AO - hunting

What will surely make a lot of ppl stop is that basically you can play a lot of different playstyles without really seeing the other styles.
You can spend your whole time at start in Newbiegarden and ask yourself if thats all or if you began start playing EQ. If you used the Mission generator and like it, and after once coming out of newbiearea you dont stop using it you will also wonder if thats all.
While you surely can spend your whole time with it, its as far as i see yet only a little fragment, that helps you getting some equip at start (the missions)

dont forget we are tiny atm, and i guess at uo start you also didnt asked much why you fight the puma when your swords was 50. (at least in older times when you didnt finished a char after 3 days).
One of the ways i use atm and its also only to get to a level where you can pvp is

using missions only for cr and equip. (missions to newland usually give good armor)
using towns only if really important. theres nothing important anyway in town besides shopping and using the whompa if you have to. for saving, banking use outposts.
group with others for experience. you will see that even pvm`ing is at least now at start really making a lot of fun and when fighting with a good group together dangerous things you will see how concentrated you will be even in pvm.

at end (for us) all leads to pvp. i had yesterday with a very cool group my first impression of pvp when we crossed zone in a pvp area. the pvp area is the war zone, the hot spots where OT and the clans are fighting. if i understood right a neutral cant attack, but only can defend if attacked, while you can freely attack OT as clan, and vice versa. Although we were around lv20 we won which was very cool. And there you will see how much fun the different classes and the big possibilities are. Of course with the time there will be some standard tactics but atm all try to find out so all gets used. If you are a martial artist or other close combat class try to get also some ranged weapon skill, or they will just para you and kill slowly.

Here an impression of a group

A BuZZsaw robot. This robot city how i call it;) (forgot its real name) is south of Athen Shire. Close is also a human outpost (over the street, where you can use the insurrance terminal. Not to mention that we died at this point x times to the Junkbots.

While if you know only main-towns and missions you know basically how to spell systemlag, serverlag or lag in general, in 8 hours hunt outside we had no lag at all. It played like uo 2d from speed.

While we started the group as 2 that searched a group, soon we got a doctor, and later more and more joined in. To my luck we got a very ao experienced (compared to me) leader that had had cool tactics. You will soon notice that attacking one monsterrace will provoke all monsters of the same race aiding in (something that was in uo too at start but made them too much serverlag). So you have to lure some of them out or you will get banged by monsters. ;)

good morning vietnam

The whole hunt i played in 3d person view. When you have Numlock on you can navigate around your viewbob with the numlock pad. +/- let you zoom. for additional reference press opt -> keyboard. Grouped you can use F1 to F6 to highlight different members, which is handy following the leader. you can also use a /follow (name) command, but that one could have been taken from uo from efficiency;)

The Minibull died.

Although i got only at end a slight clue where we were heading always our leader didnt hesitated a sec. ;) You can buy at map shops upgrades for your map-tool. These upgrades range from a simple replace of your position sign to an arrow so you see where you head, to an allname function and faction fuction on map, as well as shopnames etc.

2 egg drakes helping each other

Heading north. Did you ever got the feeling beeing back in the army? i got it when we walked as group through the woods *g. Athen Shire Exp area.

restuffing at Athen Academy in Athen Shire. Here we used insurrance to save, go west athen to shop and /terminate us there to get teleported back here. When someone had to leave we found new group members here too.

shopping in west athen

Taking about the current pvp situation

some hours later. we run back like crazy, every of us would have like 10k xp to lose

very nice landscape. sadly the rollerrats love it too. (btw dont mess with Queen Rollerrats ;)

and after 9 hours hunting saying farewell to some great ppl.