I started playing Ragnarok Online waaaay back in 2004-ish during the beta. There were a couple friends from school that I played with; we didn't really know what we were doing, but we heckin' had fun anyway! :3
The bridge outside of Izlude always gave me a feeling like I was going off on some grand adventure! So each time I make a swordy-class, I gotta pause here and reflect on my feels.
My favorite place in the game is this 'lil map that is soooo full of all sorts of different porings (the slime monsters - they're too cute! <3)
I started playing EQ around 2000-2001 on my brother's account. We each head our own characters, he primarily played a magician and I played... soooo many alts. xD
Back in the day, we lived kinda out in the county so our internet connection was potato-quality dialup. Loading patches to the game sometimes took literal days to complete. And sometimes we'd be stuck on this loading screen for what seemed like hours before realizing that the game wasn't in the mood to work today. T-T
The starting city of Kelethin in Greater Faydark was kinda scary to explore at first, because falling out of the trees was almost certain death. But, it reminded me of Lothlorien so much that I kept starting characters here!
I first started playing WoW back in university after a few friends convinced me to play. In the beginning, I sorta shared an account with a guy I had a crush on. We alternated so that we wouldn't spend too much time playing and could still focus on our studies a bit... but I sorta ended up just watching him.
Coming from a background in EverQuest, logging in for the first time and seeing the friendly UI, helpful quest indicator, and even the heckin' map was honestly pretty refreshing. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy the difficulty of EverQuest (it was almost like the Dark Souls of MMO's), but it was really nice to be able to skip the UI/addon setup step of getting ready to play.
When I first made my way to Stormwind, I was honestly bewildered - it looked larger than life! I've heard that the designers of WoW took inspiration from Disney theme parks for the design of some of their zones, especially Stormwind. It almost feels like the buildings are crowding in around you, giving you the illusion of being a tiny part of something much larger. Also, I liked that there was a cheese shop like heckin' first thing when you walk in - gotta keep your priorities! 🧀
So there were these twins in my high school class who used to play all sorts of MMOs, and they were the ones who got me Runescape. The twins looked extremely similar, even among identical twins (of which there were like half a dozen pairs in my class for some reason). And the only classes that they both signed up for at the same time, were those involving the computer lab - mostly so they could play games.
The silly thing was, none of my friends believed that there were actually two of them. They all thought I was making up a second one of these twins!!! But for anything the twins didn't really care for, they would "share the load". So like, they both worked at Dairy Queen, but as one person and they would alternate shifts. So when one of them was in class or working, the other would be leveling up characters in whatever MMOs they were currently playing.
So during computer lab, one of the twins would play their character, and another would play a side character that they used to level alongside me and teach me how to play. I remember being walked right up to the line of the wilderness, and then immediatly told: never go there, you will die! So of course, I went there and died and ended up in this spawn location many many times. :3
I remember spending waaaaay too much time beefing myself up by fighting these cows. They were much too easy, but were surprisingly decent for grinding out combat levels and cooking their meats. 🥩🔥