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New member introductions / First post - UO memories :)
« on: July 01, 2011, 10:51:02 PM »
Hey everyone, I'm Dan and for my first post I thought I'd share some of my best UO memories.
In 7th grade I had a close friend who shared a strong interest in video games. We played Goldeneye on the n64, which was an amazing game back then. He found out about UO somehow, and started talking to me about it at school on lunch breaks. He would tell me things like "you can tame dragons, or be a wizard, or beat people up with weapons". We would spend our lunches coming up with the most ridiculous things that we were going to do in UO when we finally got the game. Hours of time spent pondering the possibilities before even purchasing the game.
Come December of 1997, I received the game as my birthday present. I had a party at my house for my friends, and played the game nonstop through the party. The following Saturday and Sunday, I played for 12 hours a day. Less than 3 full days of having the game, my parents had established "rules" about my play time. I was hooked like I had never been hooked before.
I goofed around on Baja for a while, doing whatever a 12-13 year old does in video games. No particular direction to my characters, no understanding of the rules whatsoever. I stole books from bookcases, tried fighting any NPC or player I saw outside of town. I don't have many memories of this time in the game, as I didn't do much of anything useful.
At this time, the game was pretty popular among the gamers at my school, and everyone who played knew each other. Another friend suggested to come play on Great Lakes because he had money and a house and could help me get a better understanding of the game. I started a character there, and that is when the fun really started. He and a few other friends were into stealing houses... hiding next to someone's front door (under their vendor) and stealing the key out of their backpack. Then, we would wait for the guy to come back to his house with his extra key(s) and try to move his stuff out before we stole it all. By then we would have people hidden inside the house and nuke the crap out of them and steal the key. My friends and I had keys to 20+ houses while doing this, and would use them to macro or train skills. You could trap mobs back then, so we would bring in liches and such and steal the scrolls and gold that would repeat spawn in their backpacks.
I started getting into PvP from the exposure to the ganking while stealing houses, and joined one of the guilds that was in a major war at the time. Their name might have been EWK or WK (Elite Wolven Knights, or Wolven Knights). I never moved up the ranks in the guild, but I sure had a ton of fun fighting near the eastern Brit bank! Archer mages were really popular then, and that was my favorite time in UO. Casting explosions and arming my heavy x-bow before running onto screen to nuke people was sweet. I remember waiting for people to die by the bank to steal their gear too... eyeballing everyone's gear to see who had the vanq weps out and waiting for them to get ganked... then everyone would rush in and try and quickly grab the item and toss it in their bankbox before getting guardwhacked / ganked for going grey.
I played solidly up and through the release of T2A and into Age of Shadows (age of Diablo II as some called it). I can remember having to be at school the day it released, and my best friend who I played with took the day off. He got a max size custom just outside of Luna with a little pond in front. By the time I got home, I had to run NE out of Luna for a solid 5 minutes before I got a much smaller place. I still can't believe my dick friend wouldn't log onto my account to place my house for me before I got home. The game was so confusing then for me... new skills, new items, new dungeons... It was all so exciting, but I wasn't able to keep up with the changes.
That's when I discovered macroing. I started out running the 8x8er to raise my magery east of Moonglow. I then discovered what I assume was easyUO, and started running scripts to get a crafter skilled up. I ended up with 100 BS, 100 alchy, 100 tailoring, and 80-90+ carp and tinkering. There was an exploit at the time that allowed a person to create an item to place in their house (might have been a training dummy...), and smash it with an axe. You would buy boards off a NPC vendor for say... 3 gold... and you'd place the deed in the house, smash it with an axe, and you'd get ingots which would sell for 8gp I believe. I wrote my own script to do this for me, and made 3mil plus from doing it. The script combined uoassist, easyuo, and UO Autopilot, and I had to be there to change what my guy was doing. It was the coolest thing I had done in the game - far more fun than anything else.
Somehow me and my friend who I played the game with all those years lost interest in UO. I don't remember what happened... we were in highschool by then, so it was probably friends and parties or something that took us away from it. We both have returned to the game many times over the years to goof around, but never really stuck with it.
I was playing WoW for the majority of the past 4-5 years, since before any of the expansions. The enjoyment of the game seemed trivial compared to even the most mundane things that I had done in UO, but it was what all my friends were playing. The game totally lost all playability for me after the most recent expansion, and I have been lost at sea when it comes to games since. I played some Eve online, but couldn't keep my eyes open long when playing due to how boring I find it. I played some Dwarf Fortress (awesome game, highly recommend it), but it wore itself out over time.
I started joking around with my game friends that I keep in touch with that "all new games are bad, going to go back to old games. Reactivating UO account." As a lifelong recovering UO addict, I knew the seed had been planted. I said it too many times. Just like saying "beetlejuice" 3 times summons Beetlejuice, I had summoned the full wrath of UO back upon myself. I spend a few hours looking at stratics and uoguide.com to see what was new, knowing very well that nothing had to be new. I reactivated my old account that still works, and haven't looked back since. I was happy to find that scripting hadn't disappeared, and that EA and what I assume is the now defunct OSI don't run any software to track my memory on my computer for script programs.
I could go on and on. UO is the greatest game I have ever played, and is always the benchmark that I compare other MMOs to. Those who didn't play UO in its early days have no concept of how carebear current MMOs are. I *bleep* brix in ragefits on a regular basis when I'd hear people complain about getting corpse camped in WoW. I would kindly remind them... "your gear... it's still yours. In UO, you would have just lost ALL those fancy itemz."
Thanks, and I hope you are still awake after reading that.
Dan
In 7th grade I had a close friend who shared a strong interest in video games. We played Goldeneye on the n64, which was an amazing game back then. He found out about UO somehow, and started talking to me about it at school on lunch breaks. He would tell me things like "you can tame dragons, or be a wizard, or beat people up with weapons". We would spend our lunches coming up with the most ridiculous things that we were going to do in UO when we finally got the game. Hours of time spent pondering the possibilities before even purchasing the game.
Come December of 1997, I received the game as my birthday present. I had a party at my house for my friends, and played the game nonstop through the party. The following Saturday and Sunday, I played for 12 hours a day. Less than 3 full days of having the game, my parents had established "rules" about my play time. I was hooked like I had never been hooked before.
I goofed around on Baja for a while, doing whatever a 12-13 year old does in video games. No particular direction to my characters, no understanding of the rules whatsoever. I stole books from bookcases, tried fighting any NPC or player I saw outside of town. I don't have many memories of this time in the game, as I didn't do much of anything useful.
At this time, the game was pretty popular among the gamers at my school, and everyone who played knew each other. Another friend suggested to come play on Great Lakes because he had money and a house and could help me get a better understanding of the game. I started a character there, and that is when the fun really started. He and a few other friends were into stealing houses... hiding next to someone's front door (under their vendor) and stealing the key out of their backpack. Then, we would wait for the guy to come back to his house with his extra key(s) and try to move his stuff out before we stole it all. By then we would have people hidden inside the house and nuke the crap out of them and steal the key. My friends and I had keys to 20+ houses while doing this, and would use them to macro or train skills. You could trap mobs back then, so we would bring in liches and such and steal the scrolls and gold that would repeat spawn in their backpacks.
I started getting into PvP from the exposure to the ganking while stealing houses, and joined one of the guilds that was in a major war at the time. Their name might have been EWK or WK (Elite Wolven Knights, or Wolven Knights). I never moved up the ranks in the guild, but I sure had a ton of fun fighting near the eastern Brit bank! Archer mages were really popular then, and that was my favorite time in UO. Casting explosions and arming my heavy x-bow before running onto screen to nuke people was sweet. I remember waiting for people to die by the bank to steal their gear too... eyeballing everyone's gear to see who had the vanq weps out and waiting for them to get ganked... then everyone would rush in and try and quickly grab the item and toss it in their bankbox before getting guardwhacked / ganked for going grey.
I played solidly up and through the release of T2A and into Age of Shadows (age of Diablo II as some called it). I can remember having to be at school the day it released, and my best friend who I played with took the day off. He got a max size custom just outside of Luna with a little pond in front. By the time I got home, I had to run NE out of Luna for a solid 5 minutes before I got a much smaller place. I still can't believe my dick friend wouldn't log onto my account to place my house for me before I got home. The game was so confusing then for me... new skills, new items, new dungeons... It was all so exciting, but I wasn't able to keep up with the changes.
That's when I discovered macroing. I started out running the 8x8er to raise my magery east of Moonglow. I then discovered what I assume was easyUO, and started running scripts to get a crafter skilled up. I ended up with 100 BS, 100 alchy, 100 tailoring, and 80-90+ carp and tinkering. There was an exploit at the time that allowed a person to create an item to place in their house (might have been a training dummy...), and smash it with an axe. You would buy boards off a NPC vendor for say... 3 gold... and you'd place the deed in the house, smash it with an axe, and you'd get ingots which would sell for 8gp I believe. I wrote my own script to do this for me, and made 3mil plus from doing it. The script combined uoassist, easyuo, and UO Autopilot, and I had to be there to change what my guy was doing. It was the coolest thing I had done in the game - far more fun than anything else.
Somehow me and my friend who I played the game with all those years lost interest in UO. I don't remember what happened... we were in highschool by then, so it was probably friends and parties or something that took us away from it. We both have returned to the game many times over the years to goof around, but never really stuck with it.
I was playing WoW for the majority of the past 4-5 years, since before any of the expansions. The enjoyment of the game seemed trivial compared to even the most mundane things that I had done in UO, but it was what all my friends were playing. The game totally lost all playability for me after the most recent expansion, and I have been lost at sea when it comes to games since. I played some Eve online, but couldn't keep my eyes open long when playing due to how boring I find it. I played some Dwarf Fortress (awesome game, highly recommend it), but it wore itself out over time.
I started joking around with my game friends that I keep in touch with that "all new games are bad, going to go back to old games. Reactivating UO account." As a lifelong recovering UO addict, I knew the seed had been planted. I said it too many times. Just like saying "beetlejuice" 3 times summons Beetlejuice, I had summoned the full wrath of UO back upon myself. I spend a few hours looking at stratics and uoguide.com to see what was new, knowing very well that nothing had to be new. I reactivated my old account that still works, and haven't looked back since. I was happy to find that scripting hadn't disappeared, and that EA and what I assume is the now defunct OSI don't run any software to track my memory on my computer for script programs.
I could go on and on. UO is the greatest game I have ever played, and is always the benchmark that I compare other MMOs to. Those who didn't play UO in its early days have no concept of how carebear current MMOs are. I *bleep* brix in ragefits on a regular basis when I'd hear people complain about getting corpse camped in WoW. I would kindly remind them... "your gear... it's still yours. In UO, you would have just lost ALL those fancy itemz."
Thanks, and I hope you are still awake after reading that.
Dan