It was during Beta 6 that training really took off to become a critical aspect of playing Tibia. Players would spend hours, many of them AFK, hitting fellow players or monsters, or making runes while waiting for opportunities to hunt. One of the reasons why training was so popular was because of how unstable the server was, crashing often due to the huge volume of incoming players taxing the servers, or the more frequent lag spikes of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). These spikes made it difficult to move, let along risk hunting. CIP even went as far as to provide a lag meter on their website which would measure the connectivity to the game which acted like a weathervane for players decided if they should hunt that day.
Training was an important way to reclaim some of your otherwise lost time during volatile server periods. With so many players joining Tibia it was also an important way to deal with overcrowded dungeons and give players something productive to do while they shopped for the limited available runes for their next big hunt. The bottleneck for all players was runes as you could only buy from other players. People went to extraordinary lengths to secure sources for runes, prebuying even unmade runes in the hopes of getting a manageable supply. UH was by far the most in demand rune followed by the SD, and the popular HMM rune. Players would spend days broadcasting about buying backpacks of runes like the profitable Ultimate Healing runes. It was not uncommon for players to support a rune maker directly for exclusivity, providing protection and buying all backpacks they made. Most mages would parcel a backpack to a well-known place and wait until after the player finishes training before receiving parceled money. Negotiation was an important part of rune buying and players would decide on price, logistics (meet in a specific city or location), or if the deal would require a middleman or "give first" trust were one player trusted another to give their portion first. Many strong and lasting friendships occurred at the end of a negotiation and successful trade.
While accumulating these runes players had nothing else to do but wait, and training provided them a benefit while they waited. Training originally was frowned upon to overpower your character using a "cheat", but with the increasing focus on levels, players felt that they needed to develop an edge. Despite the focus on levels players remained very low level so the incremental difference each level was very little. Hunting was mainly single monster, and it was important to spent as little time engaged with a monster as possible due to the potential for getting kicks. Skills were how you gained much greater power, and more skills meant that you could level faster, survive more, and use less resources which further sped up your rune purchase recovery time between hunts.
Players primarily relied on their skills for damage increases as large gains from levels was unlikely. Having strong skills also allowed you to get more milage out of your equipment which was upgraded very slowly. Each level of melee for knights was worth about 10 levels and one distance for paladins was worth 5 levels so you would have to level an outrageous amount to get the same benefit. It was relatively easy to gain many skill levels on a new character very quickly which provided a huge benefit. As you approached 100 skills it became increasingly slower at which point leveling made more sense. Most players were stuck around level 30 though you might work your way into the 50s as a high level. Just before Smoke's deletion he was contemplating leveling instead of training as the time taken to train was over 100 hours per skill.
Even if you wanted to level, I recall many times where it was impossible to hunt for an entire week and some weeks where evening setting up a training camp was too difficult due to the kicks. Some players like myself enjoyed training to such a degree that it became more than a way to kill time between hunts and turned into a competitive sport of becoming first on the high score list. Several players would often battle it out for the top spot and sometimes the competition would lead to violence or war. The later Hokuten conflicts with the community were often centered around retribution against others for out skilling one of their members.
In one famous example, Precise was becoming obsessed with training and wanted to get his distance to level 100 as the first player to do so. Unfortunately Fillippa would gain one distance every time Precise would advance, so he realized that he would be beaten to 100. In his words:
"So one day Mike and I, we were just like, screw it, let's give it a try. And from what I remember, I didn't feel like we were going to be able to kill them. I felt like they were just going to heal and kill us.
And if we just stopped them from training, we would have won, you know what I'm saying? Just to stop it. But, and that was when, like you died, you lose like two distance skills that wasn't like, Oh, you lose one here, whatever, like the death penalty hurt.
It was, it was disturbing when you died back then. And so Siobkerry and I got on the phone. Like we, like, we did a lot when we would have an action and we walked up and I think we maybe tested t. I'm like, Hey, how's it going? Beautiful day. Like some weird RPG stuff. And then me and Mike were just like, all right, let's do it one, two, three, you know? And we just started rocking them. And then we took off, we took off and we were not killed. The blowback from that was rough, though. That was like, they had a meltdown."
Not all players killed others to take over the top skill spot, some did so by using their knowledge of skills to give themselves an edge. As skills where completely unspoiled, how to best train and even how close you were to the next skill level was a mystery to players. Some would even go as far to protect their knowledge like a family secret, refusing to share what they believed was an optimal strategy. Those who were really in tune with their character would claim to get a feeling that they were close to the next advance or would swear that there was a "tell" which would let them know they were close. When the message finally appeared, it would be a nice surprise, and sometimes you stopped training for the day only to begin the next and immediately get the advancement.
Since the beginning of Beta 5 players had begun to test the mechanics of the game to figure out what the actual rates of gain everything was. Training was an important part of that testing as you might spend hours without realizing you were wasting your time if your set up wasn't aligned to advancement. Though many experiments, it was determined that the best setup was to attack a monster causing a blood hit within 30 strikes, and to have two monsters attacking you causing poofs. The precise timing of the poofs was important as players believed they would not count unless they were separate instances of a poof. We would push a monster away until they would line up to our desired poof rate. This was done with the intent to raise shielding as fast as possible which if done right would allow the skill to rise at the same speed as players melee skill. Many of the best trainers kept their skills with a 5-level difference between melee and shield which was considered very good. The legendary Smoke had skills which were only 1 skill difference which was incredible. Players who didn't put this much time into lining up poofs only gained at around half the rate. Some players who mainly hunted or used two handed weapons would also have much wider spread between skills, which would clue in players that they were using a twohanded weapon. Shielding during this time was considered useful though not as critical as it had been in the past.
By far the most common monster players trained on was the Ghoul and even a Knight could convince one and lure it to a hidden spot. Monks would become a superior monster, supplanting Ghouls due to their aggressive healing and higher HP, which was better able to survive stronger skills players. Wolves were a common monster to create the poofs, though bugs and other non-poisonous creatures were used. Many players opted to have a training partner that they would attack though this could be much more dangerous if either player wasn't paying attention. Setting up the correct attack pattern could be difficult as players still mainly used two monsters which they set to create poofs and the 3rd hit was from the player attacking them, causing a blood hit.
High skilled Paladins almost always had to go this route as their spear hits could outpace most monster healing at high skills. You could use a healing rune on a monster during this time, but it was difficult to spot a nearly dead monster while a player would heal themselves when they needed or run away if they couldn't. This is also why training with the stand your ground checked was important, otherwise you would chase after your training partner if you were not paying attention. Player on player training was also not as recommended because over time player stats changed, adjusting your work to fewer desirable results. Monsters didn't seem to have this problem though a rumor did go around that monsters would level up their skills as you trained. Though no one could provide this was the case, players still refreshed their monsters every 8 hours or so just in case.
Training players carried a large variety of weapons, shields, and armor so they could get the right mix of damage delt and received so they wouldn't kill their target too fast or do too little damage. Changing weapons and equipment had to happen frequently as training partners changed or a skill increased. As you would likely only need a few armor points of defense, trainers where required to keep most of their equipment in their backpacks which made them a target of nefarious players. You could leave your equipment in your depot, and many left their good rares behind, but you may need some equipment in case you had to rush out to help a friend or were attacked by someone or even lured on. This left you wish a difficult decision on what to bring as this would be your choice for hours of online time.
As you were spending upwards of 12 hours or more training it was important you have a renewable healing resource close by. Training along a river was preferred as you could fish and naturally replenish your mana and HP. The more water tiles around you, the less you needed to fish as a tile took around 45 minutes to spawn a new fish. No worms were needed so you could fish for hours without problems and often a high skilled fisherman would have hundreds of fish under them they didn't need. If you were close to a hunting ground, sometimes another player would come by and ask for some fish to heal before they returned to their hunt. Players would often give the excessive amounts of fish to them, though some players fought over the fish, resulting in lasting feuds.
These players were not the only ones to come and visit as other players came to check for cheaters. Checking for macro users or AFKers was a big part of the guard style guilds as they disliked those who gained unfair advantage and would chronically pester all training players. Asking all players to dace at the same time was a popular method to check for cheating as those macroing with one computer were unable to do so. Dancing was done by holding the Ctrl button and then randomly pushing arrow keys which would turn your character in place. As bots became popular this feature was built in to allow multiple clients to dance, satisfying the player or GM that was checking. For players like myself that often did other activities like posting while training this was an annoying thing to keep an eye on and required looking for increasingly secluded training spots to cut down on the interruptions.
Where you trained was important and many players trained near a PZ, either close to town or sometimes inside the city. This was often only player vs player and most chose to not use monsters to improve their shielding due to disruptive players running any carefully orchestrated training regimens. Those who wished to use monsters typically found spots like in PoH where you could convince a Ghoul at the nearby graveyard and head to one of the secluded inlets on the west side by the ocean. Players also trained in other spots around the map like in the lower area below the mines near Kazordoon, before this was added to the game. No one had any real reason to go here so it was a good spot to be left in peace. Another good spot was the northern shores of the Orc Land area, but this could be dangerous if a determined player lured an Orc Berserker to your camp (or a God arrived and began counting down). Some, in the day before Abby, would train in the northern portion of the area around Cyc Camp. Once Satori made Abby their home, training became strictly prohibited outside of the Bug Pen to the southeast of the depot. Many also liked to train on the Ice Islands and the hidden middle island accessed from Folda was a very popular spot as it was far away from most troublemakers. Though the training spots were varied and spread all over Tibia, none were truly out of the way like the spot Smoke and I trained at, which was deep inside MoLS. This spot was a challenge to get to even if you were actively hunting for that person and only GMs visited us in the short time we trained there.
