How we "MMO"d back in the day

I was born at the perfect time as far as developments in video games are concerned. At virtually every turn in the industry I was there and was kind of the perfect age to have a huge amount of interest in them. When MMORPG's (massive multiplayer online role playing games) first started to be a widespread thing, I was working in a college computer lab and one of the "nerds" (I was one too) came into the lab with a game and asked if he could install it on one of the machines in the back.

Why? Well computers were pretty expensive back in those times and the university just bought new ones every year so the processing power was a lot better in the labs than most people would be able to accomplish at their homes or dorm rooms.

We had admin access and were specifically informed to never allow someone to install software but since me and my nerd co-worker were likely better at this sort of things than the higher up adult IT guys were at the time, we knew we could get away with whatever so we found a computer towards the back of the stacks that was new but also one of the last ones to be used and let the guy install Anarchy Online, which was something me and my co-worker had never heard of

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Anarchy Online was NOT a great game but it did have the good fortune of being one of the first games of its sort. Sure Ultima Online and Everquest came before it but they had rather limited release and fanbases so AO was the first MMO to really reach a large number of people.

It reached such a large amount of people in fact, that the game suffered a great deal from not being able to handle the demand of how many people wanted to play at the same time and would frequently "LD" (link dead) you while you were in the middle of fighting.

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Let me tell you how wonderfully stupid the gameplay was. You would start out in a beginner zone with almost zero skills, highlight an enemy in the distance, then hit the attack button which would shoot at regular intervals that you had no control over and on occasion a special skill would cool down and you could use that. They amount of times that you would completely miss the enemy despite the fact that it was at point blank range was extremely frustrating. Positioning mattered not at all and the only thing to keep things fresh was the promise of going up a level or a "ding" and getting another skill which would also be on a cooldown but now your attack rotation had two timed skills instead of one!!!!

Ah, the good ol' days huh?

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You would repeat this process of fighting enemies in the exact same way over and over again and the only real incentive for doing so was to "ding" again in the future. There was also money that would drop and the private economy would have various weapons for sale that you couldn't really buy in any stores. Like in a lot of games, the weapons and armor for sale in the stores were purely cosmetic and the only way you could get really good weapons was to get really lucky and get one as a drop or to grind and pay for them.

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Getting into a populated city was kind of neat because you could LFG (looking for group) there and join in with other parties to get better XP and honestly, very few of these groups had any sort of strategy because there just really wasn't one to be had. Everyone was on the same sort of basic attack engage-use special skill- wait for cooldown - use special skill over and over again until whatever you were fighting was dead or you were... sort of repetitive strategy.

Going into cities could be a double-edged sword though because if you put too many people on the same map the server would crash and everyone would get disconnected.

Obviously they would sort this out as time went by but when the game first launched it took a tremendous amount of patience because you would disconnect VERY often. It became a bit of a literal running joke when during a battle one of your companions would just take off into the distance and stop responding to you. For whatever reason that was the server's response to losing your connection so if several of your companions just all of a sudden ran full-speed ahead into the enemies you better get moving on running in the other direction because they just aggroed the entire area.

I look back on this game with a sense of awe because man oh man, were our standards extremely low back then. The game was NOT GOOD but it was the only thing of its type back then and therefore hundreds of thousands of people all around the world were all playing the same repetitive and very boring game rather endlessly.

We all paid around $10 a month for the privilege of getting disconnected 3-10 times per hour as well.

I know that these days getting to max level is just so easy that often, such as is the case with Guild Wars 2 they just give you a scroll that immediately takes you to max level but back in the days of Anarchy Online getting to the max level took months of very dedicated tedium. It was so rare that when you did encounter someone who was max level (at that time it was level 60) you kind of stood back in awe because you, yourself, had probably put in many hours a day for months only to be something like level 38.

I would like to say that I came to my senses one day and decided that AO and probably all MMO's were a total waste of time but that was not the case at all. The only reason why I left Anarchy Online was because a new and "better" MMO came along and I jumped to a different game.

And that was where my addiction became really bad.