Bring back Friday with Means

[Lazy]

this lack of updates is killing me

[Dysfunction]

bwomp....... bwomp bwomppppp

[nanoforcer]

Lol, if they can't manage to get some info out monthly how is weekly gonna work?
Good though thou ☺️

[nanoforcer]

This is thin, but i guess that's all we get this time
http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...6-Oct-10-Nov-7

[Soju]

was hoping for freeplay so i could come back and visit. maybe ill see everyone in july.

[Hekthor]

Dafuq....srly DAFUQ??? Maybe they will get a facility manager to write some cool things to us for a weekly update Good Luck with that^^

[Aiken]

I just want the funky hats back. I miss my funky hat

[Artyomis]

I can image that weekly newsletter thingie....
Gonna be something like

week 1. Michizure: We
week 2. Michizure: are
week 3. Michizure: gonna
week 4. Michizure: pop
week 5. Michizure: on
week 6. Michizure: Steam
week 7. Michizure: soon.
...................................
week X. Michizure: Crew was ultrabusy lately and few more things left to do before we gonna hit Steam.
...................................
week Y. Michizure: It's been some damn good few years with you guys, but I've decided to make my next step in career and join EA/Blizzard/Whatever_is_cool_now team

/insert new GD name
/repeat

[Phargus]

Come now, what has FC ever done to warrant such cynicism?

[McKnuckleSamwich]

I kinda chuckled.

Watching this lack of updates, lack of people, stuff... dunno maybe I outgrew this game or something. I read the new posts on the forums every day and it's like:

ZZZZZZZ

I remember last hallo'ween and it just came and went, and I was like, oh, well maybe I'll build that twink or whatever next year. Then, a few months later I was looking at my heroes or whatever they are called, on my loading screen, and I found out I don't even have twinks anymore. Like, what? I don't even know. Maybe I moved them off my main account or something. Whatever. I have my keeper. Sweet. I log him in, and I see my pred buff has a few hours left on it, hmm, nice! Wait around at the battle station or whatever, I go into some grey room, then go out of it again. Welp, battlestation isn't running I guess.

Can't even remember how to play that hero anyway. screw it, log off.

Do that once every few months.

I guess I'm sort of hoping something will change. No idea what it is though.

If there was TL5 Newland PVP I would go and get my ass handed to me by my scissors or whatever but those days are long gone. I can't even remember what you do with twinks anymore. Wasn't that the whole point of AO? To like, find that weird rare thing that gave you 1 point more strength and only one guy on the server had a ring that gave 17 stam instead of 16, and you spent literally weeks prepping your toon to borrow that item, then you worked furiously over some hours all the while hoping against hope that you'd have enough IP to raise tutoring enough because lol who even uses that except ta-da you got that thing on, now for sure you can beat that advy because you can actually perk him in limber now, right? right? RIGHT? omg he changed to opi, or is that a new setup?

AO used to be fun.

It took me years to build my keeper. Literally, years. I started him in Canada, and didn't finish him until I'd lived in Australia for a year. Well, we've been in aus for 7 years, had two kids. The kids are in school now, and AO still has gray rooms and empty battlestation.

At least in Newland you could sit in the grass, harass the guards, and try to gank the flagged people... Back when flags weren't retarded.

/end of story

[ByLogic]

Means Colin is busy with pony online mmo with "Elvis Prestly". i miss Colin, he was great with AO

[Avari]

Watching this lack of updates, lack of people, stuff... dunno maybe I outgrew this game or something. I read the new posts on the forums every day and it's like:

ZZZZZZZ

Not sure you outgrew anything if you feel the need to stick around to puff yourself up and deride a product you no longer consume.

[Soju]

Not sure you outgrew anything if you feel the need to stick around to puff yourself up and deride a product you no longer consume.

Ao is just and outlet to express personal pains. im guily of this myself tho too >.<

[McKnuckleSamwich]

@Avari I'm hardly being derisive or contemptuous... I'm stating the facts.

I come on forums and look at what's posted, and I try to find something that interests me... but what is there?

Hallow'een - did that, same crap, 10 years later, boosted drop rates on X,Y, Z - whatever, got all that stuff anyway.

Profession rebalance - some nerf to agents? dunno, didn't really read it, don't have one, haven't played vs an agent since BS doesn't go in my timezone, not interested.

New content - some new grind or whatever, adds like 0.03% AR and defence, probably won't change much, not interested in more grind, whatever.

Some new gear from DB? ok sounds kinda cool, but isn't really interesting, just give more crit to non-crit profs or something. whatever.


Look, it's all great if you're really digging it, and if you like it, props to you.

But there are serious, fundamental problems with AO that started a long, long time ago and they aren't getting fixed so to me it feels like a hollow pursuit.

The issues I have with the game I've mentioned a hundred times, but I'll say it again, the biggest problems with AO are that 90% of the early and mid game content is bone dry.

I have been levelling a shade for 6 months, and in the last 3 months I can recall one time when I had a team.

I log on, look at LFT, empty.
I go to ado garden, empty.
I go to ado main, nobody doing hecks, empty.
I go to dark ruins, kill some mobs, feels boring even though they are red, leave when I get a doja.
Go turn in doja, Jobe, nasce, empty.
Go wander around OA, empty.
Go to the reck, big open spaces with a few gray mobs, nothing interesting, finish the daily quests, boring, empty.
Check LFT, empty.
Go to mantis cave, empty.
log off.

These are symptoms of a larger problem. The larger problem is that the game systems have failed the community. How? Good question.

What made AO good in the early to late 2000's wasn't the 150 person merc raids, or the tower wars with so many people that the server bounced them, those were fun, but that isn't what made AO fun. What made AO fun was continuity.

I had ONE main. If I was online, my friends list was all green, I could depend on the people who I knew where my friends would have me on their friends list. Later, people built a twink. Maybe two, maybe even three. At 2-3 twinks, you still only had one main, because it was time intensive to build that main. People were highly invested in their main, because it took a long, very, very long time to finish it.

Then some changes happened. What were those changes you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

The first change that significantly sped up the systematic slow growth/organic growth was the introduction of goliath SK awards at the end of inferno missions.
The second change was the introduction of Lost eden missions. This wasn't big, but it was the start of a massive shift in the way AXP was awarded. LE heralded the alien QQ'ers, a never ending stream of "we need more options for AXP", which lead to the farming of arid rift, and culminating, in the ultra AXP nail in the coffin, with AI dailies and regular dailies.

So with these changes what happened? Well, the first thing that happened was that people who were working on their 'mains' finished them a lot faster! That's was cool! wow, we finally got AI30! holy bujesus! Back when I dinged AI 30 on my main, I had about 45 congratulations, scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling, so many I honestly didn't even know there were so many people, it was just a crazy long list of people saying 'congrats' and 'it's about time you nub' etc. All of which felt so good to see.

So what happened next? Well, people started building more toons. That's fine, of course, to experiment, but quite rapidly the proliferation of new toons meant that you could no longer keep up with who was who. And that's when continuity failed.

What made AO so valuable was having friends. But when I'm on a toon and my "friend" is on a toon, and he doesn't know my toon and I don't know his, and he's online and I'm online, but we're disconnected... I've lost my friend, and so has he.

So when the community fractures due to friends being unable to find one another, the system, the community fails.

But it got worse, of course. Because people started self-fracturing and becoming isolationist, because it was easier to depend on oneself than to depend on others (because they can't find their friends anymore... you see the downward cycle?), so people split their accounts, and kept rolling new toons, and building more 220's and they kept on and on, and eventually they have stables, full teams of 220's, 4 220's who are max geared and can do a lot of content on their own, and then, all of a sudden, we had hit critical mass.

AO was not a MMORPG, AO was an instanced game with several hundred people playing all at once, playing with themselves, in a corner, in an instance, and never interacting with anyone else.

You check !online and there's 20+ people online, you say hello, and there are no replies. Where is everyone? no answer.

And the core, the CRITICAL core of what made AO so good, so strong and so resilient in previous years.... was gone like a puff of smoke in a strong breeze.

The players wanted things to move faster, and the devs gradually fed the players, but nobody foresaw that adding dailies to the game would ruin the community. Well, it did.

Don't blame me for speaking frankly. I've always said that dailies were the downfall of AO, I've been saying it for years and years. It's so obvious from a physics point of view. The faster you go, the less time you spend in one place, the less time you spend in one place the less time you have to interact with other players challenged by the same content. The less time spent helping others through content, the fewer connections, the less camaraderie is formed, the less camaraderie, the less friends, the less friends... no community. No community... no game.

[Vinkera]

MKS, I know what you mean. More often than not, I regret logging in when I bother to do so.

Even though I prefer to mostly play solo these days, there's obviously interaction with others here and there. The problem is, the prevalence of elitism, self-righteousness and greed has turned most experiences with other players rather sour. The attitudes of most people are toxic and in spite of others. I've seen it everywhere from people that I thought were legitimate friends over the years and complete strangers, alike.

Just for fun, I googled "anarchy" and "anarchism" just now. I know what they mean already, but anyway here's what I got for "anarchism":

"Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. These are often described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations."

That sounds pretty good. It doesn't really go too deep into it, but it gives a decent overall jist of it I guess. However, when I googled "anarchy", here's the first thing I saw:

"a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority."

The term "anarchy" has many interpreted meanings. The troubling thing is, this is more of our reality right now, but obviously not the one the original developers were aiming for. Generally speaking, society in a state of "anarchy" works perfectly fine, but depends completely on the premise that people are mostly genuinely good natured to one another. Even strangers. Obviously, this isn't always the case, as some people are instinctively bad. However, those individuals are massively outnumbered, and realize they won't make it far with that mentality in such a society.

I wasn't around at the launch of the game, but it sounds to me like this was more the case back then and just a distant memory now. It seems to me that the vision of the original developers is now dead, and has been replaced by completely self-centered, greedy people who have put themselves on a fictitious pedestal above others in their mind. What a shame that the game is killed by its own players. Anyone can name several individual reasons throughout the recent and somewhat distant past, but they all boil down to the negativity and lack of regard for others.

When you say "No community... no game" MKS, you are absolutely right.

[Avari]

@Avari I'm hardly being derisive or contemptuous... I'm stating the facts.

I think I've heard that from a Trump supporter also. Facts have a way of warping themselves in your own perspective.

[Lazy]

I think I've heard that from a Trump supporter also. Facts have a way of warping themselves in your own perspective.

make rubi-ka great again! build a wall and make the froobs pay for it!

[Avari]

The attitudes of most people are toxic and in spite of others.

Should have included this in my other post, but oh well...

I think people see what they want to see (myself included). I'm having fun with AO since before the summer, so I see the positive sides. I see people going out of their way to log toons to buff a random person asking in OOC, I see an insane fixer buffing everyone in OA on a regular basis and being a regular buff machine to anyone who asks as well as people joining whatever team I'm trying to start after I've spammed Neutnet/Dnet a couple of times. A few times I've even found some nice PvP and discovered that I'm enjoying crat PvP more than I thought I would.

The only serious beef I have with AO at the moment is multiboxing because I believe it takes away the multiplayer part of the game and it has killed tower PvP. I'm not gonna start another mud fight with you over that, however, so let's just agree to disagree.

[nanoforcer]

Yeah ppl having a lot of (unknown) alts is a bit of a problem, if this was addressed with an overhaul of the friends system that would be a huge leap forward.
Either manually adding a "main" to some sort of friends tree or giving player y consent so player x automatically gets a list of your toons or something similar.

[Vinkera]

Should have included this in my other post, but oh well...

I think people see what they want to see (myself included). I'm having fun with AO since before the summer, so I see the positive sides. I see people going out of their way to log toons to buff a random person asking in OOC, I see an insane fixer buffing everyone in OA on a regular basis and being a regular buff machine to anyone who asks as well as people joining whatever team I'm trying to start after I've spammed Neutnet/Dnet a couple of times. A few times I've even found some nice PvP and discovered that I'm enjoying crat PvP more than I thought I would.

The only serious beef I have with AO at the moment is multiboxing because I believe it takes away the multiplayer part of the game and it has killed tower PvP. I'm not gonna start another mud fight with you over that, however, so let's just agree to disagree.

That has to be Kain you're referring to.

I've done a bunch of content with Kain over the years, and I would be shocked if anyone tried to malign him. He's a genuine guy, through and through. The last thing I recall we did together was s42. I boxed 6 toons, and I recall distinctly on Artillery Commander (or whatever the gold alien thing is called.) he came through and saved us with a knee-jerk ICH after my Enf swallowed a couple of seekers that broke loose. I kid you not, my Enf was at a sliver of HP instantly, but not even for a full second and back to full. I was the only other doc, and I know mine had BI cooldown at that moment, so i thought we were screwed. Even after a clutch play like that, he's always the kind of guy that is like "pass on acdc", and then you give him crap for not rolling against you on the best items in the game.