Early Priston Tale memories.
Okay... I'm starting this thread, because I'm getting questions and filling other threads with (mis)information that isn't entirely related to the thread in question.
Where Priston Tale started, and how people came to know about it isn't really about developing a PT server. On the other hand, knowing the history of the game can make sense of some of the strange things it does. So I'm going to share my earliest memories of the game, as a player, not a developer.
When I started playing Priston Tale, it was the year 1999 / 2000. At that time, the English version was still run by Triglow Pictures, and the main website was what looked like a modified Invasion PowerBoard site with a Portal front end. I remember the fighter waving his axe up and down on the site's pale blue home page very well.
I was using a Pentium MMX with 16Meg and a PCI Rage Pro, and my wife had a PII with 8Meg and an AGPx1 Rage 128.
We both ran Windows 98SE and DirectX 3 / 5, but she dual booted into Linux, and I into BeOS. Windows was purely a gaming OS for us both.
We had been playing Diablo (the first Diablo) across a LAN for some months and a friend of ours on IRC had recommended we try this funky little Internet game called Priston Tale.
My wife tried first, signed up, and logged in, someone ran past her and she went "Oh my gawd! There's people in here!" and signed out again.
It was really scary to know that your machine was connected to the internet, and you couldn't even see the activity icon because you where in fullscreen game, and if you tabbed out the entire machine locked up forcing a reboot and complete scandisk from DOS. We had no firewall in the router, Win98 was really open and lax in security and there weren't really software firewalls for Windows. Most people said you need a 3rd box running Linux, or to buy a Cisco router which was kinda outside our budget.
But another of our friends on IRC started it, and they played together for a litte bit and enjoyed it, we got a second phone line so we could both get on-line at the same time without ICS and I joind in. There was no Cable, you either used 56k or you had ISDN or a T1 backbone connection if you where a business user.
She played a Priestess, our friend Marc had a Atlanta and I had a Fighter. Later our son joined as a Knight and my cousin came to play with us as another fighter.
It was a good couple of months grinding before we were level 7 or 8 and discovered that there was another town called Richarten with different shops and different monsters outside the gates.
At that time, the splash screens where proudly announcing the "Age of Renaissance" and the introduction of a new race called "the Morians" who had magical powers. The big players (2x +) where all excited about a new challenge called "Survive or Die" that was supposed to be coming on-line in the next few months, and the level cap was 29.
Priston Tale was in "Open Beta" and was free to play. There where many holes in the maps that you would fall through when playing... oddly, under the ground, was the sky.
We all knew that you never leave town without a warp core, as you never know when you may find yourself in the eternal drop.
Things present players expect to find that just weren't there then include:-
- The 1-10 pet
- Resolutions besides 640x480x16
- Help messages
- NPCs with names you could pronounce
- an Ager
- Clans & Clan Master
- 2 Inventory pages
- Quest items on a separate inventory page
- Forced Sheltoms & Force Master
- Player Shops
Also, weapons used to damage really easily. (well they still do, but you don't notice the effect of it) Even a slightly damaged weapon was considerably less effective that a fully repaired one. So we where forever stopping play and going back to town to repair. Sometimes we would take more than one weapon into the field so we could swap out when they got to broken.
I remember, and still refer to, Cleaver Newter as "Newter DeSedge" or "Newter deSage" each time you logged in, names and text where being refined to better translations.
There was a strong sense of community on the server, because there were no Player Shops people had to talk to each other, and trade in town. There were also many item duping hacks that people would try to scam you with. The scam was, they duplicate an item in their memory, put the duplicate up for sale, you exchange money and items. But because you bought a duplicate, when you went to your warehouse or tried to put it on or drop it the server reported "Duplicate item detected (deleted)" and the item you just bought was gone.
This prompted people to ask the seller to drop the item and they would pay, but then items got stolen from the floor, or the buyer never paid.
All of this only strengthened the community, because, like eBay, there was a level of feedback from buyers. Scammers got known quite quickly and could only really scam new players who didn't know who could be trusted and who couldn't.
Because there where no help messages, and many of the quests where so badly translated, quite what you had to do to complete them was almost anyone's guess, new players used to ask in town "How do I do this", "What is this stat for", "Where can I find this monster I have to hunt" etc. And old hands would just tell them the answer.
The arguments over KSing, Loot Thieving and Spawn Stealing where just as vigorous, and back then, there wasn't the delay between your monsters item drop being seen by you, and the time it was seen by other players that there is now. It's still not long enough, but I remember it's introduction.
I remember Clans being introduced too... and boy did we want a Clan so we could talk to each other when we where in different fields. Several large Clans built up on our server, each with a distinctive style, and many with a national identity too. Although we played English PT, many Brazillians played on our servers, and they had BR clans.
They got a lot of flack from the English players, they where the worst of the KSers and Looters. But more importantly, it is culturally an honourable profession in Brazil to beg, and many many BR players would spend all their time running around town, and large spawns saying "itens plox", "gif itens", "i want gold", "plx gif gold" and would get very insistent and sometimes quite aggressive if you didn't comply.
They would band together to loot your spawn while you did all the fighting, and make sure one of them got the last hit so you got no XP. That doesn't happen now either. And they would pull in more and more monsters from the area and dump them on you till you died.
Such behaviour is very much *not* socially acceptable to most native English countries. However, if you got to talking to them, many many of the Brazillians where really nice people, and where great fun to party, so I really think it was partly culture clash, and partly a few bad apples.
The Clan we got on best with, and that I remember the most was called "PT Police". We were never big enough to join, but the Clan was largely full of high levels (3x / 4x by then) who kept the KSers and Looters and hackers in line, they where respected by what few GMs where on the server, and they did what they could to help out players who where lost, or didn't know what they where supposed to be doing.
Some of the "PT Police" claimed to be "in touch" with the devs / GMs and or Ops of the game. And they always knew what was going to be coming up in the game before it was posted on the official site... but they could have been reading the Korean, Japanese or VN sites.
Pay2Play was coming and Sheltoms could now be used to Age, as well as Mix.Survive or Die came, and went, and came back as Bellatera.
If you see the old Navisko maps, they do not have the SOD arena, and that's because it used to be a boxing ring with wooden steps up to it. The equivalent of the Bellatara girls was a chap in a Goblin costume (he's still in the files) and then he switched to a Buma costume (and that's still there too) who shouted out "Step right up please", "Keep in line please.", "Form a line for the tournament.", "One at a time." and so on... some of which I'm sure I've seen in files recently.
You couldn't see people in the S.O.D. boxing ring, any more than you can with Bellatera, but if you got far enough, there was reputedly a prize of some considerable amount of gold.
We signed up for a years worth of Pay2Play... and the Brazillians started to drop off the server, either because they couldn't afford to play, couldn't get money to the U.S., U.K. or Aus or because their friends couldn't, or they where morally opposed to people insisting you pay money some people may who have time to play games may not have. Which is actually pretty decent of them in many ways.
The "Triglow Pictures" splash screen on load up changed the name several times during this period before it finally settled down to Yedang Online. The reason for those changes I don't know. Each name had a TM symbol after it and a copyright notice. Whether Yedang were always behind it, and didn't want to put their name to it till it was successful or bought out the company that had been publishing it, or where shifting it between daughter companies, or changing international distributors, I really couldn't say.
Even the PT Police didn't seem to know what was up with that and the website remained the same. But they had suggested that the game was originally written by a group of college / uni kids for their own private use, who had sold it for commercial use. None of the original authors where still working on it when it was opened to the public... apparently.
When Pay2Play actually arrived, they went back on their statement that everyone would have to pay to play the game, and only made you start paying from level 40 upwards. Now a month after it went P2P, my wife was indeed level 40, but our friend and I had gotten a wandering eye and where running many characters along side each other.
I had even gotten a character to 30 and deleted it, as I found the grind from level 30 onwards was quite tiresome. I never did get an official character above level 35, and since they had introduced the pets, and made all the 0 - 40 stuff much much easier, much of the fun of playing those first 30 levels was instantly destroyed by Pay2Play. I was hurt, mortified and very disgruntled.I could not get them to issue a refund even 3 years later on my years subscription which was still waiting for me to reach level 40. They took my money, and my beloved game from me.
Player shops came on line, soon after, or just before Pay2Play, and it had been promised for so many years many of the "PT Police" believed it was a pipe dream and would never happen. We saw screenshots of how it looked in VN PT about a month before it actually happened.
For about 4 - 6 months it was raved about, everyone was doing it, and the "global" chat in Ric was considerably reduced to the point where you could almost hold a conversation without having to go too far from the main square.
Then people started to realise that without that trade chatter, there was nothing to stop people going into their own little 'clicks' and just not talking to anyone outside of them. Much of the atmosphere and community of the beta was dead. But there was talk of new PvP arena coming on-line and a field being set as PvP so players could actually fight other players in a dual to the death!
They where going to introduce 6x and have new tiers of skills! But hold on?.. we've had this with 5x and we still haven't had the new tier of skills for that yet?
Bless Castle was introduced, and you had to be 6x to get to it. Sadly the PvP field was Ruinen... which meant that Bored lvl 60s with no more levelling to do and no Bless Castle on went out there and killed any level 40 trying to level up.
That was later moved to Navisko, because most people avoid that place anyway, just in case it turns night time unexpectedly.
I moved away from PT after this, but returned to a Private Server that an old PT friend was running / GMing for. And it's been a background interest for me since then.
I play the game very little since the Pay2Play came in. But I have helped GM and Dev servers, and solved problems for players who can't get on to private servers and so on. My wife still enjoys playing PT (except the PvP) and always has.
And that's where my early memories of PT come from. If you are interested in any aspect, please ask... I know there are very few people here who where playing PT back then, but know there where lots of people playing PT long before I was.
Memory is a funny thing, and the order and accuracy of my memory may well not be that great. If you remember any of this differently, please feel free to air you recollections. Between us we may get closer to the truth.
And finally, I hope you enjoyed hearing my reminiscences. As I say, it's not hugely relevant to the main theme of the forum, but some people seem interested, and it does seem to help to have some of this background when you are trying to make sense of what was done and why.
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Originally Posted by Sumomo
