MMO GASM

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

I made another account on EVE again and I found out they have their own radio station.

Long story short, the DJ had a troll related meltdown on air. I think EVE is the way to go with this, it works on any OS and making accounts is easy. Plus their fan base is pretty hardcore.

[Auguste]

I've played a shitload of free MMOs.  I think I can say from experience that RuneScape isn't a good choice.  The community is full of six year old kids that would hardly put up a fight.  Also, there's no global chat and a heap of servers.  Swearing, URLs and email addresses are all blocked from chat.  I don't think it's a good choice.

I recommend:
Tibia - Free, very tight communities on each server, as characters can't be transferred.  Also has global chat and very few active mods.  There are 'tutors' that will report you, but you're looking at between 24 and 48 hours average before a mod gets around to taking action.  Lots of foreign players too.  I think it'd be a good place to start.  It's also GNU/Linux compatible.
Eve Online - I played the trial.  It's free and doesn't require a credit card.  Has global chat and one of the leading "Corporations" is Goonfleet, which I believe are all from Something Awful.
Dungeon Runners - Global chat and a player base full of angsty teenagers.  I've listened to a few arguments there.  It's very satisfying to get a fight started on global chat, then back out to listen to the players attack each other.
Meridian 59 - One of the first 3D MMOs.  There are two English servers with maybe two hundred players on each, with between 10 and 40 people online on a single server once.  The community is very tight-knit and constantly fighting over which server is better and whether or not the admins actually care about the game any more.  In a good month, an admin will log in a couple of times.  You could escape ban pretty easily there.  It has global chat, but it drains your mana to use it.  Just make a mage or something.  The game costs around $10 per month.  Pretty cheap.

That's all I can think of for now.  Google the games, I'm lazy to provide links.

[nostalgicBadger]

I've been playing Mabinogi in the early mornings lately since I finished the first season of House and my friend refuses to take the copy of the second season that has been sitting in his break room at work for a month. It might be fun to troll. What you eat seems to affect your characters weight and muscle definition, so it might be entertaining to eat a lot of cake until we all become morbidly obese and then stand in doorways since there's nothing anybody would be able to do about that and since you can't talk to NPCs unless you're within a few feet of them. Then again, people don't seem to talk that much anyway, and the "community" for the most part consists of people making jokes across the Trade board, e.g. "Sell> my body". Yeah, I didn't say they're funny...

On the other hand, Nexon might deserve a good trolling considering their business model for this game, which basic amounts to "Mabinogi is free to play! Here's the only thing: it's extremely skill oriented, and unless you rebirth, you're going to run out of AP. Want to rebirth? $7. Oh, you want to open a stand (it's actually just a blanket on the ground)? $10 for thirty days. Want a pet? Another $5." etc. The cash shop doesn't actually sell items, it sells the ability to play the game. Not that the $7 to rebirth is too much - that's still less than one J&B on the rocks - but calling it free to play is a little dishonest.

[Auguste]

I considered mentioning Mabinogi, but the US version (The only English version that I know of) was restricted to American residents only, last time I checked.  If you didn't have an American IP address, you couldn't play.

Although, we do have proxies...

[nostalgicBadger]

Check the site - they just opened to international IPs.
I'm warning you though, it's a potential money pit.
Rebirth is inevitable if you want to play competitively, and that's at least $7 each time ( probably $9 once if you want to pick from 40 hair styles instead of 8 kind of ugly ones ), plus being able to open a store or have a reasonable amount of inventory is an extra $10 a month. In theory, you could sell things through chat or exchange for items that don't take up much space, like holy water, and then horde the holy water and just pay the $10 once in a while and sell it all at once, but it's still a money pit.

[Auguste]

Sounds like a good game to target, in that case.  I always wanted to play it, having loved Wurm Online, but Mabinogi sounds ridiculously expensive.  Wurm only has a monthly fee.

Now that you mention it, Wurm could be a good game to troll, but it takes so long to get your skills up, I don't think it would be worthwhile.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

I really don't think too many of us will pay any amount of money to troll outside of our regular ISP bill.

[Auguste]

Wurm only has an optional monthly fee.

Fixed.  My bad.

[nostalgicBadger]

Well, Mabinogi is "free" so you wouldn't really have to pay outside of your ISP bill.
It could get expensive, but that's only if you actually want your character to be strong. You don't need to be a strong character to troll. Although I don't think you can spam global chat.. I don't even know how you use global chat, to be honest. I'm not sure there is one. So you know.. Like I said though, you could go hunt foxes and eat a bunch of meat, become morblidly obese and then form lines in front of / circles around NPCs so nobody can get to them. I would be down for that.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Morbidly obese pool closing? I'm sold!

[nostalgicBadger]

Also, I have never seen a GM, and considering that there are at any given time three bots spamming ads for currency trading and power leveling in the starting town, I'm not convinced that there are any.

[Auguste]

Also, I have never seen a GM, and considering that there are at any given time three bots spamming ads for currency trading and power leveling in the starting town, I'm not convinced that there are any.

Somehow I'm not surprised.  Nexon has the most fucking useless GMs I've ever seen, outside of Tibia.  Years ago when I used to play MapleStory, I ended up quitting because of all the botters and trainers.  After weeks of trying to notify the GMs, I just gave up.  I'd say either Maple or Mabinogi are good targets.  Should be easy to troll with no admins to stop you.

[nostalgicBadger]

Auguste - unrelated to trolling, but botting would be probably too complicated for most coders for me to imagine a bot being released in the near future. The combat system is a little like playing rock-paper-scissors and every successful attack ends in knock-back, so if you're not paying attention and just clicking, there's a good chance you never get a shot in. I wouldn't say it's impossible to bot, but I've done a quick sweep of google and nothing worthwhile seems to be available right now.

Unfortunately, no private servers either.

Either way, if you want to organize some kind of Mabinogi trolling, I'm down. I have an extra Nexon account, I could make a ten year old boy and see how round I can get him.

[Cramulus]

I'm not really into MMO's but I'll offer some advice from an organization point of view / brainstorming:

• Whatever game you pick has to be something easy to access. Stuff that you can access with a ten year old computer and a dialup connection. It needs to be free. It needs to be simple to understand
• What do you do when you get there? I assume some kind of prank or massive event. Like all the discordians meeting at X spot to protest against the local NPC government (or whatever). Play should be noticeable to the local players, even if they're not in the immediate vicinity. (unless you're picking a really high traffic area)
• People should be able to participate without having to level up or play the game that much. A good example is World of Warfact's corpsespam phenomenon. People will make a character with a funny name, then die somewhere, then quit that character forever and never respawn. There will then be a dead body there for all time.
• Think of a new way to jam the game. Don't do anything that'll get you banned (like spamming global chat or whatever) - do something that people don't expect you to do, and have fun doing it.
• Since it's a role playing game, you might have fun playing explorer characters, or people who seem to be horribly out of genre. Like a star trek away team landing in a fantasy MMO, or time travelers, or IRL people who somehow got zapped and got stuck inside the computer game like TRON or Captain N and the Game Masters or something
• Create a scenario where random players will play along with your shtick. Like if you set up a cabal of wise-men who live on top of a mountain and offer people wisdom, try to make it funny enough so that people will tell their friends "you gotta climb that mountain and talk to those guys"
  

back when Ultima Online came out, I made the world's first MMO door-to-door salesman. (no joke)
I spent all my time learning carpentry. Then I'd go door to door, asking people if they wanted any cabinets, chairs, whatever. I often got killed. But a lot of people thought it was HILARIOUS.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Heh, I kinda like the out of place troll. We need to find something where the players are all hardcore about roleplaying though.