I played AO since day 1 and quit after to months to rejoin today. And the only improvement I have seen is stability, everything else that used to work is now nerfed to make up for mistakes made in AO. The PvP zones are boring and unchanged not to forget the pvp rules are still boring (didn`t any of the AO team ever play ultima online ???).
Back to Nerfing which is what the AO team always seem to resort to. Im not going to list everything thats been nerfed I think the the discussion forum is already considered nothing more than a list 'of this and that is nerfed and Im not playing this anymore'.
But I think the sad fact is that the AO team simply want to slow the leveling down so that you the customer can be held within the AO world for as long as possible for your subscription fees. God forbid that they make new maps/monsters/items/200+ level cap, because of course the director of funcom knows it is more economically viable to nerf and extend the game by slowing you down, rather than spend cash on artists and coders to increase the size of AO. I know that they do add things to AO but u cant sit there and tell me that patches give more content than the do nerf.
BTW was the word nerfed invented for all games using the everquest engine or is it used somewhere else?