Ah, cool. I remember reading your comic, along with a few others. Bonedude and platedude come to mind, and a few others.. some jester guy? Hrm.

Anyways, the satire always made the problems with the game seem funny and more bearable.

At this point I haven't played in years, and I doubt I ever will again.

I remember doing something similar. I ran from Erudin to Faydwer as an enchanter (As soon as I got the invisibility spell). Man that was awesome. Running past something while invis, and just as I'm pulling away from a giant seeing the spell start to wear off - whew! I also almost got eaten a couple of times as I DID get caught without invis!

I think it was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Sadly, the rest of my EQ experiences didn't cause me to stay, but it's adventures like that - ones we make ourselves despite what the devs planned - that are the best, and most fondly remembered, imo.

If other people see runescape the way I do, they probably see it the way I do. Keep in mine, I played it years ago, so maybe things have changed.

When I first played it years ago, it was kinda cool. But so many things about it annoyed the hell out of me, such as:

1) The players: I always felt like I was just playing with a bunch of immature 11-15 year olds. The chats were always spammed with some immature people, and it was impossible to actually hold an intelligent conversation.

2) The world: The 3/4's overhead pseudo-3d with a very limited view distance caused me to be lost more often than not. Interacting with things wasn't terribly intuitive, and instructions were often vague, incomplete, or apparently wrong.

2b) The world: redux: It might be free to play, but it's not really. You're really gimped as a f2p char, and there's constant roadblocks and such that either make it really difficult or impossible to get places, or do things as a f2p char. One instance I remember off the top of my head is that I was reading a map on how to get somewhere, walking along a path, and encountered a gate. The only purpose for that gate was to cause me to walk around it (about 15 minutes), unless I paid for the game. Otherwise, I'd be able to go through it just fine. I think I quit that day, but there's more...

3) Quests: They were uninspired, badly written and just downright bland. I mean, you couldn't get worse unless you said "QUEST: HARVEST 30 FARFANUGENS, REWARD: 1 ARFANGENTIUM". I mean, really?

There's more, but that's the top three off the top of my head. Not to mention that I didn't feel that their asking price was worth it, I dropped runescape before I put much more time into it. I'm sure it's come a long way, but in the MMO biz, people don't tend to try games they don't like or had a bad experience with again, and they tend to not suggest them to others either.

Interesting post. What was the comic you wrote? I remember reading quite a few UO based comics back in the day. ;)

The real problem with UO's system was that you never really needed to go into town at all. And if you needed to use a bank, you could just go over to Buc's where there are no guards to kill you. So there really was no real penalty for being "evil", except you had to do your banking in an unprotected town. But even then, you could just hand a blue alt a bunch of gold to turn into checks/deeds/etc, so even that could be mitigated.

There really is/was no in-game mechanics to deter someone from being a murderer. There's no real risk.

Even if you weren't red, once you hit a certain point (have your own housing, etc), there is no ooc reason to ever step into town again aside from gathering reagents, and even that could easily be done with a runebook and a blue mage alt to teleport around.

Chilly

Also fp

I don't think you could *know* that the addon/expansions are going to be $60 each. However, you *CAN* extrapolate from other highly successful game franchises and what they've done with the DLC/Addons.

Take, for instance, Empire: Total War. It hasn't even been a year, and we've already seen 5 DLC's which add up to about $20, and they're releasing Napoleon: Total War which is set in approximately the same timeframe (18th to early 19th century Europe) for $40.

You've got Half-Life 2 with "episodes" of $20 a pop (Together they about equal the traditional expansion, so $60 there).

I could go on, there's dozens of other titles. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, Sins, X3, etc. They all released games and then released DLC/Expansions that pretty obviously should've been incorporated into the main package, but were intentionally held out to be used as DLC (Empire:TW, Oblivion stand out here).

So, I think as gamers we're within our rights to feel jaded and distrustful of developers and publishers for trying to shove DLC/Expansions down our throats by purposefully releasing incomplete games.

Don't even get me started on DRM.. Bah.

I can only think of one or two of those utilities which do not come with a standard, fully-functional linux distro or BSD flavor. Why on earth do you carry around a folder containing common utilities?

Just looking at the list, grep, ls, cat, cp?! Really? You've used a *nix dist in the past 15 years that didn't come with cp, grep, cat or ls?

I do the same, but mine doesn't contain ubiquitous utilities.

Does your agreement with them specify a CIR or a MIR?

You see, when you are willing to pay for these things, you will get these things. When you aren't, you get to share resources with other people. Imagine that, pooling resources so everyone can share something a little better than you could have on your own without any help.

That's really the gist of what residential ISPs are about: Pooling resources so people can share a higher bandwidth connection than any one of them could buy individually.

56k modems did exist back in 1996, as two different standards: K56Flex and X2. It wasn't until later that v.90 spec united both standards into one universal 56k standard.