zbizu
Legendary OT User
Hello OtLand!
Tomorrow (22nd Nov) is a very important day to me. It marks my 10th year on this forum and is also my 25th birthday. At December 18 it will also be 15 years since I started playing Tibia. Time sure flies fast so I think that's a good moment to share my story with you.
I started playing Tibia at December 18 2005 - soon after 7.6 update. Got around 100 level and decided to quit because I was terrible at pvp and the world was already heavily dominated. When I was around level 60, I got into ot servers and seen the best yurots and evo servers one can imagine, even though the scripts were limited to actions only and servers were still hosted with data stored in xml files. I also played old Sinteria pvp which had a nice map I must say.
I spent some months on developing my own server, but didn't had much success because I was a noob that didn't had a dedicated server so uptime was rather low. Later I returned to rl tibia, around 8.2, on the world Nerana (today merged to Bona). I was more a player than a developer back then, but sometimes I was still returning to see how the engine was progressing. 0.3.7 and 0.4 were there. Creaturescripts, talkactions, globalevents and movements were a huge thing.
I was a tester for official flash client which I didn't play much because I couldn't spam spell hotkey + arrows to move faster. I was already a high level when 8.54 update happened. Zao was a really fun update. Then soon later, 8.6 happened and it was also epic. I did the quests on both the testserver and on rl tibia. I consider this period to be the peak of both Tibia and OpenTibia.
Fun fact: on testserver, royal draken mail was supposed to give extra hp, but something bugged and it made knights wearing it unkillable (1 hp no death) so the bonus was changed later to what we have now. There was no attempt to increase max hp on rl tibia anymore after that.
Aside from being a player, I was also a beginner scripter. I was watching OT scene during time of 7.8, 7.92, 8.0, 8.1, 8.54, 8.6 and 8.7 period and there was even a moment when server engine was ahead of rl tibia, it was 8.0 update. It was possible to connect to it using 8.0 testserver client and it even had a mapeditor (don't remember if it was SME or RME, but it was there). I must say the engine became a lot better. We got talkactions, movements, globalevents, even creaturescripts later. The servers became so advanced that better content could be delivered, but very few people actually took advantage of it. After 8.54 something bad happened and someone who was responsible for correct otb left and we got two otb files for 8.6 incompatible with each other. It wasn't much problem because elfbot stopped at this version, but it was also beginning of an end of what old OT scene used to be.
Back to rl tibia, there was 8.7 update, OT was a little behind, but it wasn't that bad. I caught all new rare mounts (even camped two weeks for panther, titanica and cavebear), stayed hours on training golems, grinded the tasks to finally face the demon oak and then something terrible happened. I ran out of quests to do. Everything I could do, I completed. There was no fun from playing this game anymore, only grind. What did Cipsoft do to keep players interested? Two big and boring content updates (hive and gnomebase). Both involved hard grinding that would pretty much require botting and I didn't like the direction this game was going to. In case I thought about returning, they added Roshamuul world changes to make the game even more grindy. I quit rl tibia and haven't returned in a long time.
Meanwhile on OT scene the situation wasn't that great either. Server owners figured out that they can monetize their game and all the passion died out. Fun servers started disappearing. It was all a toxic competition regarding who can attract more players. Having a better server suddenly became a huge advantage and people stopped contributing. Less people started using development engines because bugs = losing reputation so the server development was slowed a lot. I tried my luck at hosting a server again, but it failed shortly because there was a bug I couldn't track (loading a map piece from otbm through Game.loadMap(...) was duplicating house items).
I returned to rl tibia on a new account for a while only to witness the disasters that happened here. My world was merged and some guild from Guardia was acting like they own the server, economy for new players was ruined with overflowing creature products, banned botters, players quitting and imbuements. Everything became more expensive and quest services were much rarer because there were no players nor people willing to host it because it wasn't profitable to host poi/inq service anymore.
Then I started attending university. Disappeared from both rl tibia and ot scene for 5 years, occasionally looking at what was happening here. People hoarding improvements, developers trying to help but nobody reviewing their code, tfs repo maintainers refusing to update to protocol 12 because otclient doesn't support it, br scene completely separating and advancing years ahead of us in tfs development. Then the whole pandemic thing happened. I think that it helped the community to regain activity, but I also think that we need to focus on the present instead of looking back at the past.
The current state of ot development:
Logical conclusion is that to break the cycle, we have to update both the otclient (open source one) and the server.
returning to the story: I helped to develop some things for World of Aros, but I didn't had time to help actively there because I was preparing for my final exams. I just graduated from the university, with a master's degree in IT and recently joined the team behind Osera servers. My scripts gave a lot of great examples to the community. Though some of them didn't work in the past, I'm now a much better programmer and scripter than I used to be. After staying here for so long I feel that writing new things in both lua and c++ could remain my hobby. My plans for the future are getting a job, maybe a driving license and continuing to write new code. In the distant future I intend to learn programming the UI and maybe release my own client one day, but don't get your hopes up because I'm busy with plenty of other projects already.
After 10 years here I am happy to see other ancient members still being active. It means a lot to me. I am also happy that this forum is still up and you all didn't gave up on your dreams of making the servers better. Cheers to you!
Tomorrow (22nd Nov) is a very important day to me. It marks my 10th year on this forum and is also my 25th birthday. At December 18 it will also be 15 years since I started playing Tibia. Time sure flies fast so I think that's a good moment to share my story with you.
I started playing Tibia at December 18 2005 - soon after 7.6 update. Got around 100 level and decided to quit because I was terrible at pvp and the world was already heavily dominated. When I was around level 60, I got into ot servers and seen the best yurots and evo servers one can imagine, even though the scripts were limited to actions only and servers were still hosted with data stored in xml files. I also played old Sinteria pvp which had a nice map I must say.
I spent some months on developing my own server, but didn't had much success because I was a noob that didn't had a dedicated server so uptime was rather low. Later I returned to rl tibia, around 8.2, on the world Nerana (today merged to Bona). I was more a player than a developer back then, but sometimes I was still returning to see how the engine was progressing. 0.3.7 and 0.4 were there. Creaturescripts, talkactions, globalevents and movements were a huge thing.
I was a tester for official flash client which I didn't play much because I couldn't spam spell hotkey + arrows to move faster. I was already a high level when 8.54 update happened. Zao was a really fun update. Then soon later, 8.6 happened and it was also epic. I did the quests on both the testserver and on rl tibia. I consider this period to be the peak of both Tibia and OpenTibia.
Fun fact: on testserver, royal draken mail was supposed to give extra hp, but something bugged and it made knights wearing it unkillable (1 hp no death) so the bonus was changed later to what we have now. There was no attempt to increase max hp on rl tibia anymore after that.
Aside from being a player, I was also a beginner scripter. I was watching OT scene during time of 7.8, 7.92, 8.0, 8.1, 8.54, 8.6 and 8.7 period and there was even a moment when server engine was ahead of rl tibia, it was 8.0 update. It was possible to connect to it using 8.0 testserver client and it even had a mapeditor (don't remember if it was SME or RME, but it was there). I must say the engine became a lot better. We got talkactions, movements, globalevents, even creaturescripts later. The servers became so advanced that better content could be delivered, but very few people actually took advantage of it. After 8.54 something bad happened and someone who was responsible for correct otb left and we got two otb files for 8.6 incompatible with each other. It wasn't much problem because elfbot stopped at this version, but it was also beginning of an end of what old OT scene used to be.
Back to rl tibia, there was 8.7 update, OT was a little behind, but it wasn't that bad. I caught all new rare mounts (even camped two weeks for panther, titanica and cavebear), stayed hours on training golems, grinded the tasks to finally face the demon oak and then something terrible happened. I ran out of quests to do. Everything I could do, I completed. There was no fun from playing this game anymore, only grind. What did Cipsoft do to keep players interested? Two big and boring content updates (hive and gnomebase). Both involved hard grinding that would pretty much require botting and I didn't like the direction this game was going to. In case I thought about returning, they added Roshamuul world changes to make the game even more grindy. I quit rl tibia and haven't returned in a long time.
Meanwhile on OT scene the situation wasn't that great either. Server owners figured out that they can monetize their game and all the passion died out. Fun servers started disappearing. It was all a toxic competition regarding who can attract more players. Having a better server suddenly became a huge advantage and people stopped contributing. Less people started using development engines because bugs = losing reputation so the server development was slowed a lot. I tried my luck at hosting a server again, but it failed shortly because there was a bug I couldn't track (loading a map piece from otbm through Game.loadMap(...) was duplicating house items).
I returned to rl tibia on a new account for a while only to witness the disasters that happened here. My world was merged and some guild from Guardia was acting like they own the server, economy for new players was ruined with overflowing creature products, banned botters, players quitting and imbuements. Everything became more expensive and quest services were much rarer because there were no players nor people willing to host it because it wasn't profitable to host poi/inq service anymore.
Then I started attending university. Disappeared from both rl tibia and ot scene for 5 years, occasionally looking at what was happening here. People hoarding improvements, developers trying to help but nobody reviewing their code, tfs repo maintainers refusing to update to protocol 12 because otclient doesn't support it, br scene completely separating and advancing years ahead of us in tfs development. Then the whole pandemic thing happened. I think that it helped the community to regain activity, but I also think that we need to focus on the present instead of looking back at the past.
The current state of ot development:
- the devs aren't pushing new code because it isn't being merged
- the code isn't being merged because nobody is testing it
- nobody is testing it because everybody who wants new protocols moved to br repos already
- the repo maintainers aren't willing to do protocol 12 because they don't have a open source client yet
- the otclient isn't going to protocol 12 because nobody is updating it
Logical conclusion is that to break the cycle, we have to update both the otclient (open source one) and the server.
returning to the story: I helped to develop some things for World of Aros, but I didn't had time to help actively there because I was preparing for my final exams. I just graduated from the university, with a master's degree in IT and recently joined the team behind Osera servers. My scripts gave a lot of great examples to the community. Though some of them didn't work in the past, I'm now a much better programmer and scripter than I used to be. After staying here for so long I feel that writing new things in both lua and c++ could remain my hobby. My plans for the future are getting a job, maybe a driving license and continuing to write new code. In the distant future I intend to learn programming the UI and maybe release my own client one day, but don't get your hopes up because I'm busy with plenty of other projects already.
After 10 years here I am happy to see other ancient members still being active. It means a lot to me. I am also happy that this forum is still up and you all didn't gave up on your dreams of making the servers better. Cheers to you!
Last edited:
