I played AoC got bored and left. I started Eve about 64 days ago when I bought the retail box with a 60 day timecode inside. The boxes have now dropped in price and can be found for 14.99 UK Pounds. I am enjoying Eve , just joined a guild and had war declared on us. PvP can be solo but is more often groups of ships. If you get shot down you lose the ship and all fittings. You can buy insurance but its best to not fly anything you cannot afford to lose. The skill training can get a bit annoying after the newbie 100% skill boost and my last skill took 8 days to level. The skill timer also works while offline so Eve is a game you do not have to play 24/7. The learning curve for all new games is hard but the one for Eve is vey steep and complex.

I would suggest getting the boxed game for the new cheap price and play for the 60 days. You should know by then if its the game for you. One word of advice pick your character race according to your play style ie Drones, lasers, missiles, turrets as different race ships have different bonus.

I bought the special edition box and the manual is very poor its about 20 pages in English ,and a few basic pages in Swedish , Finnish Portuguse. There is a downloadable PDF on Careers about 50 Meg in size.

The days of the large manual/Maps went out with the small DVD boxes. The game has a good starting tutorial but the learning curve is very steep.

One word of warning you can only get the special edition ship and instant war access if you use the time card to make a new account. If you use the card to update a trial account then you do not get the items.

Thier is also a 1300 meg update to download before you can play.  It took me about 2 hours to install the game, download the updates and get to character creation. I think finding a name that had not been used was the hardest part :)

The Trader seems to be working again and have used the Bank and Post to send a item to my Alt.

Pack storage space seems very limited, even with the 8 slot preorder bag. I am still in starting town so no idea if there is enough crafting resource space.

Agree that the broken quests should be given priority, I crashed during a Destiny quest and raised a petition which was not answered after several hours waiting.

The re-spawn of quest mobs seems very slow. The Underhalls quests are a pain to do with 20 other players running around killing everything.

I have killed several Bosses ( pre level 20 ) and have yet to get a decent item drop. The only blue item I got from a quest. Think there needs to be more armour or dye as all the players look very similar . I refuse to wear the Pict feathered hat on my PoM as everyone else is wearing it.

The Alt +F10 logout seems broke atm, to change characters I have to log all the way out then back in again.

Not too worried about pre level 40 mounts, but only being able to use the portal spell once every 30 min is a pain. I have had to waste it twice on getting unstuck, the /stuck command doing nothing.

I have a E4500 dual core processor, 4 Gb of ram and a 8600 256 Mb. I run vista service pack 1. My monitor is a 19inch LCD at 1280 x 1024.

I run AoC on low with shadows disabled and get between 47 and 11 FPS, most of the time between 20-30FPS . I find the game smooth and playable. I think Funcom need to sort out the low, medium and high settings some of the sliders are still set on max for low setting. I am running DX9 as the DX10 is not in the game atm. I tried switching between shader 3 and 2 but it made little difference. Even on low the graphics are very good.

If you have Vista then I would reccomend getting another stick of ram and going up to 3 or 4 GB, other then that I think you are ready to go. Check how much free space you have on your hard disk as its about a 35GB install.

My machine falls between the specs, E4500, 4Gb DDR2, 8600 256Mb graphics, Vista service pack 1. On the low setting it varies between 20-30 FPS. I tried medium but the FPS varied between 9-18. The game is very smooth and I have not had any video pausing or stuttering. I think the extra ram helps and thats very cheap atm. I plan to upgrade my video card ( maybe a GT9600 512 MB ) in the near future just waiting for the prices to drop a bit.

I think its very playable on a mid range machine as long as you are happy with the low setting and 25ish FPS. I have not tried disabling shadows or tweaking the setting yet. The only setting i changed was sound as I play with headphones and only needed stereo :)

I am playing with DX9, I tried DX10 but it did not seem to make any difference and I read its not in early release?

yes know how you feel :)

I used to like the big computer game boxes with manuals, guides and maps. I have just been looking at my Ultima Online map  and can see where I wrote, many years ago " here be dragons " ...lol

I have been able to help out many begineers over the years by using the notes that i made on my game maps. There is nothing i hate more in a game then being told to kill 20 XXX and having no idea where they are :)

Are there any printed maps with AoC?. I am not sure what comes in the box. I have got my early access and the game is DL and patched waiting for 5pm on the 17th.

I have done a quick search but can only find the map which is printed in the Conan books. The regions and therefore Maps may still be coverered by the NDA but does anyone know of any printable maps?

I am interested to hear about Earth and Beyond, do you have a URL?... i did a quick search but only found out of date info. Not even sure if I have my old CD's any more may have used them as beer mats after the last battle.

I know Anarchy Online was not mentioned but the classic game is now free to play, I often drop back when I am waiting for the next  big MMORPG.

1) Ultima Online.... played it on and off since beta

2) Anarchy Online .... poor start but classic is now free to play

3) DAoC.... enjoyed it for 2 years till the expansions

4) Guild Wars.... a very good "drop back game " when you get burned out on your main MMORPG

5)EQ2... played for about a year till Guild died

6) WoW..... got tired of end game and waiting for groups

7) City of Heros.... fun at begining but lost interest half way

8)Earth and Beyond... now dead, played till the last great battle

9)Ryzom..... good game but poor support... now dead I think

10)RF Online or Archlord both free to play, both with problems but fun.

11) just seen my old box of SWG.... great fun at launch,

Ok I know its 11 but could not leave off SWG :)

The first game I played was a MUD text only using a teletype about 1970, I built my first computer in 1979 The Acorn Atom, it was sold as a kit :) . In about 1983 I bought the BBC computer and the first Adventure game which hooked me was Twin Kingdom valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Kingdom_Valley. The game I played most was Elite. I must have spent months getting to Elite status, I was competing with a mate across the street till his cat attacked his 5.25 inch floppy on which he saved his games.

I am new to this game only level 14 but wondered how you get started crafting, any guides or URL?

I think the geforce 6100 is a intregrated graphics chipset on the motherboard. It came out about 2005 so its getting on a bit compared to newer graphics cards. I would check your motherboard manual and see if you can add a dedicated card. You may also need to check the computer power supply, It needs to be around 450 Watts to supply power to the newer cards.

Not sure what model HP you have just purchased and what CPU is fitted but it sounds like it may be a office model. OK for 2D work but poor for 3D and games. If you have Vista as your OS you may want to try running Windows Experience Index which will rate your cpu, memory, graphics and harddisk, giving it a score out of 5.9

There are 3 servers, I played on lumen. The Accretia are most popular and tend to win most of the chip wars. The Bellato are next and win about 1 in 15 wars. The Cora seem least played and I THINK the last win at Chip War was a joint effort with the Bells against the Accretia. The Accretians also seem better organised and more players turn up for the wars.

It is a very hardcore PvP game so expect to get killed several times a day. The grind from level 30 to 45 sems very bad. There are enemy hunting the areas where you are trying to do quests and level. They are often 10 to 20 levels higher then you and if they attack it is a 1 hit kill. The only thing you lose if pked is some CP, which determines your rank.

I have nearly stopped playing atm waiting for the next patch. There are several exploits / hacks in the game which need to be fixed urgently, but these should not effect you too much until you hit 30. Which should take about 1 week for your first character. There is no in game support and you have to submit a ticket if you hit any problems. We are several patches behind the Korean servers and it seems to take forever to Translate the patches and test them.

There is a online shop and if you can afford it the begineers rings and amulets are useful. You may have to spend some money at 45ish if you want to be competative in PvP.

You could try RF Online its free to play and download, there is a cash shop but you do not have to buy anything . There are some beginneers rings that help boost your HP and some items that make you more competative at 45ish.

The game is PVE for about the first 25 levels then you have to go to a PvP area to level. You end up running away or being pked by players that are 10 to 20 levels higher then you and the grind from about 25 to 40 can be painful. At 40 you get your second class skill and then can start fighting back :)

There are a a few BOTs and gold sellers and we have been waiing for a patch to fix some exploits. The graphics are good  and the servers have not crashed since the last exploit fix. They go down on a Wednesday morning for maintence.

I have played RF Online for 3 months now, first on Novus and then Lumen. I am disappointed with the game, the problem with gold spammers, bots and hackers takes weeks to get fixed. A recent hacker who was videoed breaking every rule took over 3 weeks to be removed. I doubt all the high level armour and weapons he created have been removed. There are many bugs and exploits, we had several server crashes daily till Code masters discovered it was being done by players to recover items lost during crafting ( there is normally a 5 minute roll back after a crash ). There is a potion bug/exploit that makes it nearly impossible to kill a player in PvP. There are exploits that enable a player to skip the equiping a weapon animation.

The Bots use a map exploit to jump to a new location, sometimes under or several metres over the terrain. The HQ area is full of gold farming Bots making it difficult to finish quests in the area

The Map chat in HQ can not be used unless you block several gold spammers who change the names often, my block list became full after a week.

The game is free and can be fun to play if you enjoy PvP. You will need to spend some money in the cash shop at 40+ if you want to remain competitive in PvP.

Codemasters needs to employ a few more GM's and get the new code from Korea to fix the bugs/exploits to make the game fair and enjoyable.

Hi, I play a Bell on Lumen server and its a fun game if you like hardcore PvP. The Accretia (robots) seem to be the most popular race but alot of them have rerolled Bells for more of a challenge. I have not played a Cora so cannot comment on them.

Solus is the newest server. I would pick Lumen or Solus think there was only a couple of weeks between them when they started ( about October 07 )

Do all your quests you can only hold 5 at a time. The early quests give 2 free bags. There is a bug in that if your bag is full then the quest reward falls to the ground at your feet

The Y key drops down the macro menu and you can put your potions in the auto macro slots. So you heal etc automatically.

If you play a spiritualist DO NOT buff high levels unless asked. You can only hold 6 buffs and if you get any more then the last buff knocks out an earlier one. So you could lose someone there high level speed buff... not nice

So DL and log in, the game is free. Have fun

First the good news its free to download and play, there is a online cash shop. The first 30 levels go fast and you get one quest per level, with armour and weapon rewards.

The bad news, its very hardcore PvP and with chaos potions you can be killed by your own race. When you reach 30 you are forced to level in a PvP area and often get killed by players 10-15 levels above you. There are a lot of  afk leveling and farming BOTs and its nearly impossible to avoid kill stealers. There is plenty of boring grinding to raise experience and points in melee/shield/ranged/force/ defense etc.

My advice is give it a try, you might like it and it does not cost you anything other then your time.

I have been playing for about 3 weeks and have three characters in the mid 30's, the game is free to download and play. There is a shop which you can buy items using your credit card but I have only spent 10 Uk pounds buying some Beginers rings and amulets ( Still have credits left ).

You are short of storage at the begining having only 1 bag but you get 2 in the early quests, so by level 5 ( about 1 hour of play ) you can have 3 bags and be able to buy a 4th from the NPC. Having your quest rewards fall to ground if your bag is full is a serious fault but after it happens once you make sure you have the room before finishing the quest.

When you target a mob you get a display above its head showing its details, Ace or Normal and 1 to 7 pips or lights to show its strength compared to yours. If the mob is way above or below you its shown as a grey name, if the mob is in your range its shown as red. It also shows if the mob is aggressive or not.

It takes about 3 or 4 days to get to level 30 but the game has a unique system of XP and PT points. The XP gives you your level and the PT gives you your skill with a weapon. Thats why you see players being hit by several mobs and not fighting back, they are trying to get the shield and defense skill up. 

The game is hardcore PvP so if thats not your scene then give it a miss, but it is fun to play and being free you can keep it on your computer for when you want something different or if your main game is having server maintence.

I play under XP but I think I read that you need to be logged into Vista as an administrator. I got the game on DVD from local shop, it was in the really cheap bin and installed from that but had about an hour of patches. If you see the game cheap do not use the key, get a free key and use the box key to get you 3000 credits in online shop.

Make sure that your inventory bags have room for the reward, if your bags are full then it drops to the ground :(  If you have lost your reward, depending on the level of your character, it might be worth rerolling as the bags cost about 20,000 each

Not played a Annacade but 2 of the early quests should give you a bag so you only need to buy 2.  I think its quests at level 4 and 5.  The www.mmosite.com has some quest info in its guide section.

Good luck.