Hmmm..how to begin....
There is no one single problem which will make everything better if fixed. There's a big cluster of issues with this game. Being that they are working on more content (most of which I already hear there are issues with), that's where I'll start this little FYI to FunCom.
Missions
136 NT lft! Yeah...I have it macro'd. Team missions at this point in time are the primary way of advancing your character. All the secondary ways take too long. The problem with this:
First off, one of the reasons why BS is sooo lagged is because team missions in this area are the most popular due to their size. Make missions in any playfield the same size as the ones in Broken Shores.
Secondly, missions get dull quick. They are predictable. Main room got lots of mobs or no mobs, each small room after that has one mob, bigger rooms have two mobs...etc. A small mission where you are constantly having to fight teams of NPCs who fight like PCs would and the XP reward tripled and I'd be refreshed...
Thirdly, the NPCs are stupid & they all play like either a soldier or an enforcer. A Crat NPC, for instance, should have the ability to charm you and make you fight your teammates. NT NPCs should be chain AE nuking. Engie mobs should be sicking their pets on you. Fixer mobs should be trying to constantly snare you. MA NPCs should be using their MA specials and brawl consistently with the occasional Dimach. Agent mobs should be capable of sneaking up on you and getting that killer AimedShot off if no one in the group has the Perception to see them. More often than not, NPC teams should have a Doc who team heals. You should feel the FullAuto / Burst / Fling Shot alpha from Soldier NPCs. Facing a Trader should make you think about putting points into NR as they should try and ransack the whole team throughout the fight. Point is, the mobs don't play like the profession type they are supposed to be. Because of this, all non RM / Ace mobs in missions are too easy to manipulate and kill making it simply a matter of how fast you can get to the next mission.
Fourth, teaming with people you don't know can result in problems with the rare loot on the boss. All rare loot that currently drops off bosses should only drop off of the mobs in a mission and the boss should give 2x the XP it does now.
Finally, the objectives of the missions are too simple also. How fast can you complete a mission? Well...how fast can you find something?
The find & return missions should be scraped..period. Countless times have I done one of these only to have the mission terminal I got the mission from rejects the item I'm supposed to bring back.
Find the person missions should require Perception to some degree as the person you need to find should be concealed initially.
Fix the item missions should require Electrical Engineering, Mech Engineering, and the item you need to fix should require tools found in the mission to fix it. The find the item type missions should have a more stringent time limit (like 30 minutes) and be the same size of your average BS mission.
The terminate the person missions....these missions should take place indoors or outdoors. When indoors, the only mob you'd have to kill is the person & the 3 or 4 accompanying minions.
And I still think Atrox Enforcers should be able to smash locked doors down and rip locked chests open.
Outdoor Hunting
Already heard bad things about the new dyna-camps (funny how they hate camping so much, yet they use it to describe new features). How hard is it really? Take NW Mines in Lush Fields for instance. I'd have to say that was the most fun I've had outdoors. Cross-breed insociable mobs everywhere...the occasional Lifebleeder, XP was good...etc. The concept there was good, how hard can that be to reproduce for people of all levels??
XP outdoors should be way greater than it is indoors. Why? Outdoors, you get no tokens. Nor do you have the safety of zoning up / down / out.
Tradeskills
Hard to fix something so screwed up to begin with. I don't care how many of you say AO is a skill based game. It is only so in the sense that you can control what skills advance and which ones don't. There is no "learning" of skills aside from leveling (how else do you get IP?). EQs trade system, however irritating, was alot better than AOs. In a perfect world, tradeskills would produce items that would be better than any item dropped off a mob in the game, there'd be an offensively wide variety of stuff to make, and your skills should advance as you use them. Tradeskills should be required to do certain types of missions (i.e. a team of engies having to fix the primary nuclear power reactor used to power Omni-1 HQ or the thing will blow up and incinerate Ent would be interesting).
Problems that cause problems
The increase in patients at your local mental hospital due to blackholing nukes / out of sync specials has gone up since 14.2 by 204%.
Pet pathing has driven Excedrin's stock price up $4.00.
The Yalmaha...invented by Mini-Me. As minor as this problem is, it would almost seem like lazy programming. You pop out of your yalm (if it lets you) and then everyone in your targettable range sees you as this tiny lil pixel on the ground, yet people who come into that range after you de-yalm see you as normal. It seems to be a simple refresh problem...??????!!?!?!?!?!?!
Lag when entering zones. This should tell you that the zones are too big. For instance...why is the 20k town a part of pleasent meadows and not it's own miniplayfield like NLC? Why are Broken Shores and Clon**** as big as they are? Put the 20k town on its own playfield server. Split BS & Clon**** in half. And put City Of Home in it's own playfield apart from the rest of BS like NLC is. I don't know how it is in Tir (heard it smells bad there :-P ) so I can't comment on lag there....
Overall, AO is a cool game with lots of potential. If the problems were fixed, the player population might grow.
- AO webcomics for the sake of being silly