I'm amazed to see Tibia show up on HN of all places! And a whole 22 years after I first installed the game on one of our high school computers.
This game was the catalyst to my career as an IT professional. I developed a tool back in 2003 or so that calculated experience and skill gains, as my first proper project in Visual Basic. It ended up as a mainstay in the playerbase for a long time, which meant I had to deal with release management and server capacity as a complete greenhorn.
Later, when I quit the game, I simply released the codebase on the forums, hoping for some other idealistic soul to take over. Naturally, that went the exact way you'd expect: People embedded keyloggers and released their own version of it, demolishing all the trust I'd built over the years.
Another aspect of this game worth noting: The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years.
In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games.
I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone.
I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.
> The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years. In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games. I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone. I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.
Seems like a good analogy to human society and the results of late-stage-capitalism.
Well yeah, it did - I don't remember quite what, but I think it showed the experience rate or something like that.
(there was also a hidden feature that showed your login/password in the window title for a short while - I got access to the dll for TibiaGG, which taught me a bit about memory access. This was only done as a prank though, and never for any nefarious purposes)
The software was called Tomes of Knowledge, if that rings any bells :)
Another aspect of this game worth noting: The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years. In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games. I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone. I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.