I just want to know why yall quit the game? Its down to like 600 players 800 on a good day when before the optimisation update it was at 1.7k and 1.1k on a bad day?
What I did was I put the general complaints of players that “quit” the game and put them into a poll if you could also say what you wish to be added (may or may not make a video on it later)
theres no actual replayable content so once i finished all of the new content full release had to offer i went back into hiatus until the next AO update
ever since full release there’s been just a bunch of new features added seemingly for the sole purpose of pissing me off: professions, fleets, armor breaking, weather (hurricanes especially), giant krakens, and it worked, playing the game makes me mad now.
and this isn’t even including the already existing features that also seemingly existed to piss me off
it’s just boring. straight up boring.
tl;dr: the myriad of mild inconveniently features and small bugs compound to create an overall experience that is not worth playing for the love of the game after you’ve accomplished everything you wanted
like, when I think of playing AO, I just think of mindless PVP- which is enjoyable for a while, but PVP is just one version of sustainable endgame content that has neither been refined nor loved by its creator. We never got officialized clan wars, and while we did get ranked, I honestly feel it was implemented in the least interesting way possible (though tbh my idea for a fun ranked is way too niche and I understand why it wouldnt work). Naval Battles weren’t added either, despite being teased.
I’d love for stuff like bounty hunting and the leaderboard to also be improved, but dwelling on the improvement of PVP is a stupid choice. It’ll never be considered as a main part of the game both because of the playerbase and the developer- and also because of the opinions of those who play the game.
Then for PVE… just a more mindless version of PVP. Every single NPC feels the exact same. Run around and stay 50 km away so they can’t hurt you with their insane 800 damage AOE blast whilst spamming your long range options until they die. Every. Single. Time. They’re all the same. No special mechanics, no reason to ever get up close, just sit back and spam spam spam. Boring.
Sailing is too slow. The sea is way too realistic, why would I want to play a game where I literally can’t see ANYTHING 10 meters ahead of me whenever I’m trying to get from point A to point B without pulling up the map? And as if to add salt to that wound, the actual traversal of the map is a massive slog that makes you want to doomscroll until you reach your destination?
Dark Sea is only slightly more interesting than normal PVE, which isn’t enough to keep people engaged. Exploration is like story mode, you enjoy it once and that’s that. Dragons and Dark Sea creatures are just as mindless as any other PVE entity. Then, actually SAILING around the Dark Sea is excruciatingly boring.
As aforementioned, I almost always find myself playing another game or just watching videos while waiting for a siren rock to appear on my screen, or whatever else I happened to be looking for at the time.
tl;dr? it’s boring. so, so, so, so, boring. AO doesn’t have to be, but sometimes it feels like it CHOOSES to be.
Oh, they are? I’ve literally never seen this feature be used. Probably because the only reward for engaging with it is just ego-boosting/glory, not something actually tangible to motivate the player to continue playing the game via improving their PVP skill.
…Like many things in this wretched game.
there’s some infamy loss/gain depending on the amt of players in the war, but otherwise it’s just a really janky mechanic (and as a side effect of how it’s implemented clan higher-ups can literally draft their members into clan wars 
) i don’t think the developers even know this is a feature
I actually recall the first moment I ever fell in love with AO. I was watching one of the teasers where a tester named Kurumai was fighting the Archon (forgot his name. it’s been so long 
). He used M1s, he parried, he dashed and he constantly got up close.
I thought that was how AO was supposed to be played- you were supposed to get up in a bosses face, parry their magic blast and punish to your hearts content. That sort of PVE matches the excitement one might feel when PVPing.
Then I play the game for myself… disappointment. Well, not at first, but it never got better from there.
we tried it 10000 times and it didnt work since some people wont get teleported overall the feature is broken which is why theres no badge owners
Maybe it’s for the best? From what I can remember (and from what tbd just said), you don’t really have a say in whether or not you want to participate.
Most people who are still playing AO are usually preoccupied with their own respective tasks. Imagine being in the Dark Sea, about to find a Hecate after 12+ hours of grueling sea travel, just to be teleported into a Clan War without your consent. I’d probably quit the game sooner than I already have if that ever happened to me.
This is also the reason why some people referred to AO as a bandit beater. Every NPC is dealt with in the same way- statchecking. Even though there are other ways to progress, once quests are complete, you are left with only a few ways to continue leveling up: sinking ships and raiding towers. Both of which just feel like more tedious versions of bandit beating.
You sink a ship after maybe 5 minutes of chasing (more or less depending on your level/ship progression). You kill all the NPCs effortlessly in a fraction of the time it took you to sink the ship.
Then for towers, its the same. Fumble with the sensing mechanics for a bit, miss a couple towers because you were distracted doomscrolling or having fun in some other way, then effortlessly clear the tower in a fraction of the time it took you to find it.
Same rewards, same completion process, only thing that’s changed is how you find your bandits. All that’s changed is that the process has become more tedious, rather than more fun.
vetex happens to prioritize adding things that piss me off over keeping the game nice and sound
some bugs have existed since early access first went up, like how sometimes your character will look up and not actually take control of the ship when you press E at the wheel
others are significantly frustrating, like how brig loot tables are broken. you will get more loot from a caravel than you will a brig. also, sometimes a wave will just take you despite having already passed by your boat, and it will fuck you over despite you doing everything right
as an example, i’ll provide a rant i wrote a while back:
also, some aspects of the game feel shoddily handled, like the dark sea. it is apparently intended to be a miserable experience. that is a bad thing because this is a video game where you are a magic wizard pirate. venturing out in dangerous waters should be fucking awesome. but no, he’ll nerf the only good island for dark sealeds and add dragons that don’t actually do anything but maybe give you a weapon you already have a probably better version of. and his approach to making something difficult is usually to pump the numbers up and increase the AoE of whatever you’re fighting.
also for a ‘story game’ the writing’s really lackluster
All that Roblox once was - all its virtues and peculiarities - have been stripped away. Any and all freedoms it once afforded to the average player have since been rescinded.
I cannot hear anyone. I cannot speak to anyone. Soon, it will be literally impossible to accessorize without paying real money. There is hardly even any “roblox” left for me.
August 21, 2010. This coming month will be the 16th anniversary of my account. And the only activity that will be afforded to me during that celebration will be watching this universe slowly die.
So, this is my stop. This is where I get off.
exactly this, but also just lack of build variety
the only unique builds you can really make right now are damage, size and speed, and all of those feel overdone
even the supposed damage over time magics(cough cough poison) is just damage damage first and tack on an annoyingly long bleed but it doesn’t have synergies.
also plasma should’ve gotten flare’s DoT stack ability instead of just strong but short burn, since it’s kinda a middleground between fire and light
putting all the fun, unique stuff behind lost magics while we can’t even access them yet is just stupid
These
On top of the fact there’s barely any proper replay value and the further we get into updates the more bloat we’ll get.
there will probably never be a point where i dont check out an update when it comes out
AO would be better imo if we could have a new game + feature that allowed us to start a save file with most stuff like fleets, professions, etc being shared between files, but still let us have the option to play the game again normally without shared progression.
holy rant 
the reason why i quit ao is because of the lack of qol and ‘limitations’ that come with each feature added to the game(im not even gona get into performance)
every content update vetex adds comes with is own set of limitations, take dragons the newest one:
at first it seems fun or exciting to fight these beasts see how you fare against them but through the entire process these ‘limitations’ serve to frustrate you, first off you have to sail into the dark sea which means waiting 30+ minutes and doing nothing all the while invisible tornadoes and acid waves destroy your ship, after all that you now have to waste even more time trying to find the cliffs while dealing with horrible dark sea island generation as the game spams volcanoes, siren islands, and sunken forests instead of spawning the actual ‘useful stuff’ and then after spending maybe over and hour you get your dragon cliff, you are ready you grab your shield(like straight up impossible to kill them without a weapon build) and engage with the dragon, it starts spamming blasts and your warding armor breaks so you repair it then the same piece breaks again but guess what since this game is a horrible buggy mess you cant repair it and you die to insanity damage and eat shit. time: wasted
what about replayability?
like trying out new stat builds, spoiler it sucks
when you make a new file there are millons of factors working to keep you away
professions are a required part of buildmaking but they need you to gather thousands of items just to progress while some are a massive time sink like fishing, bounty hunting and charting they take tens of hours just to complete.
on top of those are fleets they are a must have in today’s ao without fleets you cant interact with the marketplace(the only non rng way to obtain items) because everything is just so overpriced for the non fleet haver.
now with making new files out of the way you turn to your main file
instead of starting over you will now change the build of your main file
but that also has ‘limitations’ holding you back and they are as bad as the ones you get from starting fresh lets start from the easiest option changing stat build:
in order to change your stat build you need a prometheus acrimony an item with a 1/6000 drop chance from chests or 100% drop chance from an even rarer legendary chest.
but what if you wanted to change your magic?
for that you need hecate essence and to get hecate essence you have to go through the same pain as finding dragon cliffs but 100x worse, you have to spend over 20 hours(if your lucky) just staring at a virtual ship for the chance to find one since hecate essence is luck based it has a 1/12 chance every island and while that does not sound really bad you have to realize that in order for that 1/12 chance to work you need like 3 other luck based conditions to work
you need dark sea to generate you an island(10 mins)
you need that island to be a normal island(really fucking rare)
you need that island to be easy to explore(really fucking rare)
you need your ship to stay alive to find the islands(cant because of acid waves, invisible tornadoes and atlantean ships)
you need to sail back to i3(30 mins)
you need to go through all these steps just for that 1/12 chance to work
but it gets worse if i wanted to change my build on my main file i would lose 50+ hours of work.
because of this:
as a mage if i were to reset my build i would lose 6 dragon-slaying rare spells
while weapon classes get to just unequip those moves and not lose them
this inequality makes resetting builds for magic and strength classes much more costly than weapon or spirit.
so i am just stuck here unable to do anything new
cant make new file because
profession
fleet
build
ship
deckhands
dark sea
dragonblood
and i cant change my build because of
lost knowledge
hecate essence
rare spells
lost spells
rare techniques
lost techniques
interchange
there are so many things about ao that limit my gameplay
its like every feature in this game adds a way to ruin my day or take away from my freedom
like when ao was in early access i didnt ask for:
clan building
towers
professions
fleet
difficult to obtain but required items(acrimony, hecate essence)
raidable forts
talents
dragons
dirt
tanning
armor breaking
i asked for none of those
all i ever wanted from vetex was dark sea and story content
and i honestly think that if all we got was story and dark sea ao would be more successful because
those were things that everybody looked fowards to not some gimicky shit nobody interacts with or a required aspect of the game that takes AGES to complete
in conclusion wom would be better than ao if it had dashing and re-enchanting because
unlike ao wom had true freedom not bounded by some bs feature
