[davewood]

I used to be a Gamemaster for Tibia. Before that I learned english from playing this game.

This MMORPG was a university project of 4 german students from Regensburg. running on university hardware. Once they finished their studies they had to make a decision to start a company or shut the game down for good. The server was offline for days, if not weeks and the community was anxious about the outcome.

it was such a fun game to play at the beginning because everything was new. for players AND for the guys developing it. you could attack others by aiming with your mouse. so you could attack characters on your screen. but there was no range check, so you could also attack players all the way on the other side of the world if you tweaked the code. also, no cooldown, and no penalty if you aimed at a tile where no player was standing. that means you could have sent an attack command for every single tile on the game world and instantly kill every player/monster around.

Duplicating stuff was possible because the map (including all items lieing around) was saved once at 9:00am ... but your characters inventory was saved whenever you logged off. so before 9:00am you put your amazing and expensive sword on the ground, after the save you pick it up again and log out. now you wait for a server crash, which happened regularly in the early days. (and some might have figured out a way to crash it on purpose) .. after a crash a backup of the map was restored. so you could log in. your sword was on your character but it was also on the ground where you put it at map save time.

me and 3 other people organized a meetup in austria, back around the year 2000 i think. people from all over europe attended. so did the 4 german guys who created the game. out of gratitude for organizing the event we could ask for a special favour. i got a unique weapon, i think one of us got a custom house on Fibula (a tiny island south of thais) ... sidenote: most names from the beginning were latin words stemming from medicine. (Fibula: shinbone, ...)

fun times, also addictive like hell.

[davewood]

at some point i started writing my own C++ based bot. some other guy did the hard work and reverse engineered the bits you needed to send to communicate with the server. my bot was able to log in and listen to spoken command from another character that was whitelisted. i could make the bot controlled character walk in any direction.

in the early days my internet was very unreliable, that meant a disconnect during hunting meant you got killed and loose not only 10% of your progress (thats easily 10s, 100s, ... of hours of work) but also loosing all your equipment. afterwards you had to rush to the spot where you died and hope you were the first to pick everything up. without your top equipment on you it happened more than once that I died again, losing another 10% of all your skill points.

learning to deal with frustration and anger on that level was an experience that was as painful as it was life-enhancing.

[nchi3]

I remember many of these unique items more or less becoming super rare "mythical" collector items which only existed on the older servers.

Do you remember what the weapon you got was?

[davewood]

Thunderhammer ... at a time when it wasn't possible to get through game mechanics quest/loot.

[davewood]

one more .... the game had containers ... backpacks, boxes, ... naturally you could put packpacks into packpacks into boxes into ... :)

a guy I knew who also did alot of duping in the early days of the game once told me that he had so many items in his "depot" (kind of a bank where you could store stuff savely) that loading his depot content into memory froze the game for seconds when he opened his bank inventory.

[davewood]

another fun bug I just remembered ... the higher your lvl, the faster your avatar could walk. But you could also drag&drop items, monsters and other players around. and you could drag yourself. dragging yourself diagonally didnt have a delay/cooldown in the beginning, so with training or the help of 3rd party software you could move really fast. :)

[avenius]

Which was also abused to kill players, dragging them back and forth fast enough to essentially make them incapable of moving :o