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Anarchy Online Journal One
Tub Thumping
I'm fairly stubborn, so I did not immediantly uninstall AO and piss on the box. I started a new character, this time a nanomage doctor named Rottingham. I went with Omni faction again. This time when I went into Omni Trade I stayed along the outer tiers, where crowds were at a minimum. That isn't to say there wasn't obscene hard drive accessing at the time. I was though able to get some missions. However, this was a bit of Russian Roulette. During this phase of AO's development, you could not delete missions, so it was entirely possible I got a mission to a location too close to the Bermuda Lagangle. Which meant if I got 3 like those in a row, I was just screwed for the next 3 hours. AO should have been named CornHole because thats what it felt like playing.
It sounds like maybe my AO experience is at least starting to be playable. Far from it though, because AO had the worst memory leak...ever. Imagine a game called Memory Leak online where the whole point of the game was to use up available RAM. Now imagine AO being worse than that! Basically every 30 minutes to an hour depending upon how many players or other textures I encounter, AO would slowly begin to start thrashing my harddrive until it reached a point were I was stuck in a never ending hard drive access mode. If I was lucky I'd actually crash before then. You see AO had a habit of crashing, zones would crash, game would cause illegal operations, random booting out of the game for no reason, lag out of the game, one time AO just decided to load itself again for me, no explanation as to why, the game just shut itself off then reloaded. These abysmal performance problems are not just happening to me. Inbetween server crashes or computer crashes, my friends that are playing are complaining of the same technical difficulties and the message boards are lit up like a Colorado Wildfire. This game is so bad, its really a legitimate miracle that Funcom survived and AO is still in operation. I say this without hyperbole.
My new doctor had actually managed to dupe a few items by sheer accident between the crashes, not that any of the equipment was worth more than a handful of credits, but it did mean that even when they managed to fix the client chaos, there were still plenty of problems left to tackle. At this point, I couldn't have cared less about how unbalanced the actual game was. As I alluded to earlier there were plenty of classes that had abilities that easily exploited the system. Like soldiers reflect shield that let them solo targets many levels above them. Before I quit the game in August, there was actually a guy who had already made level 200. Amazingly enough all these problems were on the backburner because performance issues and memory leak were the only concern of the majority of players.
Despite all these back-breaking issues, I still plowed through it, managing to level my doctor. My next AO installment will consist more on the actual gameplay and some of the more memorable moments of early release. I did not play AO for long only about a month and a half, but in that time there was enough weirdness and intresting events to make note.
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