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No players in AO!
ghostsaman
Member Posts: 48
I've tried AO 2 times. The first time I tried it I got to level 14!#!#"# Because I didn't have much time and then I tried it again for 30 days ...Well I didnt have much time then either but people helped me and when I reached level 20 I had money for a yalm. I like AO it's the best mmorpg I've tried but one thing bothers me, there are not so many people playing it. I've played on RK 1 and RK 2 and people say that there are more players in RK 1 but when I started there I only saw some players....Then I asked where everyone is and players said that the other players usually hang around in Athen and Entertainment district. So I went there and I saw many people but not to many like max 25 everytime i visited the place. So I asked if this was the right place and then someone said to me that everyone hangs around in SL.... And I first started my char in SL and I spent a lot of time there but I never saw a lot of players! When I bought my yalm I explored the fields of RK but I never saw a single person!
And one more thing, the mmorpg.com AO forums are empty.
Comments
AO was a big game even before SL came out, but Funcom made some big mistakes (one of which was the SL expansion) and this has cost them players and reputation (the ability to attract new players)
Plus every time a new MMORPG comes out there will always be a (sometimes temporary) migration to the new game while the players work out which one they prefer to play
all players with those free trials waiting for new MMORPGs
time killing in cheap MMOs
AO must die the worst dev. team ever
I tried AO again with this trial period, and it is much better than when I first bought it at commercial release.
I see a lot of complaints about it not being SciFi, but as I followed the introductory actions, it is easy to see it as SciFi, with a group of scientists escaping the evil Omni-Tek and developing their own island (Island of Dr. Moreau anyone?). After all, we call prehistoric creatures on islands in the 21st century SciFi, do we not?
If anything, I am overwhelmed all over again, as I have no idea where to find the nanocrystals my character needs, weapons and armor I can use, etc. And since I don't have unlimited cash (unlike in EQ where I've been for 5+ years and can twink anything), I have to actually consider what I buy and its' long term impact on my character.
Graphics aren't that great, even at 1200X1024X32, and the newbie quest giver in SL really needs some work on his scripts--seems like he forgets he is testing you every time you go back and you have to go through the whole script over and over again.
My disappointment with the game is that I read on the official forums about roleplay only boards and for some reason thought people would actually roleplay a little bit. But my experience was it is just like EQ has become--a bunch of kids begging for loot, wanting to make their character as powerful as possible as quickly as possible, with no consideration whatsoever for the idea of RPG. As someone alluded to earlier in this thread, lots of chat--unfortunately, WAY too riddled with profanity and juvenile diatribe. And when I saw a character named Marypoppins, it was all I could do to keep playing--will any of these games every enforce an "alternate" universe where people have to at least use names consistent with the game? Don't mean constant name police, but geesh...
Anyway, I will continue to play for the near term (after all, have to find my nanos and such, don't I), and perhaps I will actually meet some people who want to play an RPG. In game name Takas on RK1 (Antlantean)--level 5 adventurer, just...can you tell I'm not twinked LoL....
I've Read The Island of Dr. Moreu
In reply to Twiz, I think you may have just joined too late. AO had a very strong RP community for a long time, but many of them have moved on to other games at this point. When you play AO now, you're going to find people inbetween games or highly dedicated. The RP'ers have most likely moved onto other games to see what they offer them.
I wish that every city in Anarchy Online was full of people.....
I want to point out a major point. As all MMORPGs get bigger and bigger aka release new expansions, expand the gameworld, the player populations will disperse. 9 months ago the cities in AO were extreemly overcrowded. You had to turn your setting very far down whenever entering some cities or else the lag would be unbearable. AO with the release of SL (Shadow Lands) has basically doubled the size of the playable gameworld. You better believe the player populations in the older cities has seriously thinned out and dispersed. But all the cities are not yet ghost cities/ghost towns.
Use the chat channels to find players, meet up with players. Join a Guild! AO is a very guild oriented game.
Go play EQ which has a million patches, and expansions, and you will really see how hard it is to find players LOL!!!! Many cities are ghost cities. Many areas of the game world you will NEVER ever see another player! LOL! EQ has seriously expanded the size of its playable gameworld over the 5 or so years it has been out. That is just how it is...... the bigger the gameworld gets, the more expansions there are... the more thinned out the player populations will get. Even in EQ which has over 400,000 accounts.
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MMORPG games I've played:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/xplororor
Star Wars Galaxies:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/capt_xplororor
More games:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/xplororor_archives01
Well.. I might go back to AO after a while I just got to try some other mmorpgs. And now when AI is coming I think more players will join Anarchy Online.
I guess we'll never find out how many players AO got because FC wont tell us.
AO has between 50,000 to 100,000 players. It is doing well enough to be considered a successful game. And it will/has made back all the millions invested into developing it. It is not a runaway success (really because it never fully recovered from its horrible release.)
Check out the MMORPG stats by Sir Bruce.
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MMORPG games I've played:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/xplororor
Star Wars Galaxies:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/capt_xplororor
More games:
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http://community.webshots.com/user/xplororor_archives01
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The BlackHand
"We Always Prevail"
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The BlackHand
"We Always Prevail"
http://auno.org/ao/stats.php
This is the AO character database, it lists pretty much every character created since launch, it do miss a few players, the really new ones for example, at the very most i say 10-15% unlisted, say 15 to be on the safe side. That means about 260-270k characters created in AO since launch 3 years ago, the absolute most accounts combined would be the same number. Accounts total since launch mind you, not active. The absolute fewest is the number divided by 24, (one can have 8 chars on each server).
I do not know the average amount of chars per account though, but probably around 3-4, say 3 to be on the safe side again. If we round upwards heawily we come to number 100k accounts created in AO since launch. Now how many are still active, i dare bet it is not all, nor is it 50k at that.
Fact is though, that character DB is funcoms own, auno just dumps the DB now and then onto his site, so them figures is accurate. AO homepage has its own character lookup from wich he gets this info.
Now that you have the figures you can make your own decision, my numbers are all estimates, exaggerated estimates I think BTW. I also think most active accounts have more then 3 chars, I do think less then 25% of them are still playing. I really doubt AO has more then 25k active accounts.
There has never been a player wipe that I know of, people who played the first month only should still have their chars if they log on, so that is indeed every char since launch.
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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Former long time player here and I must say if you want to know why AO is empty above is your answer...
My order of AO's downfall
1) From early SWG beta untill SWG release you really saw a chunk of AO's community... missing...
2) After people found out that SWG was a flop, some started to come back to AO in expectation of the New Expansion SL...
3) Prior to SL's realease Funcom put a AR nerf patch out.. It basicly pissed alot of people off and was not a good omen for SL...
4) SL's release and we were thrown to the wolves...
a. Bugs that were complained about during beta but not fixed (ex. stuck in geometry anyone?)
b. MoB hit points and damage were STILL insane starting around lvl 30ish...Tweaked out chars where getting slaugtered by White and Yellow con creatures... This was a major complaint in Beta as well, one that was ignored as usual.
SL basicly just killed the game for many people in more ways than the one's I listed...Hell for 2 weeks after SL ALL and I do mean ALL the outdoor mobs that we used to have fun killing were mysteriously gone (funcom said it was a bug, yeah right)... This meant that if you wanted to hunt outdoors agian and get XP you either had to go into a Dungeon, a Mission, or DING DING explore SL and hunt outdoors there. Talk about trying to make you buy an expansion..
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You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.-Mr.Smith
I remember that I once explored the broken shores alone, and as I walked I met some brontos and some monoliths (I think)so I ran from the monoliths and somewhere in the broken shores I found a strange desert town, I don't remember the name of the town. There were som few high levels there and I asked one of them why they come to this place and they said "for good missions" Anyway I talked to them about everything and about what they think of AO, one of them said : I liked it more when the story was about the Clans vs Omni-Tek now it's only about Shadowlands....
I should have began when SL didn't exist.
The AO story died a long time before SL came out........
Which is a shame because it had massive (RP) potential but (predictably) the PvP/Powergamer/levellers during beta made the most noise and the damage was done
I have been playing AO off and on for a couple of years and it seemed to die off sometime after shadowlands shipped. It may have been heading to a slow death before but after SL it was really bad. This is a shame because I have had an s*** load of fun playing this game. I have maxed out my account with characters because I couldn't stick with just one. This tells you something about how great the character classes are. Back in the glory days you could find people forming teams in ent district for all levels. The lag was really bad but it was still worth it, I would rather have lag from lots of people than no lag and ghost towns. Now it seems that there might be maybe one other person you can group with at any given time and there are many more high level characters around. Shadowlands was a great addition but I think it fractured the game too much, maybe it should have been saved for a new MMORPG entirely. It sounds to me like will be to AO what should have happened in the first place with the player housing and town raids. If this would have happened then AO would have been a front runner with this type of game rather than playing catch-up. Hopefully AI will add to Rubi-Ka rather than being yet another hidden away area that will fracture the game worse than it allready is. AO is also one of the original players and I think it is time for Funcom to come out with something new. AO is going to get beat out by the so called second generation games. If you are playing AO and having problems finding players then join a guild, one thing about AO is that it probably has one of the best communities and that is the most important aspect for an MMORPG.
I have been a fan of MMOGs for a while, but I admit that I am not a very serious player of any game. No games have really fit into my play style and schedule yet, but that's ok. I have subscribed to a few, and beta tested many more, and i have not found a perfect game yet. Anarchy Online is the closest game to perfect for me right now. I started almost a year after its release, when most of the major issues that killed the game early had been resolved. I convinced a few friends to start with me at the same time, and I think that was the greatest move for starting a game of this proportion. You have probably heard that AO has a huge learning curve, and I agree. But the learning curve gives more depth to this game than any other that I have played. Because of the skill system, you can try many combinations of class/race/equipment, and find what you like best.
However, like many people here are saying, I too feel that this game may be slowly dying. When I started playing, there were a lot of people in the game, but of course, the land area was much smaller than it is now. So naturally, it will be easier to find people in a closer area. It was fun to run for several minutes (I had low run speed at that level) to some outpost that you didn't know existed, save your char (kinda like binding in EQ) and go shopping at the shops in some of the outposts. It was even a common occurence to run into people, usualy higher levels, that would be there to help you if you were getting chased by a mean mob.
Shadowlands has taken away a lot of that fun. I personally dislike Shadowlands, although it does add an interesting new dimension to the game. However, it ruined AO as it was, and should have been a seperate game (that i would not play). The mobs are much meaner, drop less (unless you do tradeskills or the quests), and have different aggro patterns than mobs on Rubi-Ka. But they do reward you in MUCH higher experience per kill, and some of the items they drop are very awesome or worth a lot of credits.
Because of the rewards in Shadowlands, especially experience, there have been a flock of people rushing to those areas. I have seen newbies level up significantly, but not be half the character they would be if they would have taken the time to learn the game, do missions, get rewards and money for nanos, armor, etc. And then they run around gimped, looking for help and handouts. But who could blame them? That is the way the game is played now. People join, quickly level in SL, decide to try to "old" way of doing missions, hunting, and dynacamps, find that the leveling is slower (although the money and loot is better) and then return to the Shadowlands, because to keep up, you have to level up there. This is the main reason that the game has sunk (according to me).
I never did much role playing, but I hear that is mostly non-existent now anyway. They seemed to do a great job at one time of making a very thouroughly-developed storyline, complete with one novel extending over 300 pages. I read a good portion of it, and it is a pretty good history of the game, from present time to game time (about 25000 years later, right?) There would be constant news updates on the official website, and often they were related to in-game events. PVP has always been an important part of the game, but only in certain zones, so if you don't want to do it, you can stay away. There is still new events and evolving storyline, but those news stories come in though the chat interface, and not as often on the web site. And they're not as interesting as they used to be before shadowlands.
The graphics and sound have always been my favorite part of the game. Coming from EQ (2+ years ago) these seemed very awesome. The detail in them is still immense, but the quality isn't so good to today's standards. Music is excellent. I have even downloaded more from the musician (legally) from another game they made.
I think there is still hope for the game when AI comes out. Like someone said, the most important part of the game is Organizations (guilds) , and Alien Invasion will really focus on this bond. Plus, it seems to aim at bringing action back to Rubi-Ka. So old players, do not give up. And potential new players - maybe wait until AI...i don't know.
And if all else fails, just a few months ago, Funcom got some massive investments from different companies to continue development on AO, and for future MMOGs. Then they started looking for employees. So there may be a good future for AO, or new and similar games.
Sorry about the length. I still love AO, and I hope that it has a long future. It has just been a bumpy road for Funcom.
Yes! Nice of you to mention the MUSIC! If music alone could make an MMORPG I have NO doubt in my mind AO would get the crown. The great music is the first experience you get and it chills you to the bone. It totally sets the mood for the awsome architecture you see after the first screen with AO logo gives way to the play screen. I love every aspect of design in this game. There are many different designs you can do and I have seen some people put together some COOL characters. The female chars in this game are hotter than girls in hardcore anime LOL not that I have ever seen any hardcore anime (Geek porn? no thanks!) I think the designers and the community have made this game among the best which is why I am extremely interested in seeing the next games that Funcom comes out with. AO is great but it might be getting close to the end of what it can do. It will soon need to sort of break out of the shell that is the first generation of MMORPG's and that is where the upcoming releases from Funcom come in. I am confident that Funcom will unleash something that will drop like a ton of bricks and sure that I will be at their doorstep waiting for an account when it happens... thanks Funcom!
Yes. Not only can you totally customize a character's ability, but you can also make a very unique looking character. The social aspect is big in AO, since there used to be (and still is, but not as much) huge events, sponsored by different orgs and even ARK. People would take off their fancy armor and put on their fancy clothes for these gatherings. And yes, the female characters are very beautifully done. To give an example of the different clothing options - I saw an obese solitus with women's strap bikini-like clothes running around. And what made it even funnier, was that his pet's name was "Hot stuff commin' though!"
With these kinds of options, I'm not sure why more people don't enjoy at least hanging out in the game.
Oh, and if you liked the music, you can check out http://www.longestjourney.com/download/music/ Its not quite the same as AO's, but its by the same people, and its still good.
lol thats priceless))
When was the last time you guys played AO, 6 months ago?
Seriously, i agree that AO is small compare to games like FFXI, but i am rarely in an area where theres no people. SL brought in THOUSANDS of new players. Before SL the game was empty, but then the players read all the reviews on prestigious sites like gamespy, stratics, etc, and the game grew immensely. In the cities you cant go 10 feet without seeing at least 3 other people. Jobe and the shadowlands are especially well tread (at least nascence, which is an area of the shadowlands). The last time you guys played it must have been before all the patches, because SL doesn't have that many bugs anymore. And if you said the game was deserted, then you must have been in Omni forest or something...
I love AO.
I always maintain an AO account, and, while I drift off to try new games, I always come back to AO. Truth is, AO is the standard I compare other games to.
AO is huge. It is, without a doubt, the hardest game to learn of any MMORPG I have played. The reason the game is hard to learn is all the complexity. And, that is what I really enjoy about the game. You have more levers, bells, and whistles to tweak you char than in any other game I have ever seen.
The game has a great sense of humor. I doesn't take itself too seriously. If you think it does, go talk to a leet.
Finally, since the game has been around so long, it has worked ou good options to most of the major bugs and gameplay issues that drive me to distraction.
Any new games I play, I always try to compare the number of options to AO. I check to see if they have folks as helpful as the AO staff, and I look to see if they have as much stuff (options, territory, etc...) as AO. Inevitably, they don't and I come home once again.
AO is an older game. But, it's a great, fun game. I believe it is far from dead.
EZ
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila" --Mitch Ratliffe
EZ
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila" --Mitch Ratliffe