I saw this very interesting question posted on this board and thoguth it should be addressed.
Well for one most of the veteran ao players are worn out for a variety of reasons. ( solutions at end this is just not a complaining session, the game is getting better month by month I just want to say that the beginning)
1. We came to ao with high expetations and found a game 1/3 complete totally unbalanced and in need of major work just to be played.
2. Funcom for the better part of a year that totally ignored the players and treated us as incompetant kids ( that is now changing and I believe it was mostly done because they where afraid to admit that they come live with this game way to early)
3. We have seen list after list of promises by funcom that have yet to materialize and when something does arrive it often comes with a booby trap.
4. Each new patch seems like a fresh garden with a mindfield hidden in it. (players spend months and hundreds of hours developeing characters then wammo nerf time and your pride and join is now neutered, yes many of the nerfs made sense but you cant do this to players without understanding that you will alienate many of them.
5. ATRITION we have seen legions of our friends leave this game.
6. Any of us that are still here are here because we truely love this game but we now feel like part of leaper colony, ao has recieved wonderous and justified remarks from the press but it is the laughing stock of the online game community, in the players opinion they hate it. AO may have won the press war but they lost the player war and that is more important most gameplayers listen to there friends and seek out associates opinions of the games that are available and wherever I go I only here negative comments about ao from the gaming community.
7. Many players feel used by ao, the have used our monthly payments over the past year to fund a game that was not complete.
8. A year has gone by and tradeskills are still pretty much a joke. Only the super powerful players can actually do it as a living. A player does not have spare IP to spend on trade skills until they get to 100th lvl and then then they need to spend 50 lvls getting the tade skill to the point where it is actually in demand. There is no benefit to putting IP into tradeskills until your combat skills are near maxed, the experience you get for making things is all but useless so players are forced to ignore tradeskills until high lvl. This makes everyone a soldier until 150thlvl then some tradeskill specialists start to materialize. Funcom has never understood that people dont want to just spend all there time killing things and that is all there is to do in this game, kill mobs and kill people. guess what notum wars and shadowlands is about new and better ways to kill mobs and people.
9. housing? well thats just a silly joke. boxes that people have keys to and cant even decorate or store stuff in, housing is just plain pathetic and thats being nice. Go to uo and look around, you may laugh at it but thousands upon thousands of players compete to buy better homes and castles and spend hundreds of hours playing just to get the best items for there homes. ( a true status symbol is a heraldic banner on your houses front porch.
11. Player venders, dont exist and no plans to make them. Simple thing is we collect bags of nice items only to sell them to a machine for 1/10 th of the price another player would by them for. Why do we do this, cause none of us want to spend our limited game time camping the shoping channel. Simple solution have player stores and let us rent vending machines charge high rent and it will work.
12. VENDORS AND HOUSING IS IT STUPID? No its not, maybe only %15 of players want to be vendors and maybe only %20 of the players want great housing ,and maybe only %20 or %30 of your players want to be tradeskill specialists , but add all these players up and you find out that AO as alienated another large group of players, the player that does not want to spend his or her whole game time on a mob killing merry go round of non stop killing.
13. Classes well lets be honest this game is about notum right, nts are a joke, the key is to get high enough lvl to use a great gun lol now thats funny. If you can stomach 150 lvls of being agroed every time you use your best nanos, and this for the class with lousy hps and no special armor or hps buffs. Basically nts from lvl 75 to 150 are totally dependent on getting in good teams, soloing is just a stupid idea. ( okay yes my first character was a nanomage nt, and its so dusty I forget his name sometimes.)
14. Potential, well ao has lots of potential always has but its been fritted away, there are only a finite number of online players and a huge chunk of them have been alienated. I also know that a huge number of players are just waiting for another game to come along that offers a real alternative.
SOLUTIONS
1. Do some massive advertising many of the bad feelings will disappear when we see 50,000 new players bring life to this world like it should, oh and well fix the lag if you get those players lol.
2. Reward the veteran player. do something right now for all the people that have stuck with you. Its simple any account that has a original activation date of at least 6 months ago or more give them something extra for there loyalty. Alot of people have quit and come back so do it based on original account activation date and you might find alot of those long gone players coming back to get that little bonus. and keep the new players here by offering them the same reward after there account is 1 year old.
3. Fix the tradeskill increase exp points by 2 times, sounds crazy yes but give people a choice of something to do besides kill kill kill
3. vendors simple allow players to rent vendor machines
4. housing well good luck there you kinda painted yourself into a corner. but find someway for us to use the dam apartments you came up with for storage and decoration.
well Ive blahed enough but Im sure Ive said much that many other vets would agree with
Wonder what I wasted my money on.
