Jalia's AO Journal


Jalia in Anarchy Online! 8-24-01


A lot has happened since my last entry. Jalia is now 40th level, and I've started playing Keeka again. I dumped a lot of pistols onto Keeka plus some armor to help twink her -- without good pistols she was barely able to kill greens, but after twinking her she could kill yellows without a great deal of trouble. Good weapons make a huge difference. ^_^

This week was the huge 12.5 patch, that added all kinds of fixes and new content. Among other things, dual wielding became more difficult. Jalia had to raise her multi melee skill more than 30 points to keep wielding the ql 74 batons that she currently has. With Keeka I had a ql 4 freedom arms 3927 in my off-hand, but this weapon in particular was targeted for HUGE dual wield upgrades, so now the weapon requires a 71 in multi ranged to wield. I had to place it in my main hand and put a ql 15 minielectronium in my off-hand. It is, however, a testament to why the FA's are so popular that I can't find a better weapon for my main hand still. I'm level 14, the FA is only quality level 4, but other weapons that I can wield of up to 10 quality levels higher just don't do the same damage as quickly.

Anyway the point of this particular page is to show you a very odd mission I took last night. I was in the city of Tir, and the mission directed me to one of the buildings in the city. When I zoned in, this is what I saw:



I was surprised and taken aback... I'd never seen anything like this before. Maybe it's one of the new content things they added in patch 12.5. Either way, walking into the mouth of some snake-like creature was very weird and creepy. I liked it. ^_^



Each room was a long hallway, like a segment of the snake. The doors were fleshy and irised open, and the sound effects were squishy and added to the whole overall feel of creepiness. Don't ask me why there were humans inside this snake shooting at me though.



I fought my way down the snake's gullet, guns blazing. I had no idea what to expect with an unusual dungeon like this, but it was all one-way... each room led directly to the next room. There were no decisions to be made except go further in or turn back.

It's a credit to the designers that the dungeon design itself made me this nervous... the guys I was killing were all green or yellow-green, and very easy to kill, so the mission wasn't hard at all (I left the setting at medium).



Here's the end room. There were only about 5 or 6 rooms total, with a guy to kill in each one and the mission objective here at the end.

It doesn't look exactly like a snake's stoumach or the end of his tail, but it's still pretty creepy.



From the inside looking out. ^_^ Kudos to whoever designed this mission dungeon. I love running into new things!

Here's a couple of odd shots:

They call me legion, for I am many!
A common sight around Rubi-Ka.
Don't ask me what the testicles comment is about...
just some moron spouting off in the buy/sell channel.




They call me bug-face!
My low tech helmet fused with my head
in a very odd way... luckily the operation to
seperate it from me was successful, and
the doctors say I'll lead a mostly normal life. ^_^
Final comments: I loved the setup for Anarchy Online, the characters, classes, clothing and equipment, world, etc. It could have been a great game. Unfortunately, the people running it are morons and have continued to make *major*, *fundamental* changes to classes, items, skills and gameplay, so that what works one week doesn't work the next. The game is filled with bugs and new ones are introduced every time they try to fix something. I've kept up with the Punching Bag AO Martial Artist's forum and nothing has changed in the months since I quit. But for me, the ultimate reason I quit was their utter lack of respect for players, demonstrated by them introducing major patches on a Friday afternoon (after they'd said they would never again do such a thing) and then not understanding what all the fuss was about. The patch I had in mind also introduced many bugs that had been pointed out by players on Test who were completely ignored. They had to shut down the servers for an emergency patch, spent the weekend explaining that it wasn't a problem because they were working on the weekend... basically they didn't have a clue. I could see that this sort of thing would only repeat itself, and the game was becoming more problematic instead of better, so I bid them adieu and sayanora.






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