Ao is not free to play. It just has a really big demo area. As a froob you never get to see the most important parts of the game. The key to bringing the game across the finish line is not gated content, its microtransactions. The game needs more people, but it can't afford to fizzle out either.most gamers have no idea what Ao is and you know as well as I when the engine goes live there will be a ton of bugs. All it takes is some bug that wiped out a characters inventory, or any big show stopper early on that affects the entire community, and its not if but when, what, and where. Then you lose potentials, the potentials say xyz is available f2p why should I stay inside a game with a broken engine when there are so many mmos out there that isn't in beta.people these days have a ton of options to game. Gw2,Tl2, and more with a one time price and lots of content.
As a froob in anarchy online all the way to level 195 before I upgraded, I never even experienced sl I heard about it rarely from other players but I couldn't distinguish it from the rkexperience. I had no idea what I was missing out on.if I didn't have many friends in this game, I wouldn't have cared what I was missing. I never even experience tower battles because I was perpetually stuck grinding the same areas as a froob. Hidden content is a bad thing. Increase the XP gained on stims, then raise their cost. Eliminate mission XP bonuses for froobs, make rewards subscriber only bump up the XP for the missions 10x the rewards of inferno missions. Stick a timer on mobs if they are not defeated by x amount of time they pull the attacker, even if they are not aggroed to prevent highly exploited leveling.
The leveling in the game should be primarily mission oriented. Second to that I think the mobs on to should be buffed up and given more robust loot tables. I think it would be pretty good if clusters always fell from monsters, but the best ones were rare to epic. People would then have an incentive to farm the entire planet, not just one location.