game gear? Well you better be in a guild. On top of that, there's at least 4 other people in your guild all after the same things that you are. So you go on Raids 3 times a week, hoping that the 3 items you need from a dungeon drop. If god smiles upon you and deigns to allow that equipment to drop, now you're fighting with the 4 other people that need that same item. In other words, you're paying for a chance at having a chance at getting what you want. If not, there goes 4 hours of your life spent drinking and chatting with people while clicking buttons, better luck next week. Not to say that wasn't fun for a while, had a lot of great times on WoW raids, but I can do the same thing by going out to a bar with some friends without having to worry about over DPSing and pulling aggro and having some guy I don't really even know start bitching at me...all while paying a subscription to have the privilege of that happening.

In short: this about sums up all you need to know about "the dark side" of MMO's

Spoiler: One of the brightest shining moments in nerd rage history.

 

[Mr Cwtchy]

Like others here it seems, my first was Runescape. Played it as a free player for about two years or so, then got bored and eventually left.

After that I tried out this obscure little Turkish(?) MMO called KnightOnline. Bots and grinding galore, why I bothered I never know.

After that I found LOTRO a few months before it went F2P. Tried out the free trial, liked it although I was a complete newb at everything. Waited for patiently for F2P to arrive, eventually subscribed, stayed as such for a couple of years until I could no longer afford it, fell down to premium and here I am.

I have also tried other MMOs like ChampionsOnline(great character creation, meh everything else), Everquest 2(felt too generic), Rift(same as previous) and SWTOR(Star Wars was fun, but the F2P restrictions are too discouraging for me).

Nothing else has appealed to me thus far. I might have tried out GW2 if it had a 'try it out' option, as there's no way in hell I am shelling out ~£50 for a game I might not even like, but mostly because all of the 'greatest MMO ever' and 'revolutionises the genre' talk has done more to put me off it than make me want to play.

 

[purf]

Nothing else has appealed to me thus far. I might have tried out GW2 if it had a 'try it out' option, as there's no way in hell I am shelling out ~£50 for a game I might not even like, but mostly because all of the 'greatest MMO ever' and 'revolutionises the genre' talk has done more to put me off it than make me want to play.

You know, I got to talk about GW2 earlier in this thread and all I had to say was critique - let me redeem this.
~50,- have so far given me 275 hours of good enough entertainment. 315 even, if I count across all characters.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Warhammer Online. It was great, until the population crashed after a WOW expansion or something. I did play WOW, but my account got hacked and had to quit, the RIFT, which I lost interest in. I'm playing none at the moment, but am willing to go back if I find a decent one.

 

[Baralak]

Everquest. The original. Nothing can, and ever will compare.