So there's a lot of memories that stand out in my gaming on Abandoned Realms. And they range from super negative to fairly positive. I think it's important to acknowledge that everyone does stupid things, even some of the people who help run the game these days, as a sign to people who are trying to be more on the straight and narrow that almost any amount of bullshit can be forgiven if you're honest about wanting to do better.
Earliest "big" moment that stands out was the purge. There was a lot of little stuff like getting my first few pks and looting level 50s and having the University library banned from AR due to the actions of a lot of us (I contributed, guilty as charged.) But with the purge, I totally had a "Holy F**K, what is this?" moment. I'd been struggling to get characters past 43 or 44 due to all the 50's who loved to prey on people as soon as they hit range, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to have a level playing field. All the guys from my school who were playing were skipping classes and ignoring homework to scrape any level we could out of a day to try to hit 50 before a lot of others could. I actually was doing pretty good, and had found a few good totally in-game legit groups to push with, when someone from the local group found out my password, stole my characters gear, and deleted them. Guy was total scum. I still ended up doing a lot better than some of my friends but that was a huge set back. But yeah, a purge was both scary and super exhilarating.
Getting my necromancer denied. So the summer I got dial-up I made a human necromancer and was planning to be the first to 50 with a necromancer. I was spamming spells and pk'ing where I could and having a pretty good time. Believe it or not, I sunk over 400 hours into my necromancer in less than 7 weeks. It was absoloutely gross. I was living off a case of pepsi a day and was wired like no ones business, training spells, hoping to get into Mystics and just have a great time. For some reason the idea of getting a familiar was important to me. Anyways, I am being 100% honest when I say I was up for over 96 hours straight. I was pretty high-strung at this point, and if I had contained a shred of common sense, would have gone to bed and taken a break much much earlier. But I didn't. And then Stryth, who knew who I was based off my ISP decided to pick on me a bit, and I LOST IT. Flipped out like a ninja and cursed him out for picking on me, it was super ugly. He went from gentle bullying to full tilt deny in about 2 minutes. I honestly sat there stunned for like 20 minutes not believing that just happened. Then I went to the spare guest room and cried like a little kid, and passed out, for an entire 25 hours. It was just past noon on a Tuesday when I fell asleep, and when I woke up, there was still sun coming in the window, and the clock was just past 1 pm. I felt like a million bucks (other than needing to piss really badly), and thought to myself "Best hour sleep of my life!". Went upstairs and my parents were shocked to see me, assuming I'd gotten a ride into town and spent the night at a friends, at which point I discovered it was Wednesday. In retrospect, I think if I'd just gone along with Stryth picking on me for a little bit, that's probably as far as it would have gone, it was never wise to mess with the bull, because that'll get you the horns. Just bad timing all around really.
My first 50. Myrkul the shaman, I have a blog post touching on this, so I'll just sum it up by saying it really felt like an achievement and I did a lot with him and learned a lot that helped me down the road.
My first caballed char. Knights and Justice had always been the two cabals I wanted into the most, and when I was feeling like my opportunity had come, Knights definitely had a lot less members (Pretty much Yilhet and a few inactive paladins). So I made a guy to 35 (this was the point to stop at back in the day), and started training skills and spells, and pk'ing a lot of people, I really honed my tracking skills at this point, because killing people with dispel undead and a mace takes a lot of time usually. After being Wanted 5 or 6 times and spending a couple hundred hours training in the Galaxy (Such a great stock area), they finally let me in after getting a lecture about how I should continue to prove I earned it, and I then started grinding down my 170k xp hole (totally a funny story with me leveling with Myria before she got imm'd and pissing her off during the process). So at just over 260 hours I finally got my first cabal character and made it to 50. Had a great time with this character, he was pretty much unkillable, and solo'd lots of scary stuff groups in this day would struggle with. Even got tattoo'd right before I deleted, back in the day of tattoos being super rare. Great memories all around.
Getting Imm'd. Honestly, was probably too soon for me. I got to run Warlords, and felt like I did a good job of walking a lot of the newer Warlords through the basics, and definitely loved rocking out the description room and name change room when it was slow. But I was pretty young and full of piss and vinegar and loved to get into arguments so it wasn't a surprise when I got canned for being
too argumentitive with other Imms. I took it pretty well I thought, and just enjoyed my graduation summer with a lot of drinking and campfires.
Mass denying. So there's still chunks of this on the forum if you can find it, basically my friend Matt (Kalist to you folks who might remember), asked me to use one of his characters so he could beat him with his Warlord to get his record up in hopes of a promotion. I gave two shits and did so since we were having a slow Saturday, and before I know it, I find that since I payed attention last, the rules for that now entailed the denying of all characters from both parties, and all of a sudden I found myself with a lot of denied characters, most noticably my Warlord Kanata and my Herald Dabilor. That really made me feel shitty, as I was really attached to Dabilor at the time. http://www.network54.com/Search/view/109789/1067931912/Fuck+me+up+the+goat+ass.?term=ratings&page=53849 for anyone curious. Was pretty soul crushing at the time, and at which point I took a break for at least half a year or so, until I moved back to my hometown from where I had been living. Definitely morale to the story here being, never do anything shady, even if you think it's harmless.
2005(ish) to present: I was re-immed and was around for a bit, but the evil temptation of WoW and real life pulled me away so I went idle on and off for a few years, had a kid, definitely did not show up much over the next half decade, and just resurfaced recently. Noticed a lot of old players I used to interact with are gone, along with some of the staff. But part of the good things about Abandoned Realms is that when you come back after being AWOL for 5 or 10 years, people just kind of quietly welcome you back as an old friend they haven't seen in a long time and you can just continue on like you never left. It's a nice feeling to have really.
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