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Originally posted by delak

Amathe you have hit the nail on the head yet again. All to often I found when playing in a MMORPG like Everquest that their was the type of player that you described. I would be in the halfling town (the name escapes me at the moment) with my rogue who at the time was about level 30ish but I didnt have the best gear as I didnt have time to camp those spawns nor did I want to had a player walk up to me and laugh saying how my god you dont have the might dagger of speed. or what is your DPS (damage per second) what you dont know what it is you suck.

I found this type of player in every mmo I have played except Gemstone. The player base their was for the most part nice or at the very least focused on RP.

Also I to hope that Simu makes the journey of Hero's Journey something great.

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You mean to tell me you don't think Gemstone had these players? I think Greentide (first person to level 100) and Tarakan, the guy who has 3,000,000,000 (ya, 3 BILLION) fame which broke the game because of a divide-by-zero error never fixed because nobody expected anybody to kill that many mobs (which is why his fame showed as 3.9xxxxxxxx fame until they cut everybody's by 1/10th). I would venture a guess that most everybody that is in the first 100 players on the fame lists is just that type of player you've described. They want to be the best, they wan't to be at the top of the fame lists for all to see. They don't just want to beat out the other guy's fame and be on the top of the fame list, they want to get 3x the fame of the #2 guy on the fame list so he will be immortalized on that list for as long as possible. Nobody will ever catch Tarakan without a really good script and a LOT of free time.

The simple fact is that Gemstone is more expensive and less flashy than most other games out these days, so most of the playerbase is there because of a true love of that game. But I do remember a lot of people in the AOL days playing like that. In most games these days even at high levels you can get a level in maybe 8-10 hours of work. In gemstone, at 75 (cap is 100), it can take you 5 to 7 days to get one level playing 8 hours a day. That is tedium to its most ravishing point. I would make a guess that everybody over level 50 in Gemstone is that type of player you describe. It's just that there isn't much in Gemstone to farm or covet other than silver. All the cool stuff you have to get from GM-run merchants or auctions. So people farm silver and experience, and when there is a merchant in a town, that town is flooded with people ravenous to buy the next cool thing.

Also, there isn't very many things that are a standard, that you have to have. All you really have are types of armor, Def +X, Crit/Damage Padding, weapon flaring etc. You have no "Massive scale armor of Might" that every level 50 warrior has to wear. Let alone a single mob that drops that armor once a week, and pops once every 4 hours. You do have a 10x FGB massively crit padded. But FGB has a very limited supply, 10x takes months for a wizard checking every day to get it to 10x, and crit padding that you can ONLY get if you pay twice the amount of a normal player to become a permium member - and even then it will take several years to get it to massively crit padded.

In Gemstone GMs give away and sell the things that in regular MMORPGs let mobs drop. Thus making the quest for greatness a covert thing, taking the camping for hours on end out of one or two mobs, and putting it into every mob (you kill to get silver to buy the cool things).