Jalia's AO Beta Journal page 6
Jalia in Anarchy Online! 6-24-01
Well I wasn't planning much for Sunday, since it was probably going to be my last day as a Beta tester (game was due out the following Wednesday 6-27-01). For the most part I just wanted to try a few more of their social armor costumes out, since I had a little money left. There was no point in trying to level up anymore and I'd figured missions out, the ones that worked anyway. It would have been nice to do more exploring but my two highest characters were level 7 each, and during my one attempt to head out away from West Athen I quickly realized that there were deep red mobs out there who would aggro on me and kill me fast.
Which wasn't really an excuse since I couldn't lose my corpse and stuff anywhere, and if I did, so what? But I'm cautious by nature so I did limited exploring in the areas I already knew a little bit about. Pretty boring stuff really, there were massive PvP fights going on elsewhere with the higher levels, trying to go out with a big bang. I was just goofing off doing nothing.
One thing that was cool were these massive storms going on, with thunder and lightning crashing down, bright flashes in the sky, and where the lightning hit the ground, rocks and dirt would fly up and scatter about. That was pretty cool to see. ^_^
I bougt a red dress (don't have a picture here) and then found some more shops, but still couldn't find a good low-level Adventurer nano program that sounded fun or useful. I saw several morp programs, including wolf, bird, sabretooth cat, and some variations that were for an entire group or ones where you could target others and morph them. These programs add to your attack and add some other bonuses so they're not just fun, but could be useful too.
I decided after that to solve my last two curiosities with the social clothing, ie how is the "female" Oriental suit different, and does it look like a dress on a guy too? In order to do this I needed more cash, so I went on another mission to help complete my outfit.
As you can see here, I was able to get my chilled plasteel boots to go with the legs, arms, and gloves that I already had. I never saw a mission for the chest or head piece, nor did I see any missions to get armor to match the chest piece I had. That goes ditto for Jaqui my monk. The chilled plasteel armor came up often in missions, so it was much easier to find and while it looked cool, lots of other people were wearing it too.
My mission didn't yield a ton of loot but I had enough to buy the "female" oriental suit. The first one I came across was red, so red it was. And I was happy to see that it had a different graphic from the regular suit, more of a full dress than a top and skirt, as you can see:
I also found that when I zoned, I got some odd graphic bug:
I spent the last half hour or so talking to a guy in the newbie area. His main character was in a zone that had crashed, and he was trying out a doctor. He was an EQ refugee too, had just cancelled his account the day before. Anyway, I got him to model my "female" oriental outfit, and sure enough it displays as a dress on guys as well:
Only a few minutes later the server came down, for what turned out to be essentially the last time. They actually came back up an hour later, and patched to not only 11.3 but then immediately patched to 11.4 which was a 10 meg patch! I sat down to watch "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" while the patch went through, and as it turns out they brought the server back down before my movie was through. Turns out that there were some major bugs in the patch (surprise!) that affected the character database, and they just decided then and there to wipe the characters clean.
They're planning a final beta event, and in order to have it they will buff every character that has been created between Monday and Tuesday at noon to 75th level and give them millions of credits to outfit themselves. Since I work in the evenings, I'm sure I'll miss the whole thing -- should finish by Midnight which is when I usually get off work. Oh well. ^_^ I'll be buying the game later this week, and probably recreating Keeka (or a Jalia) to play in the live version. If you're playing look me up.
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