Tibia 's introduction

Tibia is one of the oldest massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), first released in January 1997. It is a free game which is open to the public, though players have the option to pay a fee in order to upgrade to a premium account, granting special in-game benefits, including additional areas to explore, access to vocation promotions, and extra spells.

There are about 300,000 players, mostly from from the Netherlands, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, The United States, Canada, Poland, and Sweden[citation needed], distributed amongst some 74 servers located in Germany and the United States.

Gameplay involves advancing levels while training to improve skill levels, hunting monsters using weapons and magical spells, gathering treasure, doing quests and exploring the Tibia world. Players interact with each other in character for conversation, trade and group battles and partake in guilds for more role-playing opportunities. On most of the game''s servers, players are also allowed to attack and kill each other, although there is a system in place to keep hostile actions under control called the skull system. Some servers do not allow such player versus player combat at all, while others encourage it by rewarding experience for kills.

The concept of the game is to hunt creatures, or monsters, to gain experience points. Gaining experience points allows the character to advance in levels. When a charater dies during game play, 10% of its experience points are lost, lowering its level by one or more. Dying may also result in losing equipment that the character is carrying. When killing becomes excessive (3 or more in a pvp world) a red skull will be obtained. While having a red skull a character will lose all of his or her items once he or she is dead regardless of having an amulet of loss.

When creating a character, over 74 different Worlds (servers) can be chosen from. While each world is exactly the same in appearance, there is one main difference: whether or not players can attack each other. Three choices are given when a new character is created: Player vs. player, Player vs. player enforced, and Non-player vs. player. Antica is the first server created and when it was first created, it was simply called "Tibia". With the creation of new servers, "Tibia" was changed to "Antica".

In the game, there are four vocations, each with advantages and disadvantages. All new characters start out without a vocation. Once a character reaches level eight, he can go to the Island of Destiny where he chooses a vocation from four choices. Knights specialise in melee, Paladins in distance, Sorcerers in black magic, and druids in white magic. Once a vocation is chosen, the choice cannot be reversed. Premium players can purchase a promotion for their character''s vocation once they have reached level 20 for a one-time fee of 20,000 gold pieces. The Promotion gives the character various in-game advantages.

The game also has a large number of Non-Playable Characters, or NPCs. NPCs are there to buy/sell items and for quests and other roleplaying purposes.