Six months means little change in AO for me.

I originally bought AO after Beta testing it and absolutely loved it during Beta. It seemed stable and though it was bugged, that was to be expected...it was a beta! Well, when the game came out and the first month was so fubared that I couldn't do a thing in game, I left and went back to my old haunts.

Buying it so I could play from day one was my first mistake...

Six months or so go by and I get this neat little email from FunCom saying they were going to give me a free month! I thought the idea was great and found my disk after much searching, moving is a real b*tch, and reinstalled it.

I think that was my second mistake.

Well, I start up a new character even though my others were there so I could try something new. Bearucrats sounded neat with pets and charm so I made Nitsche. Nitsche is now level 18, and I must admit, I have had some fun in game. I think the fun has really been exploring, but I am having a hard time deciding actually what was fun. It took some work getting Nitsche to level 18, I have to say. Not a single question I ever asked anyone was ever answered. Either every other player is unresponsive or they just don't give a damn. I didn't expect that...

That was my third mistake.

Well, I thought there would be great content after finding most people were playing with WinAmp or pr0n instead of in game, so I decided on trying some missions.

That definately was a mistake!!

I got some great loot for being my level very early on...the missions were certainly tough and without a pet it was even tougher. I soon found out that the mission system was screwed up. I got missions were I was to find a guy only, and he attacked me on sight. Not a problem, but my pet would kill him so fast I wouldn't get any experience from the kill and no resolution to the quest! I sucked it up... I tried different missions too like the one where you just have to pick up an item and never got my reward, or the missions that are for newland desert which isn't actually part of the newland city map even though newland desert area is there. I petitioned a GM, and although he seemed nice, wouldn't do anything for the item mission and the desert mission was given up for after a 3 hour wait in queue. So much for missions...

I decided to just see what there was to do besides missions and arena PvP...certainly there has to be more exploring to be done! I hit the nearest zone...nobody has a decent map anyways, so I figured I would poke my head through and see what was afoot...

A Bullthingie has hit you for 135 dmg.
A Bullthingie has hit you for 127 dmg.
Loading please wait...

WTF?
The zone hadn't even finished loading yet?

So much for exploring....

Well, other bugs that are still in game:

Pack inventory deleting when the backpack is full
Pack inventory moving
Pet pathing
Pet standing in front of monster but never attacking
Pet popping up right beside you the moment the monster dies and/or you die...I got exp one time when I died with no pet help and got exp after exp loss from pet coming up and getting the last blow in...
Nano spells never sticking even on lowest mobs
Nano spells not sticking to pet(not a bad thing for me, but it was odd seeing my rooted pet sliding along with me)
LAG
Instant attack extremely red KOS monsters on other side of outdoor zones
Zones not loading
Lockpicks not working on doors until you try them multiple times, not a failure, but when the message that you cannot use that item type on that...

Well, some of these problems are the exact kind of problems I had six months ago and I see they are not fixed. =/ I loved AO in beta, it has great potential and I invested a lot of time to get these same problems fixed, but I cannot invest any more time into a game just to lose everything I did. It's just not fun...

Thanks for the free month guys, but I think it's sad that I used it only about 5 days before I finally got this frustrated =(

Nitsche