OMG!!! Ultima Online! I used to play that!! (Catskills server!)
it was the first experience I had with digital value as well.
Housing space was limited so these were valuable and sold for dollars. But I also had rare glitch items that were not supposed to be in the game: an opened book (as opposed to the closed one) worth $250, some closed barrels, scattered hay and my prized possession: a pile of horse dung! I could have sold that for $400 at one point because it was so rare.
And this was back in 1998, years before the internet really went mainstream. I have no doubt that blockchain will be revolutionary today, in games and itemization. It will be much crazier than ever before
I had a character named Barad Dur on the Siege Perilous shard. GM Blacksmith. As far as I know there are still Valorite katanas and full plate sets with that name on them.
The thing I remember the most was the periodic "house drop" to clear out the servers of stuff from inactive players. They never seemed to go right.
I also remember when you could dismember a PC and lock the body parts down on the floor in your house and as you scrolled over it with the cursor it would read "The severed head of [PC name here]".
Oh yes, the PvP server!
I was into the RPing community which was huge on Catskills. I fought the Shadowclan Orcs pretty much daily! lots of pvp in studded leather armor and crap-weapons.. much more fun than tank-mage going corp por, corp por! God I miss that game.. Never was anything quite like it, and EQ/WoW totally ruined the genre.
You mention dismembering a pc, but actually even before that you could chop up their bodyparts and cook it over a campfire and eat it :)
Devs took it out pretty soon though, haha.
OMG! I never saw that. Hell I never even heard of that that I can recall.
Yeah, that game was awesome. I get nostalgic when I see screen shots and such. I backed Richard Garriot's new game, SotA and have been unpleased to say the least. In an interview he said that his team approached EA to get the brand back but they said no. To damn bad.