Remember this fondly. My elder brothers introduced me, I must've been 8-9 years old and was reduced to mining for them. Three of them played, a lvl 42 warrior, a 38 wizard and a 36 tao when they quit. I'd watch them on guildhunts up to ZT KR, they'd have to queue and then our dial-up would disconnect and all of us call it a night.
I didn't have money, or knew what a splash plastic was, so I levelled characters to 21 only to hit the P2P gap and have to restart a new character. I'd be in medium armour, power rings, green bead and spririt sword PKing miners and generally being a shithouse. I used to sell 'amazing' mystery items in town that were actually useless.
Eventually they started paying for my account if I'd give them good drops, that was around the time Past Bichon & PI came into the game. I remember my brother got one of the first thunder rings and was buzzing, sold it for 60m or something and bought a dura 0 para ring and Lionroar. He quickly realised he could pay people online for items and real world traded a dc0-40 luck3 judgement mace.
When the easter/med level caves came in I clicked on one of those little yellow eggs and getting a Baektaglove, I didn't sleep for about 48 hours running around in there.
Not sure when, but I do recall the game quite often being offline, being out of action for days at a time, and then one day it was just done and we all moved onto SSX and need for speed on the Xbox.