Thats great

I faded away when the remaining players couldn't get along and chose to PK back and forth, making it impossible to do the harder boss content in the game - that I preferred. The grind was bad, but as a kid in school it wasn't hard. I can't imagine grinding all the way to 40 now as an adult, would take 10 years hahaha... If I didn't get PK'd for no reason...

Also didn't care for the fact that there was no high end development for my preferred class, druid.

And lastly, when everyone started sharing my drive faded. Why grind our own characters when we can just share everything and nobody needs to do anything anymore. There were plenty of characters leveled in the game to share amongst the 15-20 players at the time.

Funny, you were one of the people I was specifically thinking about when I talked about Andy repeatedly pking a few years ago driving off over half the server. We would be on a boss run, he would use his own clans locations and come kill me and whoever wasnt in his clan, then leave you guys who were in the clan stranded to go keep training his own characters.

I think at that time you, lisa, jason (original og one), holly, wes, me, nicole, and a couple others all quit at the same time that all happened. A little bit of random pk'ing isn't bad. completely stopping the progress of the anyones playing the game legitimately destroys the game. Then what's the reason them few players are left to get all the good stuff? There's literally no one for you to play with anymore. Good Job.

It's a shame replacements for the Cobalt weren't available before the Nerf. I bet Nightmist would still have alot of interest. 80% of the Playerbase rolled and levelled a Thief since they were an epic solo Class / PKer and when they got drastically nerf'd  the Cobalt was the saviour. 

 

I still think 10mil is well worth having a 30% Vamp Rating. 

Essentially no one quit due to the Cobalt nerf or there not being alternatives in place when it was nerfed (although, there actually were about 6-7 in place when it was nerfed, players just didnt know how powerful they were because "coballlt rulez dude!!11!"). The vast majority of players who have quit during max exoduses have been during times with 1-3 players go on pk'ing streaks for weeks on end disallowing players to play. Plain and Simple. The dynamics of how people play games have changed greatly.

People don't want to play 3 years to make 1 character max level. People don't want to be pk'd 4 times in a week and lose a months worth of leveling. The Cobalt nerf was many many years after the thief nerf, the thief nerf was very early in 1a. We've had the training weapons in the game for multiple years now, we've had numerous updates to bosses and monsters, new stuff dropping, more powerful items coming out, none of it kept players around when people started pk'ing though. This is especially true for the few casual players who return from time to time.

Before you try to argue about that point, 1 of the 7 players ive seen on in the last 3 months, literally said he quit because of such a situation recently. We talked for about an hour, he talked about whomever was the person who had went on a pk'ing rampage like a year ago or whatever, and he has no desire to deal with it. Pk'ing is fine, but when you repeatedly target over and over again, those people will just quit because no one wants to see no progress, and you can say "be better, or hide better" but not everyone knows the game that well, not everyone hs the right training weapons, not everyone has tons of time to play, not everyone wants to hide so they can get a little progress. Especially when that player might only get 1-3 hours a week of playing.

Foxie I think was the main person trying to suggest changes.

The idea on 1a was always "make people work together, don't make it easy"

In general. I've never been the play with others type of person. I've always been in my own clans and only ever have alts in other clans because of randoming items from boss runs. I've never much enjoyed the idea of having to rely on others to do things, expecially when i comes to the leveling system. If I've put the work in myself, why should I need 6 other people to help me get tokens to level. 1a has always been a disaster that many people loved, because I think the vast majority of people never wanted to play 20 alts at once, it kind of destroys the the game. You're just clicking a couple macros and running through everything never looking around at whats in front of you.

Yes, I remember Trevayne butting heads with quite a few people. I couldnt remember if you were staff then or not but i remembered you coming back later. I knew in the beginning there was nothing you did with 1a regardless of reason. But yeah, I think in general there have been times people have been allowed in things regardless. I.e. i was allowed in 30 for 30 quest but i didnt know anything other players didnt know, i was allowed in christmas quest but couldnt lead the parties or give hints.

Regardless the in general answer is trevayne added stuff to game in which he refused to have that stuff ported from multi to 1a. I also remember one of the female staff members trying to recommend changes for 1a on a semi-regular basis and trevayne vetoing it. I even remember one of the ideas being proposed for leveling past 35 being "players should vote on it and if they say yes they can level" god, imagine if that had been implemented.....

tell him no so he cant move from 1a to multi

To be honest, there was a huge battle behind the scenes that players only slightly knew about. There were staff who were upset 1a was created. I think most players have forgotten however there were years on 1a when nothing was changed or added to the game. The staff members had decded they wanted nothing to do with 1a except for a couple who did what they could however in general didn't add much to the game but instead dealt with events, bannings, and things like that.

At the time the person who added the most to the game, almost everything was ran through him, was Trevayne. Trevayne was the chief person against 1a and was actually just extremely open and rude about it. It's actually crazy the things I've read that he was allowed to remain staff. However Trevayne absolutely refused to have anything to do with 1a as well as multiple other staff. It would seem at times he actively wished for its demise. He added the White Ring to the game which is why it isn't on 1a. Staff since then have been extremely hesitant to add things to 1a in which might make players too poweful or make things too easy. 

At and around that time you had trevayne, gaddy, amy, gareth, piggy, foxie, scripto, elf, omega, oracle, pandilex, and jlh. (i may be forgetting some)
trevayne: was seemingly the longest running non-admin staff member and tended to try and have everything ran through him. he did a lot of the higher level additions to the game

gaddy: if i recall did a lot of work with guild of crafters and trying to fix the economy and quit as staff before a lot of things blew up if i recall

amy: i dont really recall what she did but would occasionally show up on 1a to talk
gareth: was just coming on as staff if i recall and mostly stuck to multi-alt development because its what he knew

piggy: ran events
foxie: designed quests on 1a (its how we got spine axe and such). she proposed a lot of 1a balancing but often ran in to a lot of resistance. i dont know how much she changed or her multi-alt contributions
scripto: i couldnt remember who he was.... i dont really know what he did as staff but he was acrive for a long time
elf: i think she mostly did images
omega: quit as staff around this time, i dont know of his contributions to the game but most likely multi-alt only.
oracle: i think he didnt do a lot of design and instead mostly dealt with player problems.
pandilex: tried adding a lot of things to both servers, somewhat of an idea man proposing things. guild of crafters, achievement system, magimoxes, random same day quests, proponent of creating 1a. he was fairly active for awhile but if a recall he generally quit because of being tired of trevayne. a decent amount of his stuff was removed from game, temporary, or never finished.
jlh: coding essentially.
 

so based on that list, i think most the stuff added were by staff who mostly did multi-alt which is why we dont have the stuff. like dverger stronghold and white ring. Most of this stuff was being added to multi-alt with it being considered end-game stuff for a game that had been running for a long time where 1a was newer and everyones though was that lower level stuff should be the focus, not flooding the game with powerful things, and the game needing balanced that no one wanted to do so why do things for it.

We had our own staff that tried to change this or that over the years, mostly taking up the task of rebalancing and leveling that was ignored for many years and often only taken up by 1 staff member at a time. Crusher, Deval, Angelus, and Stig. Each essentially being the only staff member working on it at the time and doing there best with what was left them. I've left 1 person out of this list due to the extreme amount they cheated as staff, but they also did a decent amount to change 1a both for the good and bad.

imma vote Mr_Pirate

its pretty safe to assume its the only level 1 character to ever win a real mosh. i used 14 dark mist potions to stay invisible the whole mosh. pande members called staff saying they couldnt find me and there was a bug or i waas cheating, a staff member (i think aidon?) came and found me, saw what i was doing and told them i was there. they kept running around trying to find me but couldnt. 2 ended up quitting and the last one died of hunger as i sat on the square talking to them. 

it was also kitted out with all the cool items. rubber sword, rubber bracelet of speed... had like 35 armor at level 1

Disjunction was pretty nasty. i remember killing him with my level 14 druid Butter after i cast Lesser Wurm morph (before they changed how morph works) on it and and enhanced it; giving my level 14 druid 92 strength. Also, that's what Herric originally dropped; alternate morph potions "Big Bear Potion" and "Lycanthrope Potion" which morphed your druid in to those special morphs. Morphing use to change you stats based on which morph you chose when you morphed so like Lesser Wurm morph was like +35 str -5 dex and lasted like 30 seconds, jaguar was like +2 str +7 dex and lasted like 2 minutes, brown bear morph was like +7 str lasting like 5 minutes, big bear morph gave you like +14 str, lycanthrope was like +10 str +10 dex lasting like 30 minutes; i forget to other ones. they also had level requirements, like lesser wurm i think was 24 where brown bear was like level 10.

For the record, Butters stats were like 18 x 14 15 19 x as a human.... I was too lazy to roll a character, this chick princess_nevermind had been trying to get me to play forever, she had found the game because she had met jose online somewhere and he got her to play. i missed pre-reset but came soon afterwards before all the major changes. when the bosses comprised of only elshira, zanitos, crystal giant, giant chameleon, spider king, demonic general, giant sand wurm, rel-thon, giant centipede, giant crocodile, and atrium monarch. thieves power trained by letting thieves in SDG steal huge amounts of gold from them and stealing it back, most spells were diffrent (morph, greater heal) or not even made yet (clerics had like 7 spells, druids didnt have natures fury, and everyone ran around with rangers and 1 druid to stake out a spot in large forest to trap people with vines and quickly kill them.

Kalypso brings back good and bad memories. Proudest moment from nightmist era was probably jen hitting me up on aim or yahoo messenger all messed up and telling me i was hot. her, jumpsteady, surf, and i think deval (whatever crit he used?) use to prey on me and princess_nevermind pking us every chance they got. became decent friends with deval, developed some stuff with jen that never went in, and married surf in real life lol.

oh.... the good old days.

I think the leveling items really did help on the 1-alt server. You literally have characters hitting level 36 with less than 10 days game time. The grind isn't nearly as hard there.

That being said, I do agree about boss drops. Especially on 1-alt where you have to get people to do them. You finally get 4 people together and you can only kill half the bosses, then when you do kill it, you get something pretty uninspiring no one needs. Even if you can get the required people together for something like hornet queen, no one wants to see an insect wing drop, or a mana crystal from gu'ul'arg.

On Multi being able to kill bosses alone helps, but the drop rates shouldnt be 2-5%. No one has time to play 60 hours a week anymore like we did back in the day.

On 1-alt the top bosses should always drop good items. You get the people together finally for something and getting a null drop just isn't a good idea. You don't have to worry about flooding the game because people just aren't doing it. People shouldn't have to solo lyzanther for 2 hours for 3 months to get a single ring. I don't think the drop rate should be 50%, but 10-20% on certain things definitely isnt out of the question when you have 2-3 people logging on.

New areas are always nice, but it's just a short "this is interesting" until it isn't. On multi it's probably more interesting because you can do it yourself, on 1a that just isn't the case if theres going to be a boss most likely, and then its just another place to grind without other players.