Anarchy online. Does it have a future?

[Beammaster]

Hi guys!
First off, before you start trolling, try to see this from an old gamers perspective.
I’ve been playing this game on and off for 11 years now. Most of that time, on. A small 6 month break in 2005, another break in 2008 and last in 2010/2011 because of studies.
After i came back last summer and until november i had a lot of gametime in here, and most of it was spent helping others. I don't generally mind that, but it feels kinda heavy when i have to log on 3 chars every time to pull other people through. That is also why I quit the game the first and second time. Some of you might say that it’s my own fault for not ditching my org and joining another more “powerful” org so I didn’t need to do this. That mindset is part of what’s wrong.
For quite a long time now, my org (Forsaken) has been in trouble member wise. People started falling off many years ago, and the numbers just decreased over the years. We've done a lot to try to fix the problem. Inviting new people, merging with other orgs etc. However, much to my disappointment, it hasn’t helped and we’re still seeing the ship sinking. Why? People stayed in the game for the longest time with not much new content for years. Why did they quit?
It's not our fault. It's the game. People are tired of promises that never see the light of day, and they move on to other things that consumes time in a better way. To be honest, having paid for this game for 11 years myself, i am frustrated and disappointed to see that the game doesn't go anywhere. Well it does, but not in a good direction. Instead of listening to the whining of a bunch of 14 year olds FC should go back to the game at its core, namely it being challenging and having consequences if you screwed up.
I see no future in this game as it is now. Levelling is a joke. When i can easily do 200 levels in a day something is wrong. The alien levels from the old times were ridiculous. AI 30 took forever. FC fixed it somewhat by increasing AXP gain, and then they screwed it up the other way...now you can actually get AI 30 without killing a single alien! The time spent grinding things in the earlier stages of the game seems like a total waste. 11 years of time and money put into this game, only to see said 14 year old "accomplish" the same things in the matter of weeks. It's sad, and frustrating. I am not saying that these changes are bad, they are just insanely over exaggerated.
One can argue that the oldies have gained experience that the new people haven't, or will never have. But does that really matter when you don't get punished for not doing things the right way?

I'm not sure what to do really. This whole game is kinda dead now. FC is WAY too slow with the engine, and they need to get their fingers out of their asses and save this game until it's too late.
i could continue ranting i suppose, but there's no use. I have a new payment coming up on one of my accounts in April and I'm gonna do a 6 month thing there to sync my 2 accounts playtime. But unless something drastic happens from here to October, i have some doubts about my continued support for this game. And it saddens me, because this game always had so much potential!

/Kryptogeek

[Ruffixx]

I see a server merge as only a stop-gap measure to prolong AO's life by a year or two. It won't really fix the population issues - people will be as much or more segregated.

The revamped new player experience along with the new engine are equally crucial and need a lot of effort put into them and released at the same-ish time.

[Collodion]

As for the levelling bit, there's a recent thread about an article discussing levelling speed in mmorpgs, it has lots of relevant points.

But yes, I think AO very easily has a future. It is still unique, even if it is following the player-driven trend of super quick levelling. There are a number of features that AO has that most other games don't, and I think FC really needs to be focusing more on these points:

- social atmosphere, I haven't found any other game that has in-game social events like AO, whether it's player driven, ARK or FC themselves

- a volunteer customer support group, and despite all the crap that gets thrown at them, ARK is a large part of why AO exists today

- twinking, I have never understood games where all their gear is level-locked (WoW I'm looking at you and all your players who claim to be 'twinking'... you can't twink level-locked gear!)

-story, sure every game has story, but AO's used to be dynamic and a part of the world, in which players could participate in the event as they happen, not watch a cut-scene to explain what happened between expansions

ALL of these make AO the game that most of us come back to after becoming dissatisfied by the other games out there. And more than just a new engine, FC really needs to make sure that the features that make AO different than all the other games get noticed by public. They do all that, and I'm pretty confident that we'll be having this conversation again at the 20th.

[Raggy]

I see a server merge as only a stop-gap measure to prolong AO's life by a year or two. It won't really fix the population issues - people will be as much or more segregated.

The revamped new player experience along with the new engine are equally crucial and need a lot of effort put into them and released at the same-ish time.

But the problems with AO are alot more deep-seated than the engine and new player experience, look at the thread here:

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...d.php?t=567908

That was posted at the start of 2010 and out of all that only 2-3 things have been fixed. In 2 years.

Most of them are incredibly trivial and simple fixes, it's just FC deems them not worth of dev time, which is hilarious in all aspects.


I wouldn't mind if there was a few bugs here and there, but the amount of bugs in AO is phenomenal, it really is like playing beta that has gone on for 10 years. But each patch we get retarded little social items that, while nice, don't add anything to the overall game.

On top of all this, FC asks me to pay £17 a month to play. That is double any other MMO on the market, it's extortionate and the only reason AO makes any money for the company at all.

Last year, I asked Kintaii in a PM about the population issues and he told me this:

Things aren't as dire as people like to try and make them out to be - Number of active players on-dimension at any given time are pretty much the same as they have been for a long while now and haven't changed much. Sorry to burst your bubble there, man, but yeah - Not really a lot different in terms of numbers.

But the amount of people online is visibly lower than ever. Last night, there were 3 Clans on LFT for Inf at 10PM (22:00) GMT, which is afternoon for the US bunch too, meaning that was primetime on RK2 on a Friday night.

3 people. How am I meant to play like this?

Don't get me wrong, I love the game but the amount of promises we have been given, I have become so cynical about any 'time frames' given by the Dev team that I just dismiss them instantly.

Lindelu says she wants the big 3 out in the next couple of months. Means said the Engine would be Q1 2011.

It's now Q1 2012 and still no engine, I have no reason to believe anything they say anymore.

inb4 Anarrina.

[Towerblock]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development is/etc..

If FC miraculously makes a huge comeback with this game and you were a new player, how would you feel if you read this stuff? I only pose this questions with a sort of curiousity, not meaning to troll the OP or folks. I'm kinda serious.

[Gunfytr]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development is/etc..

But is all this stuff true?

[Raggy]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development is/etc..

If FC miraculously makes a huge comeback with this game and you were a new player, how would you feel if you read this stuff? I only pose this questions with a sort of curiousity, not meaning to troll the OP or folks. I'm kinda serious.

Weary. And rightfully so.

But what's stopping FC redoing the forums again like they did before?

[Beammaster]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development is/etc..

If FC miraculously makes a huge comeback with this game and you were a new player, how would you feel if you read this stuff? I only pose this questions with a sort of curiousity, not meaning to troll the OP or folks. I'm kinda serious.

It was not my intention at all to say that the game is worthless. It's not! My point was that something has to be done to keep the old players playing, to keep the AO atmosphere going, etc. Many of the things FC has implemented of late has been ideas and ways of doing things from other MMOs. Some are good and some are bad. What is certain tho is that AO has moved in a direction towards WoW and the likes. I don't want AO to become a different version of WoW, i don't want a lot of hopeless implementations in AO just "because they work/are cool" in another MMO. We are also being pushed towards very specific end game setups for the different professions. Where did the fantastic diversity and uniqueness of AO go? Underneath the social tab we're all pretty much the same with very small variations, and it sucks!


/kryptogeek

[Traderjill]

Unfortunately, I do not think the future for AO is bright if promises continue to be made with no delivery. I look at Means' last 'Answers' thread where he discusses the fact that rebalancing won't be done before April and states that the new player experience and engine will be released before rebalancing comes. Whether it was his intent or not, that starts to set timeframes in people's head.. maybe rebalancing won't be done before April but that would indicate that the New Player Experience and New Engine will be.

Taking that into consideration, I read Lindelu's end of January thread and she stated that she would tell us her thoughts about the new player experience on February 29th. I didn't want to post negativity in that thread, out of respect for the fact that she's in a new role, but honestly that's unacceptable. unless she's going to introduce her thoughts as an immediate pre-lude to saying "And this will be on Test Server next week."

The thing I find most disheartening about the game is that in the interim you have a lot of us on the sidelines wanting the game to stay alive.. wanting it to grow.. wanting it to be even a shell of what it used to be and I don't even see the support for those individuals. I won't go into detail on my thoughts on the customer service and how little is given to long term vets due to threat of being banned but I will say that when Funcom can give us a carrot, they often choose to give us the stick instead.

I've tried organizing server wide events and could barely get support for that. Asking for something like a formal game announcement to show up, which should've been easy, is met with "Well if we do it for you.. we have to do it for everyone that does an event" type statements.. which I found to be really disheartening as I've not seen anyone else, besides me, organizing a server wide hunt or contest of anytime (at least not in years). Sometimes it really feels as if, as a player, I have to fight Funcom to help them.

---
To answer Bubba's question (miss you by the way), I'll be perfectly honest and candid. I can't get to the point of thinking about what new players will think when they read the forums and whether they'll read it and choose to leave the game or not come at all. I can't think of it because I'm too busy making that decision for myself and hoping that someone in Funcom's office actually cares about what the players who have kept this game going actually think. So yeah, my concern about other folks that don't even play is secondary to how I feel about my own game status at this moment.

And I agree with whoever said.. if they do actually re-release the game they can just archive whatever they want or just delete the threads for all I care. It would be unlikely that I'd complain about forum moderation or censorship if I'm too busy enjoying myself in the game.

[Louderer789]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development is/etc..

I don't know, mostly this kind of doom and gloom posting is present on every MMO board. A week after SWTOR went live I saw some threads with titles like "Why this game is dying" or "Why everyone will leave after free 30d". Usually such threads are the exception rather than the rule, but with AO I think perhaps they will tell the story of a slow decline that might have been halted had FC taken a different path.

I recall saying a year or two ago that FC should merge the servers before the population declined too far for it to do any good. After all, consider the speed at which FC moves and the time it took for the Germans to get a transfer. It seemed like a valid futureproofing move to me. At the time everyone said that was stupid, but now the people left are increasingly clamoring for this option. In another brilliant move, FC instanced cities - but didn't give any method for these cities to sell items through GMS. Great for farm orgs, but most players are no longer willing to spam their wares in shopping channels especially to such a dwindling audience. And now, the lack of foresight is an obstacle to merging the servers.

The AO forums have an interesting dynamic. The game has been around for so long, even people who joined with the froob program have progressed substantially in real life, and seen many changes affect the game. But they have also seen the changes that were promised and never delivered. And as well, a great number (I won't say a majority, but who knows) of posters on the forum are either totally inactive, or have active accounts but no longer log in. Whether it's malicious harping or merely that they hold on to hope that things will improve, the "disgruntled former player" is an odd demographic that FC has to deal with.

In theory FC could try to clear out the squatters and archive much of the current postings, but that only replaces the complaints of an angry population with the reality of little population at all. Windguarde and Masta do not an active forum make. The current forums are almost 10 years old, the threads about game mechanics and other content-rich posts could never be recreated by the kind of population AO will have going in to the future. It will be rather sad for future players to see these endless discussions and guides only as ancient reference material rather than an interactive forum.

[Mostadio]

I highly doubt many people come to AO forums and spout malicious BS about a dying game because they have little else to do, but if you look carefully you can see that there's really only about 50 people actively posting on the forum. If that. It's rare to see a forum name that isn't familiar.

It's rare to see a toon name in AO that isn't familiar unless it's someone's alt. Aside from the random froob who makes it to totw and quits, I don't see many "average" low level toons. Seems everyone runs around with a JAME or other rare drop.

The moral of the story is the people playing care about the game and at one time found it quite enjoyable. The people you see in the game are what's left. You either bring more in to replace us, or start writing a eulogy for your game, because it's lost flavor.

[Polaria]

I can't wait for all the people who may arrive, and they start reading forums and see all this stuff we post about how dead the game is/worthless the development

Yep. It's not like these new arrivals would be able to figure it out for themselves when they try to play the game *eyerolls*

[Mastablasta]

I personally don't see how making a few changes to leveling speed make anything you did any less than they were at the time of their accomplishment?

[Raggy]

I personally don't see how making a few changes to leveling speed make anything you did any less than they were at the time of their accomplishment?

It's less about levelling speed and more about the amount of content between 1 and 200 that gets skipped because it's not the most efficient way to gain XP.

Usually if you want to powerlevel to 200 without having to think about it:

1-9: Newb Isle
9-30: Early Nasc
30-70: Nasc OST/NT
70-90: Tiigs or Ely OST/NT
90-160: Ely Ost/NT
160-200: Inf Leech

Most of SL has become utterly redundant.

[Traderjill]

1 Correction Raggy: 9-30 War Academy with OST/NT

[Raggy]

1 Correction Raggy: 9-30 War Academy with OST/NT

Or that. Personally I just TabQ some Crips with a 220 Soldier on follow for Gazump.

[Mastablasta]

It's less about levelling speed and more about the amount of content between 1 and 200 that gets skipped because it's not the most efficient way to gain XP.

Usually if you want to powerlevel to 200 without having to think about it:

1-9: Newb Isle
9-30: Early Nasc
30-70: Nasc OST/NT
70-90: Tiigs or Ely OST/NT
90-160: Ely Ost/NT
160-200: Inf Leech

Most of SL has become utterly redundant.

I dunno about you, but I recall that we all powerleveled as much as we could in the past as well, the only difference was that back then people in Inferno did not accept anyone lower than 205, so you grinded hecklers in Adonis till you hit 205, at which point you could start to get considered to join inferno teams. Noone ever went to Penumbra, because the XP was silly. Hardly anyone was in Nascence and Elysium either, except maybe some people who for whatever reason were playing lowbies.
Meanwhile, people were doing kite teams on Cyborgs on RK to skip all the hard SL content so they could come join people at Adonis hecklers.

Noone bothered with all that content that the game had till they were way past it all. We have to go back to before SL to find a time when people did more than JUST powergrind, because at that point, the grind really was all that there was to do. You could grind and then at some point maybe some raid target might be in your level range and then you could sort of relax your grinding, because there were only 200 levels and the actual difference between lvl 160 and lvl 170 wasn't that great in terms of how powerful you were.

No, nothing's changed in AO the last 6-7 yearse except the tolerance of higher level people towards lower level people.

[Raggy]

I dunno about you, but I recall that we all powerleveled as much as we could in the past as well, the only difference was that back then people in Inferno did not accept anyone lower than 205, so you grinded hecklers in Adonis till you hit 205, at which point you could start to get considered to join inferno teams. Noone ever went to Penumbra, because the XP was silly. Hardly anyone was in Nascence and Elysium either, except maybe some people who for whatever reason were playing lowbies.
Meanwhile, people were doing kite teams on Cyborgs on RK to skip all the hard SL content so they could come join people at Adonis hecklers.

Noone bothered with all that content that the game had till they were way past it all. We have to go back to before SL to find a time when people did more than JUST powergrind, because at that point, the grind really was all that there was to do. You could grind and then at some point maybe some raid target might be in your level range and then you could sort of relax your grinding, because there were only 200 levels and the actual difference between lvl 160 and lvl 170 wasn't that great in terms of how powerful you were.

No, nothing's changed in AO the last 6-7 yearse except the tolerance of higher level people towards lower level people.

True, but then lets try another angle.

With everyone who stills plays doing this setup, it leaves little room for new players (lol) to gain team experience or really any experience at all because AO has next to no direction in terms of levelling progression other than 'go up in SL'.

It falls on the vets to educate the new players simply because AO is so horrifically bad at doing it. But if all the vets are AFK in kite teams, they get lost, get bored and leave.

Also what does it tell newcomers when the only way they can level is by paying 2m/level in Ely?

[Mastablasta]

True, but then lets try another angle.

With everyone who stills plays doing this setup, it leaves little room for new players (lol) to gain team experience or really any experience at all because AO has next to no direction in terms of levelling progression other than 'go up in SL'.

It falls on the vets to educate the new players simply because AO is so horrifically bad at doing it. But if all the vets are AFK in kite teams, they get lost, get bored and leave.

Also what does it tell newcomers when the only way they can level is by paying 2m/level in Ely?

This is completely true, not another angle to anything. I wasn't arguing that it's a good thing, just saying that nothing's really changed. The modern MMO style that AO is emulating is top heavy and has a vast grind at the end of the game rather than in the middle/start like they used to have. That people do all they can to skip to that, the real grind, is just a symptom of this. And as so many people are at high lvl and expecting more content there, things aren't going to change much in this department, as it's a self-reinforcing problem.
The only thing that could really stop it is a large number of new players, but even then, they'll all have the expectation that endgame is where it's at, so they will do whatever they can to lvl as fast as possible, and skip everything in the middle too. Leaving your only being to either develop serious amounts of content for all lvling ranges, or reduce the grind for lvls as much as possible to expedite people to endgame where they can play with other players.
The last option is the easiest, fastest and cheapest option.

[Otansaanpas]

when the other content aside from hecklers is without rewards and provides less xp. its not hard to guess how people want to level.
jobe scientist-, xan-, yuttos- and spirit-quests in SL are the only way you get people mobilized
they provide nice XP and items usable while leveling and in endgame.
but those few endless quest-lines are not enough to stop people afking at kitehill.

AO has nice amount of unique endgame armors and system to interpolate stats by items quality levels.. and in SL its barely used.