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Sixfools
Aug 27, 2005

You be the Moon,
I'll be the Earth
And when we burst
Start over, oh, darling

https://soundcloud.com/thwargle/gamesdead-el-oh-el


Asheron's Call is a fantasy MMO that was developed and released by Turbine Entertainment in 1999. With free monthly patches, Asheron's Call has had over 100 content updates in the 12+ years since its release until it's sunset in 2017. When Turbine split from Warner Brothers to become Standing Stone games, Asheron's Call was left behind to secure the IP rights for DDO and LotR in the bargaining.

The game takes place in the land of Dereth. Asheron Realaidain is a Yalaini mage and central character in the story of Asheron's Call. His research into portal magic inadvertently led to the demise and departure of his people, thanks in part to a fellow mage named Gaerlan for leaving a gateway open on the Olthoi home world. Virindi tampering would later lead to portals appearing on planets that the Yalaini had once explored, including Ispar. Ispar is the name of the planet where humans originate from. Ispar is the name of the only known landmass on this world, and is thus the name of the world. Ursuin, rats, cattle, and rabbits are also from Ispar. Humans from Ispar are known as Isparians. The four heritages (Aluvian, Gharu'ndim, Sho, and Viamontian) currently found in Dereth on the planet Auberean are all Isparians.

There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the basic summary of events. The four main races of the game were pulled through a one-way portal from their world to the world of Auberean, and thrust into a war for survival against the Olthoi, a race of giant bugs. The lore in this game is deep, and you can spend your entire gaming experience just figuring it all out if you'd like to. The lore is pretty good, and doesn't include a lot of the go-to fantasy tropes like dragons, elves, and so on.

Skills and Classes

As you kill creatures in the world, you will gain Skill Points which can be spent to increase any of your skills. Instead of cookie-cutter "mage" or "melee" templates, you have full control over what your character can and can't do in the world (sometimes to your detriment!). Current skills are raised with Skill Points, while skills such as "Bow" or "Magic Defense" are purchased via Skill Credits. You initially have 50 Skill Credits to work with, and will gain more on your way to the maximum level of 275. If after creation, you discover you made a mistake in selecting your skills, or if you want to specialize additional skills, you can do so with different Skill Redistribution quests. While it may take some time to move things around, your character template is never set in stone.

Emulators and Preservation Project

Prior to the games sunset, packet capturing was utilised by the still active playerbase to interact with as much of the game as possible to later reverse engineer a way to host personal servers. Early methods were clunky but now the two existing branches are almost close to the end of retail experience. Content restoration updates are still occurring regularly with a few actively populated servers hovering around 200-800 people and bots.

There are two main emulator groups, GDLE is mostly closed to outside development and hosts 2 of the most populated servers (Reefcull, Harvestbud) ACE is open and does not host their own servers, the most populated server is Coldeve. ACE is the closet to the End of Retail content restoration. Setting up an ACE server for your own use is easy and can be hosted on a Raspberry Pi4 even.
Thwargle Launcher is used by both emulators to create and manage accounts for player servers.

Seedsow is the only Pre-Master of Arms (weapon class changes) server

Decal is a plugin tool that is almost mandatory to use as it allows outside functionality not originally possible by the client. Virindi Tank bundle is the most important for combat macro and other general quality of life tools like interactive world/dungeon maps and portal routes.

ACE servers have automatic account creation, GDLE require registration using their discord

http://www.thwargle.com/ The Launcher for all Emulator branches
https://www.accpp.net/ Asheron's Call Preservation Project - These guys are scouring the internet in search of Asheron's Call media and memorabilia trying to preserve as much as they can.
https://asheron.fandom.com/wiki/Home Most complete out of the two wiki's but also the worst looking
https://emulator.ac/ ACE Emulator https://discord.gg/acemulator
https://github.com/ACEmulator/ACE/wiki/ACE-Hosting Hosting instructions
https://www.gdleac.com/ GDLE setup instructions, with some character building advice https://discord.gg/JsYnAShv
http://www.virindi.net/plugins/ THE plugin set to install https://discord.gg/k235m5Y9
https://www.silostoybox.com/plugins.php Other plugin links collected that will work in 2021 for the most part
http://www.zuggsoft.com/ac/ac.htm The best map of the world, details pretty much everything you can find in the overworld
https://treestats.net/ Server activity data (submitted by player plugin

I will continue to update this post, as the projects continue.
credit to Chakron for content taken from the original AC thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3101288&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

Heran Bago posted:


OP, please include this list of servers. Each has their own goals. I wouldn't recommend any particular server. If it's just you or a group of friends, pick one with the ideology you like and has the highest active population on TreeStats. Each one has a community. Allegiances can have in-game discord integration.



Coldeve - Unrestricted 36 account limit now apparently, most "populated"

Levistras - Account limits & no botting allowed, up and coming favorite.

Harvestbud - 3 account limit, popular choice

Reefcull - Unrestricted? Heavily "populated"

Drunkenfell - 3 account limit, custom content

Duskfall - removed level and skill caps

Morntide - 3 account limit, partial character migration from Coldeve

Leafdawn - whitelist, 3 account limit, custom content

Thistlecrown - "Retail experience with convenience changes."

Seedsow - Dark Magesty -era content

Snowreap - PvP Dark Majesty release

InfiniteAC - Single Account, 5x XP, 2X Mob Dmg, Custom Enlightenment System

Asheron4Fun.com - 4 account limit, custom content, double XP weekends

Frostcull - 10x XP/Lum, 25x Drop Rate, No Level Cap, Custom Content and "more"

Duskfall - 10x XP, 5x Luminance, Custom Content/Dungeons/Gear/Story Progression

Jellocull - "progressive" custom content

Evensong - Spell research

AChard - PvP, 4 account limit

Podtide - PvP

Killiakta - No level cap, custom content

Morntide - 3 account limit

FunkyTown 2.0 - Custom Content


Some servers will have XP multipliers at certain times, like weekends or holidays. "account limit" generally just means simultaneous connection limit from a single IP. If you're confused or have like a family of 7 that wants to play at the same time, just talk to the admins first.

Around the start of the pandemic, I made the server Leafdawn with other players that focused on custom content and events. It's an invite-only server and peaked at the 3rd most populated by player numbers, and may have been the biggest for unique players for a bit but that's impossible to tell. Had an absolute blast, really proud of the custom content and events. I contributed to Lifestoned to help restore content and wrote some guides for ACE. I lost interest after about a year.

If you want to visit the game and explore, consider installing ACE on your machine and connecting Thwargle to localhost. You can see the sites as a level 999 admin and spawn in anything.


Sixfools fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Feb 12, 2022

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Zotix
Aug 14, 2011



So ummm is this a call to arms to play an emulator? If so are they running the PvE ruleset or the full PvP Darktide ruleset?

Is splitpea still a thing or is there a replacement? Because gently caress finding out your own tapers.

Sixfools
Aug 27, 2005

You be the Moon,
I'll be the Earth
And when we burst
Start over, oh, darling
Yeah, both branches ACE and GDLE are working towards restoration of the game as it was when it was sunset, content up to 2007 is considered to be complete. There is one pre Master of Arms server, Seedsow.

Spells can be worked out the old way, you can also utilise scriveners who sell every level spell in scroll form who are located throughout Dereth. If using Essences for spellcasting all you need is the appropriate scarab and proper amount of prismatic tapers

Sixfools fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Dec 10, 2021

Zoopy
Aug 31, 2002

"HAT."
Darkfall was maybe my favorite gaming experience ever

Freakazoid_
Jul 5, 2013


Buglord
You should've picked a server for all of us to gather on before making this thread.

Tell me more about Coldeve and Reefcull, what kind of culture exists on those servers, and which one is more likely to have more active players vs bots?

The other servers are a fraction of the size and don't seem worth considering.

Sixfools
Aug 27, 2005

You be the Moon,
I'll be the Earth
And when we burst
Start over, oh, darling

Freakazoid_ posted:

You should've picked a server for all of us to gather on before making this thread.

Tell me more about Coldeve and Reefcull, what kind of culture exists on those servers, and which one is more likely to have more active players vs bots?

The other servers are a fraction of the size and don't seem worth considering.

I would say both the cultures are fairly similar, very relaxed. People just want to play an old game they love and hang out. That being said I run into people most often when playing Coldeve for sure, there are now global chat channels so it's easy to find someone on to do something with.

shirunei
Sep 7, 2018

I tried to run away. To take the easy way out. I'll live through the suffering. When I die, I want to feel like I did my best.
What is pre-master of arms and is that good or bad? I never played live eq but enjoyed p1999 a lot, so is it similar to that?

FreeWifi!!
Oct 11, 2013

Okay, that's true. Good point, Marquess. Point for you. But you get a point taken away for being a dick. So, back to zero.
Wasn't there a Asheron's Call 2?

What happened to that?

Is there an emu for AC2?

Zotix
Aug 14, 2011



FreeWifi!! posted:

Wasn't there a Asheron's Call 2?

What happened to that?

Is there an emu for AC2?

AC2 was hot dog poo poo.

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP
There's a new pvp server every couple of months and your standard gaggle of weird trailer trash dudes run it into the ground with 3rd grade drama. Repeat.

Reefcull vs Coldeve: Reefcull/GDLE is one dude in a basement he doesn't really do much, unless theres some massive patch he's been working on Coldeve/ACE is years ahead.

Coldeve and Reefcull both are full of people running multibox groups (some people running dozens since one of the dudes that keeps a plugin up to date released a graphics-less client that uses minimal resources). Hunting for rares to RMT or something, who the gently caress knows. Though there are plenty of legitimate players, most end game farm/xp spots are permanently over camped.

There's a few other smaller servers, usually full of weird drama or bizarre custom rulesets and stuff.

If you want a legitimate AC experience you remember play on Levistras (2 client max, no macroing), or uh... Seedsow which is a DM era classic server. Both have super low population though, but when you consider the actual population of Coldeve could be as low as 100 unique people sometimes it's not so bad.

I haven't played in awhile. I'd suggest avoiding LostWoods, dude who runs that is a loving weirdo. Though he does make some pretty cool custom content.

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP

shirunei posted:

What is pre-master of arms and is that good or bad? I never played live eq but enjoyed p1999 a lot, so is it similar to that?

It's when they reworked the melee skills into something coherent. Instead of having a skill for every single type of weapon it was consolidated into Finesse, Light, and Heavy weapons. It was A Good Thing.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.
I played on drunkenfell earlier this year and it was fun. They do some custom events and content and there’s a 3 account max. They also do weekly quests to encourage running of old content which I found very cool. Eg you get a currency for handing in a dagger of tikola or virindi mask and can buy good stuff with it.

Playing this game without botting is just not feasible in my eyes, levistras is fun to plenty of people but it wasn’t my jam. Running a 3 person party yourself allows you to do pretty much any content in the game and it’s also fun to figure out and optimize the automation. You can always play your main account only when you want to group.

In the end I just don’t like private servers. The person running each one is always a loving diva and they are all incredibly cliquey. AC is the best game ever made, though. There is nothing like it.

Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime
i remember when in 2003or 2004, a USB stick with the complete AC server and backend stuff was stolen from a tradeshow booth (they were using it to showcase stuff on a locally hosted server). I played on it for a bit, it was a perfect snapshot of probably the best period in AC pvp in it's history. Unfortunately it was shut down relatively quickly when some loud mouthed players let it get out. C&D orders were sent to many people. To this day I don't know if people who had copies of the code actually deleted it but i'm guessing they did or it'd be released by now. they were tightlipped about it regardless.

a shame now that it's dead. a non-emulated, complete AC from ~2004 would be so loving rad.

that said I havent tried the emulated servers yet, but i'll probably do it at some point. my love of AC was a pretty specific era, ~1999-2003/4ish specifically and more specifically the PvP. I didn't mind it later, like 2008-2012 probably was the last time i played it seriously but that was I think before a lot of the 'major' changes at it's end of life were implemented in the base game like dual wielding and poo poo. my memory of this time period is pretty hazy and possibly very wrong


edit: also re: ac2, I loved ac2 for a lot of reasons. I played the closed alpha/beta a lot as a kid. I think I was 14 or 15. It was a good time. Had a lot of nastalgia for it, though I never reached anywhere near endgame so I didn't experience the worst problems with the game which was the complete lack of any kind of endgame iirc.

I did play the reboot beta in ~2016?/17? right before turbine was shuttered. It was great, and a nice source of nostalgia.

unfortunately, iirc the codebase was a mess and anyone who knew or developed on it were long gone from the company. severlin? I think who was pulling double duty with EOL support for both AC and the ac2 beta (which I think was a pet project?) along with maybe 1 or 2 other people at most basically had to reverse engineer their own companys code to try and change anything at all. It was a bit of a mess, and they did try. It was fun while it lasted.

RIP turbine, RIP AC and AC2.

as an aside, does anyone know of any attempts to catalogue/post mortems on turbine and AC as a whole? There is so much of that historical cataloguing for Everquest but almost nothing for turbine and AC. I desperately wish there was though.

Tabletops fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Dec 12, 2021

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.
Things I love about AC that no single game has ever been able to capture since:

Interesting random loot system. Probably my favorite thing. Knowing that the best piece of loot in the entire game can come from a mob you are killing or chest you pull at the end of a quest is super cool and makes all activities interesting rather than forcing you down a predefined path. Can’t think of a single game that has done this well since.

Challenging open world with a sense of danger. This mostly fell off of most MMOs after the early wave of them. I liked just exploring the world being a viable endgame rather than grinding the same dungeons or loot corridors over and over. GW2 is the closest game emulating this but it’s not really comparable.

Interesting quests and dungeons. Puzzles, mazes, you name it, AC did it better than any other MMO. It was fun having to actually think when I was doing these. DDO is the only game I have played since that captures this.

Unique lore. Virindi are cool as gently caress. Shadows, drudges, Olthoi. What a pleasure to play a game that doesn’t use the same enemy tropes of all other RPGs. Even the fact that there are no mounts, no classes, it just does away with so many of the rpg tropes and creates its own unique world.

I will dare to say combat here. At first glance you will play and be like “ok I’m a melee and my combat is literally just auto attacking. There are no skills”. But the interesting part comes from managing the encounters. You have to be on top of healing yourself, positioning so you don’t get crit in the back, managing your weapon choices to use whatever element your enemy is weak against. It’s about strategy but still moves at a very fast pace. Kind of like MOBAs in that sense.

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP
Yeah this game in general does not lend itself to attended gameplay. Particularly the loot system, which is good, but it's like decking your character out in rares in Diablo II. Except there's a million more slots and things to get, so you just hoard loot and use a program to make you a suit. It's oddly fun.

I'm getting the itch to play again, but I always just make new chars instead of playing what I've already done. Let's be honest, the endgame of doing repeatable quests for Lum is not the good part of the game.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.

PriNGLeS posted:

Yeah this game in general does not lend itself to attended gameplay. Particularly the loot system, which is good, but it's like decking your character out in rares in Diablo II. Except there's a million more slots and things to get, so you just hoard loot and use a program to make you a suit. It's oddly fun.

I'm getting the itch to play again, but I always just make new chars instead of playing what I've already done. Let's be honest, the endgame of doing repeatable quests for Lum is not the good part of the game.

I don’t mind the lum endgame if you vary up the quests. Usually I’d do 2-3 of the legendary quests per day then just kill tasks which I enjoyed. The emulators are missing a lot of lum quests so you do end up doing the same few sadly. I have metas for 6 or so of them but babysitting those is lame.

Zotix
Aug 14, 2011



PriNGLeS posted:

Yeah this game in general does not lend itself to attended gameplay. Particularly the loot system, which is good, but it's like decking your character out in rares in Diablo II. Except there's a million more slots and things to get, so you just hoard loot and use a program to make you a suit. It's oddly fun.

I'm getting the itch to play again, but I always just make new chars instead of playing what I've already done. Let's be honest, the endgame of doing repeatable quests for Lum is not the good part of the game.

Didn't you just deck yourself out in pre patch GSA or Nexus armor and call it a day?

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP

Zotix posted:

Didn't you just deck yourself out in pre patch GSA or Nexus armor and call it a day?

You would on the Seedsow server. Modern AC quest armors are more or less holdovers until you get a drop suit with Full legendary cantrips.

Mercury_Storm
Jun 12, 2003

*chomp chomp chomp*
Ah the graphics:



Could be worse I guess.




The controls and movement are very bad, like worse than I remember. I played on Darktide which made things interesting, can't really imagine continuing on a regular server though, or that an actual PvP server would even be viable in this day and age.

boho
Oct 4, 2011

on fire and loving it
I tried Levistras maybe six months ago because the idle genre exists if I want to optimize a math problem and Factorio and Zachtronics games exist if I want to optimize automation.

It sucked.

The server was full of nice people but Asheron’s Call is just not a good or interesting game to play as a human.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.

boho posted:

I tried Levistras maybe six months ago because the idle genre exists if I want to optimize a math problem and Factorio and Zachtronics games exist if I want to optimize automation.

It sucked.

The server was full of nice people but Asheron’s Call is just not a good or interesting game to play as a human.

I’ve been playing on that server the last couple of weeks and it’s really fun. No other mmo has dungeons like this one that require you to think and problem solve to beat it. It reminds me of tomb raider games or something.

Ort fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Jan 2, 2022

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP
AC owns if you're wanting to go for a nice drive through a game. Especially with most quests rewarding solid chunks of XP and there being a metric gently caress ton of them at all level ranges.

Oh and sorry, Coldeve has a concurrent connection limit of 36. Pretty nuts. When I played it years ago, all the top end xp spots were filled with multiple fellows stepping on eachothers toes and no one getting poo poo for XP/loot. That was with 500~ people on. Now it's peaking around 1200.

PriNGLeS fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jan 3, 2022

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.
I just read through all of the old threads on AC from 2009-2017, what a trip. It was sad to see the entire dev team just get laid off overnight. Also hilarious to see people talking about official private servers, “why even bother grinding on live when we will have player made ones soon with thousands of people!” was a funny post since they never released and now we have servers with a whopping 20 active players.

I wonder if Devilmouse ended up contributing to any of the private server development.

Tacier
Jul 22, 2003

RIP to the game that let me specialize in Run and dump all my skill points in it so I could be the fastest idiot on Morningthaw. Many fond memories.

D-Pad
Jun 28, 2006

Ort posted:

Things I love about AC that no single game has ever been able to capture since:

Interesting random loot system. Probably my favorite thing. Knowing that the best piece of loot in the entire game can come from a mob you are killing or chest you pull at the end of a quest is super cool and makes all activities interesting rather than forcing you down a predefined path. Can’t think of a single game that has done this well since.

Challenging open world with a sense of danger. This mostly fell off of most MMOs after the early wave of them. I liked just exploring the world being a viable endgame rather than grinding the same dungeons or loot corridors over and over. GW2 is the closest game emulating this but it’s not really comparable.

Interesting quests and dungeons. Puzzles, mazes, you name it, AC did it better than any other MMO. It was fun having to actually think when I was doing these. DDO is the only game I have played since that captures this.

Unique lore. Virindi are cool as gently caress. Shadows, drudges, Olthoi. What a pleasure to play a game that doesn’t use the same enemy tropes of all other RPGs. Even the fact that there are no mounts, no classes, it just does away with so many of the rpg tropes and creates its own unique world.

I will dare to say combat here. At first glance you will play and be like “ok I’m a melee and my combat is literally just auto attacking. There are no skills”. But the interesting part comes from managing the encounters. You have to be on top of healing yourself, positioning so you don’t get crit in the back, managing your weapon choices to use whatever element your enemy is weak against. It’s about strategy but still moves at a very fast pace. Kind of like MOBAs in that sense.

Original release AC and the 3-4 years after before macro'ing got super crazy and wiki's popped up was the best gaming experience in the history of gaming. There was and is nothing even remotely like it. A big part of it was there not being wiki's yet that had every single detail ever listed and you actually could find all kinds of cool unique poo poo that few knew about. The dynamic GM run events were epic. The economy functioned in a unique way that I've never seen replicated, very emergent with pyreals not really being worth much and trading being entirely based on what items were popular at the time and with the ever present risk of getting scammed because you had to drop poo poo on the ground and hope the other guy was honest.

My fondest gaming memory was when those shard things that came from the crystal mobs were super valuable and a very low drop chance with the mobs themselves being rare because they didn't spawn in any one place and were randomly found around the open world. A new patch hit and I randomly stumbled upon a new portal to a dungeon that had just been added in out in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere. There was no data mining of patches so nobody knew about it. I went in and was absolutely floored to discover that the entire dungeon spawned nothing but the crystal mobs on a pretty fast timer. It was like finding a secret mine full of respawning gold nuggets in real life. There was one other player in there. He SWORE me to secrecy because we both knew that as soon as word got out it would get camped to poo poo. I was like a freshman in high school at the time and my best friend and I played religiously so I brought him in on it. We camped the gently caress out of that dungeon for about two weeks and became rich in the process. Occasionally a new player would stumble in and anybody that was in there would give them a spiel about how it had to be kept secret at all cost. Eventually word got out to too many people and it became camped to poo poo as we knew it would but for about two weeks we were in a very small handful of players that had exclusive access to a diamond mine.

No game has ever recaptured the magic of that and never will. Partly it was the combination of being a young high school game nerd and MMOs being a fresh and unique gaming experience, but the fact that it was possible to discover something like that and go from being a mid-tier nobody on the server to suddenly being rich and guarding the secret sauce was incredible. There were so many other magical things about it. The dungeons being puzzles were definitely a big deal. I remember when the first island was added with the volcano and the coral golems and it took months before anybody was able to figure out how to complete that quest. There was true danger in that you could easily be killed and be unable to retrieve your corpse if you hosed up in the wrong place. Or you could gather enough vassals and patrons to make an attempt to get to your corpse if there was something valuable enough on it, sometimes ending in complete disaster. Darktide and the emergent politics that came about because of how different towns were valuable because of an NPC they might have or because of where the portals in the town connected to were endlessly fun and fascinating. The lifestone system and the fact that you couldn't own a town in the way modern MMOs do it, but that your monarchy/alliance had to actually guard it and keep from being pushed out has never been replicated.

If I had a time machine one of the first things I would do is go back and replay launch and the few years after. There is just nothing like it and if you weren't there you can't understand.

D-Pad fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Feb 4, 2022

Tacier
Jul 22, 2003

D-Pad posted:

If I had a time machine one of the first things I would do is go back and replay launch and the few years after. There is just nothing like it and if you weren't there you can't understand.

As someone who played during those first few years, this is all true, though I’d submit EverQuest had the same sense of the unknown at launch, and ultimately that’s what most of us remember most fondly—a world where all the maps that existed were player drawn and fully populated with interesting things and dangerous places, but open-ended enough to never feel like a fully curated experience.

For me, AC’s unique selling point was it’s spaciousness. The lack of zones and staggering size of the world, procedurally generated or not, enabled a feeling of real exploration that I never got from another MMO. I could find myself in some forsaken corner of the Direlands that felt a million miles from everything in a way I couldn’t recreate in EQ and I loved that feeling.

Tacier fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Feb 11, 2022

Spoke Lee
Dec 31, 2004

chairizard lol
Is it possible to create a server that stops at a certain monthly update? Like pre Dark Majesty, or like right before xp chains were a thing? I'd love to check out the places I was too low level for. It's just I remember popping in after not playing for a long time and nothing felt the same, Glenden Woods was a smoking crater and everyone was like lvl 300, so I don't think I'd get the nostalgia hit if it was later in the games life cycle.

Alligator Tower
Aug 22, 2004

D-Pad posted:

[Beautiful things]

Thank you for that. It was really nice to take a trip back to those times in my head. I'd spend so long running around collecting mostly useless junk, running through random dungeons and just talking to the other people I'd come across. It really was magical.

The Little Kielbasa
Mar 29, 2001

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.
I remember spending so many hours during the first couple months of AC farming in a little dungeon up north (the Olthoi tunnels, maybe?). It was like a sociology experiment. You zoned into a ledge and you had to jump down to get to the first room of the dungeon, which wasn't huge but went down a few levels. The exit portal was right in the first room you dropped down to. So a system developed where one player would jump down, run as far as they could to aggro as many olthoi as possible and then run out the portal. This allowed everyone on the ledge to slaughter Olthoi with ranged attacks for lots of xp and no risk. The social contract was that the puller would get all the loot the bugs dropped. Of course, this agreement would break down now and again, but for the most part it held. Faith in humanity +, which is very rare in an mmo, especially back in those days.

D-Pad
Jun 28, 2006

It is increasingly becoming a valid opinion that theoretical physics might have wasted decades of work going down a blind alley with string theory. I think something similar happened with MMOs. Had the genre taken the path that AC laid out things might be much different now. Instead WoW became such a juggernaut that it forced all subsequent MMOs down a different path that has ultimately gone nowhere and almost killed the genre. I keep hoping someone will come out with a new MMO that sheds all the bullshit WoW introduced and take inspiration from the early days of AC and revive the genre and the magic that is possible. There is clearly a demand as you see every new MMO get rushed the first couple of weeks before everybody figures out it's the same old bullshit and leaves.

Heran Bago
Aug 18, 2006



This game is fun as poo poo. Solo play, with friends, multiboxing a party, combat macros. Many ways to find the fun. When I played on Coldeve, I knew a player who would have 100 simultaneous accounts, a player who got everything without using add-ins on principal, and players experiencing the game for the first time.

OP, please include this list of servers. Each has their own goals. I wouldn't recommend any particular server. If it's just you or a group of friends, pick one with the ideology you like and has the highest active population on TreeStats. Each one has a community. Allegiances can have in-game discord integration.



Coldeve - Unrestricted 36 account limit now apparently, most "populated"

Levistras - Account limits & no botting allowed, up and coming favorite.

Harvestbud - 3 account limit, popular choice

Reefcull - Unrestricted? Heavily "populated"

Drunkenfell - 3 account limit, custom content

Duskfall - removed level and skill caps

Morntide - 3 account limit, partial character migration from Coldeve

Leafdawn - whitelist, 3 account limit, custom content

Thistlecrown - "Retail experience with convenience changes."

Seedsow - Dark Magesty -era content

Snowreap - PvP Dark Majesty release

InfiniteAC - Single Account, 5x XP, 2X Mob Dmg, Custom Enlightenment System

Asheron4Fun.com - 4 account limit, custom content, double XP weekends

Frostcull - 10x XP/Lum, 25x Drop Rate, No Level Cap, Custom Content and "more"

Duskfall - 10x XP, 5x Luminance, Custom Content/Dungeons/Gear/Story Progression

Jellocull - "progressive" custom content

Evensong - Spell research

AChard - PvP, 4 account limit

Podtide - PvP

Killiakta - No level cap, custom content

Morntide - 3 account limit

FunkyTown 2.0 - Custom Content


Some servers will have XP multipliers at certain times, like weekends or holidays. "account limit" generally just means simultaneous connection limit from a single IP. If you're confused or have like a family of 7 that wants to play at the same time, just talk to the admins first.

Around the start of the pandemic, I made the server Leafdawn with other players that focused on custom content and events. It's an invite-only server and peaked at the 3rd most populated by player numbers, and may have been the biggest for unique players for a bit but that's impossible to tell. Had an absolute blast, really proud of the custom content and events. I contributed to Lifestoned to help restore content and wrote some guides for ACE. I lost interest after about a year.

If you want to visit the game and explore, consider installing ACE on your machine and connecting Thwargle to localhost. You can see the sites as a level 999 admin and spawn in anything.


If a group is interested in making a new server HMU.


Spoke Lee posted:

Is it possible to create a server that stops at a certain monthly update? Like pre Dark Majesty, or like right before xp chains were a thing? I'd love to check out the places I was too low level for. It's just I remember popping in after not playing for a long time and nothing felt the same, Glenden Woods was a smoking crater and everyone was like lvl 300, so I don't think I'd get the nostalgia hit if it was later in the games life cycle.

Dark Magesty -era Seedsow PvE and Snowreap PvP.

Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Feb 11, 2022

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.

D-Pad posted:

It is increasingly becoming a valid opinion that theoretical physics might have wasted decades of work going down a blind alley with string theory. I think something similar happened with MMOs. Had the genre taken the path that AC laid out things might be much different now. Instead WoW became such a juggernaut that it forced all subsequent MMOs down a different path that has ultimately gone nowhere and almost killed the genre. I keep hoping someone will come out with a new MMO that sheds all the bullshit WoW introduced and take inspiration from the early days of AC and revive the genre and the magic that is possible. There is clearly a demand as you see every new MMO get rushed the first couple of weeks before everybody figures out it's the same old bullshit and leaves.

I’m not sure if everyone has seen these dev interviews, but they are absolutely fascinating to learn how a group of fresh college grads with fresh ideas and no MMO “requirements” to adhere to made such an amazing game.

Interview with Stormwaltz goes in great detail of the lore of the world, how it was made, etc. https://asheron.fandom.com/wiki/Stormwaltz_2016_Q%26A/Full_Q%26A

I was fascinated to learn Virindi were the dev implementation of sci fi into a less traditional fantasy world. Their lightning is supposed to be like using lasers.

This one is more about the development of the game itself, with old notebook sketches. https://asheron.fandom.com/wiki/Toby_Ragaini_2021_Q%26A/Full_Q%26A

Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime

Ort posted:

I’m not sure if everyone has seen these dev interviews, but they are absolutely fascinating to learn how a group of fresh college grads with fresh ideas and no MMO “requirements” to adhere to made such an amazing game.

Interview with Stormwaltz goes in great detail of the lore of the world, how it was made, etc. https://asheron.fandom.com/wiki/Stormwaltz_2016_Q%26A/Full_Q%26A

I was fascinated to learn Virindi were the dev implementation of sci fi into a less traditional fantasy world. Their lightning is supposed to be like using lasers.

This one is more about the development of the game itself, with old notebook sketches. https://asheron.fandom.com/wiki/Toby_Ragaini_2021_Q%26A/Full_Q%26A

This is cool. Thank you. I really wish there was more info/interviews/post mortems on AC. Or maybe I just can’t find them.


edit after reading: that was a really cool lore deep dive in the first one. I like to feel like i knew a lot of AC lore but i must have memory holed gromnatrosses (or however it's spelled) completely because i had no idea they existed.

also i never knew about this interview before, and that the age old question of "what are the lights on the moon?" was actually answered and yes it's cities on the moon. that would have blown the community and my 12 year old brain away in 2000.

Tabletops fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Feb 11, 2022

Everyones Favorite Poster
Dec 6, 2017

:toot:
AC, great times! Played on Frostfell from launch through Dark Majesty-ish and every few years came back for a few months to muck around on Darktide.

Are there any active/goon presence on any of these emulated servers? Wouldn't mind dipping back.

shacked up with Brenda
Mar 8, 2007

Just started up on Levistras.

Super easy to get into: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsheronsCall/comments/cfbncb/levistras_100_botfree_servernow_open/

Bot free and no major power leveling, i'm trying to revel in old content with all the new combat systems.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

shacked up with Brenda posted:

Just started up on Levistras.

Super easy to get into: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsheronsCall/comments/cfbncb/levistras_100_botfree_servernow_open/

Bot free and no major power leveling, i'm trying to revel in old content with all the new combat systems.

New combat systems you say??? :thunk: I will come join you.

shacked up with Brenda
Mar 8, 2007

I said come in! posted:

New combat systems you say??? :thunk: I will come join you.

Yeah skills are wide open now covering tons of different weapon types, but races still have affinities for specific weapons. In the past I specced bow/life magic, now I'm Missile/Life Magic and Dirty Fighting which has a bunch of different effects on range/melee attacks. They now have sneak attack too which I might look into.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

shacked up with Brenda posted:

Yeah skills are wide open now covering tons of different weapon types, but races still have affinities for specific weapons. In the past I specced bow/life magic, now I'm Missile/Life Magic and Dirty Fighting which has a bunch of different effects on range/melee attacks. They now have sneak attack too which I might look into.

Okay I made my character and am playing now. I haven't played in years and years, so I don't know what I am doing, but never really ever did!

PriNGLeS
Feb 18, 2004
ONCE YOU POP THE FUN DONT STOP
Levistras is extremely cool, got a void mage up to 100 something. 101 I think, but it eventually falls into: pick a few quests that are easiest/rewarding in your level range, and run as many of those as you can each day. Repeat forever. You can obviously grind forever as well, but vtank became essentially required for a reason. Good server though, much better than the 10 people running 80+ accounts and the 20 other people that play regularly on Coldeve.

There's also a few quests that you can tag along with that technically don't have a minimum level requirement, or the minimum is much lower than it should be. I don't recall which, one was something in an ice cave. It was a t8/lum quest.

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Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime

PriNGLeS posted:

Levistras is extremely cool, got a void mage up to 100 something. 101 I think, but it eventually falls into: pick a few quests that are easiest/rewarding in your level range, and run as many of those as you can each day. Repeat forever. You can obviously grind forever as well, but vtank became essentially required for a reason. Good server though, much better than the 10 people running 80+ accounts and the 20 other people that play regularly on Coldeve.

There's also a few quests that you can tag along with that technically don't have a minimum level requirement, or the minimum is much lower than it should be. I don't recall which, one was something in an ice cave. It was a t8/lum quest.

what about pvp? pvp was always what i ultimately did in AC even on white servers (when you could go pink which was peak white server pvp content). i never had the patience to level up to insane points to do whatever, including pvp. i'd always get to a point where I felt competent (mostly pvp'd with mages, sometimes bows. so around lvl ~80-90) and only had a ~5-10% fizzle rate

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