7 ms·

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch

by jdk 4y ago

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone to to actually investigate. Wi came to one of the player gatherings with little printed out cards and would hand them to people and say, "You've been Wi flagged!" The fondest of memories.

berkle4455 4y ago
Sorry, who is Wi?
- johnnyo 4y ago
  "Wi" was An early player of the game that was the a victim of the bug. His character's name was Wi, and the bug was named after him. I remember people theorizing it was due to a short name (only 2 characters), and so would create longer usernames to try and avoid the "curse"
nevir 4y ago
AC was such a fantastic game and community - props to all you at Turbine that worked on it. So many great memories for me!
- jdk 4y ago
  Thanks! Glad it holds a special place for you :) In retrospect, I give a lot of credit to the fact that we were young and dumb and didn't know any better. I've been revisiting a lot of the stories from back then and so many of them end up with us saying, "I dunno, let's see what happens!" and not being dissuaded by "best practices" or even common sense. Also lots of credit goes to the early internet era when people were a LOT more forgiving of, well, everything.
Naomarik 4y ago
AC was my first MMORPG, fond memories indeed. I remember the sheer adrenaline I got when "going red" and watching PK drama and battles unfold at the subway, dominated by a build called the "OG mage," slidecasting all over the place casting drain health until finishing with a missile spell. I would cast Blooddrinker 6 on monster weapons and giddily laugh as they sliced through new players starting out. I remember staying up the entire night during a school day when housing was released and being one of the first people on my server to claim one. I even remember being a vassal to a very generous asian guy in his mid twenties living in LA named Kyoto and my countless interactions with him and his brother under a specific tree. Countless memories I could keep going on and on, but what an experience!
- picowatt 4y ago
  Some of my favorite memories as a kid were playing Asheron's Call. Incredible game.
- jdk 4y ago
  Haha "Og mage" ... yeah. The combat of AC still holds up in its janky for being fun in the context of an MMO. I spent most of my playtime on Darktide and dear lord, it made me so sweaty. It's amazing to me how many people are still friends with their patrons/vassals from 25 years ago.
jdwithit 4y ago
I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny. The character was awful in all other regards, but I didn't care. I made another character whose sole purpose was to climb to the top of the highest cliff or building I could find, and jump off it. And there were some HIGH places in AC. I miss being able to play MMO's innocently like that rather than trying to min-max every last bit of efficiency out of everything, as embodied by WoW (another game I loved, but for different reasons). I also really enjoyed the periodic story events that had really dramatic impacts on the world, like the shadow invasion. It was a great game, especially for its time. So thanks for whatever part you played in its creation.
- jdk 4y ago
  Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly close it back up and go back to the nostalgia. I was on the design team, so was directly responsible for a lot of the shadow invasion stuff (if you ever saw the big bad Bael'Zharon running around in the live events, that was me!) and other patches for the first 2 years of its lifespan. Weirdly, I work on WoW now with my career having come full circle after having not worked on MMOs since the mid 2000s. :)
  - yvdriess 4y ago
    Another "grew up playing AC" here and fondly remember interacting with Bael'Zharon on the Harvestgain server during the life events. Did you also blow up Arwic? :D I still use AC and to some extent AC2 as an example of how wild, weird, dynamic and interesting MMOs were before the EQ formula won through WoW's success.
blipmusic 4y ago
Min-max:ed dagger warrior for the win! Also, fear the ash gromnie! AC was never really trumped for me (AC2 was... different?). I just wanted a world to roam, and the vassal system is probably the only pyramid scheme that incentivised making social connections. :) My patron did a lot corpse runs for me.
- jdk 4y ago
  For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt. And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.
  - PolyphonyReq 4y ago
    What do you see as the major flaws and what do you think you would do differently?
    - jdk 4y ago
      The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations. I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.
    - rapind 4y ago
      It eventually ended up being a straight line where you could add yourself lower and higher in the line with two different characters, and turbo feed the xp upwards (there were loyalty stats to push up and receive more xp). It peaked with a prevalence of bots that would be parked at the bottom feeding the line 24/7. Loved AC. Bots kind of killed it IMO (something I feel bad about contributing to), but also new MMOs (WoW decimated the competition when it came out). I remember a portal / recall trick with two vendors, where one would sell a specific thing cheaper than the other would buy it. This was before eBay cracked down on virtual goods. Interesting times.
PolyphonyReq 4y ago
I was in from beta until about 2004. Lots of fond memories! Closest I've come to feeling the same way I felt playing AC in recent memory is actually Valheim. Can't quite put a finger on why, but there are very few games that hold such an important place in my heart. I was a high schooler when it came out. Some days I regret not going into game design, especially with the current wave of VR games. Some days I'm tempted to quit my major tech company job and try to create that magic myself in a VR MMO. But that would be something only a crazy person would do.
- jdk 4y ago
  Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great. It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point Any idea how the targeting algorithm was chosen? It does not behave the way this letter says that it should.
- jdk 4y ago
  Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.
hesdeadjim 4y ago
Any insight you could share on why the server didn’t end up being provided to the community for self-hosting?
- jdk 4y ago
  I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.
choffman 4y ago
Devilmouse! AC is one of my favorite games of all time (neck and neck with Ultima II (I'm old)). I still play on the emulators from time to time - endlessly searching for more Hoary Mattekars. I played on Thistledown and ran a little portal bot named Stip Dickens an Ayan Baqur that helped ferry people into the Shard of the Herald event. That was a lot of fun. The loot system was also one-of-a-kind. I don't see that level of randomness in many other games. The game felt like the writers and staff were highly literate and well read. I now know so many real life herbs and plants due to their use in spellcasting. And AC taught me words like "Mnemosyne". And each month we would get several pages of amazing lore. (Side note, there's an ongoing web serial called "The Wandering Inn" that reminds me quite a bit of AC. People dropped into a video game like world, insect people, references to a "Zeikhal"(similar to a town name).... So, I just want to thank you for your work on AC. It's had a profoundly positive impact on my life.
- jdk 4y ago
  You're welcome! Haha, mattekar farming will always hold a special place for me. And, of course, TD's herald defense is probably top 3 gaming memories for me. So much lifting done across the community for what's now basically oral history. But also thank YOU for participating in some of my very formative experiences of my life as well. The players really made it a joy to work on.
iamthepieman 4y ago
A fellow comp sci major in college introduced me to AC. Bought it on a whim after seeing him play it in his dorm. I still remember the physical box with some special bonus map and swag. Lost so much sleep power levelling on a rock with those ape like creatures and just spamming magic to discover new combinations. The discovery and wonder does not match up with the graphics I see now when I search for screenshots and videos. Beta and early WoW almost had the same effect but your first is always special.
a_e_k 4y ago
Add me as another with fond memories. I was introduced to AC by my coworkers at my first full time job after college. Pretty much all the software devs I worked with at the time played it, including both my manager and the head of the site. Our office had our own little monarchy on Leafcull at first, though we later joined up with a bigger group. On patch day, the office banter usually centered around the things we were seeing popping up as we'd reload Maggie the Jackcat's community-sourced patch notes throughout the day [0]. Sometimes we'd even download the patch and log in for a few minutes, just to poke around. (Always being careful not to do anything _real_ due to the risks the infamous patch day server rollbacks.) Then there'd the be waiting for the Decal updates. I still remember that my main was a tank archer build, which was pretty much untouchable going toe to toe with the mobs in PvE as long as the stamina held out. I went through a _lot_ of stam potions, though! I remember also finding somewhere about how to extract the terrain data from the game. I scraped the coordinates for various destinations from some place and wrote a little OpenGL viewer that would let me do flyovers with the various locations marked with labelled bullets. Good times! P.S.: Anyone remember the Drudge Dance [1]? [0] http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm [1] https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav (direct link doesn't work; copy and paste URL instead)
- vehementi 4y ago
  I still hum the drudge dance sometimes. It melds together with YTV "short circuitz" reels as well (this one in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvIbcNV38k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvIbcNV38k)

by jdk 4y ago

berkle4455 4y ago

Sorry, who is Wi?

johnnyo 4y ago
"Wi" was An early player of the game that was the a victim of the bug. His character's name was Wi, and the bug was named after him. I remember people theorizing it was due to a short name (only 2 characters), and so would create longer usernames to try and avoid the "curse"

nevir 4y ago

AC was such a fantastic game and community - props to all you at Turbine that worked on it. So many great memories for me!

jdk 4y ago
Thanks! Glad it holds a special place for you :) In retrospect, I give a lot of credit to the fact that we were young and dumb and didn't know any better. I've been revisiting a lot of the stories from back then and so many of them end up with us saying, "I dunno, let's see what happens!" and not being dissuaded by "best practices" or even common sense. Also lots of credit goes to the early internet era when people were a LOT more forgiving of, well, everything.

Naomarik 4y ago

AC was my first MMORPG, fond memories indeed. I remember the sheer adrenaline I got when "going red" and watching PK drama and battles unfold at the subway, dominated by a build called the "OG mage," slidecasting all over the place casting drain health until finishing with a missile spell. I would cast Blooddrinker 6 on monster weapons and giddily laugh as they sliced through new players starting out. I remember staying up the entire night during a school day when housing was released and being one of the first people on my server to claim one. I even remember being a vassal to a very generous asian guy in his mid twenties living in LA named Kyoto and my countless interactions with him and his brother under a specific tree. Countless memories I could keep going on and on, but what an experience!

picowatt 4y ago
Some of my favorite memories as a kid were playing Asheron's Call. Incredible game.
jdk 4y ago
Haha "Og mage" ... yeah. The combat of AC still holds up in its janky for being fun in the context of an MMO. I spent most of my playtime on Darktide and dear lord, it made me so sweaty. It's amazing to me how many people are still friends with their patrons/vassals from 25 years ago.

jdwithit 4y ago

I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny. The character was awful in all other regards, but I didn't care. I made another character whose sole purpose was to climb to the top of the highest cliff or building I could find, and jump off it. And there were some HIGH places in AC. I miss being able to play MMO's innocently like that rather than trying to min-max every last bit of efficiency out of everything, as embodied by WoW (another game I loved, but for different reasons). I also really enjoyed the periodic story events that had really dramatic impacts on the world, like the shadow invasion. It was a great game, especially for its time. So thanks for whatever part you played in its creation.

jdk 4y ago
Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly close it back up and go back to the nostalgia. I was on the design team, so was directly responsible for a lot of the shadow invasion stuff (if you ever saw the big bad Bael'Zharon running around in the live events, that was me!) and other patches for the first 2 years of its lifespan. Weirdly, I work on WoW now with my career having come full circle after having not worked on MMOs since the mid 2000s. :)
- yvdriess 4y ago
  Another "grew up playing AC" here and fondly remember interacting with Bael'Zharon on the Harvestgain server during the life events. Did you also blow up Arwic? :D I still use AC and to some extent AC2 as an example of how wild, weird, dynamic and interesting MMOs were before the EQ formula won through WoW's success.

blipmusic 4y ago

Min-max:ed dagger warrior for the win! Also, fear the ash gromnie! AC was never really trumped for me (AC2 was... different?). I just wanted a world to roam, and the vassal system is probably the only pyramid scheme that incentivised making social connections. :) My patron did a lot corpse runs for me.

jdk 4y ago
For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt. And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.
- PolyphonyReq 4y ago
  What do you see as the major flaws and what do you think you would do differently?
  - jdk 4y ago
    The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations. I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.
  - rapind 4y ago
    It eventually ended up being a straight line where you could add yourself lower and higher in the line with two different characters, and turbo feed the xp upwards (there were loyalty stats to push up and receive more xp). It peaked with a prevalence of bots that would be parked at the bottom feeding the line 24/7. Loved AC. Bots kind of killed it IMO (something I feel bad about contributing to), but also new MMOs (WoW decimated the competition when it came out). I remember a portal / recall trick with two vendors, where one would sell a specific thing cheaper than the other would buy it. This was before eBay cracked down on virtual goods. Interesting times.

PolyphonyReq 4y ago

I was in from beta until about 2004. Lots of fond memories! Closest I've come to feeling the same way I felt playing AC in recent memory is actually Valheim. Can't quite put a finger on why, but there are very few games that hold such an important place in my heart. I was a high schooler when it came out. Some days I regret not going into game design, especially with the current wave of VR games. Some days I'm tempted to quit my major tech company job and try to create that magic myself in a VR MMO. But that would be something only a crazy person would do.

jdk 4y ago
Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great. It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point Any idea how the targeting algorithm was chosen? It does not behave the way this letter says that it should.

jdk 4y ago
Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.

hesdeadjim 4y ago

Any insight you could share on why the server didn’t end up being provided to the community for self-hosting?

jdk 4y ago
I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.

choffman 4y ago

Devilmouse! AC is one of my favorite games of all time (neck and neck with Ultima II (I'm old)). I still play on the emulators from time to time - endlessly searching for more Hoary Mattekars. I played on Thistledown and ran a little portal bot named Stip Dickens an Ayan Baqur that helped ferry people into the Shard of the Herald event. That was a lot of fun. The loot system was also one-of-a-kind. I don't see that level of randomness in many other games. The game felt like the writers and staff were highly literate and well read. I now know so many real life herbs and plants due to their use in spellcasting. And AC taught me words like "Mnemosyne". And each month we would get several pages of amazing lore. (Side note, there's an ongoing web serial called "The Wandering Inn" that reminds me quite a bit of AC. People dropped into a video game like world, insect people, references to a "Zeikhal"(similar to a town name).... So, I just want to thank you for your work on AC. It's had a profoundly positive impact on my life.

jdk 4y ago
You're welcome! Haha, mattekar farming will always hold a special place for me. And, of course, TD's herald defense is probably top 3 gaming memories for me. So much lifting done across the community for what's now basically oral history. But also thank YOU for participating in some of my very formative experiences of my life as well. The players really made it a joy to work on.

iamthepieman 4y ago

A fellow comp sci major in college introduced me to AC. Bought it on a whim after seeing him play it in his dorm. I still remember the physical box with some special bonus map and swag. Lost so much sleep power levelling on a rock with those ape like creatures and just spamming magic to discover new combinations. The discovery and wonder does not match up with the graphics I see now when I search for screenshots and videos. Beta and early WoW almost had the same effect but your first is always special.

a_e_k 4y ago

Add me as another with fond memories. I was introduced to AC by my coworkers at my first full time job after college. Pretty much all the software devs I worked with at the time played it, including both my manager and the head of the site. Our office had our own little monarchy on Leafcull at first, though we later joined up with a bigger group. On patch day, the office banter usually centered around the things we were seeing popping up as we'd reload Maggie the Jackcat's community-sourced patch notes throughout the day [0]. Sometimes we'd even download the patch and log in for a few minutes, just to poke around. (Always being careful not to do anything _real_ due to the risks the infamous patch day server rollbacks.) Then there'd the be waiting for the Decal updates. I still remember that my main was a tank archer build, which was pretty much untouchable going toe to toe with the mobs in PvE as long as the stamina held out. I went through a _lot_ of stam potions, though! I remember also finding somewhere about how to extract the terrain data from the game. I scraped the coordinates for various destinations from some place and wrote a little OpenGL viewer that would let me do flyovers with the various locations marked with labelled bullets. Good times! P.S.: Anyone remember the Drudge Dance [1]? [0] http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm [1] https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav (direct link doesn't work; copy and paste URL instead)

vehementi 4y ago
I still hum the drudge dance sometimes. It melds together with YTV "short circuitz" reels as well (this one in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvIbcNV38k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvIbcNV38k)