(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash)
Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.
Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.
Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.
The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)
Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.
I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.
That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded.
You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.
Yeah, I remember the rules about "botting", too. I don't know if they changed a lot since I played, but back then they basically amounted to "don't automate your character to farm while idle". In light of the pay-to-avoid-grind system, it didn't take me too long to conclude that the rules were pretty much "don't affect our bottom line, anything else goes".
Because botting is basically impossible for us to detect algorithmically (we're a tiny company and don't have the resources to engage in that kind of battle with botters), our line boils down to, "If we come and talk to you and you don't reply, you're not playing the game and that's not allowed."
It's the only standard for botting that works for us.
True, but not strictly true. I played with 100% manual attacks and cures, but made heavy use of color coding to recognize threats in the rapid scroll of incoming text. It wasn't any harder than playing a competitive puzzle game: recognize colors, make matches, try to throw sand in your opponent's gears and make combos faster than they can.
Iron Realms games are pay to win enough to make every publisher jealous. Though they are some of the most involved/integrated communities of players/developers/tool-makers in likely any game at the moment.
Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.
Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.
What was the code word... "Duanathar"?