I was jealous of older players when I started too. I recommend focusing on your own experience rather than worrying about the particular ways people before you had it easier. There were also a ton more bugs to deal with and people quit at a faster pace. The landscape of this server has changed many times over. It's more active and vibrant than ever before. Try to enjoy it. Don't be bitter at the old folks who have not much left to do but stand around town making you jealous of gear.

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I think you may have got the wrong impression from my post... somehow. It's more curiosity than jealousy. In fact, if everything was practically handed to me I wouldn't have any interest in playing. The challenge is what makes it exciting, and what adds value to the items to begin with.

I didn't read through everything, but regarding kings, Alpha and Yes used to take turns killing Nidhogg. Fafnir could sit up for days (sometimes a week+)

-BLM was the OP god. 4 BLM BRD and RDM could kill Fafnir and Nidhogg easily. BLM could literally solo anything, possibly even sky gods (not kirin).

-KA could be force popped by crashing the zone

-Argus once broke and chain spawned for 2 days straight. PCC crashed to nearly 60k for months.

-Nasomi made a mob with 1 million HP that took 4 hours to kill the first time.

-No one cared about 99% of NMs because there were more items than players.

-DRK used to be good

-we sleep nuked tiamat

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Well this thread is the only one that I could find any mention of me on.

I think my account got deleted. Also... I remember that. Starbucks internet was hecking awful for anything relating to Sky or NMs

Casting magic wouldn't break bind.
Pets yielded full exp.
All birds had zero evasion.
The HNM would hit a player for only ~30% more than an even match.
Cures, sleep, and dispel, all gave no CE.
If anyone caused a crash anywhere, the whole world went down.
Sync worked for any level range.
It wasn't uncommon to make it all the way to 75 only killing worms/pets/colibri.
Dynamis Jeuno rained relic currency, averaging the equivalent of 27 singles per goblin (the goblins only /checked as T).
Dozens of npcs gave away free gil in a variety of different ways, the economy for endgame items was primarily barter based.
When nas turned off field manuals, the portals up to the four outer sky gods broke and stayed broken for nearly a year.
Simurgh stopped spawning for nearly a year.
King Behemoth was broken.
Tiamat was really really broken.
Once you got over a hundred shield skill, shield block always proc'd.
Sushi gave a ton of bonus racc.
The original server-wide linkshell was white and it was called GrindHouse
There was no hard limit to spell recast reduction.
KA would spawn randomly from individual knight crabs, often times two or three KAs would show up.
Dcloth was 5k each, prism powder was 30k a stack.
Occasionally all your key items would simply vanish.
NMs (including HNM) would occasionally decide to chain-spawn.
Nasomi once accidentally dropped the table that stores everyone's merits (deleting them).
Halver would frequently forget who you were and that you were in the middle of a mission.
Getting charmed and dying would crash the server.
Busting puppet roll or magus's roll would crash the server.
The tenshodo coffer gave out nexus capes... which would crash the server.
Hearing someone speak whose name was over ten characters would occasionally crash your client.
Seeing someone do an emote would occasionally crash the client.
Sometimes characters would glitch causing the zone they just left to crash. (people would run around blissfully unaware of the chaos they left in their wake)
Seeing people flee hack was a weekly occurrence.
Shell was overpowered by a factor of 2.5 (I think protect still is)
A level ~40 blm could cast stone 1 for ~250 damage.
Goblin drink gave a three hour long refresh effect.
Mobs did not respect walls and would frequently aggro through floors.
Casting burn and then using fire shot would prevent it from ever wearing off. Subsequent fire shots would exponentially increase the DOT damage with no limit.
Only people who knew how to read C++ could get the nice HQ rates until a guide was published on the wiki.
TH was very generous. Even something set to a rate of 0% would drop at least 4.4% of the time.
"Either or" type drops would default to normal drops for the first kill since the zone booted.
Kirins wind meva would drop by thirty every time he spawned, by the sixth kirin or so even people subbing blm could land aero.
The metalworks elevators took patience.
The port bastok bridge took prayer.

o hi Deadwing

Reading all this stuff that used to happen all the time makes me thankful that mostly is a thing of the past.

I leveled to 75 on both my characters exclusively in Attowa Chasm parties off worms.

- We had Muffin.
- Dread Spikes didn't cap on max HP, it was effectively up forever.
- All TOAU and some WOTG spells were in; biggest one I can think of was Abs-ACC (yum).
- Hasso didn't come with a recast penalty.
- Last Resort lasted the correct 3 mins (still salty about the nerf).
- Desperate Blows was considered a class ability as well as a merit.
- Weapons with procs, didn't. It was very exciting when DSP finally started coding them.
- Footwork was in and was affected by +Kick Attacks DMG items (Oddin and I could probably have duo'd a lot of the later CoP fights because we both had Seihanshis).
- Bunch of wonky WS behavior, some of it unintentional on Nas's part and some of it imported from bad/unsourced coding on DSP.
- There was one, massive endgame LS run by Muffin, it was called BloodMoney and your invite was not guaranteed (hah).
- Formless Strikes worked on WS (this was hecking fantastic, I wish it had never been fixed).
- This wasn't "from the beginning" but there used to be a bug that caused an effect on you to become permanent duration after zoning; everything was fair game (this is the Flee hacking referred to above). I ran around with Last Resort and Blood Weapon permanently up for a couple hours before I felt awful about it and stopped ;p
- Adaman turtles had no TP moves and dropped Ores like candy.

And much more. Exelyon, Cityhunter could probably go on for days I'm going to go against the general consensus here and say there was a lot that I really loved about early Nasomi. I miss some of it a lot.

There were moogles in cities that you could talk to to get a bunch of 2 hour ability effects for 30 minutes (maybe it was an hour?) if you were under level 20. They would give you fewer buffs from 20-30.

I remember that pet xp thing, lol

Oddly enough though... I can't say I ever actually leveled up off of pets, except very briefly in the 20s~ on BLM until it was actually better to do low-man BLM burn parties

I do remember a fistful of COR glitches were a thing for awhile, including cards not being used up when you would fire a Shot ability. I used to walk around with a single card for each element when I was leveling COR and only one bullet (since bullets aren't consumed using card shots either which was a thing in Retail too)

I believe you've got some nostalgia in your nostalgia.