Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Classic server plz!!
Wharg0ul
Member Posts: 4,183
I SORELY miss Anarchy Online before Shadowlands. I beg the Funcom gods of Notum.....open a "classic server" for the old-school fans!!!!
I'd pay TWICE the monthly sub fee, personally.
Comments
I'd support this. With a graphics overhaul and no expansions past say Notum Wars, I'd be back in a heartbeat.
Shadowlands sucked.
Shadowlands really killed my favorite (and first) mmorpg. If they *could* support a single classic server, I would rejoin and probably never leave.
How come people don't like Shadowlands? Didn't it add the end-game? I'm just curious, I started after SL so I don't know what it was like before. I do think leveling is much funner in Rubi-Ka than SL, it's not like they took that option away. Most people still leveled in RK back in '04-'06.
It ruined the game...plain and simple.
SL was supposedly another game entirely that Funcom was working on.....they decided to scab it onto AO instead as an expansion.
It didn't fit with the lore, or even the genre at all. It ruined the economy (ingots, before they were nerfed), it ruined the pace of progression (heck n00bs), and it made fixers completely broken.
It was released unfinished, with several quest chains leading to further areas intentionally broken so that people woldn't find out that areas past (and including) inferno weren't even THERE yet.
Suddenly people finding out that they had played for a year or more to reach 200 (yes, it took that long back then) now had even MORE levels to grind out.
Everyone's equipment became obsolete. Areas on RK became totally empty as everyone moved to SL to speed-level their characters.
And let's not forget NT's kiting 40 hecks at a time, while groups sat around afk and paid 1m per level to the NT.
Oh...and my personal favorite....my GA MK4, which cost over 900million credits and took me a year to get....was suddenly worthless, and my character was reduced to nothing but a weak soldier with HoTs and pathetic run buffs.
Don't even make me go on about shades stealing aggro from tanks and wiping groups.....implants suddenly becoming even MORE of a head-ache than they previously were, and the suddenly obscene OP imbalance of NTs.
I really could go on and on with this. SL totally destroyed AO.
Shadowlands didn't add an endgame. It entirely obsoleted the old pve game and added one with a way bigger grind.
My list of grievances against the SL expansion:
The trader profession got destroyed at high levels. By far the lowest damage combined with undesirable support. Most of their toolset received no update at all.
The agents old toolset got discontinued. False profession was stuck with pre-SL nanos, the stuff that was meant to make up for that wasn't all that.
NTs very small new replacement toolset got locked away behind levellocks. You basically had to finish the game to be able to play the game.
Doctor healing went through the roof and for the rest the profession trampled in place.
Every old crowd control toolset got pretty much disabled in SL. Those snaring&calming professions generally got inferior replacements, that had to be reacquired.
Adventurers become the posterchild locechild: good damage, good healing, very good survivability, good crowd controlling abilities. If you wanted dps/heals/tank/CC, you only had to find 1 good adventurer.
So while some professions got boosted through the roof and turned into very good generalists (adventurers and soldiers mainly), others professions were nerfed (traders, agents, NTs, fixers), while the rest trampled in place.
The "new" toolsets of most professions were rife with bugs that wouldn't be fixed for years, but not the toolset of adventurers ofcourse.
Stat inflation on the professions went completely out of control, every SL level equals about 5 normal levels. The pvp level ranges were not adjusted.
The SL mobs have absurdly high AC values, which made every weapon with low minimum damage obsolete, which is basically every pre-SL weapon.
The SL mobs had way more hp+ACs than old RK mobs, which made killing even a single mob alone an absolute grind.
The SL zones were changed to give much more xp than RK (because noone at first went to SL, since noone but NTs did any damage ...), so old Rubi-Ka was turned into a desolate area.
SL came with Hecklers in every zone, supposedly very hard mobs living on the brink (the edge of SL), higher in level than the rest of the mobs in the zone and all conveniently close together. Players took the way of least resistance and grinded these. When word came to FC that there was fierce competition over a limited supply of hecklers, since nearly everyone was grinding them, they decided to add even more hecklers because "that is what players want".
After level 200 you could only obtain xp in SL, the xp you gained for kills after level 200 was depending on your reputation with factions. The only way to get somewhat high reputation for clans/omnis was to kill a single mob on long respawn. So players implemented a bot queue system so players could take turns for killing that 1 mob. Players were grinding to be able to grind xp. Level 200 in old AO took some time to achieve, but it was nothing compared to 20 shadowlevels.
"There will be no camping in the Shadowlands." A quote from the wonderfully incompetent game director Gaute Godager. Gaute managed to write the initial design of both the Shadowlands and Age of Conan on his CV. Age of Conan with it's invisible walls, poor class design, bugs, linear progression etc was also basically a retake of the Shadowlands, but this time really in a standalone game. Back on topic: how did Gaute Godager achieve his no camping? He implemented mobs on a 20m respawn, with a chance of 0.1 to 3% to drop a good item. And Gaute was right in part, players didn't camp Ado dryads, the chinese working people did it for them.
The SL zones were linear. You level in 1, pass to the other, level, pass on etc. To pass from one zone to the next you had to do some bugged+long+grindy right of passage quest. The complete opposite from the open old RK. Eventually FC made it so you could pass from one zone to the next after a certain level, so the players just grinded in 1 zone till they were high enough level to be allowed into the next without a quest.
... There's more.
FC was fortunate into being able to mislead game reviewers into thinking that SL was a good expansion, getting somehat decent reviews (see gamespot), drawing in new players. The reviewers tended to only play at the low levels (basically playing the old AO game, without the stupidly high AC/hp of mobs or the epic grinds) and then also got a pr tour of the higher zones.
With SL FC threw away their old players and replaced them with new players who didn't leave SL (the hecknoobs), players who didn't know what old Rubi-Ka had been like before SL.