Larry Parrish posted:

I was on dial up until I was like 14 because of being a mountain redneck so I played this religiously from far too young of an age lol. I played it basically every day between 12 and 18. It was a complete piece of poo poo game, had absolutely no idea what it wanted to be, like it had actual game mechanics around sex but the poo poo was misspelled and glitchy. Like you could use a skill check to grab somebody, which basically stunned them, but they'd wiggle out quickly. So you would simply have sex with them, locking you both into the action for upwards of 5 minutes if the top was good at sex. In group PVP this was basically the ultimate strategy for locking down one guy.

Not that it came up much because the RPG system was kind of a broken piece of poo poo so fairly quickly, like halfway to the soft XP cap, every single fight people would die in 1 or 2 hits through endgame armor and maxed hp lmfao.

Me and my guild buddies used to log in every day, check who was online, methodically use a mutation to see where they were, then send a squad of teleporting mutants there to hunt them down. Or we'd stack up and try to break into an AFK guys apartment and steal all their poo poo. The game had no real PVE to speak of besides grinding money or XP, so it was just a constant free for all at all times lol. Anyway it's offline now and I don't have copies of a lot of the funny poo poo from over the years. I can assure you it was an absolute piece of poo poo game in basically every way, but they made this weird open pvp masterpiece by accident lol. There's nothing that comes close.

Larry Parrish posted:

Like way back in 2012 the admins wanted to player wipe the game and institute a daily XP income and make it so it basically couldn't be ground normally otherwise. This was supposed to be an attempt to stop nolifers dominating everyone. The game would close for about 6 months after only a week or two of this system being in place. I am probably more responsible than anyone else for this.

Since everyone was stuck at around the same XP level, I decided to scan NPCs for money, which used a useless rear end skill called persuade that nobody focused on early because it didn't do anything for you for combat or quests. But in this daily XP era, you got all the XP you should have gotten when you rerolled instead of starting from zero. So I scammed a bunch of NPCs out of money, then rerolled to pistols because a friend had gotten a lucky drop- the best endgame pistol was a random drop in NPC apartments, and you could just follow them in when they went to sleep at night. Firearms worked weirdly in HellMOO- they couldn't be dodged or parried, they did more damage than all but the best end game weapons, and they were fairly fast when modded and speed capped. But they had two unique mechanics- aiming and cover. Cover meant you couldn't be hit by anything but bombs and other guns until someone had flushed you out, which basically meant they just couldn't hit you or anything for 5 or 6 seconds. This usually gave you time for 2 to 3 shots, which generally would kill people without good armor.

But aiming is the important mechanic. It was a check of your guns skill versus the victims gun and dodge skills- if successful, they were frozen in place and any further action would let you shoot them in the head for critical damage for free. Because of the daily XP poo poo, nobody had high dodge because it was useless without a combat skill. Because of the fresh database wipe, nobody had any money to afford a better gun or good armor.

So my genius strategy was to hold people up at gunpoint and ransom them into joining my corporation, which is what guilds were called. There were only two corps so far, the goon Games thread corp and mine, because they were slightly expensive to start and the best money making was in the end game or exclusive money grinding only available to corporations. The game was super popular at this time, so there would be 100+ people online, and rapidly my friends and I subsumed almost the entire server into our corp. It got so bad that the head admin spent like 5 minutes yelling about how my loving goon squad was ruining the game for everyone. He banned a bunch of my guys who were doing the ransom thing, but he just scrambled their passwords and he didn't know you could just password reset to get around that because he basically didn't work on his own game ever at that point.

Anyway, like 2 days after that demand, the game closed for the public for like 6 months and it never really recovered. There were a couple shards run by different people, one of which I was an admin on, but they never took off as much.

Larry Parrish posted:

Anyway HellMOO is why I joined SA lmao. I was a facepunch poster before that game.

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

first they make the new server and everyone is hyped... then someone discovers exploits and then the admin is revealed to be a part of the cabal exploiting the exploit then the server shuts down when the admin melts down

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

AnimeIsTrash posted:

i joined the forums for the relationships thread

AnimeIsTrash posted:

i joined the forums for the relationships thread

Second Hand Meat Mouth posted:

smarxist posted:

i role played a sith empress in a star wars mud for 6 months and had to take a month off from hobbies after she finally got betrayed and died because i was so far living inside her skull

these terrible stories and others in the tremendously manic tales of smarxist

smarxist posted:

i role played a sith empress in a star wars mud for 6 months and had to take a month off from hobbies after she finally got betrayed and died because i was so far living inside her skull

these terrible stories and others in the tremendously manic tales of smarxist

Al! posted:

im a 9/11 kid

aw frig aw dang it posted:

nice job becoming empress tho

Al! posted:

ahego to the polls

Al! posted:

brutally and insanely engaging in pvp

Ohtori Akio posted:

nobody used them for anything but erp

smarxist posted:

put down by their master like a dog

Al! posted:

brutally and insanely engaging in pvp

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

first they make the new server and everyone is hyped... then someone discovers exploits and then the admin is revealed to be a part of the cabal exploiting the exploit then the server shuts down when the admin melts down

quote:

Something strange started occuring with Xirri. When we ended up getting a large forge on what became [?] island, Xirri was racking up a ridiculous amount of resources. He would tell us he was setting up macros to make 30,000 ingots overnight or was going to have another million gold in the bank by morning. Raugh and I would laugh at him but he always proved us wrong. He was also at this time selling the gold for real money through IRC private messages. Every day or so in Ventrilo he had "just made 300 dollars", or some insane amount of cash. His cell phone would ring in the background and it would supposedly be someone with his phone number interested in buying gold. Although Xirri told us he had several insane macros for mules going (which was *why* he was so filthy rich) he would never explain to us how they worked when we begged him.

I forgot to mention that a man by the name of Rixus was the shard coder during Pre-Wipe. I later found out that Rixus and Xirri were friends and that he owned the 2 story house next door to our guild base on the island. It was noticable at this point that some foul play was going on behind the scenes. When Xirri started magically creating several 7x characters and selling them for "$500" and up, the corruption was more than obvious. Eventually information started to leak out and Azaroth made some comments to the everyone regarding the situation... The staff was having internal arguements and Xirri was giving Raugh and I all the details in Ventrilo. We really didn't know who to believe since everyone had a completely different story, but Xirri admitted he was being spawned millions of gold and slowly but strategically having characters skill gains altered by Rixus in which it would be difficult for fellow staff to detect. The purpose for all of this was said to be money.