So assume you have a working time machine, and you don’t want to use it for anything boring like picking winning lottery tickets or teaching the Elizabethans about penicillin. Nope.
Instead you decide to dip into your MMO of choice (or maybe even switch games altogether) and use your foreknowledge to have more fun in the game.
If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently in game?
Would you roll a different race/ class/ server? Would you have gotten in on a different game at the beginning (maybe picked up a lifetime sub in a game you passed up, for example)? Would you have used your knowledge of the in-game economy to make some easy gold? Would you have joined a different guild? Booted someone who was going to cause a problem later on? Exploit bugs that later get fixed?
Or maybe you’d even know to take a break and skip a patch altogether until bugs got fixed a few months later.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I should have been less trusting of guild leadership. Having the guild split in two one day after I joined was a definite sign of things to come. I’d also should have skipped buying a 6-month subscription and the Collector’s Edition of Wrath. The artbook was nice, though.
Go back and buy 2 lifetime subscriptions to LotRO when they were offered cheaply and I could have afforded it. 🙂
I would have pyramided passive income alts in Eve.
I think I wouldnt have changed anything. It was all part of the curve. Part of the experience. Some painfull lessons learned.
The main leasson I’d pass on to me:- Guild and Raid Leadership is a beetch in the mid-long term so be nice to the folk who do it, be philisophical when it doesnt go your way and be ultra wary of thinking you can do better for although you might be able to for a while. ‘You cant please all of the people all of the time’
rolled on a different server. not sure which one, but it would have been either a server researched beforehand, or a server where people I knew in real life were already playing rather then just going with first thing blizzard assigned to us. with a more appropriate timezone too (raiding on a server where everyone is 3 hours behind you so most raids end between 12 and 2am is challenging to say the least).
I wouldn’t be a bloody belf.
I know I can pay and fix that but it feels like cheating now.
I genuinely had no idea this disposable priest I rolled for lulz was going to become my main…
Oooh interesting question. With hindsight..
First up I would have rolled horde straight away, not alliance. (oops I might not have met my husband then though.. and would probably have given up before level 10 because I was so crap you would not believe).
I wouldn’t have server hopped when someone gave me a lot of grief starting a personal vendetta against me, and instead just stuck them on /ignore, and changed guilds. Missed out on all the level 60 end game because of that and playing DDO.
Though I am not sure that 40 man raids would be for me either, it would have been nice to give them a go.
Oh, and from what I know now, I would also probably have rolled on an RP server 🙂
I did think of saying I wouldn’t have levelled any alts til now when it is all so much quicker, but actually, I would have missed out on seeing a lot of the world then, so I am glad I did it the slow way 🙂
I would have stuck with my horde warrior rather than rolling an alliance hunter. Yes, I’m now in a HM guild on the verge of killing Arthas, but I’d like to take 10 mins out of waiting for a random group on the Dungeon Finder each day…
I’d have perservered with my Orc Hunter with Vanilla and tried to get that long grind to 60 done. I’d love to know back then what I do now, it would have been a very different experience. I also would not have rolled Priest during TBC when my friends and I switched from Horde to Alliance, sure it was useful as we managed to roll a tank/dps and healer without any planning or forethought with each other but I ended up hating that character after a while.
Parts of me, wanted to do it all over. Never have rolled a priest, but stayed with my pally or rolled a warrior.
If I was allowed a due-over I would try something new, just to try something new. Id roll horde warrior on a Rp realm. Orc, I think.
Also, I think I would have waited to roll some classes until they got fixed. Priests where murder to level in the old days. These days, not so much.
Actually the main thing I would have changed would not have been my current game.
I would have known how to get a Jedi account in Star Wars Galaxies at the beginning. Which means I could have been the first (whee) and spent much more time playing when Jedi were still suffering permadeath at the expense of being ridiculously overpowered.
I also probably would not have started playing World of Warcraft on a Rogue. Proper warrior all the way. And with hindsight – stacking defense at level 60, instead of trying for a matching dungeon set 1.
Hmm. And more pvp back when Alterac Valley took days.. although that would have been a weekend occupation, I suppose.
And I would have rolled a Jenquai explorer on a second account in Earth and Beyond right away for superfast wormhole travel.
And …
I see where this is going. Yeah.. I would abuse my time machine for more personal flexibility (okay.. that was a nice way of putting it – more personal power compared to my fellow gamers). If only I could use power for good. Ah well… that ship has sailed, I suppose.
Started screaming loud and long the first time SOE mentioned those 3 fateful letters, oh so long ago..
NGE.
I would make myself get my own account. That is my one big, and entirely justified regret: my first account was borrowed from a friend of a friend. There are experiences I’d have not had without having someone else’ 60 warlock, but I think that’s offset by the total loss of everything. Thought it was that which got me where I am now, and I’m pretty happy with where I am.
I would have tamed the ghost hydra from Sholazar. I may have also rolled my DK on an RP server, since she’s the only toon I’ve ever had a character for.
I’d have kept my curiosity at bay and rolled Ally OR Horde, but not both. First I had a troll rogue, then a draenei mage, then a belf pally… now I’m rolling new ally alts again because I’m homesick for Darnassus.
It’s silly to be forever getting lonely for one side or the other and feel the urge for irresistable main-hopping.
I would definitely get stuff that’s no longer obtainable and I missed it on some chars, like spirit of competition pet or tabard of Argent Dawn, spent time on getting it instead of activities that could be done anytime later.
Y’know, I can honestly say that I have no regrets with any MMORPGs I’ve played 🙂 I wouldn’t change a thing!
No regrets in MMOs, really,
but a time machine?
Oh yeah, I’d have the winning lottery numbers for sure!
And, um, yeah, end hunger and all that….
Not backward. The game I want to play hasn’t been invented yet but I think it’ll look very much like a holodeck.
In all seriousness, I’ve played only a handful of MMO’s and none of the come close to resembling Dragon Age Origin in making me care about my character or my allies. Obviously, DAO is an unfair standard today, but I hope that is the direction that designers are headed in.
You wrote recently about the connection between BWL and Onyxia, the crafting that was a cost of entry, and the joy of heading in with an army of 39 others and using areas that had been conquered (alchemist table?). Those are wonderful memories well told, but you also noted that BWL also required Onyxia Scale Cloaks and I wonder how many weeks I would have been willing to farm Onyxia. (Even at 4 a week, it would be 10 weeks.)
Green Armadillo (Player v Developer) came across an advertisement for EQII maybe two months ago. It described an incredibly unforgiving “hardcore” game. I missed UO, EQ, and vanilla WoW. I’m not sure I missed much.
~~~
My best moments have been social. Standing on top of Minotaur in City of Heroes chatting with a friend. Getting my non-raiding friend into Gruul’s Lair and seeing her win the T4 pants (I still call her “fancy pants”).
Okay, here is a real answer: I don’t know how the opening of the gates of Ahn Quiraj was handled, but I can imagine how it could have been epic.
Thats intresting:- I’m finding DA:O a huge let down. Now I admit I’m in the minority as my wife, Spinks and several other people who’s opinions I trust are raving about it. But for me the motivation to complete quests, explore new areas, gear up is so I can interact with folk. Not characters in a game. People. Okay may exploring isnt quite there. So I’m getting very little payback from DA:0. Doing the old STV Fishing champions ship the other day (2 fish off winning GAH!) I bumped into a fellow fisherman pre-event and there was some friendly in character banter about favorite fishing corners 🙂 made me smile. Never met the chap before. I had much more fun leveling my DK and then gearing him than in any single player game…even though I mostly solo’ed to 80. Odd.
I am somewhere in the middle of spinks and you with DAO.
At the start I was hardly on wow at all apart from raids and it was great. Then I got my wow head on and started to think too much about min/max which spoiled some of the immersion. Then I found some of the areas, dwarfs and mountain cult espcially, to be a bit of a slog and a new wow patch hit and I haven’t loaded it since. Keep meaning to go back but now I have 2 alts at 80 ( new one being SK as well!) and don’t have the time for all the daily heriocs. Will probably go back when this patch on WoW gets a little old.
I had fun levelling and gearing up my DK alt on a server where I didn’t know anyone! (But once I finished that and got her into a few raids …. yeah, bored with it now.)
I would abuse the ever-loving hell out of the old reckoning bomb.
1st I’d stop myself from pre-ordering the WAR collector’s edition. Then I’d tell myself to say NO when a friend wanted to start over in WoW on his brother’s server, causing me to abandon my character in a big guild. Brother’s server was east coast while I live in CA. Missed out on so much due to the time difference, and his brother didn’t play much. Sigh.
Hey y’all,
I would have made more alts in TBC, back when levelling was still a challenge and everything was still new and fun. Probly not have levelled as a 20/20/20 something druid or tanked in kitty form, hehe.
but biggest regret was my easy loss of temper when back I was a druid tank, pretty much pissed off most of the people in the realm.
Of course I should have chose Horde and levelled my Belf warlock as a Forsaken though.
But yeah you live and learn, and I’m loving tanking on my Death Knight with an obscure in character history.
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idd learn every species the knowledge of space and time on that world so they can be a god in a world of their own givin them they love the things they need as the thing the leading timetraveller in this world is doin all along idd just do the same but learn everyone of the thruth …
Why?
noone deserves to suffer and everyone should be able to live a normal decent life therefor every specie should be made gods so they all live happely ever after in the end of every story that is what its all about live happily ever after so in order to have that u need knowledge and as on this earth u need the lead and us others to gain that power but in the end i dont wanna end up destroyin the ones that leaded me to that point to have gained me that same knowledge idd rather end up lettin every one of em end up in the same idd have reached then immortallity in an everlasting world