Some Knowledge

An MMORPG is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  They are all very similar.  The first thing you will want to do when setting up any MMORPG is to check out the website for the game.  Read the information on how to download and setup the game.  Read the information on how to start and play the game.  Find out which keys control which game functions.  This will save you a lot of trouble when you start playing.  Players have little patience for clueless noobs who do not know how to control their characters.  It is better to take the time to learn the game before you start so you will not be asking people all kinds of dumb and obvious questions that will brand you as the clueless noob.

If you bought the software for your game at a shop, it should come with a manual.  Read the manual first before you start installing the game.  This may not seem like fun and games, but you want every advantage you can get and you want to know about the strengths and weaknesses of different career paths in the game.  The manual will tell you what you need to know to make intelligent decisions on how to build your character.  This does not take a lot of time.  If you spend an evening reading up on what may end up taking a lot of your free time you will save yourself the trouble of doing something stupid.  If the documentation for your game is only online, read and search for alternative sources of information.  Player-run sites and third party operations often have better information than the official game sites.  You might check out Youtube to see if there are any tutorials or game videos posted that will help you make your decisions on if you even want to start a particular game.

Alright, you’ve done your research.  You know what race, class, and build of character you want to start.  You know if you will be focusing on player killing or mob killing.  You know where to get quests and what you will need to do to complete them.  You know about training skills and earning experience.  You have installed the game and downloaded the ubiquitous patches.  Now what?

Look at your inventory.  Look to see what gear you have equipped.  Find out how much gold, if any, you start with.  Do you have food?  Do you even need food or water?  This is easy stuff.  Look for a quest.  If the game is based around quests these should be fairly obvious to spot.  Try talking to non-combatant characters in the starting area and pay attention to what they say.  Make sure your weapon is equipped.  Find something to kill.

In any current MMORPG you will find that fighting monsters is the main focus of the game.  Killing monsters is how you get experience and gold and items.  Look for a type of creature that you can kill without getting hurt too bad.  Now, hunt a lot of these creatures.  This is the level grind.  Keep killing things and taking their loot.  As soon as you have some game currency, buy better gear.  Look for a trainer and practice up the major skills you need to build your character.  Most games have some limiting factor on what and how high you can practice.  Make a list of the skills you want on your character and budget your resources so you can learn these skills.  It may be money that the trainers require, it may be skill points, it may be practice points.  Whatever the limiting factor is keep track of it and use your resources wisely.  It is better to get very good in one skill than to waste your points practicing all kinds of different things to a low level.  You want a character who is an expert in what he does, not a klutz.

Either do quests or kill creatures to advance in levels.  In general, you will have a more powerful character if you do some of both of these things.  You will generally become better in your main skills by using these skills repeatedly in combat.  You will generally get more gold by killing thousands of mobs than you will from running a few quests.  You will find more items from mob drops if you kill a lot of mobs.  It’s like this:  You kill and kill again.  It can get very boring.  It can be exciting if you find something good or valuable.  This is what the game is all about.  Endlessly fighting creatures over and over again until you get sick of it.  You will have to do a lot of this to get a high level character in some games.

Once you have a high level character you can look around for boss fights and dungeon raids or you can retire and spend all your time socializing with your clan or guild.  All of these games have chat functions.  You can usually talk to any other player just by sending them a tell or a whisper.  You might enjoy helping low level characters on their quests or with some difficult part of the game.  You may become an antisocial recluse who does nothing but farm the same mob endlessly for loot.   You might lead a raid that takes out the baddest boss in the game.  You might sit in a bar getting drunk on mead.  You might even go insane and start roleplaying.  What you do is your own choice.  I’ve told you basically all there is to know about MMORPGs.  If you make a powerful character you might specialize in player killing.  There are a limited number of things you can do in any game, but there is usually some way to have fun.