I have being gone from it for quite some time, and i was wondering how the population is now?  Also would it be worth it to come back?

AO was my very best friend for a very long time.  I have yet to find a game that equally matches what this game was for me at one time in it's long 7 year history. 

Completely tired with WoW Lich King and sad to see Tabula Rasa has been shut down, I went in search of a new Sci-Fi MMO.  I'm just tired of Dwarves with axes and Elves with Bows.  I found nothing to strike my fancy.  Stuff is either in production or in worse shape than ever.

So, that bring me to your question.  I downloaded the AO client and logged in on a Sunday evening.  Typically, a great time for gaming.  Weekend + Not too late = high population.

RK1:  After making a newb account (Wasn't ready to pay to re-activate my old account(s) ) I headed through newb island... scary how few people were there.  I saw 2 people on newb island though I admit, I didn't search the WHOLE island.  Considering the game is free, newb island shouldn't be dead.  AT LEAST people should be logging in for free and testing the game out on newb island.  This, wasn't so.  I made it into West Athens.  A city that used to be ripe with players looking for subway teams or pvper's fighting it out while guards are shooting away.  Nope.  Dead.  Nobody there.  Well, surely Old Athens.. the capital city of the Clan would have some shoppers on the hill and buff beggers at the Grid.  The hill had 1 lvl 200-something guy shopping at the terminals.  I saw a few people standing, AFK.  I asked 5 high-level players if my old clan was still alive.  They all ignored me or were AFK.  The grid wasn't much better.  1 guy was running in circles on that little hill by the grid.  Two others were talking about credits. I made my final stop at Borealis.  I saw a total of maybe 10-12 people in Borealis.  It's so sad, the memories I have of this game.. all the wonderful people I knew.. the busy streets that had so many people... so sad.... it's dead.

RK2:  Exactly the same as above, but multiply all of the people I saw by 2.  x2.  I saw maybe 30-40 people total on RK2.  The shopping channel actually had people talking on it... barely... and one of them was a gold seller.  

The game is pretty much on vacation until the graphics engine is released.

Walk away, it's a shell of old beautiful memories, empty but looks the same.

I'd have to say that experience is much different than the one my fiance and I had returning 3 weeks ago. You may have been on at an off peak time, or in an empty instance of the zone on newbie island, (remember, AO zones have multiple instances of them, so if one is full you get put in another) but honestly the game is very much alive and quite a few froobs are playing. I've ran 3 new characters up to level 60 in the last two weeks and each time I was on the newbie island found quite a few people to group with. I've been on everyday especially on weekends and in the evening and found it to be the exact opposite of what you saw. As a matter of fact, I am logged on and in old athens right now posting WTS on trade channel, and i have a rather large group of people surrounding me doing the same. I've found plenty of people in the subway and on to ToTw as well. When I went on to the Shadowlands, I was instantly invited for a group at crippler cave, and ran with them for quite awhile before it broke up, and ended up in a new group for hecklers in no time. I am currently playing on RK1 and am rather glad I returned to the game. A lot has changed since i last played, but its good to see it still alive. Old Athens is still packed with people of all classes and levels, west athens was never the popular when I played, and Borealis seems to be becoming the main spot for all factions, more  so than before, Newland and the Jobe platform also seem to have a lot of people hanging out there more than used to be. I recently joined an org as well, and there are about 30 people on at all times, about 8 of us are new players, a mix of froob and paid, another 4 of us are returning to the game from not having played in years. The game is doing well for its age, I played it years ago during its beta and release (as rocky as it was then), and quit in 2005 to try some other games and finish college. I am really glad to be back and am having a blast relearing all the old stuff I had forgotten, and seeing the new stuff thats been added since I last played. The community is still mostly mature and helpful players, though I have found there are a few that try to cause problems. All in all though, I think It is still well populated.

hello ,

     I agree  , i took a 3 months break and   its still pretty active on RK2  at least .  I beleive theres alot of good times to come on AO still   .    

  Hope to see you later ingame  !    take care :) 

               PHirbyro  , General of TEstament  .

I have a question for this thread.

I was in AO at launch till SL.

When I plaid I suppose I grinded more then anything, and did countless missions at the terms.

Questing was not my thing back than and I think I might have missed out on a lot of the story line if I had quested.

My question is, in terms of questing. Can someone actually spend level 1 to 200+ by questing or is he going to be returning to the mission terms and headed to HOME or what ever that place was... =) 

thank you.

hi ,   hope i can fully answer your question  ,    since i talk french mostly  but  .. 

 Yes you can Quest from lvl 1 to 200+     on rubika  as a free player or not  ,  there is some quests also in shadowlands if you get these expansions .  You can  and or have to return in main cities to sell or buy new stuff  .   You can play your character as you want such  exploring  or pvp  ,  etc. ..      hope i helped you by answering this  :) 

 talk to you later   :) 

You cannot quest from 1 to 200, not even close.  They have added a few quests but the majority are grouped in ranges for lowbies, then some around lvl 130, then high end quests (of which there are quite a few).  maybe 15-20 of your 200/220 levels can be acquired by questing (not counting the ones on the starter island).

---

Originally posted by xcopymmo
My question is, in terms of questing. Can someone actually spend level 1 to 200+ by questing or is he going to be returning to the mission terms and headed to HOME or what ever that place was... =) 

---

There are missions given by NPCs (quests) but you're not going to be lvling the whole way on them. They are usually more for specific item gain purposes although some are just for some XP and creds. They did add a mess of extra ones in SL over the past year or two though.

While you're not going to be questing through the game you don't do the RK mission grind either. Generally if you want XP you team up and do things in SL as the XP is much better. Although as many are in a huge rush to go from lvl X to Y many just pick on the best XP sources like crips cave in Nasc, tigs in Ely, hecks in Ely and hecks in Ado. Then around lvl 170-180+ they find one 220 or more to team and do Inf (SL) missions with for crap loads of XP/SK. The new booster though did add a decent amount of new stuff for lvl 201+ chars to do to both gain SK, AXP and new items, some solo, some in teams.

just done a tower battle (on rk2). 87 clans vs 73 omnis. omni lost (noooo :P) but it might give u a fair impression of the state of the game. (it was a tl7 (thats lvl 205+) towerbattle, those are the biggest tower battles)

btw: those 87+73 is a very small piece of the total amount of people online on the server lol dont get me wrong, a lot of people dont care for pvp and do missions or hunt bosses somewhere, etcetera..

also with the legacy of xan booster i noticed some people coming back, some to test out the booster and some who noticed the game cause of the publicity that the booster brought with its release. not a great boost to population tho, and its only been  "vets" that have been coming back. the new graphics engine will be the best chance to up the population, its steady as it is (been that for years, about 12k subs, rk2 most popular server) but it would be nice to see a fair amount of new people come in the game, the community is overall very newb friendly.

Originally posted by 3on1

just done a tower battle (on rk2). 87 clans vs 73 omnis. omni lost (noooo :P) but it might give u a fair impression of the state of the game. (it was a tl7 (thats lvl 205+) towerbattle, those are the biggest tower battles)

btw: those 87+73 is a very small piece of the total amount of people online on the server lol dont get me wrong, a lot of people dont care for pvp and do missions or hunt bosses somewhere, etcetera..

also with the legacy of xan booster i noticed some people coming back, some to test out the booster and some who noticed the game cause of the publicity that the booster brought with its release. not a great boost to population tho, and its only been  "vets" that have been coming back. the new graphics engine will be the best chance to up the population, its steady as it is (been that for years, about 12k subs, rk2 most popular server) but it would be nice to see a fair amount of new people come in the game, the community is overall very newb friendly.

Out of curiousity, how did you determine the precise number of people involved in that TL7 tower battle?  That's actually pretty high considering how low the pops are on the servers.  But, compared to most MMO's it's not very high.  At any given time EVE Online has 20-30,000 people playing and battles can feature literally... 300-400 players.  I've heard of even bigger battles.  Actually, have seen video on youtube of those battles.  In WAR, during RVR during a decent time of the day you can get a random RVR Battle with 150-300 people.

Out of curiousity, how did you determine the precise number of people involved in that TL7 tower battle? That's actually pretty high considering how low the pops are on the servers. But, compared to most MMO's it's not very high. At any given time EVE Online has 20-30,000 people playing and battles can feature literally... 300-400 players. I've heard of even bigger battles. Actually, have seen video on youtube of those battles. In WAR, during RVR during a decent time of the day you can get a random RVR Battle with 150-300 people.

Most likely by seeing how many players where in each sides chat bot. If I'm in the clan bot, it's easy to know how many are in it. All I need to do then is ask an omni friend how many are in their bot and I'dd know the numbers involved on each side.

Eve is an online pvp spaceship game, with one world, as such it's not really comparable to a classic 3rd person mmorpg.

WAR was build for large scale pvp fights, AO has always been more of a pve game (with unfortunately some very poor coding behind it).

Your 2 examples are not typical for "most MMO's" either, I'm pretty sure that if one went to check out CoX, EQ, EQ2, WoW, Ryzom, Lotr,... ; that he'dd find that AO's 150 people involved in one fight isn't all that bad.

Originally posted by Brezjnev

Out of curiousity, how did you determine the precise number of people involved in that TL7 tower battle? That's actually pretty high considering how low the pops are on the servers. But, compared to most MMO's it's not very high. At any given time EVE Online has 20-30,000 people playing and battles can feature literally... 300-400 players. I've heard of even bigger battles. Actually, have seen video on youtube of those battles. In WAR, during RVR during a decent time of the day you can get a random RVR Battle with 150-300 people.

Most likely by seeing how many players where in each sides chat bot. If I'm in the clan bot, it's easy to know how many are in it. All I need to do then is ask an omni friend how many are in their bot and I'dd know the numbers involved on each side.

Eve is an online pvp spaceship game, with one world, as such it's not really comparable to a classic 3rd person mmorpg.

WAR was build for large scale pvp fights, AO has always been more of a pve game (with unfortunately some very poor coding behind it).

Your 2 examples are not typical for "most MMO's" either, I'm pretty sure that if one went to check out CoX, EQ, EQ2, WoW, Ryzom, Lotr,... ; that he'dd find that AO's 150 people involved in one fight isn't all that bad.

Sucks for them. In AO, 150 people in one area = slide show on even the best computers ( which doesn't say much anyway since you need an old ass computer to be totally compatible with the AO engine code ). Wonder how long an orbital strike last at 1 frame per minute. lol

yes, i determined that number by counting the ppl in the omni and clan bots.
its not a slide show, sometimes u get warped away a bit cause the area is too crowded :/ that really sucks, but at least it shows the shere size of the battle lol

While I'll be the first one to  say there aren't enough people on AO, especially at the times I play, it's certainly not that slow by any means.  I ran a new toon through newbie island and there were probably 30-40 people on it while I was there and that was a weekday morning.  Just hanging out in OA, there are always close to 50 or so people wandering around, even at the slowest times and that's just in one city.  Gamewide, there are certainly always a couple hundred at a minimum.

I used to play a couple years ago and have been trying like hell to get back to it. Unfortunately every attempt to install and patch the game (either client and including manually patching) has resulted in total failure. I've read every forum post in the AO forums and technical assistance and tried every method mentioned to get the show on the road and I find I can't even change the folder options despite the fact that I am the admin! My computer functions perfectly with all other software and games so I seriously doubt the fault is mine or my computers.

With FunCom's usual flair for totally fucking up everything they touch these days I guess I may have to be content with forgetting the game even exists since they can't even make their own patching software function.

I suppose that the popularity of the game would be better than it is if people could actually install, patch and play it. Maybe not. I was looking forward to the new engine but with the luck I'm having with the old crap I won't even bother to try the new.

If anyone else has had this issue and beat it or is currently playing a recent install I'd appreciate some instructions on how you managed! Thanks in advance!

AMD 64x2 6400+ / 4 gigs RAM / Nvidia 9800 GTX+ / WinXP Pro

New people download and install the game fresh every day with no problems.  Probably some oddball configuration issue with your specific hardware and/or software.  Be sure to install the Large client instead of the small one, as can be a hassle later on.

For over a year I have had a problem with the AO patcher malfunctioniong (checksum error). I circumventend it by running the patches with windows Run, without starting up the patcher so AO's patcher couldn't mess up. When I switched PCs, the problem disappeared.

Anarchypatcher.exe has had problems for a long time now for many people, so you're definetely not the first to have problems getting into the game.

However, for us to help you; a bit more information is probably helpful:

Patch n° downloaded/old AO client version?

Standard installation path or not?

Does the "end user agreement" open after running anarchy.exe?

Does "Anarchy Online - Local Version (patch n°)" open?

Does the patcher give an error message? Which one?

Does your firewall block access to the internet from the launcher point (firewall history)?

Can you see the servers (Atlantean is default) after patching and logging in?

I did a comeback just recently (after 2+ years) and I can tell you there's plenty of people playing! Boy I'm happy I decided to reactivate my account. It's far from dead like some guys keep telling from time to time. I'm playing mostly daytime (GMT +2) and I haven't had any difficulties to get in teams or build them from scratch by myself. Many of my old in game friends have quitted or moved to other games though but it doesn't bother me at all because the overall population is decent.