Of course we did found him aboard the Tibianic. :)

Huhu Taghor :)
Greetings :)

When did you start to play?
I don't know the exact date, but it was around summer 1998. Must have been July or August. One year and a half after Tibia was released, if I remember right, in the begining of 1997.

Was it very different of how its today?
Of course. :) There was only one server, one city and only very few hunting places. The characters where not animated and jumped form square to square. And we had around 50 people online at one time. So it was a very small community. The Gamemasters back then were called: "wizards". So you can say we had no gamemasters :) But we had 5 wizards perhaps? I renember the following people as wizards: Knightmare, Maegwin, Lostboy and 1 or 2 more i think. Can't renember 100%

What about CipSoft? Durin, Steve, Guido... did they played more than now?
Guido wasn't even a CipSoft member at that time :) He came later to the team. If they played they played on chars not known the majority of people. I myself didn't meet them often. As today the biggst chance to meet them was on a testserver.

Tibia had ugly graphics... the gameplay was laggy... square by square movement... tiny map area... why did you play Tibia? How comes you liked Tibia so much?
You forgot the daily sever crashes and resets we all had to suffer :) Well i askes myself the same question over and over again. It can only be the community. The friends you find in the game. The guilds. That is what makes this game so interesting. Tibia was my first online game and i din't know these aspects of this game, but i found out that i really like that.

For example, a typical day in 1998.. Well there were several posibilities how the day could happen :) But tou could log in the temple go out and stumble over one of the PKs around (Bluesoul for example) then the day was quickly over :) most of the Pks in those days used Makros to shoot Runes in a very fast way. You had no chance to avoid death. Another very favorite place to spend oyur itme was the ghoul room north of thais. Many people gathered there and drew numbers who could kill the next ghoul and the entrance to the room was blocked with flowers so the ghouls could not get out. The only monsters existed were: rats, spiders, poison spiders, ghouls, rotworms(few), cyclops, beholders, dragons and demons.

Aswell, as a newbie you had a very intersting aspect of getting equipment. If you were brave enough you could run into the dragon lair and try to grab stuff from the ground that the highöevels left there cause it was worth nothing. The things you could get was: Enchanted Plate Armor, Helmet of the stars and Fireswords, which were the best equipment back then but well they weren't rare :)

Eplates lying on the ground!
Yes, I bought my first eplate for 300gp. The only thing whihc was a bit rare was a master Mind shield. Cause it was only lootable in demons it did cost around 1-2k, which was something that everyone could get in a reasonable time. Of course it was more worth than today 1-2k cause you had not so much monsters to hunt.

There was no Rookgaard back then... how did you choose vocation?
You had a level rquirement for the vocations and then had to pay a price to get your vocation. If i remember right it was: Knight Level 5 (200 gp), Paladin Level 6 (400), Druid and Sorc Level 7/8 and 800 gp but i far my memory is not so good in this facts. To pay, you went to your "guild" leader. Sorcs to Muriel, Paladins to Eolane, Knights to Gregor and Druids to Marvik.

people seem to believe in the "old days" everybody roleplayed... is that true?
Well i think that depends on the definition of roleplaying. If you think we spoke all in old english and only said thinks like: "What wind brings you to me today?" then i must say no, we didn't roleplay all the time.But what is different that in the old days thinks like a player driven shop or tavern were possible. Take the famous Mino Outpost, driven by Thorin Oakenshield. For the people today it would be only some crates near the water but for us it was our loved tavern were we met and thorin made us our mino burgers.

This is the minobar that oldschoolers mentions here and there?
Yes, the minobar. But it was not were it is today, it was south of Thais near the respawn of the Mnotaurs. So Thorin could serve us fresh slayed mino burgers. He even made me a Cyc Burger as i asked one time for it. We sat evening to evening at his bar and told our tales. Today the people would throw the crates into the water cause they think they block the respawn or something like that.

Looks like there was much less "powergaming"... no? Would you say leveling wasnt that important?
There was powergaming... and it was called Opa Wetterwachs :) Of course there were people who liked to have a high level. But it wasn't that important. in my eyes it isn't important today either :) Opa Wetterwachs was the Bubble of the old times. He lived in the dragin cave and killed thousands and thousands of dragons. He was around level 50-60 or something like that and there was a big gap between him and number 2, like bubble today :)

You see I try to understand the "old days" syndrome... all highlevels speak of the "old days". Do you think its nostalgia? Or is there anything else? Did the "old tibia" had more appeal than todays one?
Well, I think if you compare the old Tibia with todays Tibia, it's like if you compare a village where everyone knows everyone, with a big city where everybody is anonymous. It's not the game that changed so much. Many good things were implemented which were druiving us crazy in the old times. We had daily server crashes for example, but at the end of the day, what counts and makes the old times so great to renember is the community. We had many Player driven quests back then and the communication and fun over the broadcasts was great. Technically the same as the in gamechat but practically it was better.

Why better? Less abuse?
Well, it was better cause of the small community. If for example a team defeated the demon the first time after the update, they made a broadcast and all knew about it. And then came the Grats and so on. Broadcasts were a common tool to simply express: "hello I am back, anythign happening?" That can only work with a small community, of course, because else you get spammed. But the gamechat today is not the same.

Some players got the tibia editor to design some areas... you had the chance to be one of them?
Yes, but I didn't design an area. I designed the Tibianic which today is our guildship. It was a very hard fight with CipSoft to get them to allow this. CipSoft did copy the design of the ship after i finally convoinced them that it is possibel to build ships in Tibia and used it on the cities and also the ghostship. It was hard to do that cause they didn't accept the first designs of the Tibianic.

Why did they thought it wouldnt work? I suppose now that we have seen it its obvious how to do it but... it was hard then?
Well, the first designs had no sails, so it simply looked like another house but not as a ship. The begging for sails did not help there were non implemented as i had to design it, so after thinking a while I had the idea how to solve this problem; I wanted to use the red wall carpets for sails. But there was another problem then... the map editor did not allow to hang carpets in th air. You need a wall to attach them but hanging walls on the mast was not a good idea and looked very ugly

They needed to modify the editor then?
No, that was out of question. So what to do? well if you look very closely today on the sails you will see what I used. If you would be able to turn Tibia 180 degrees you would see.... fences hanging at the mast. And to them I attached the carpets :) You cann see the left side of the fence on each ship in Tibia if you look closely ;)

Laughs!
That was around 3 years ago and CipSoft did not repleace them yet with something invisible.. but well as long as nobody is wondering about it :) With that sail invention we finally managed to get the Tibinic into the game after 3 years of begging to CIP. And after countless parcel Tibianics build!

Great :) Ok, now I have one tricky question. We heard rumors of a secret Cow Level in tibia... that did exist back in the old days. What do you know about that? :)
Thats a very tricky question :) I can say there existed a secret Level but it was not called: cow level It was called secret sheep level. But it doesn't exist anymore since it was removed after some people found it and used it for afk-macro training

Sheeps? :) big ugly sheeps with super strenght?
Hehe well lets have some rumors left in tibia, so no comment :)

Thank you very much, Taghor, for your time and for sharing your experiences with us :)
I am allways glad to share the memory of the old times :)