Ostekake took his look back, so I'll take mine.
I received a copy of Planetside for free at GenCon in '03 or maybe '04. To this day, I'm not sure if the cute booth-girl was giving me the game or if I was supposed to have walked to a nearby register to pay for it. I walked away with it, so the outcome is easy.
It was probably 6 months or more before I had a computer, though, and it was a late night with my brand new laptop whenever I decided to see if the free trial was still valid. It was. I remember that was a Wednesday and I probably played until 3 or 4 in the morning. Work the next day sucked. Second wind had kicked in by the time I got home and I starting playing immediately, stopping only to make some instant noodles and line up some sodas next to me. I think I fed my cat that night. Maybe. I called in sick to work the next day, having not slept yet. I think I napped whenever the servers went down for maintenance but was anxiously trying to reconnect as soon as they were supposed to have been back up.
So, in that first 96 hours of having Planetside, I think I slept 8 to 10 of them.
The irony? I hate... hate hate hate hate HATE first person shooters. I suck at them. All these little kids who do nothing else but play and whose reflexes are SO much sharper than mine. And, in the beginning, time spent playing mattered a lot... no matter what anyone tells you. At that time, you started with enough Certifications to start in a single direction with a character and you needed to level a bit to earn the few more Certs to get that build solid. Then you needed even more to balance yourself out so that you had options outside of your specialization when needed.
But it was innovative and ambitious... and, while horribly unstable and unbalanced, it was a great concept.
Some of my fondest gaming moments and oft-told stories are from Planetside. From a guy named Byrd who was the best enemy I ever had and who made taking a horrible beating entertaining to finally getting an Outfit who would follow my orders instead of zerging like the teenagers on "Command Chat" insisted on calling strategy. I will always smile whenever I think about me, a pitiable Command Rank 2, leading a wing of air cavalry and dropships to salvage a poorly planned assault by those "Commanders" only to have them question why so many people were following a CR2. I will smile broader when I remember the reply from someone I didn't know... "At least he knows what the hell he's doing. So go call in an orbital strike somewhere and get out of our way."
I miss the silly kids in the Vanu Mafia, who would regularly go play on some remote continent just to see how long it would take people to come see what we were up to. I miss being so annoyed with DireWolf (or however he l33t spelled his name), that I picked up a bolt driver and followed him around for a whole night, Griefing him until I couldn't shoot any more (and was then offered $20 to switch to another character to keep doing it, because his whining was amusing some people). I miss being at the apex of a dozen-strong wing of Reavers and watching a carpet of rockets blanket a target. I miss ANTs being viable weapons when dropped from a Galaxy.
I went back for a while, some time ago. The BFRs just make the vehicle-centric play that had formed before I first left so much worse. It was more frustrating than it ever was and, with but a fraction of the playerbase left, the battles were not varied enough to let me enjoy finding a niche to play within.
I will miss Planetside. It held my attention for a very long time and for all of its flaws, it was an innovative and noteworthy game. Maybe I'll pick up a Pulsar again and have a giggle as attacking snipers find auto-turrets popping up behind them... that's so much more fun than detonating mines under their squating hindquarters any day.