You guys who posted your email and such might want to go back and read the instructions, just to double check you followed all the them.
I started playing MMORPGs with the grandfather of them all: Ultima Online. I still have fond memories of the game despite not playing it for over a decade. The lagspikes from hell, the 100% skill based PvP and complete character looting, the satire laced adventures of platedewd & B0N3D00D. But more to the point, it was not only my first MMORPG, it was my first beta test and I got banned from it. Yep, banned.
But why? Well, it was common knowledge that one of the key NPCs in the game, Lord British, which is also the namesake of the game's lead designer, was
supposed to be unkillable. But I used a lot of ingenuity and observation of NPC behavior/AI and hatched a plot to pull it off. No bugs were used. And so I killed him. I took screenshots, and then posted on the beta boards, both saying I had done it and detailing just how I had done it, and what could be done to stop people from doing it again in the future.
A couple of real geniuses on the beta boards then saw my post and immediately went out and killed the other key figure in the game that was supposed to be unkillable: Lord Blackthorn, basically Lord British's nemesis and alter ego, who was an equally important character to the players.
As it turned out, because the devs assumption was that both these characters were unkillable, they
never programmed them with respawn times! Further, the devs/GMs had not implemented a feature to allow them to manually spawn NPCs! These were the two most important and key quest NPCs in the game including the title quest which was the ultra cool special name you get given that everyone player was just dying to get affixed to their names. And for nearly a week they were gone.The beta testers were livid because they wanted to do their quests and get their titles.
Finally, they rebooted the server and that fixed it. Sorta. It didn't stop some idiots from soon afterwards again copying what I did and kill them again... reboot... killed...reboot...killed... Devs pissed, players pissed. I didn't do any of the killing other than the first, but I got banned because I "started" all of it and it got out of hand fast. No. I actually got banned because I did the fundamental job of a closed beta tester: I broke things, I reported to the devs exactly how I broke them, exactly how to recreate the "brokeness", and suggested ways in which they could prevent it from happening in the future.
Within a week of the banning I was unbanned. I had emailed one of devs that was active on the message board, and I only sent him a single sentence in the email: "Imagine if someone figured this out but only after you released the game and people were paying money for your product and services." I was even sent an apology on behalf of Lord British himself(the designer).
Because of this happening I became a very important tester for UO, and I often talked to the devs daily on one on one situations. And I think the game was better for my input, or I'd like to think so. After release I carried on the close relationship with several of the devs, and I only played on the test center, which meant my character was constantly wiped, deleted. But it didn't matter, I enjoyed the fact I got to test the new content and provide direct, quality feedback/data to the devs, and sometimes personally see my suggestions become reality or some terrible bugs fixed before they entered the "real" servers and wreaked havoc.
One of these devs ended up getting a job working for a game that was just being put together: Everquest. He offered me to come with him, so to speak. I got to be alpha tester for Everquest, sometimes referred to as "in house testing". I jumped at the chance to play in a new game, this one a real 3-d rendered MMORPG! When I first got onto the team, there were 12 total testers. Only the most barebone mechanics of the game were implemented: movement, zone change, autoattack. Nothing else, no skills, no sitting, no quests, no dialogue. Qeynos was directly connect to Black Burrow dungeon, and those were the only two zones in the game, and only half of qeynos. I got to watch and, to a degree, help guide the MMO from its very infancy to its release date-- and beyond.
I had mixed results with testing for Verant(EQ's parent company). Sometimes they listend to me, sometimes they didn't --which they paid a price for. For instance, I could actually kill the raid bosses (two dragons) in EQ during the beta when they implemented them. Why? It's too complicated, but because of my feedback the dragons were given the summon ability, which teleports the player they are attacking to their feet if they are not in melee range of the dragon. Sounds a little dumb, doesn't it? But something needed to be done. These were supposed to be raid bosses requiring 25-30 people to bring down and I was soloing them with, again, just abit of ingenuity and observation of computer AI. I had a better idea to fix it, but they implemented it that way instead. But at least it was fixed before release.
They did not take my advice on several other major things: Manastones, Spirit of the Wolf, Journeyman boots, and 2hd damage caluclation versus 1hd damage calculations. All of these issues turned out to be huge albatrosses around Verant's neck that caused tons and tons of problems for the playerbase and Verant, albatrosses that could have easily been averted had they taken my advice.
But I fell in love with Everquest, because I had played it and had influence on the game from its very beginning. I helped squash bug after bug, find exploit after exploit, critique unbalanced skill after unbalanced skill, all in the hopes of creating a great game free of exploits and bugs that all players could compete on a level playing field.
I didn't realize how profoundly the whole thing affected my entire paradigm of thought on MMORPGs. After EQ, no other game really came close to recapturing the addiction of Evercrack. Because of my voracious diet of buying new MMOs and quickly losing interest, I started playing tons of the free MMORPGs instead, anything I could find. I especially enjoyed unique games the most, like Space Cowboys and Granado Espada, but, alas, I just never rekindled that flame, neither in intensity nor in duration. After bouncing from game to game, no doubt having some fun for awhile but nonetheless soon flaming out, I realized the very things I've just detailed above were the reasons they all felt so hollow. Without that early connection and that feeling I had a part in helping a game develop into a great game, that love for a game will never return.
So, I'd like to be in RoM's CB, not because I just want to try it, but because I want to fall in love again. I tire of being an MMO vagrant.
