The best thing, but it happens almost every time I play: -
Made real connections to real people that I may never meet in person.
It never ceases to amaze and please me that you can have such relationships in such a fantastic (literally) environment.
MMORPGs may one day bring about World Peace...
...Pantheon might be the one to take us into that Golden Age!
I agree with disposalist, the friends I have made via EQ have lasted nearly 20 years even though most of us have never met in RL.
And he has a point about how these types of worlds may help bring about some peace, since ethnicity,nationality, religion and all those other dividing factors in society are removed and we tend to judge people on how they interact in game.
Well except dwarves, we will always look down at dwarves, unless you are one. ;)
Well, my biggest ever achievement is going from a small guild with very good friends in a guild called Dragons of Lore, on Luclin server, we then became Jade Dynasty. We achieved our entry into the end game when we killed Derek the Vindicator (Kael raids), I think it was...but my personal biggest achievement came when I got VT Keyed during the Luclin expansion. I was pretty proud of beating the Emperor and then on to spend quite a bit of time in VT. I retired during Planes of Power due to real life work (was in the military so couldnt play much)
But, getting to Vex Thal...that was aweome
*Epic quests would be second (I obtained the Druid epic with help from about 60-80 people for the end fight) #friends
-Chryos/Chaos/Kirvahl
I know people aren't really into WoW on this forum, but I would say my biggest achievement was on the server Spinebreaker during BC there was a notorious guild who had characters that would leave their own guild, so you didn't know they were apart of that guild, and fill in all the essential parts of the raid(tanks, healers, and some solid dpsers) and would form PUGs to get through to a certain point in the raid and then just leave. This would make the pug have to disband because they wouldn't be able to move forward and defeat the other bosses. The later on their guild would log on and take the instance and defeat the remaining bosses that they needed and screwing over the rest of the pug raiders.
I was apart of a very skilled guild that had everything on farm status and many of us were gearing our alts up when I came across this. So I persuaded a bunch of my guildies to advertise which guild was doing this and if that they needed services that we would help. Sure enough another pug fell victim, only knew because an out of guild friend was apart of this, and we decided to act on it and fill in the rolls and carried everyone up to and defeating Illidian.
This must of gotten alot of talk because after that we found several other attempts, through tells, of them doing it in other pugs. Eventually they stopped because the guild I was in was big enough and we all had enough alts that were geared to carry multiple instances. It also helped that a few of the guilds that we had close relations with also joined in to help this cause.
I remembered one of my guildies remarking that he has never done something this cool before where we banded together and solved a problem that was happeneing because of other players. I simply told him then you haven't played Everquest, because it happened alot with that community.
I would have to agree with the first couple of posts. Making friends, helping friends, helping finish guild achievements. #communitymatters
As a side note, I always loved the EQ fan faire and wish we could do that again to connect avatars with people. I live in the midwest, and was able to take in the Minneapolis fan faire for Luclin release ( think that was 2001?), and the in game friends we met in person was a great time, instant connection.
I understand logistically why it was consolidated to vegas in later years instead of locally, but vegas never really appealed to me so I never went again. Would be neat to see some local gatherings again.
For me it's the communities I've been able to build.
In EQ, I built a successful casual-friendly guild that could compete on top-end raids without sacrificing its ideals. While we weren't getting server firsts, while we were active we were in there alongside the top raiding guilds that existed only to raid.
In SWG, being one of the first communities to actually build a rank 5 player city that really worked, and felt like a city and a community.
In EQ2, I merged my small guild in with another guild, only to have the other leaders all bail on the game and go to WoW a month later. It took a lot of effort by me and a few other folks, but we turned it around, and for years our guild was recognized as one of the strongest on our server.
In Vanguard, my guild and I built a legacy of running community events that survived even after we stopped playing. We may not have been able to stop the demise of that game but for the first three years, we helped keep people playing it, in spite of the bugs and the unfinished content - and not just our own guildies too but our entire server community.
In EVE, taking a small highsec industrial corporation and building it into a powerhouse in wormhole space, able to carve out our own little slice of the galaxy and hold it against all comers.
There's other games and examples (including my last project in FFXIV) but the theme is always the same for me. My best memories are when I could grow or enable a guild or community to achieve amazing things - sometimes, in spite of the prevailing "wisdom" of many other players. Along the way I've made some really great friends, but what I've also found is that as games have changed, that roster of friends have changed. A few I still keep in touch with from the old EQ days, but just like when someone moves away in real life - when you're playing different games, it's easy to lose touch.