After canceling my account a few months, bored of the endless mission tunnel that AO had became, I'm now back and taking a new character to discover some new parts of the game.

I must say that the Christmas effect of coming back with a whole new range of items around is very nice. It seems that the 14.6 patch will be quiet welcome too for that reasons. AO starts to be very enjoyable in term of armor / weapon customization, and some real alternative start to appear for each profession, and the way they can or should be equiped.

Unlike maybe some of us, I am very pleased with the boss team mission loot strategy. It's rewarding, it gives better equipment than the regular one, and yet it's not too unbalancing. People equiped with Sekutek's Chilled Plasteel for example, will have slightly better stats than regular Chilled Plasteel, yet using Chilled Plasteel won't gimp you.

The team missions seems totally doable and more balanced now, and the small adjustements made to the way missions keys are used (refreshing, etc) is totally welcome and tremendously helping picking up a group.

Adventurers, MAs and Fixers seems to be happy, with well rounded nanos / items brought to them. I really don't see many professions now that have big balancing issues, except maybe the Bureaucrats and NTs for some details. These are very casual comments mainly from friends playing these prof. So don't flame away.

Even if I am not really playing anymore my Enforcer I happen to log him for social events or some hunting fun, and I am very pleased to see this nice community have some love with new ways to play, outside the Atrox-Beam-Senpai Coat way. We all hope that the way these new items will appear will not be to extreme...

I also find the new quests that are poping here and there totally enjoyable and adding a richer flavor to the game. But the prototype of the Cool Quest (tm) is still the Fixers' grid stuff. More things like that, and I mean this kind of way to introduce new content, should be a milestone for next patch / development.

The way crits were fixed, OE taken care off and the consecutive IP reset were very brave moves, with a lot of customer pissed off potential, but it was a wise move. It's helping PvE and PvP, even if all the game mechanisms problems are far from being solved.

So, hey many positive things here !

I am less enthusiast with the marketing necessities that divert a lot of Dev Team work to new content and new game mechanisms. I realize that december 2002 is coming fast upon us and the MMORPG market is moving forward too, but well, in my view that was just not the time when we see that for example pet pathing is still hurting, mobs still shoot you through walls, Tir and BS are in 75% Glue Gas Zone from lag and the probability that you look like a toy after getting out your Yalm are 50%.

Also many game mechanisms are still criticized by testers and players that have a good grasp on the game and the communication is still as scarce as ever on what is planned and what is going on / out of scedule (lack of communication on the patch, forum censorship, Cosmik being 'away').
The Community Corner being ok though and a welcome return of what was done many months ago with official answers to players questions.

Of course being very open with the players community is usually not very rewarding in the short term, but I still believe that the long term view is always paying well... If I'm still playing AO in 2003 I hope that the new content won't screw a fragile balance that was starting to appear.

Kudos for what have been done.