Why I love AO but had to leave... and will be back!

[____________Betawulf]

This is a great game. The concept is great, it is competently created and supported, and the community is mostly cool. I bought it the day it came out, played it for about three months, then quit, then came back for the free December re-trial, then quit again.

I am writing this mostly to iron out my ideas of what went wrong and see if anyone else agrees... for me, I think the crisis that affects AO is inherent in the class system.

Consider this, two things make your character who it is; IP allocation and equipment. Nothing else. No amount of roleplaying or guild connections or vehicles or nice clothing will make a good character out of someone who screws up their IP allocation or isn't geared up properly.

IP allocation is the beatch goddess of all character creation systems. You can't screw up. You just can't. That means that you have to spend hours... days... weeks... experimenting with different characters and different IP allocation strategies to figure out what you're doing. Furthermore, The gear you use (specifically the weapon you use) is critical to the IP decisions you make... more on this in a second.

So the class system determines the general strategy available to you for IP allocation, right? Wrong. The class you choose determines what "green" and "light blue" skills you get, which are the only ones you can afford to invest heavily in. The only viable weapons are the ones you can get the most points in the fastest. If your primary weapon in not a green skill, you will not be able to raise it 5 points at a shot! with a few exceptions (such as an enforcers 2hb skill, this is pointless).

Combined with the fact that there are only a handful of weapons worth using in each category, what we end up with are "class clones" or "templates". There are the "hammer enforcers", the "shotgun traders", the "nova soldiers", the "mausser fixers"... etc. etc. ...this is not condusive to the kind of individuality that we would all like to infuse into our alter egos!

The problem is one of damage... sheer, pure damage. There is no other way to get ahead in the game besides committing mass genocidal atrocities on a grand scale, slaughtering thousands of NPCs... (which I like! Don't get me wrong!) is the only way to advance. Even if there were viable tradeskillers, they wouldn't want to gimp themselves by having IP in a blue skill weapon.

So... in the end, you have to do the following...

1> Waste countless hours experimenting with IP allocation and weapons to get the right combination for the right character, discovering that there just isn't any "extra" IP to customize that character template without gimping it in combat.

2> Run countless missions... tokens are critical, and therefore farming is mandatory, unless you want to be gimped in combat. This is dull.

3> Be forced to become a "class clone" and allocate your IP and choose your weapons just like every other "hammer enforcer" or "nova soldier"

The process of discovering all this was both fun and frustrating for me. What's my solution? Well, ideally I would say, give me an option for one more character class... let me create a "custom" character class and decide which skills are green and which are blue (within certain guidlines) and then add a whole slew of new and useful weapons that are viable alternatives to the current "must-have" weapons.

I will be back to check on AO in a few months. I still have the bug. And I think FC is doing a good job. It's easy to criticize but hard to create. I couldn't have made this game and I feel the time and money I put into it was well spent!

Good hunting everyone!

[Ferrett]

I as feeling some of the same frustrations, and I took a couple months off and came back. Now I just play for the love of the game and to RP and don't worry as much about my character being perfect. He's more than good enough, and I have a lot of fun playing.