My favorite exploit in this game was boosting a friend of mine (Splatt) to level 74 mere seconds after the TSS expansion went live (where they increased the level cap from 70 to 75).

EVERYONE was freaking out, demanding our blood. His guild was threatening to boot him. A GM even came to talk to us. And after we explained what we had done, he agreed that no rules had been broken.

There were a bunch of game mechanics that we made use of:

- When you die, you lose experience.

- If you lose too much experience, you even lose a level.

- The lower your level compared to the mob you kill, the more experience you get (to a point).

- If your corpse has no items on it, it decays after 3h of in-game time (meaning when you are logged in, the timer counts down). While you are NOT logged in, the timer is 7 days.

And then the mechanism that shot him up to 74:

- There's a special verteran's reward AA "Experient Recovery" that recovers 100% xp from ALL non-expired corpses instantly.

The trick was to delevel him as low as possible, and then gain as much exp as possible within a 3h in-game window so that the expedient recovery would shoot him past his original level 70.

To do that, we first had to delevel him, which is difficult to do quickly since you respawn wherever you are bound. But there was one area with lots of aggro mobs where you could bind: Sanctus Seru. So we bound him there and let the slaughter begin. HUNDREDS, possibly THOUSANDS of corpses, all piled up and slowing down the zone something awful. We let them pile up for 2.5 hours, keeping the last 30 minutes of the first corpse timer in reserve for gathering the XP. I think we ended up deleveling him from level 70 down to level 52 or something.

Then we went to Plane of Disease. In case you don't remember, there's an old sword from the Hole called "Earthshaker", which procs Earthquake (a 90pt AOE). But due to the game mechanics, it had a chance to go off with every swing (in reality it would go off I think 20% of the time? Can't remember 100%). The Warrior's ability "Rampage" causes him to instantly swing his sword at every single creature near him. So if you get enough creatures near him, he'll proc a ton of times from all of the instant swings, generating a massive AOE (everyone called this "Shakerpaging").

Anyway, I'd done a lot of research on mob hitpoints and resistance, and determined that POD was the optimal point, with just the right amount of mob hitpoints that a group of 100 or so of them would cause enough of a shakerpage to kill them all.

So we got to work. Over the next few hours, I'd run around POD with my cleric, gathering up a HUGE army of mobs to the kill zone. Then I'd signal to Splatt to log in, at which point his corpse timer countdowns resume. I'd hit Divine Aura (which makes me completely invulnerable for a short while). Splatt would come into the mass of mobs who are aggroed on me and completely ignore him, then hit rampage. The whole zone would stutter and go wonky from the calculations it had to do. From the outside, you would see the mobs attacking, and then they'd dance some weird looking jig, and all fall over simultaneously, dead.

Some mobs would survive, of course. I'd aggro and drag them away, he'd sit down, camp out, and quit. Corpse timer would stop.

Rinse and repeat until we'd used up almost all of the corpse timer (we kept a spy in Seru to keep watch on the first corpse). We got him back up to the mid 60s. At that point the mobs were green and gave very little xp.

Then after the system upgrade, he simply logged on and clicked expedient recovery. Boom, level 74.

Next patch after that, they changed rampage to only issue one "swing" for the purposes of procs.

I was also the first to one-group OMM (got a Triton invite for that). Even at lv 75 you do NOT want to miss a mask click on him! But that's a story for another day.