The good old days when the game was live are mostly associated with playing the game with my siblings, in particular my older brother, who was at the time playing primarily with people from Something Awful and approached the game somewhat accordingly - he had at least a couple characters at 50, but my strongest memories of playing with him were him dragging me and the other siblings around to basically just troll people, going into Pocket D on the RP server (Virtue, IIRC) occasionally with characters like Douggy the frat bro or Furry Statesman (a funny one to reflect on, given later revelations about myself) to just mess with people taking it more seriously. During the game's final days, when people were rushing around trying to get characters to 50 before sunset, my brother pulled one final stunt, getting us to help him rope people into a faux-farming AE mission literally about saving a farm's cows from gremlins, all the while we were yelling about having to make sure the farm survived the coming winter and stuff like that. (IIRC, that mission gave no XP at all - maybe a bit too cruel for a game's final day, but the crimes of 2012 need not be dwelled on nowadays.)
I should note that he did play the game perfectly normally otherwise, as did most of the Something Awful crew he played with - he just liked doing that stuff, and he liked bringing us in on it, and those memories happen to be what stick with me the most. I never did get a character to 50 on live myself - that was just my older brother and my little sibling who managed that, but I certainly made plenty of characters and did get a War Mace/Willpower Brute to just a little under 30. I probably would have managed more, but I never did have a consistent subscription myself and my computer circa 2006-2009 was prone to GPU overheating and making tree textures go haywire every so often - even so, I always adored the game, and maybe one day I'll get a character to 50 on Homecoming. I am currently closer than I ever have been before, though that's to the tune of a Broad Sword/Shield Defense Brute being at 33 right now (and playing very on and off over the course of, like, 4 years). One thing hasn't changed: it's just too tempting to make alt after alt after alt after alt after alt...
