I joined in January 2007, although that account unfortunately is long lost by now.
The skill tree only went to level 150.
It took me a LONG time to complete the level 5 quest: "Darmov's Fall", because the Elite critter only spawned once every half hour. And back then there were a lot of players at the same level as you, doing the same content. But only one guy would get the kill every half hour.
It was quite hard to always 1-hit mobs. Often I would accept that I would be 2-hitting while leveling.
At my 'peak' I was around level 70 with the best players just hitting level 100.
The auction house was introduced right around the time I joined.
I remember unique items being amazing. In the beginning there were no epics, no crystalline, no super elites and no legendaries. It was hard to kill the elite mobs without fancy pantsy buffs and legendary gear, and you only got to kill one every half hour, unless another player snatched the kill in front of you.
I remember the first legendary event. It was some kind of dragons, don't quite remember which. Frost and leaf dragons maybe. The dragon items felt so powerful, it was a new rarity, and the item-pictures had this cool aura around them. I remember it being near impossible to get any drop from the legendary dragons. I didn't get a drop at all. And only the richest players would be able to afford a full legendary set. These players were so epic at the time.
I remember using the old map. It was hard to navigate, but the world felt much bigger when all you could 'see' were the 8 adjacent fields. Now we can just run across a map in 10 seconds if we want to.
I remember "abusing" that if you could click all the mobs at your location before the whole page (!) would reload, then that would work, and you could kill things much faster, avoiding a lot of page reloads. There was no doubler of course. So a hunt would take a while.
I remember Librarian and Merchant being quite exclusive buffs that only few players had. And they were super (too) expensive to get for me.
I remember the frustrations of PM'ing players for buffs that were active 5 seconds ago only to watch time go by. Last active 1 minute ago. 3 minutes ago. 5 minutes ago. COME ON! Only to then buy buffs from another player. And then have the first player buff you and be like "Pay me, you requested the buffs!!!". Ya dafty, 20 minutes ago. I'm already half way done hunting.
I remember relics were hard to get, because there were only so few, and the big guilds would sit on them.
I remember always having a PvP rating that people would attack each other for.
I remember buying a piece of common gear in a shop, intending to actually use it because it was an improvement over the rare piece of gear that was getting out-leveled.
I remember "The Dark Stalkers" being amazing as guilds goes.
I had just 3 inventory slots for quite a while. The struggle was real. Especially when you needed the third slot for drops and quest items, you really only had 2 slots for storing stuff.
There were no "components".
You could add yourself as an "Enemy"
Edited by BigGrim, 24 June 2021 - 11:37.
Removed swearing.