Jalia's AO Beta Journal page 5
Jalia in Anarchy Online! 6-23-01
Here's how it all began. I'd been looking at all of the things you could buy, especially fancy clothing styles that allow for a lot of different looks. The game has a lot of "fashion" clothing which has all the gaming benefits of cloth armor but has a variety of cool looks and graphics. My first introduction to this was the newbie shop in each newbie area, which always offers one unique piece of clothing for sale. This changes on a regualar basis (whenever the server resets, at the very least). However, out in the city are shops full of fancy clothes, where you can buy a full leopard or zebra cat suit, Chinese and kung fu outfits, wedding dresses, hot pants in pink or bright yellow, miniskirts of various types, etc. etc. Some clothing is designed for women and some for men, but it seems anyone can wear anything if you really want to.
Assuming you can afford it, of course. The prices aren't really that much to a seasoned player, but to a newbie like me, several thousand credits was a fortune. But I really wanted to try several of these items on, to see how they looked.
So to begin with, when I finally had enough cash I bought a simple, white bikini bottom. As you can see, there's a display bug currently where skin turns neon lime green rather than displaying correctly, but you get the general idea. It's a thong in back too. Ick, butt floss.
Well I wasn't satisfied at that. I wanted to try on a miniskirt and especially I wanted to buy one of the various Chinese outfits, which I thought would look great on Keeka. But it was a lot of money, so I set about doing missions to raise money and to flesh out my actual battle outfit with good equipment.
Now, the problem with missions is I always lose connection before I finish one (on a dialup, but often it's the server crashing). When I log back in, the dungeon is generated again for me. People that I've killed don't re-spawn, thankfully, but currently treasure DOES respawn. Also, the mission objective (object that I'm trying to find and click on in the type of missions I'm doing) seem to disappear some of the time or maybe don't get moved when the dungeon is re-drawn, so that several times I've run into missions where I simply can't find the object anywhere in the dungeon to finish the mission. Which really sucked because not only did I not get the item reward, but I wasn't getting the cash reward either and the loot from some of the missions was otherwise next to non-existant.
This was frustrating enough, but I ran into another bug, where every time I crashed on a mission, the dungeon that was recreated for me was the same one from an earlier mission. I ran through this one dungeon OVER and OVER and OVER, and even the loot duplicated itself. It was kind of annoying at first because it was a dungeon that really didn't have great loot anyway, but when it happened again later I got a few variations on the loot, and that's when things got interesting.
There was this ring I got, which was a ring of luck. It added plus 1 to just about everything I did or attempted. It said it was very rare. I put it on, along with another ring I'd picked up, and didn't think about it again.
Then I got a second one, because of a crash and a duplication of loot from my previous mission. So I took it to the store and sold it, along with everything else. However, where the most cash I'd ever recieved from selling an item fell short of 100 credits, this ring sold for 2,000 credits!
Right then I was able to buy the oriental outfit I wanted for Keeka. ^_^ I was very happy!
One thing that surprised me was that it displayed as a top and skirt, like a dress really. They sell both standard oriental outfits and "female" oriental outfits, and the icons for them show with/without a skirt depending on the type, but apparently women always get the skirt when they put one on. So now I'm wondering what happens when a guy puts on one of the female outfits... not to mention the unisexual big guys.
But this was only just the begining. The next time I crashed, it occured to me that I could run back to my mission dungeon and get another ring. This had turned out to be one of the missions dungeons where I simply couldn't find the objective and complete the mission, so that meant it kept running until the time for the mission was up (most missions give you several hours up to half a day of real time to complete them).
So anyway I zoned back in to my mission dungeon, long since swept clean of enemies, and there were the treasure chests as promised. Only a couple of them had had loot to begin with, but the 2,000 credit ring was all that really mattered. I looted it again, and went and sold it.
The best thing about my new-found exploit was that there was a shop right next to the mission entrance, and I was almost guaranteed to get disconnected at least once between entering/leaving t he shop and entering/leaving the dungeon. If not, I could do other things and would disconnect soon enough. AO's beta has not proved very stable so far.
It was frustrating crashing so much -- often it took several tries to reconnect, AO even likes to make my line disconnect about half the time when it's trying to load, something I've never seen any other program do -- but it also became kind of fun, because every time I crashed, I thought "Hey, there's another 2,000 credits if I hurry!"
In the end I exploited my way to about 13,000 credits, even after a few small purchases. What to do with all this money? After all, with Beta almost over I only had one day to enjoy my ill-gotten goods! Most of the really good weapons and armor and upgrades were still way too expensive... but maybe I had enough to buy a complete catsuit with an unusual look?
As you can see, I settled on the blue zebra pattern. There are lots of other patterns I'd like to see, including a rainbow leopard pattern and a waterlily pattern. Of course, with all of these special textures, you're going to get some display bugs now and again:
I did purchase and try in a miniskirt at one point, but a crash erased the purchase and I decided not to make it again... I was disappointed that a miniskirt looks remarkably like a pair of shorts. Oh well. So ends my life as a L33T exploiter. ^_^
The Last Day
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