FC's so called "rebalancing" only fundementally changes one thing: nanos have separate (much shorter) recharge and (longer) cooldown, so you can cast other nanos where you would be locked in recharge before. The feel of using attacks, nanos and perks will stay the same, for most professions playing will become somewhat more active/involved. What is being changed are the numbers behind the actions themselves.

So if you find the current attack, nano & perk system to be fun, then you'll find the future attack, nano & perk system to be fun as well. IF your characters their toolsets aren't nerfed or broken too much, because being able to perform adequately without having to jump through loops, is a large part of the fun, so the discussions on the forums about the numbers do matter a bit.

I don't agree either how these changes are going through btw. What FC has presented so far I can only describe with one word: FUBAR.

If FC's intent was to balance the professions so all the gimp professions could actually have a chance of being invited to PUG raids, then there would be no need for a total conversion like they are presenting now, just boosts to the gimps and minor nerfs to parts of the toolsets of the prima donna profs. Instead FC is changing everything, but somehow based on what already existed: no changes to the game mechanics that were not meant to be used with post-SL/AI numbers, not adressing the AR issue, not adressing the damage-multiplier problem post 1k, without filling in or smoothing out the progression of toolsets across levels, without actually boosting the gimps,... From a game that is at present completely unbalanced, we will go to a game that will be utterly unbalanced after "rebalancing".

The developer's team that didn't see a problem with releasing farm instance after farm instance for the past 3 years and catering to their professions in updates, while useless professions were rerolling/leaving, they are now the ones that are doing the "rebalancing". If the developers were unable to understand the dynamics between the professions on live servers with thousands of players playing, then they are certainly not going to be able to understand how these changes (that so far only exist on paper) are going to work out. They could try to iron it out by repeated playtesting on the test server (the way they determine the stats for their monsters in playfields; they can't even calculate out the stats for simple hp/AR/dmg mobs without a toolset), but given the scope of what  would need to be tested and the limited amount of people available for testing (and the extremely limited amount of people available for unbiased feedback), this will never happen properly.

I personally fear that this "New Game Enhancement" could be the end of AO. Right now the looming changes are already hurting the low population a bit, since people don't want to invest time in their characters when there is this much uncertainty wether they will still be viable (fun) in the future AO. Several people in my org are going to let their accounts lapse already, while they and others are spending more of their gametime in other games. FC trying to rebalance AO now seems like their worst idea ever to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-iTNrfqZnE

That's a frapsing of the NT mentioned in the OP, somehow removing his 30 minute lockout from NBS.

I also tried finding back the website that listed the series of events that followed when FC banned pretty much every clan leader active in NW, but to no avail.

The handling of exploits and harrasment, but also of things like getting help from FC after being hacked, by FC has always been very unprofessional. Any outcome is possible, entirely dependant on who gets to handle the petition.

And since there is no definite list of exploits and some possible exploits have been around forever, telling what is an exploit and what is to be considered a "feature", is pretty much impossible.

I went to auno.org, I checked the online numbers 201-220 for Atlantean (431) and I checked how many of them didn't have any AI levels at all (3). So 3 out of those 431 online 201+ players are probably SL only subs. Not many, but there's a few atleast.

Originally posted by adeptuz

Doesn't sound good. I was looking to level a new character in a normal way but if it's just powerleveling nowadays I won't subscribe. Not worth it IMHO. I have a 219 doc on second account as well so I could just pocket my new alt but I don't like to do that. Too bad all my in-game friends have quitted or moved into other games already long time ago.

I'm from Rimor, we have a population problem on our server. I'd try to get hold of someone from Atlantean that PUGs when leveling and see if you can get a status report from him. It probably won't be as bad as on Rimor, so maybe ...

edit: I think you can now make forum accounts without being subscribed on the official AO forums (it was possible for a while atleast), so you can ask in Life on Atlantean as well.

The german server was merged with Atlantean a few months ago, giving it a population boost. I play on Rimor myself and that server is struggling atm, but I've been told by other Rimorians that moved that Atlantean has a much better population.

For the AO farm instances, I think the following is a decent order in which normal players (without personal connections or an extreme reputation) get invited to PUGs:

• Absolutely always: doctor.
• Pretty much always: bureaucrat and soldier.
• Most of the time: enf.
• Regularly: engineer, keeper, shade and adventurer.
• Rarely: MA.
• Pretty much never: NT (generally speaking), agent and trader.
• Absolutely never: fixer and MP.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Doctor healing went through the roof and for the rest the profession trampled in place.
5. Every old crowd control toolset got pretty much disabled in SL. Those snaring&calming professions generally got inferior replacements, that had to be reacquired.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. The "new" toolsets of most professions were rife with bugs that wouldn't be fixed for years, but not the toolset of adventurers ofcourse.
9. 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.
10. The SL mobs have absurdly high AC values, which made every weapon with low minimum damage obsolete, which is basically every pre-SL weapon.
11. The SL mobs had way more hp+ACs than old RK mobs, which made killing even a single mob alone an absolute grind.
12. 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.
13. 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".
14. 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.
15. "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.
16. 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.
17. ... There's more.

AO has a greeter's program to welcome every new player to the game. The greeters are usually ARKs (anonymous players logged in accounts with special privileges to aide GMs in their tasks, dunno where the abbreviation comes from). During your first few levels one will usually pop up suddenly, welcome you to the game and ask if you have any questions. A nice touch imo, but no substitute for another player running around with you and showing you the ropes.

When you give AO another try, try getting into an active froob org (see aofroobs.com) as soon as possible. The low levels in AO can/will be desolate and having others around will certainly enhance your experience.

For more MA special attacks, check the 7th post in the following thread: forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php

A guide to the Temple Of the Three winds (TOTW) that is mentioned in there: www.ao-universe.com/main.php At the end there is a paragraph about the MA attacks. At level 14 you are still a bit too low for that dungeon, you can probably start exploring the first few rooms on your own at level 20 and up.

The following is a comprehensible list of all MA nanos: auno.org/ao/nanos.php. Only a few higher level nanos are missing from it.

Besides clicksaver, the only other add-on that pretty much everyone uses is the maps that grunty linked.

Originally posted by Lateris

Question: Is there a test server for AO that AO testers are playing on with  the new engine?

Back when FC was still going with Ogre as the new engine, they had shown some footage of players and groups of players on test as seen through the new engine.The players were logged in on test in a classic client, the dev taking the screenshots was logged in a client build that sported the graphical updates.

FC doesn't need a separate test server to test the purely client side aspect of the graphics.

However, I don't think FC has distributed any downloadable new-engine clients to any testplayers yet. Or maybe they have and those few testers who got it, have not broken their NDA.

Imo there's 1 good reason to give away your stuff and that is if you want to burn bridges to prevent yourself from coming back.

Sometimes we just have to quit playing mmos for a while even when we would rather keep on playing :)

The item you gave to your corp leader was probably a pioneer backpack, which is different from a veteran backpack.

The pioneer backpack is UNIQUE, but not NODROP. This means that it can be traded and sold, but not through gms (the market system). Because of it's rarity by now (8 year old item and no new ones are being created), it would probably cost you an arm and a leg to buy one.

Originally posted by misterdurp

Originally posted by Brezjnev

Originally posted by misterdurp

Originally posted by Brezjnev

Originally posted by burmese

All classes are perfectly viable.

so your just gonna ignore the fixers evade in the pve comparison? ;)

Please enlighten me, how is a fixer having good evades going to help the one who is actually tanking, to tank better?

If you mean the 80 something evades that gsf gives, then I can only shrug. There are more endgame encounters with SL rules than RK ones where that doesn't work at all and even on the RK ones that 80 evades will only make a marginal difference.

Fixer is not considered a support prof anymore (a shame though), cause the devs listen too much to those elitist assholes on the official forums

but yea.. i kinda missed the main point of the comparison, thought u were talking about the classes overall

when i came with my own 'unorthodox' fixer ideas on the official forums end ending with 'fixer is support, dont forget' i got a load of flames thrown at me for "being stupid/no idea what fixer is/claiming that i dont have a fixer (they looked my forum name up which is the same as my 220 enf)/etc, im not touching AO till they are done with the rebalancing and the graphics engine.

Personally I look different on it. In team games like these I think there are 3 major roles that players can fill: help the team kill faster (personal damage or buffs), help the team mitigate more damage (buffs, debuffs, healing) or be the attention whore (agro gobblers or meatshield) that allows others to do their roles (killing or mitigation) without interference.

AO doesn't have clear divisions like these between professions, but the different professions do have roles that they tend to fill. I'm personally not going to pass judgement on which role which profession should fill, but I'll judge by which role they usually take up in a team. In the example of doctor vs fixer support toolsets, I'm assuming that neither will tank because there are several other professions better equiped at filling that role and therefore neither of them tends to fill that role (even though both can actually tank most content in AO).

Even though fixers can get formidable defence, I expect a random fixer to splat when agro'ed by a  boss mob, random soldiers on the other hand won't splat. So when making a pug you probably have another profession already on which you can depend to fill the meatshield role. Once the meatshield is filled, fixers have to earn a spot in the team with their killing and mitigation capabilities. The meaningful support a fixer has to offer is 8000 something hpm, 8000 hpm is a joke in todays game. Fixer damage isn't anything exceptional either (there are fixers who do exceptional damage, for a fixer ... ;)). So in the end they don't get invited.

Agents are similar. They don't add too much to the killing power, they don't make good tanks and their support is pretty obsolete by now as well (in most teams they can't CH because they'd get agro and splat and the boss mobs are 100% resistance to ubt, not much is left after that - and even then the doctor fp is the best active support an agent can give in most instances).

MPs are the same again. The hpm of their pet is joke compaired to doctor's hpm (not as big as fixer's hpm, but a joke none the less). Doing decent damage requires a dedicated pve setup (when looking at that lft screen, you can't rely on that unknown MP actually having it) and their damage mitigation capabilities are subpar nowadays (even more so because half of it gets overwritten by superior debuffs from bureaucrats). As a former CC profession they also offer no CC in boss fights, unlike bureaucrats again.

When a profession makes as little impact on the performance of a team as fxers, agents and MPs: there is a reason these 3 professions see extremely little invites to raid teams for  a reason. Not because of lack of understanding on the part of the team leader of how the game works, but because that team leader most likely has seen and experienced himself what does actually work and what doesn't. For a new player starting AO, I regard these professions are not viable in the endgame because they add so little to a team, that they can be considered useless.

It is for reasons of simplicity that I chose to use fixers in the example above, because it is by far the easiest comparison to make between a lovechild and a useless profession (the fixer hpm calculation wasn't exactly hard :)). When using agents or MPs as the basis of comparison against a lovechild, I would have had to use a lot more "ifs" and "buts" + add up various kinds of little things. And even then the end result would have been less as black and white as a comparison between fixer and doctor support toolsets.

Originally posted by hobo9766
I hate fixers so much these days. The trolling and whining of your lobbyists on the forums is one of the supreme causes of the improper balance. Fixers ruined s10. you ruined having miy's cloaks in game. You got full auto which makes no sense what so ever... Fixer did not deserve full auto and the only reason you got it was whining and trolling which fc gave in too. Now fc is thinking of hard caping run speed super low over the constant fixer bullcrap. Enough is enough shut up. Fixer trolls are one reason the game is failing. The Fixer class motto should be TAKE TAKE TAKE TAKE TAKE TAKE TAKE!!!!! edit: An interesting post I found earlier its food for thought. http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=569088

It's a giant fixer conspiracy to destroy the game!

The 220 fixer trolls' had nothing to do with the changes to sector 10, logically anyhow, because they can not enter it and thus have no reason to troll to try and get changes introduced to it.

Miy's cloak and fixers, the direct relation is lost to me. Was it an OP item that didn't make it to live and you think the reason that it didn't, was because of some fixers and not because it was actually OP?

As to which profession "deserves" to be able to effectively use which skill and which not, this table shows how proficient each profession was with each skill in the initial design of anarchy online (2001). That table tells me that fixers back then intended to be using full auto, and so were adventurers and engineers. i doubt that the initial designers of AO are part of the universal fixer conspiracy of 2010. What you think professions should and shouldn't be using, has no bearing on the initial design of AO.

The lowering of the maximum possible runspeed probably has less to do with fixers, than with melees being completely unable to hit any good kiting player in pvp. And they too complained about, rightfully if you ask me. The runspeed players can achieve in AO is simply too large for the to be expected synchronization times. If FC wants to tackle this problem and give melees a fighting chance in pvp, than they would need to either lower the maximum possible runspeed or give melee weapons & perks the reach of ranged attacks. Melees still being melees in the future doesn't sound so bad to me.

Also, at the same time the low runspeeds feels to slow and it probably is a deterrent to new players. Rethinking the way runspeed works in AO isn't totally superfluous because of that. But it's easy to bork up so I hope the devs proceed with caution.

All in all: with how angry, personal and irrational your posts are, it doesn't surprise me in the least that you were mocked on the official forums.If you want to be taken seriously, take a deep breath, think and only then start typing. Also: no, not everyone is out to get you, there is no big conspiracy going on.

Originally posted by misterdurp

Originally posted by Brezjnev

Originally posted by burmese

All classes are perfectly viable.

so your just gonna ignore the fixers evade in the pve comparison? ;)

Please enlighten me, how is a fixer having good evades going to help the one who is actually tanking, to tank better?

If you mean the 80 something evades that gsf gives, then I can only shrug. There are more endgame encounters with SL rules than RK ones where that doesn't work at all and even on the RK ones that 80 evades will only make a marginal difference.

Originally posted by burmese

All classes are perfectly viable.

I ran into another person who claimed this today and it got on my nerves. To annoy those back that are still living with their head up in the clouds (or with their head in a hole in the ground, ostrich style), I decided to run some numbers to show how "viable" everyone still is for the endgame. For this purpose I will compare 2 professions that usually do not fill the tanking role, 2 professions who have to earn a spot in a team by how good their support is.

First off the doctor:

Doctors' their key support abilities are healing and initiative (attack&recharge speed) debuffs. They have some other tools, but because of how the game encounters are designed, that other stuff is almost entirely irrelevant. To establish how good a doctor's support toolset is, I'll establish roughly how much damage a single doctor can mitigate.

1. Doctor healing:
   
   1. Bodily Invigoration for 13,000 every 4s
   2. Improved Complete Healing takes the place of 1 Bodily Invigoration every 20s, how much healing potential it has depends on the player being healed by it (up to 70,000 for enforcers). I'll take a conservative 26,000 every 20 seconds (easy math).
   3. Doctors also have heal over time tools, heal perks, ... But I'm not going to dig after each and everyone of them. The above 2 heals make up most of doctor healing. 
   4. Total: ~=243,000hpm
2. Doctor initiative debuffs:
   
   1. About initiative debuffs:
      
      1. Every 150 points to Ranged, Melee or Physical Ini. will fasten your weapon Attack speed by 0.25 and Recharge speed 0.5 seconds. Every -150 will have an opposite debuff as a result.
      2. The fastest attacking speed is an attack speed of 1s and a recharge of 1s. There are mobs which have more initiatives that is needed to reach this and that thus have a certain threshold of -inits before initiative debuffing has an effect.
      3. Combine that with most endgame mobs using several different weapons and doing precise calculations would require more time than I'm willing to spend on it. So I'm going to simplify.
   2. Uncontrollable Body Tremors:
      
      1. -1452inits
         
         1. +2.375s attacktime
         2. +4.75s recharge time
      2. Many/most hard encounters since the SL expansion were made 100% immune to this.
   3. Muscular Malaise:
      
      1. -908inits
         
         1. +1.51s attack time
         2. +3.027s recharge time
      2. This is a high probability proc action: not on demand but you can rely on it triggering and sticking on the mob afterwards.
   4. Anatomic Blight:
      
      1. -2569 inits
         
         1. +4.282s attack time
         2. +8.563s recharge time
      2. The same chance to trigger, but also has an 12% chance to break on a successful attack.
   5. Totals:
      
      1. Max possible for short intervals only:
         
         1. +8s attack time
         2. +16s recharge time
      2. Against trash mobs:
         
         1. +3.8s attack time
         2. +7.75s recharge time
      3. Against any mob:
         
         1. +1.5s attack time
         2. +3s recharge time
   6. Hypothetically, if a mobs weapons were so that he was right at 1s attack speed and 1 second recharge speed (and not because of the speed cap), doctors' initiative debuffs would lower the mob's damage by following factors:
      
      1. Max possible for short intervals only: x26
      2. Against trash mobs: x11
      3. Against any mob: x4.5
3. Against a hypothetical boss mob:
   
   1. Damage lowered by a factor 4.5
   2. A hpm of over 243,000
   3. The boss mob could be doing 1,093,500 damage a minute before debuffs.

Second, the doctor's competition, a fixer:

1. Similar to doctor's fixers have a wide toolset that is for the most part entirely useless. Fixers old signature tools were:
   
   1. runspeed buffs (going from 800 to 1500 runspeed to run quests on the planet of Rubi-Ka is huge, going from 2100 to 2500 to cross a tiny room in which an endgame raid takes place isn't);
   2. ncu buffs (there's little point to being able to fit in all buffs if most of them are no longer relevant.
      
      1. As an example, I'll use some buffs of that other contender of biggest loser profession as an example: -nanocost buff => useless because all iconic casters (like doctors) never run out of nano anyhow and usually self cap their -nanocost numbers. +nanoskills buffs =>  useless since every profession equips themselves to be able to selfcast all top nanos.
      2. Another good example is a still good buff: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=231340 The soldier SL reflect aura which still works like a charm, takes up a total of 1 ncu for each team member.
   3. Evacuation nanos: simply don't work anywhere important. Good for shopping for alts.
   4. Hots still work.
2. Top long hot:
   
   1. 2,904hpm
3. Top short hot:
   
   1. 5,400hpm
4. Against a hypothetical boss mob:
   
   1. Adding the fixer to the team would mitigate an additional 8,304 damage a minute.

If you are doing an encounter and are looking for additional support classes, keep in mind that any doctor can mitigate up to 13,168% (yes, 13k%) more damage than a fixer could. I'd dare say that in pve the support given by an NR8 doctor (no nano healing, just perk healing- which alone is much more hpm than a fixer can provide- and the initiatives procs) is vastly superior to the entire support toolset of a fixer.

I could do easily do the same exercise for bureacrats (lovechild), MPs (useless) and agents (also useless in many encounters).

Only in 1 way every profession can still be considered viable:  there are no profession locks on entering the game, no locks on entering dungeons, no locks for looting items. If you happen to be useless and want to acquire loot, you will just have to make sure to piggy ride along with some lovechild professions.

Doc/crat/enf/sol is probably by far the easiest and safest way to do things. If everyone in the team is just decent players with a decent equip, all the content that AO has to offer is cakewalk for that team. But the doc/crat/enf/sol combo isn't the only way to do every farm instance with just 4 people.

To give a few examples:

An engineer played by a good player offers much more survivability to the team than a soldier. Engies may offer slightly less reflects, but when they spam their blind aura they mitigate more damage than a soldier can. Unlike a soldier an engineer doesn't make a good main tank, engineers also offer less damage than soldiers to the team now. But if you're teamed with a 70k hp enf, that is pretty irrelevant since that enf will tank everything and won't die no matter what. So doc/crat/enf/engi works well too.

There's also no content for which you absolutely need an enf. Because of their huge hp (and other tools) enfs make the easiest tanks to hold agro and are by far the easiest to keep alive for a doctor. But with good players an enf is overkill, you don't really need them. Soldiers and keepers make very good single target tanks as well (and the aeo taunting of enfs isn't an absolute requirement in the farm instances). Other professions like MAs, shades and adventurers played by very good players can tank everything in the farm instances as well when in the right team (read: teamed with pve lovechilds like docs, crats, soldiers or good engineers), but less fail safe than a mediocre enf still.

Combine a keeper (with the warding aura) with a doctor and crat and you turn all pve content in a joke as well. Docs+crats can debuff the attack speed of a mob by so much, that when combined with absorbing normal hits (+ reflects from soldier/engineer) any profession with a good equip can tank pretty much all the content. Doc/crat/sol/keeper makes the game look as easy as the doc/crat/enf/sol combo. Doc/crat/engineer/keeper can also turn the game in a joke, but they can't be complete dofuses unlike in those 2 other teams.

Now the 3 examples above aren't all combination possible in AO. The above examples make the pve content a cakewalk. If you happen to have a supply of good players with superb equip, then you don't need the above to succeed. You can tackle content without a crat and still succeed. You can tackle some of the content without a doctor (but with crat, without both crat and doctor you won't do the instances in question with just 4 players) and you can still succeed. You can exchange others of the lovechild professions by some gimpier professions (but not all) and still complete the content. A good team leader will recognize this and not wait for the ideal fantastic four setup before starting.

For the AO farm instances, I think the following is a decent order in which normal players (without personal connections or an extreme reputation) get invited to PUGs:

• Absolutely always: doctor.
• Pretty much always: bureaucrat and soldier.
• Most of the time: enf.
• Regularly: engineer, keeper, shade and adventurer.
• Rarely: MA.
• Pretty much never: NT (generally speaking), agent and trader.
• Absolutely never: fixer and MP.

So suppose that someone wants to roll a shade now and asks if he will be able to acquire an endgame setup: Then I would advice to do it. You would get far less invites than doc/crat/sol/enf, but with a good reputation and also by making teams yourselves (+making connections), you will still be able to farm the AO content in an effective manner.

If you wanted to roll a fixer or MP however, then I would advice to level up a lovechild sugardaddy first though :)

So while I do agree that there isn't anything remotely resembling balance in AO, it's not as black&white as either be a doc/crat/sol/enf or don't bother. There's a few absolutely useless professions that don't add anything to a team that a lovechild cannot already do far better, but there still exists a grey zone in between the absolute lovechild professions and the absolutely gimp professions.

And in case you're asking: Why this obsession with doing "raids" with 4-man teams (or 5 or 6, not everyone goes with just 4 all the time) instead of the possible 12 or more. It comes down to the loot: only 4 people means less people to share loot with. Considering the amount of times some instances have to be repeated to acquire loot, this can be quite significant. And to boot, the killing is not even that much slower than with just 4 people because of the mob events + looting + timed instances. Once the 4 of you have everything you need, you can still continue farming the instance to sell lootrights to people that can't get it themselves or loot the stuff with non-lovechild alts of yourself.

When a teamleader invites lovechild players to his team, he also has to respect their feelings, you just can't invite more people because you feel sorry for them. Players want to get done with the grinding and go once the team can handle the objective, without adding additional players to share the loot with. If the leader announces beforehand that it is a 12 person raid, they won't object, but if you invite a lovechild (I've never had a single complaint from fixers, MPs, ... about doing a raid with 12 people) from lft without mentioning it; there are many who would fake-ld or not accept future invites. A doctor on a friendlist is likelier to join you repeatedly if he knows your raids will be conducted in an efficient manner (and thus with as few people as possible).

Originally posted by bigdaddysfe

This gentleman reminds us how the good old days of PvP were:

 

www.youtube.com/user/MEzm3r1z3

It also reminds me of some of the worst: A bunny permadom, a tray full of breakfrees and several escape methods. A player with a build like that could come into Warburg/RV and make all pvp by players without a fotm build impossible.

CoX also had some of the worst "leet" characters (not the person in the video) in pvp that I've ever seen (but I have never played WoW or CS, so maybe I had high standards), whose only skill existed out of a fotm build and breakfrees. And then ofcourse the endless 13year old leetspeak drivel that they would pour out... In general there used to be more good than bad apples though, which made pvp a great experience most of the time, even if my build wasn't optimized for it :)

Every few months I check back the forums in the hope that the devs reverted most of the I13 changes and I always have to leave disappointed :(

It boggles me that devs often can't admit that they made a mistake and then act on it. At this point it should be crystal clear that almost noone wants to do the separate pvp game that castle designed. You'd think the devs would be able to learn from their's and other's mistakes, but it looks like admitting a mistake is still a bridge too far for them.

Originally posted by dude990

Unique Buddy Key:
CCBH9-XEXPU-8HBYL-CHEMV-7XXE7

This product key is already active, it cannot be used again.

Not by me though, whoever used it could have had the courtesy of posting imo.

The last time I used my CC for AO, it worked instantaneously.

Are you sure that you didn't make a mistake somewhere? If you made a mistake, it will be "pending payment" for forever.

If you made a mistake, you can probably try again by canceling the "pending payment", deleting your "my payment options" and redo everything from scratch.