The year was 2000 or something along those lines and I was working in an computer lab at the university I was attending. This was back in the days when having a fast internet connection at your home was either impossible or very very expensive. Therefore, everyone still used the computer labs at the school. There was one dude that would come in there every day and play a game and it turned out that game was Anarchy Online. I had never heard of Massive Multiplayer Online games at that point other than Everquest (which I never played) and I liked the idea of it.
The game had 3 different factions of sorts: The Omni-Tek corporation (kind of like the empire,) the Separatists Clan(like the rebel scum,) and a group not affiliated with either and I don't remember what they were called - we called them people that died a lot because they had no allies and would be insta-killed almost everywhere they went.
There were many different professions to choose from and for the most part this stuck with the "holy trinity" of gaming where there are tanks, healers, and DPS (damage per second) toons that are necessary in any sort of group.
While the game evolved over time and improved, AO had some pretty terrible limitations in the early days. For one thing, the servers would go down on a regular basis. This of course was very frustrating because you might have FINALLY found a good group and then everyone would inexplicably go LD (link dead.) When you did finally manage to get back in-game finding all of your group members wasn't always easy.
For early adopters of the game we would frequently encounter massive expanses of map that had nothing in it. I mean nothing: No towns, no enemies, no NPC's and no ability to fight other players. It was bizarre that these places even existed because certainly they could have simply shut those servers off.
There was also very little in the way of crowd control in dungeons which meant that 100 people could run a dungeon together and very easily defeat everything in it.
Funcom (the developers) counteracted this exploit by adding an absurd amount of enemies and an extremely short respawn rate that would almost always result in something just appearing out of nowhere.
Keeping in mind that these very frustrating elements of a game wouldn't likely be tolerated today but back in 2001 we didn't really have a whole lot of options so we just stuck with it and for the most part this newfound addiction started to consume a vast amount of my life. I would stay up all night on a raid and miss classes the following day or avoid hanging out with friends and whoever I was dating. With one exception I can honestly say that there was never a game that was as completely consuming at AO was to me and many other people.
MMO's come and go and I was actually surprised to find out that Anarchy Online is still going strong today. Also, it is Free to Play now so I suppose if you like the idea of a Sci-Fi oriented MMO there is no harm in trying it out. Looking back on the experience that I had playing this game it seems strange to me that I would devote so much time to it. Probably because it was a brand new notion. These days MMO's are a dime a dozen and I think AO would struggle to maintain any sort of viability if it wasn't a free game.