Cycopl

whoops

sorry for not updating for such a long time. I forgot my movable type password. Not a whole lot happened anyway... In summary, I moved back to tulsa from norman, I started working as a projectionist at the riverwalk, and I upgraded my comp a lot. All caught up.

I've been playing a game lately that is a server emulator of an MMORPG that has been out for more than half a decade and is currently dying a slow, painful death. I'm not at liberty to talk about it, but let's refer to the game by the codename "Fasheron's Ball". I played Fasheron's Ball for years after it was released, watched it begin with a playerbase full of confused newbies who didn't know how to play, and grow into a playerbase full of lazy high levels who cared more about macroing their characters to the level cap (and beyond) than actually playing the game.

When the game was first released, the early levels were a challenge. Eventually, with the advent of third-party software that could control the game for you, the earlier levels became more of a mere nuisance than a challenging hump to get over. People started creating "buffbots" that just sat in the game, and accepted pre-set commands from players that gave them free buffs. To compensate for the drop in the difficulty curve, the developers just made the monsters harder, and the spawns more inconvenient for lower levels, making the game even harder for legitimate lower level players. Much more has happened since then, but that's around the time I quit playing.

Anyway, this server emulator is basically an exact clone of the game. All of the monsters are there, dungeons, towns, items, quests, everything. It is a huge world, but the population is very limited and the administrater wishes to keep the server secret and any knowledge of its existence unknown. It's almost like playing back in november '99 again, except everybody already knows how to play the game. The special debug client required to play the server emulator doesn't allow the use of third-party programs, so it's almost like we're getting to see how this game was meant to be, untainted by the evil third party programs that cheapen the experience and the game as a whole. It's kind of something that I and a lot of other people that played on the PvP server have hoped for for a long time. I really hope that it lasts, and also that the creators of the emulator decide to release it to the public, so more servers can open up and cultivate their own communities. It has potential to be great, but it's held back by some guys afraid of being caught. :(