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Which MMO's original (before nerf/major change) version did you like most?

DreadToothDreadTooth Member UncommonPosts: 150

Ok, so... Everyone has an MMO that they fell in love with or thought was just the most awesome thing ever, and then a major game update completed changed the atmosphere. Usually, this involved nerfing something that was 'just too hard' for casual or carebear players. What was yours?

For me, there are two.

First, it is UO. I liked the original UO, where you could steal from players anywhere and kill players anywhere, guards had to see your indiscretion or know your law-breaking name to attack you and they didn't one-hit you also they could be killed, you could kill any NPC anywhere just like normal players, going grey meant you did something unlawful and people could steal or attack you without repercussions and going red was because you were a murderer and your title changed to murderer and all guards would attack you on sight and anyone could kill you. Also, you could buy shops and run your own bakery. Also, people actually did all the little stuff like go get the wheat from the fields, make it into dough, and make cakes and sell them. People hung out at the blacksmith and the mages shop and practiced their stuff all day, mining was fun and people created mining companies. A lot of people traveled in groups because pff recalling and gating was just unheard of for the average person and nobody wanted to die and lose all their stuff they worked so hard for (darn you gazer!!!! that was MY green shield!!!).

Second, it was SWG. I liked the original SWG, where you actually had to DO THINGS to DO OTHER THINGS. You couldn't just wake up and decide "I wanna be a jedi! hehe!" You had to master 6 skills, (there were... 28? 42? I forgot) and you had NO IDEA which 6 you had to masteras it was random from person to person (I was never a jedi obviously, this is what I heard/read), and to make it harder you couldn't have every skill mastered all at once, you had a limited amount of stuff you could know so you'd have to drop a skill-tree after mastering it and pick a new one in the hopes you were choosing correctly each time. You could find people out hunting weak stuff because that's all they could kill, people prone in the grass sniping ugly bee-things and people actually seeing someone's camp and hanging out and talking while sitting in chairs around the campfire, anyone that owned a big house or a bunch of hoppers was just awesome. Bounty hunters would track people and send their droids to other planets searching for them based on the last sighting of that person. I once was on Naboo outside the starport (I forgot the name of that big main city?) standing around doing nothing with a ton of people maybe 50-60 people, and a jedi comes running into the middle of the crowd with multiple player bounty hunters shooting at him, he completely dismantled them and was zinging laser blasts all around, people made a hole in the middle of the crowd and we all watched while he was jedi kicking bounty hunters (now dead) 10s of feet away, then he just runs off. Also, if you made it to jedi master, there could only be one (again what I was told, coincidentally by a jedi) good and dark master, and if they died, their character was a ghost permanently (I saw an evil one on the wookie planet(I think it was that? its been a long time, it was ugly and had trees)). I loved my bothan, made him as little as possible with big ears.


Nostalgia...

Currently Playing:

Fallout 4 (Xbox One)

Puzzle Pirates (PC)
Dreadtooth on Emerald Ocean

"Dying's the easy way out. You won't catch me dying. They'll have to kill me before I die!"

Comments

  • AlbatroesAlbatroes Member LegendaryPosts: 7,671
    FFXI. Definitely a great game in the level 75 era with a huge emphasis on group play and social status. Server transfers could only be done once every 90 days and there weren't things like paid name changes, so you couldn't really troll unless you wanted to level a new character from scratch which would take months/years to get back to where you weren't depending on how far you advanced in the game (had HNM drops, dynamis stuff, etc). Personally, I felt the game went downhill at abyssea, not really because abyssea was bad but because the barrier to enter was too low. You had people able to enter at level 30 and leech up to cap, not having most of their spells/skill levels/or even knowing how to play like leveling up in normal parties taught people. 65+ entry level would've did fine imo since that's the level a person could enter dynamis and you could still be pretty useful depending on your class and atmas you had inside. The current game is eh, but SE's handling of the current game is too desperate to milk as much money as they can with the remaining player base until they eventually shut it down. I'm not really one for private servers, but if there were some done right, I'd definitely play on one.
  • ApexTKMApexTKM Member UncommonPosts: 334
    SWG pre-cu ftw.
    The acronym MMORPG use to mean Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.

    But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
  • AethaerynAethaeryn Member RarePosts: 3,150
    UO before items had stats etc.
    Then wow before Burning Crusades. . sorry I know that one was popular. . maybe I should say wow before the Harleys.

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  • NanfoodleNanfoodle Member LegendaryPosts: 10,875
    edited November 2016
    GW2 focused more and more on fluff content they called living story. At first it was ok as you had a month to play it. Then they let slip they noticed they make way more money from people who log in at least once every 2 weeks. So living story cycle was shortened to 2 weeks. For a very long time the rest of the game was ignored in the hopes of getting people on the 2 week treadmill. Just turned me off and my wife and I walked away. 

    I thought I would give GW2 a try with the expansion but how they had changed the classes was a mess. So it was the final nail in the coffin. There is nothing that could get me to come back to a game that for 2 years I thought was just awesome. This is coming from a guy who does not like twitch combat and zerg tactics (what makes up 90% of the game) One of the biggest letdowns in gaming for me, next closest was ESO.
  • Krynt0kKrynt0k Member UncommonPosts: 256
    1st would be SWG PRE-NGE, second for me would be DAoC pre Trials of Atlantis, Althought the server that didnt have ToA was great with with catacombs and darkness rising.
  • JemAs666JemAs666 Member UncommonPosts: 252
    1st - Everquest - started with UO, but it was Everquest that pulled me in...
    2nd - Vanguard - I loved the Disciple class.
  • rodingorodingo Member RarePosts: 2,870
    edited November 2016
    - SWG pre-NGE

    and

    - Planetside before Core Combat which caused Aftershock, which came after CC, to be a lame update due to it's dependence on CC

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  • KyleranKyleran Member LegendaryPosts: 43,975
    DAOC before Trials of Atlantis / New Frontiers expansions.

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    Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm

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  • EothasEothas Member UncommonPosts: 84
    Ragnarok Online before renewal.
  • TzavokTzavok Member UncommonPosts: 52
    WoW Vanilla.

    Joking, lol, i mean i loved Vanilla but it was a giant mess.

    For me it is WoW Wrath of the Lich King, it was the perfect MMORPG for me.


  • angerbeaverangerbeaver Member UncommonPosts: 1,272
    My first online game experience, Lord of the Rings Online. For the time the scenery and community was amazing, truly. When Moria came out and Legendary weapons came out the game was ruined for me. I stopped playing from 2012-yesterday actually lol.
  • VyntVynt Member UncommonPosts: 757
    Kyleran said:
    DAOC before Trials of Atlantis / New Frontiers expansions.
    Yes, definitely before ToA. Even when I went back later, I could stomach ToA stuff, or play on classic server when they had them still, but New Frontiers was abysmal. 
  • NephethNepheth Member RarePosts: 473
    Ragnarok before renewal

    Knight Online before the Moradon patch

    Star Wars Galaxies pre-NGE
  • LynxJSALynxJSA Member RarePosts: 3,334
    I liked Asheron's Call prior to housing. Not that the housing system itself was bad, but the side effect of it was that it turned once busy towns into ghost towns, and that really 'broke' a good bit of the world gameplay and social aspect of it. 
    -- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG 
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  • rojoArcueidrojoArcueid Member EpicPosts: 10,722
    I can't think of any... probably Allods online before the infamous Gipat -P2Wfest- update.




  • LeiloniLeiloni Member RarePosts: 1,266
    Vanilla TERA was a great game.
  • cameltosiscameltosis Member LegendaryPosts: 3,832
    SWG Pre-cu is the most obvious one, but having said that I quit before the CU (went to uni) and didn't return. 

    For me, probably LotRO is the biggest one for me. The first expansion, Mines of Moria, changed some things for the worst. There were three main things MoM added that really reduced my enjoyment of the game:

    1) Radiance (aka vertical gear progression at endgame)
    The vanilla game had horizontal progression at endgame. By this, I mean that each set of endgame gear was roughly equivalent to one another. There wasn't that much choice - crit-crafted, helegrod raid set or rift raid set, plus one or two random pieces - but it meant it was easy to gear up for endgame and nobody was left behind. It created a very inclusive community, pugging was easy and casual raiding was a thing. Your ability to complete a raid was based entirely on player skill and teamwork with virtually no emphasis on gear. 

    In MoM, they added radiance. Basically, bosses had a "dread" aura that reduced your effective level and if you were exposed to 5+ dread, your character would just cower. Radiance countered dread. In vanilla, bosses would have 5-7 dread but you'd use a consumable to counter 5. In MoM, bosses started having 10+ dread. This forced you to wear radiance gear and they tiered the gear. You had to farm one set of instances for basic radiance, then farm others for more radiance etc. 

    Firstly, this removed player choice - you had to use specific gear or fail. Removal of choice is bad. Secondly, it added massive time constraints to the gearing process, so all of a sudden the casuals just couldn't raid. This fragmented the community, destroyed some guilds and cut the raiding community in half. 

    Turbine did eventually admit their failure with radiance and removed it from the game, but it took them 2 years to do so and the raiding scene was a fraction of its original size by that point. 


    2) Legendary Weapons
    In theory this was a great idea. Weapons that level up with you, that have their own traits that can be tweaked to your own playstyle. 

    In reality it was just a massive boring grind. Not only did you need to get a 1st age weapon (rare), when you identified it you needed to get lucky with its initial traits (pure lucky), then as you leveled up you needed to get lucky again with new traits. Not only that, you then needed multiple weapons for different builds because the traits had big impacts. My captain had a PvE 2hander for DPS, a PvE 2hander for healing, and PvP 2hander, then 2 buff weapons. Probably went through 100 weapons before I got the 5 I wanted. Then with each expansion, you'd have to start the grind again. 

    I think they've now got to the point where the weapons actually level up with you, and it is easier to swop traits out and new ones in, but to start it was just pure ballache. 


    3) Quest hub design
    There was always some of this in vanilla lotro, but there was a lot more back and forth between hubs. So you might do 2 or 3 lvl10 quests from Bree, then 2 or 3 from a camp along then road, then a couple somewhere else, then back to Bree, then someone else, then Bree again. It felt a lot more fluid and natural. 

    With Moria it was very much "go to hub - grab 5 quests - hand in at hub - grab next 5 - complete - progress to next hub". I really didn't enjoy leveling up in Moria, even though the zones looked great. Luckily I could just power my way through it, leveled 50-60 in 2 weeks, geared up for raiding in 1 week and completed the raid a week later. 
    Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman

  • botrytisbotrytis Member RarePosts: 3,363
    Rift was fun before Trion decided that they needed to milk the cash cow.


  • GaendricGaendric Member UncommonPosts: 624
    Vanilla and SI era DAoC
  • JemcrystalJemcrystal Member UncommonPosts: 1,988
    Vanilla DDO.  The noisy guild airship ruined the relaxed sunset skyline.  Plus the beginner zone used to be hoppen now it's dead.  Everyone is about endgame but the beginner dungeons were atmosphere.  Game was fun now it's elite pay to play.


  • ScorchienScorchien Member LegendaryPosts: 8,914
    UO before Trammel
  • WizardryWizardry Member LegendaryPosts: 19,332
    FFXI also in the 75 era,pre Abyssea.I did not and do not think it is the most amazing ever but i do feel it is still the best option at least for me.Once Abyssea set in you could tell the different direction the team was going in and imo it was a brutal change that completely ruined the game and basically turned it into Wow 2.0.
    You would think the team understood even among the games with higher populations WHY players chose FFXI but nope they figured we wanted to change the game into a close of other games.Their greed segregated the community into a FFXIV or a FFXI or other,instead of keeping one big happy family.

    Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.

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