SL adds twenty extra char lvls and gives you SL/normal perks. You get one every ten char lvls for the first 200 lvls then one every lvl after that for a total of 40 perks. SL you can get for in the cheap pay account (SL00b) at $5 per month I think it was.

AI adds 30 AI lvls and you get one AI perk with every AI lvl.

LE added research. Each char has seven lines of personal research with each having ten lvl locked lvls (70 in total). There are also global (sided) research but they have all been completed by all sides on all servers long ago now.

NW and LotX are the two boosters. Neither added any sort of lvls, perks or research type things.

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Originally posted by Datcyde
I need  some help with the game and chill with some cool people just hit me up on here  thanks.

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A number of people coming back every so often lately so you're not alone. If you want more help here you'd need to be more specific as to what you need help with. In general though try poking around looking for an org to join (in game or in the official AO forums). That should largely take care of most problems as a returning player.

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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... =) 

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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.

They're just two different servers. No matter what server you play on you need the same patches.

Currently FC has set RK1 as the default server for new players apparently while RK2 was the default for years. As a result those on RK1 complained of low population problems and asked for that change in the forums every so often. RK2 is currently livelier still I imagine (been a while since I went to RK1) but once you get in a good org of a decent size which may have allied orgs as well then getting people for things shouldn't be much of a problem usually. So just start on whichever you have your old stuff and chars on.

If you play without expansions as a fr00b you can expect that deal to continue on indefinitely. When you buy an expansion you can from what I remember get a one week (7 day) trial plus would get 30 days (the 7 days come out of this I think though) of paid play time tagged on. You would still need to sign up for the recurring subscription and pay up front, the 30 days would just be tagged on to that. Try looking in the AO FAQ on the main site, pretty sure that is talked about there.

As for where to look for current deals and order them log into your "my account" page and look under the upgrade offers section.

MPs tend to work better with bows for range than other range weapons and are considered the main bow prof, even if MAs have more perk support. Bows and rifles can also have comparable ranges. Another range weapon MPs can be good with are pistols then with those there's the Pepper Pistol line that has bonuses to MC, BM and MM nano skills.

IP cost wise those two will also be your cheapest range weapons at +2.4 (pistol) and +2.5 (bow) IP per point compared to +4 on rifle (each point you increase the skill the IP cost of the skill goes up that much). Also IP cost decides how many points you can put into the skill per lvl and title lvl, the lower the cost, the higher you can raise the skill. Then you can use bow special attack items with regular bows (not cross bows) which is the only weapon special MPs don't spend +4 IP per point increase on.

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When it comes to your nano pool all profs have at least some issues earlier on but later things become much easier. So you can be busy nuking like crazy without much worry of running out at higher lvls. This is especially true if you have expansions as for one thing you can use symbiants rather than implants. Ones MP can use have bonuses for nano cost reduction, nano pool, nano points and nano regeneration.

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You will run out of RK pets eventually. My one MP with expansions could self all of them and other than the higher creation nanos self all non-lvl locked nanos at lvl 75 (don't get SL/AI pets till lvl 165+). It'll take longer as a fr00b but the higher you go the more you may want/need to pitch in when fighting. One problem with regular MP RK pets is they suck at taunting so you will pull most of the agro. The Inner Sanctum ones can be nice in that regard but are lvl locked (lvl 135 & 185). The ToTW MP pet can taunt well too but it is also lvl locked and its damage sucks compare to the regular attack pets you can use by that lvl.

One thing you need to learn is when you should or shouldn't jump in with your pets. For much stronger stuff you can be better off letting your pets all do the work. You also need to work on pulling just one or two mobs from a group. Best way to do that is put your pets on follow then just move close enough to draw agro from a hostile mob then run off a ways before attacking. With social mobs if you attack one too close to the others they will all attack which could be overwhelming. With non-social mobs it won't matter and with non-hostile mobs you can't pull in that manner.

Then you should make use of all those hot key bars and use one attack macro for your attack pet, one for your mez pet and a specific heal one for your heal pet. This way if you pull two mobs you can send your attack pet after one and the mezz pet to keep the other out of the fight. To make that easier rename your pets with macros rather than using their default names. Once you run out of pets though then you may as well use their default names.

They dropped the idea of the game not having character levels a long time ago. It now has a lvl 200 cap for character lvls just like Dofus.

Also many things from the web pages are grossly out of date or are still things they want to put in, but haven't managed to yet.

You may say that but considering what some of the people in Dofus are like I can guarantee you that there will be groups of people trying to do just that. Even without doing it on purpose a lot of people all trying to lvl their char on mobs or profs by collecting resources could bring about the extinction of various things. Then if it were a real ecosystem the loss of one thing means others are also affected.

They've already tossed various important concepts for this game before it even hit open beta. Good chance that the idea that things can go extinct will be tossed as well.

The problem Ankama has always had is they do not have the people to properly support their games in languages other than French. In the past (and maybe present too) they would use translations given by player volunteers and anyone that played in the earlier days of Dofus would remember all the Engrish (intentionally misspelled) in the game.

Their paid staff can have no to shaky English skills and then they figure "hey, let's add German and Spanish services too!" At that point they didn't even have one non-French GM, any GM that may come by would have iffy English or would just run around showing something off without saying anything at all. Yet they figure that they can then support the game in languages that differ a fair bit more from French than English does?

Look at the forums for their games. At least some paid staff on the French one and it looks like just volunteers for the most part on others. Then there's their new game in beta, Wakfu. The French one has staff starting official bug report threads and suggestion ones with said staff responding to posts and interacting. Over on the English side nothing of the sort. In fact they haven't bothered to even update the little blurbs telling people about down time and such for almost a month now while there have been several on the French one.

Don't get your hopes up too high. Ankama does good art but their ability in other areas tends to be weak plus they looove grind. Your ability to have a high lvl in this or that has more to do with how much time you can invest than your ability to play the char well, especially in the current form of Wakfu. The current spell XP system is also sloppy and the game is riddled with bugs which tend to just build up.

Going through your list.

1 & 7.
With the relatively small number of players in game now people already wiped out some mobs for the most part in the past so they bumped up spawning a lot a ways back. Now you can hunt to your hearts content and it makes no difference. Same with spawning of resources.

The AI is so good mobs will ram themselves into the boarder of the fight area till they suicide if you stand in the right spots and they were beside the boarder. At times they may get stuck in the boarder so rather than fixing it so they wouldn't ram into the boarder in the first place they just added the workaround of letting us attack things in the boarder.

2 & 4.
What's wrong with NPCs? NPCs never really controlled land ownership and so on in any game so where this concept of NPCs are inherently bad has come from is beyond me. If used poorly as they were in some cases in Dofus they can be annoying but that's it. The devs would limit where what could be done and so on then the players, not NPCs, would go from there. The value of NPCs would be to buy useless junk no one wants to help new players get going and sell common things so as to take money out of the economy to try to help limit inflation.

Take baking or alchemy in Dofus. I'd hate to have to collect water from wells all the time as they run out and you need lots of it but I can instead just go to a NPC and buy all I want. In Wakfu it seems we need to draw all our water from the few wells in lag town thus far, oh joy.

Anakama is putting in specific factions for you to join again, we don't control that. Land disputes in games is usually between player guilds or what not anyhow, nothing new there (not that it's been implemented yet). Tax usually comes through guild/org/whatever (not in game yet) taxes which has nothing to do with NPCs. Most of what you mentioned in 4 either has not been implemented or has not really even been discussed except maybe to supposedly sell this no NPCs is good idea.

3.
The fast turn buff is nice and all but while some could use one spell at a time and that's it others need to chain many. Add to that lag, unnecessarily lengthy animations, currently broken toolbar hot keys plus other problems and it's not a good combo. Short and simple isn't smarter and better, it's just short and simple.

You could fight anywhere in Dofus too, difference you knew about what to expect and start points could be mixed and all over. Here they just divided the field in half and hopefully you won't get stuck somewhere that has the mob out of reach. Leaving collectable resources on the battle field is also a pain as you can't see through them and some block your path.

5.
It's not all that different from the one in Dofus. It's just missing things like the ability to join two players so you don't have to trust the crafter to make it and return the actually completed product. Also it took a long time and lots of complaining to get the Dofus crafting system to that point. Originally you had to put in each crafting item for each craft each time. Eventually they added the touchy repeat button and were pretty resilient towards the idea of going past that. Grind is good and provides "difficulty" as far as they're concerned.

6.
If PvE were not available nothing else would be either. The PvP now is just simple and more about personal epeen or abusing bugs (unlimited dolls a while back). Raiding and faction wars are not in game, complimenting things not even available for review is foolhardy.

On RK you could go anywhere at any level (excluding lvl locked dungeons), it was just a matter of going there. With SL there are multiple new large regions but you progress through them based on your level or if you can do the required task for each ring (acts as a pass and buffs some stuff) to move to the next region. Although once you have keys to side gardens/sanctuaries (kinda like towns) for a region you can hop from one to the other but if you got SL after playing a char to 200 and wanted to go to the sixth region you would have to get yourself through the five before it first (could skip the first actually with a Jobe portal). Rather than the grid or whom-pahs there are many statues through each region that you can access from the gardens/sanctuaries of that region and keys can get you from one gardens/sanctuaries to another.

There are no real lvl locks for anything in SL short of some quests and the starter area (can go back in till lvl 50 I think). You could play from lvl 1-220 in SL and never go to RK once if you wanted. SL is mainly for the much better XP and the only place to get SK (Shadow Knowledge, XP to gain lvls past lvl 200) plus of course SL only items. With SL RK would be for getting various items of interest from the different dungeons and quests, tokens plus anything relating to the AI and LE expansions.

The perks, new items, new nanos, new areas and such from each expansion didn't really change how you play, just added more to play with and more options. SL was the first expansion and the biggest by far in regards to game area and only one to add new profs of the three. Closest thing to totally changing the way you play the game would be how a lot of people used the generated missions to level but with SL you will get most of your XP at lvls 1-200 from various mobs outside or in the various static SL dungeons.

Because most MMORPGs have far more to it than this does. With others there's many varied places to go, items to try to get, mobs to fight, things to do, abilities to try to gain and so on. All of which would take far longer than a one to two week trail period allows. Here aside from gaining the licenses for the higher ships you'll be able to do and try about everything the game offers within that trial period. The description makes it sound like EvE with a different ship control method but it's really much closer to Quake in space than EvE.

FC paid support staff is shared between all their games. There aren't AO only or AoC only ones so they did not pull people from AO's GM staff as they are just FC game support staff. Since they're shared and since AoC was only just launched the current mess is to be expected. There were various problems apparently where people would need to petition but as always there would be a lot of petitions about simple game stuff they could ask other players about or read the freakn manual for but don't. As a results everyone from AO and AoC that needs GM help is boned till things calm down.

Another thing is it's summer. At this time of year the students go home, people go on vacation, spend time doing other things outside or what not and so on. As a result the player population always goes down and as the player population goes down so too do the number of ARKs as they are players themselves. So first the paid support staff are tied up with things at AoC and to make matters worse many of the AO volunteer support staff are not around either. Since AoC is brand new they likely don't have much in the way of volunteer support staff yet so even more needs to be done by the GMs. It's basically a mess all around.

In regards to someone leaving AO dev staff that's hardly new. People come and go from one game to another in a company constantly.

AO Universe is a better source for info on what quests and what not are available.

There's the FAQ in this forum which also has links to other sites to get help from. RK2 (Rimor) has the largest population but the AO population isn't as big as other games such as WoW.

Regarding levelling how long it takes depends on if you have the expansions and how you play. With SL levelling is much faster then if you're willing to team you can move along quite well. Someone that really wanted to push things managed to do lvl 200 or maybe even lvl 220 in twenty-four hours of game time so how long it takes you depends a lot on how fast you want to level. Although your first chat will take some time as you don't know your way around and can't get at items as easily. A good Org will help you there.

Also this is a MMORPG, not a single player RPG. The idea of these types of games is that you can do whatever rather than follow some scripted routine of one quest after another like in single player RPGs. WoW isn't more mature, they just made levelling too easy and had it so you could solo up to cap before needing to do much anything with others. There are some quests and such you can do if you want to so as to gain some quest specific reward but you're not required to do any of that if you don't want to.

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Originally posted by burmese
yep, today Silirrion put out another Letter from the Game Director:
current patch is 17.8, 17.9 will be next, then they expect to have the new graphics engine in 18.0

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That's not how software version numbering works. There could be a patch 17.99999999999999999.0 before 18.0 comes along. The graphics engine upgrade is planed for the later part of the year, how many version patches we get before then is impossible to say.

Also remember this is an engine update, not a graphics in general update. Originally they said all it would do was take advantage of current video cards to take the work load off the CPU and that visual improvements would come after that over time. Now it looks like at least some things will look better right away but still, don't expect night and day changes. It will look better but the main gain at the start will be that it should play more smoothly. Considering how many textures and meshes there are in the game it will be some time before they can give everything to most things a facelift.

See "C-30 Can you Rest your Skills?" in my Anarchy Online F.A.Q. thread in this forum.

C-30 Can you Rest your Skills?
When you start you'll be given some IPRs (Improvement Point Resets) and you get more at each TL. If you have the expansions then you'll have more IPRs to play with than fr00bs and can also buy them for credits at a terminal in the Hardware Dimension in Jobe Plaza (250 million creds is the base value) or for 50k VP at one of the LE shop terminals in the Tower Shops.

To reset a skill you first must stip off everything from the three tabs in your wear window (ctrl + 1). Next open your skills window ("U"), click the "i" icon in the top left corner of that window, select "reset skill" from the menu that pops up then click on the skill you want to rest in the skills window. When you do that a button will show up towards the bottom of the window with the number of remaining IPR noted beside it, click the button to reset that skill. Map Nav can't be reset and abilities generally can't be reset properly since to raise a skill very much at all you need to increase the related abilities as well.

After big game changes like expansions you may also get a single use "reset all skills" option as well which will reset everything including abilities but still not map nav (some abilities may not be fully reset if you have put some points in map nav). This is a limited time option FC gives us due to the changes that expansion brought us but you don't need that expansion to get the reset. Right now with LE it is possible they will offer another "reset all skills" reset later on (said they might do that before LE came out) but last I heard they have no plans to do so.

Sounds more like a firewall issue. The game is trying to connect but can't due to your firewall not being setup properly to allow it to connect.

Missions generated by mission terminals will give you a map location and a key. With those you get from NPCs (aka quests) you need to pay more attention to what they tell you and the mission description as not all will give you a defined go here location and they tend to be completed above ground rather than in mission areas. If you get really lost check out AO Universe for help. The NPC missions tend to provide more specialized or unique rewards and can come in mission chains where you do this and that for one NPC then get directed to the next in the line to do this and that and so on till you get to the end.

Missions from different areas can send you to other areas depending on the mission level. Just pull missions from different zones to see where they send you (don't actually do them) then go back to pull missions from the ones that sent you the easiest to get to locations. Think at around that level if you're Clan pulling them in OA or Tir can get you sent to locations in the city of Bliss which you can get to from OA. Another thing is don't pull one mission at a time, pull several all to around the same area.