As Asheron’s Call 1 & 2 are going offline shortly, I thought I might give it a final send-off with a list of things I learned from the series. Maybe it’s cheesy, but I really did grow up in Dereth. Some kids get their life lessons from sports, girl/boy scouts, farm life, church life, alien abduction camp life, and so on, but I learned a lot with the help of the AC series and the people I played with. I’ll focus on 10 life lessons learned from the Asheron’s Call series, but trust me, it’s more than that.

1. Get some perspective

Asheron’s Call took place in a single seamless world. No instancing. If you wanted to kill the new big bad, you literally had to stand in line or risk community exile, as people regularly got blacklisted.

However, as the genre was still young and most of the world was essentially undocumented (in game), people got attached to their hunting spaces. When some random guy found my grinding spot, I got upset and tried to run him off. My patron (essentially a guildie who recruited you to the guild and acted as your mentor) took me to the side and asked how I would have felt if I had found a new area to explore, only to have someone tell me to GTFO.

That was the first and last time I did that (in a PvE area). Like most lessons, the first time wasn’t enough. When I tried putting my (terrible teenage) AC fanfiction online, I had people come in and critically rip up my stories, including (supposedly) a college professor. I was 13 years old. As a kid, most people tell you wonderful things just for trying, but AC fans weren’t always nice, and they weren’t always aware that I was a kid. Again, though, I actually learned once I understood their perspective. Just because I knew certain game locations and their significance, it didn’t mean other people did, so I learned to better communicate through writing.

Heck, understanding where I disagreed with people helped me refocus my energies. If someone kept using fire attacks on a fire elemental and dying, I could call them stupid or could realize that they didn’t know damage types matter, meaning someone should teach them. Maybe as adults, we don’t think about this or when we noticed it, but it makes interacting with other people much easier, and that’s really important for hormonal teenagers who are constantly unsure of why they’re hulking out all the time. It’s also great for teachers and writers that have to worry about smart people realizing how little we sometimes actually know (please don’t tell anyone!).

2. Your reputation means everything… and nothing.

I mentioned being blacklisted for doing stupid things in AC1&2. Unlike modern MMOs where you’re randomly forced to group with people for the sake of convenience, even the original World of Warcraft lacked a dungeon finder at launch. WoW players often picked Progress long before Social Grace. AC‘s progress was limited and smaller in scope, making the game far more social. As such, problem people would be reported to their patron or monarch (guild leader). If neither at least hinted that he or she cared, gossip ensued and that entire guild might have been blacklisted. Without name changing services, players would have to make a new character, try to find a new guild that would accept them, do something to fix their image, or quit to avoid a blackened name. It was more than just being a good person; it was making sure you kept good company.

It didn’t always matter, though. If you were a power player, some people would blacklist you out of jealousy. If there were a relationship situation and things went sour, one person would get shamed and blacklisted. Heck, some people were the bad guy just because it was needed, such as when Turbine made use of a past developer-led roleplaying scenario to convince a monarch to aid them in killing a key lore creature, the Shard of the Herald.

Truth be told, when I started playing the game, I didn’t have the best friends. They may have gotten me into AC, but I remember figuring out early on that I didn’t like playing online with them. The few times I played AC1&2 with them, they often did things to remind me why we didn’t play together. What really hurt was the way I’d get treated because of my association with them. While they eventually started blowing off school to pursue less legal hobbies, I stuck with it. I had at least made online connections with people who were a good influence on me and wanted to be seen as respectable players/people. Later, when we had to play “bad guys” in AC2, those same people still strove to get me to do good. Some people disliked us and didn’t want to play with us any more, but that was their loss. I kept in contact with those who mattered, and it’s paid off emotionally (and a little financially).