AO THE DESTINATION simply driving players away.
More resources poured into developing PVP content??? Game population is in free fall so lets give them more of what nobody wants???
I guess the designers prefer to design areas that will be never used, and therefore receive very little criticism.
Graphics??? One of the best selling games for years (Grand Theft Auto San Andreas) had graphics way below the detail of current AO, yet game play and world design are light years beyond AO. Not to mention RDR starting up soon, no that's not going to be competition, naw.
The principles at AO simply refuse to fix the major things that are broken in the game, like the extremely dated nubi island experience, like vanishing mission entrances, bugged quests, too few unique quests or activities, lack of decent auction system, the lastly, the dead horse in the room.
The dead horse being that most new players come in expecting and wanting a game where leveling up is THE JOURNEY and these players quit after they have played long enough to realize that the game is fashioned to suit a dwindling set of paying end-gamers.
AO as THE JOURNEY has been co-opted with AO as THE DESTINATION.
I love AO, I love exploring all that it has to offer. I actually like a little bit of everything (hunting mobs in the wild, missions, quests, dungeons) (PVP not so much), but every day that goes by with THE DESTINATION mantra driving game development there are fewer and fewer players.
The daily missions were a small step in the right direction, I think it is going to take a great deal more to stem the player base collapse.
The latest batch of heads need to be sent back, they look just plain awful to me. What I would like to see improved are the sitting posture of most toons, talk about looking bizarre and grotesque. Yea, I know, no body wants to be assigned to work on butts. :-(