When AO releases many people are gonna swarm in. It might be delayed by payers designing their characters. On day 1 finding a player above lvl 60 will be difficult. Because of this all he early game places will be swarming with players.
Getting food will be painful because of the new players taking anything they find.
Bosses will be assaulted, so finding a living one might be difficult even if the bosses are hard.
By day 2-3 higher levels will be more common. They will likely farm bosses for items because they think those items will be good for their builds. So boss populations will still be low or lower
For the first week or so everyone will be testing out new gear trying to find a meta. Because of the huge amount of customization in builds, finding the metas will be extremely difficult, everyone will be trying to get every item they can with as many different enchants as well to experiment. Items and chests will be difficult to find.
Players will be hunting any bounty or fame they can get at, money will be hard to get so players with any bounty or fame will be hunted down and will constantly have to be watching for players who might want galleons.
Competition over the leaderboard will also be heavy during the first month.
These reasons are why I’m worried and scared about the release.
I see your points but most of my outlooks on them is more of the opposite, tbh. I’m looking forward to full servers of old and new players alike and the chaos of the first few days after release
I’m kinda looking forward to that, Seems like it’ll be a surreal experience
There are tons of trees on tons of islands, you’re bound to find something easily
Just join people in ganking the bosses, I’m pretty sure they have set spawn so you can just camp there
Either more people to help you gank the boss better, or less people interrupting you while you do stuff like sail through the sea
People still have all their items and gear from WoM, plus chests will probably be in abundance
What I am afraid and excited about the post is the competition
At the beginning I’d say it’s more horrific to go through as the game hasn’t released it’s leaderboard badges and that’s only the beginning. You only have 2 weeks to farm for reputation and you don’t know if you’ll reach it by that time and the bosses, islands, and other things will possibly immediately be raided by players looking to get clan leaderboard easily.
When the first 2 weeks end It’ll be more calming as you are more organized of what you’re doing as the competition for the badges have died down due to the reputation wipe
The Bronze Sea is gonna be pretty big. There’s plenty of stuff to do that isn’t bosses; quests, doing chest rounds for people with zero lives, sea combat for sealed chests (ship customization), fishing to make use of the pity system, and like you said bounty hunting.
I get why you may be a bit turned away by servers being full but you can always grind out your second file when servers are more open.
