This MMORPG was a university project of 4 german students from Regensburg. running on university hardware. Once they finished their studies they had to make a decision to start a company or shut the game down for good. The server was offline for days, if not weeks and the community was anxious about the outcome.
it was such a fun game to play at the beginning because everything was new. for players AND for the guys developing it. you could attack others by aiming with your mouse. so you could attack characters on your screen. but there was no range check, so you could also attack players all the way on the other side of the world if you tweaked the code. also, no cooldown, and no penalty if you aimed at a tile where no player was standing. that means you could have sent an attack command for every single tile on the game world and instantly kill every player/monster around.
Duplicating stuff was possible because the map (including all items lieing around) was saved once at 9:00am ... but your characters inventory was saved whenever you logged off. so before 9:00am you put your amazing and expensive sword on the ground, after the save you pick it up again and log out. now you wait for a server crash, which happened regularly in the early days. (and some might have figured out a way to crash it on purpose) .. after a crash a backup of the map was restored. so you could log in. your sword was on your character but it was also on the ground where you put it at map save time.
me and 3 other people organized a meetup in austria, back around the year 2000 i think. people from all over europe attended. so did the 4 german guys who created the game. out of gratitude for organizing the event we could ask for a special favour. i got a unique weapon, i think one of us got a custom house on Fibula (a tiny island south of thais) ... sidenote: most names from the beginning were latin words stemming from medicine. (Fibula: shinbone, ...)
fun times, also addictive like hell.