Some thoughts about new or returning player experience

Anarchy Online General Discussion
1

A returning player here. Used to play back maybe 5 - 10 years ago more actively. Now with Windows 11 and Steam edition I stumbled upon two issues that might block new or returning players from joining this gem of a MMORPG:

  • For some reason my froob account gave me the “Not paid or blocked message”. I send a support ticket but after reading the forum posts about the amount of time it takes to possibly get a reply I did some googling. Apparently all I needed to do is access “account.anarchy-online.com/uncancel_sub” and my account got unblocked :crazy_face: This sounds like an issue that might possibly be easy for the customer support to fix. Potentially infuriates/confuses many returning players.

  • With my fancy 4k monitor, I of course set the resolution of the game up high and got the mysterious game just not starting after hitting play bug. Turns out the non-beta version just doesn’t support these resolutions at least on my machine. This ought to be a quick fix by just omitting those or putting a disclaimer somewhere? Potentially has made a lot of new players just quit thinking their machine doesn’t support AO (it being fairy old game). Or maybe make the beta version the official version if it works better on modern machines? Call old one the legacy version.

Great that this gem is still up and running. Hopefully it would get some more love that it deserves and these issues fixed that prevent some potential players from even getting into the game.

2

Glad you found the fix for the froob account, as f or resolution fixes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv1W7WiHCVk Thanks to Dream. https://forums.funcom.com/u/dream/summary
And alternately Dgvoodoo2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP-o7DD0J2s

3

That freezing bug seems to affect old accounts and not those made more recently, as someone who hosts bots I would say losing them once a month could be considered infuriating, yes. Only reliable solution you could expect at this point is make a new account, although I don’t have enough datapoints to firmly say it is completely fixed for all new accounts I would imagine it is.

Old games generally have problems with big resolutions and require some fix, Caloss2 linked both common ones we use :grinning:

4

Yeah luckily all these have solutions although that account fix was just out right bizarre. I just fear AO is loosing a lot of potential new and old players due to these and I wish there would be some money to at least get things fixed to the state that interested players get inside the game. Community can take care of things from there :smile:

For a returning player the account issue feels pretty rude combined with the customer service response time. The issue with the graphics is a pain because there is no error message. It feels like something is just broken and people with modern computer assume that AO is not meant to be run on their machine.