This was sent in by RNN: Are you ready to go toe to toe against the finest gladiators on Rubi-Ka? Are you the type to brag about your combat skills but never had a forum to truly test them? Are you ready to fight for fame glory and a cash award? Then you're ready for the Arena Combat League. The Rubi-Ka News Network will be covering the bouts and televising the highlights, giving the best of the personal bio sheets and best of all making sure that all of Rubi-Ka knows who's got the toughest warriors...Omni Tek....or....The Clans. Go to http://www.rubikanews.net/entertainment.htm to find out more about the ACL.

I figured I would put this up and let you debate on it. Funcom announced that the free month that comes with the purchase of the game has officially started as of yesterday because they now consider the game to be playable. Do you feel that the game is playable? Should they have started the free period or waited longer? Is the game now a final product and not just a beta? Feel free to add your opinions.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the whoompa map at AO Atlas. Very useful.

Lead programmer Martin Amor put up a new status update on the bugs they are trying to fix. Among the important things he announced is that they are aware of the memory leak and are working on it, and that they will be adding a second dimension. You can read the whole article at this link.

This was just posted on the AO Site: Our Lead programmer, Martin Amor, again comes out of the dark to enlighten our community with an update on what's going on, and what the programmers are currently working on. Dear AO-players, Things are getting better. I didn't want to write an update yesterday because I didn't feel we had the actions to back up my words - and I would hate to keep promising lots of stuff without being able to "show you the money" Last night was a big improvement for us - we managed to reduce number of ‘server losts’ to around 15% of what it was the night before. It's still not good enough (since you guys are still getting them) - but it's an improvement that you should be able to feel. At the same time we had almost 50% more people online than the night before. This caused a few of our servers to run a bit slow until we rebalanced the load (~700 players alone in Athens city :-) Our network department found, and fixed, a problem with our switches – the problem (as I have been writing about before) caused packets to be lost when a lot of players were online at the same time. A big hurray for the guys! We are adding more login-handlers to make it easier for you to get into the game. I have seen some wrong numbers referred on some community sites - the current login-handler we have is capable of processing a LOT more than 700 logins per hour. I think there must have been a misunderstanding somewhere. At the moment we are logging in over 700 players a minute. It's still not good enough, so we are adding more power. I expect this to be ready during the weekend. Now that the ‘server lost’ problems are getting smaller we are going to put a little more focus on the lag issues. Making the game 100% stable is still our biggest priority – but you can expect to see improvements with lag quite soon. I'll keep you informed on the progress. Last, but not least - the client patch. We'll have a very small client patch very soon - this will not contain any new features but will only fix some version ID issues we have (more information later.) The real client patch (with e.g. gfx-card fixes) will be out as soon as we are ready, hopefully not too long from now. I know this is a bit vague, but experience shows that I better not mention any dates as we'll probably break them and get a lot of angry people on our backs :-) Remember to have faith in that we will continue to work hard and dedicated until all of AO's launch problems are fixed and you have a good gaming experience with Anarchy Online. Martin Amor AO Lead Programmer

Funcom posted up a report on the issues they are trying to fix. They also stated that 35,000 people have registered for AO since launch. The entire post is inside. Anarchy Online is now launched, and it is time for a little update on the status of the game. The launch on June 27th has not gone as smoothly as we had expected. On the positive side, the game is up and running and all the features we have promised are implemented. The number of players that have logged on to the game has exceeded our expectations by far - five days after release we had 35.000 registered accounts! However, there have been some significant issues that our customers have been dealing with the last few days. It has been difficult to log on due to massive traffic, and the game is unfortunately still unstable. We apologize for all the inconvenience this has caused our customers and we are working around the clock to make things right. These are the most prominent issues that we have fixed or will fix in the near future: Personal CD keys: Some of our customers have been unable to register their personal CD key. This was due to a minor interface error in certain web browsers, but we have fixed the problem now. Registration difficulties: Due to the large number of people logging on to the game, many people were unable to make it through the registration process. We have now increased our capacity for log in so that everything should run smoother. Customer support: Our customer support staff has been quite overloaded with questions due to the overwhelming interest in our game, and has been unable to give our customers quick responses. We are now dealing with this by hiring more people and improving the existing support system. Lag and crashes: Our customers often experience lag and crashing once in the game. Funcom had done thorough testing and massive simulations before the launch to test server capacity and playability. However, we see today that there are still some issues to be solved. Again, Funcom would like to apologize to all of our customers who have been troubled by these various issues. We would like to inform you that the first included month of playtime will not start until further notice. Funcom can also assure you that most of these issues will be solved in the near future that we will work very hard to prove that Anarchy Online is the very best online there is! :-) As for reviewing the game: We will send out review copies soon, but we would like to ask that you hold back on a full review until we have solved these problems. For daily updates and Anarchy Online news, please visit our support site . Marit Lund Director of Public Relations Funcom

As you may know, when I get an interesting editorial or article, I like to post it here to be read and debated on. here is a nice guide to getting credits that was sent in by Plutarch: Low on money? Just dying to get that shiny BFG in the window but your account is just a few thousand credits short of the pricetag? Unless you have a rich mutant of an uncle who likes to play russian roulette with a Perminate Death weapon, you're going to have to earn credits the good ole fashion way: Freelance Contracting. Missions are going to be the best way to get credits for the forseeable future, so you need to learn how to 'massage' the system to make the most you can in the least amount of time possible. So here it is: Mission rewards are higher the farther you have to travel, but that doesn'tmean they take longer to do. What do you think whompas (and later on, the Grid) are for, anyway? So here is how you use that information: Use the whompas (or grid when you get access) to go to the farthest away city that you can. Go up to the mission terminal and get a mission (set the Money/EXP slider all the way to money), preferably one where you just have to pick up an item (not return it) to complete the mission. Before accepting the mission, see where the mission is sending you. The best is to pick a city as far away as possible from where you currently are. For example, go to the clan city of Avalon and get a mission who's destination is in Newland City or, preferably, Tir (not Tir County, because you have to run outside for that). The reward for such missions at level 4 is a stunning 2700+ credits, not counting the reward item. Get the max amount of 3 missions, preferably all with the same destination city (don't worry about what the reward item is), then go to the city. Use a cell scanner in that city in case you die, which you very well might (don't worry, death means nothing in this instance). When you get inside the mission be sure you're healed up and: RUN! Go through each door looting any chests you find, ignoring all the enemys. If you're rooted then you may need to kill whatever monster is fighting you,but that doesn't happen too often. Do whatever you can to find the mission objective item and grab it. Then you can screw around in the mission doing whatever you want, but once you've looted everything you might as well leave. If you want some exp then you can just do this mission as normal without doing the 'loot run'. When finished leave the mission and go sell all that ph@t l00t you don't want to keep in a nearby store (so you're not ever overburdened.overburdened = lower run speed = failure and death). Without killing a single enemy you will be anywhere from 3000-5000 credits richer than when you started. And all in less than 5 minutes of running, and only slightly more if you die. Final notes on the mission terminal: The sliders mostly change what kind of missions you get when you hit Request Mission. You do not have to close the window each time after requesting a mission. Just move one of the sliders over and the button pops up again, and you're free to move the slider back before requesting another mission. You should almost always set the mission slider all the way to Money. If you do not move any sliders and Request a mission sometimes the top-right mission will have a Merit as part of the reward. Not precisely sure of their effect, but they are worth getting...I think they raise your max HP and nanopoints, as well as increase your rank within the Clan/Omni-Tek/Neutrals. My favorite type of mission is the eye over the blue box, which I call 'art missions'. Move the slider all the way to Bad and all the way to Money to get offered 3 of them. While this is all doable at even before level 4, you can't do squat with all the credits you'll have. Anything you can buy has reqs higher than you can use, but it's nice to have enough money so that you don't have to worry about it at all for the next 10 levels or so. If you clear the whole mission of enemys you'll get just as much, if not more, exp than you could doing any other kind of mission. So not only are you getting a ton of money, but you're getting good exp too. Not as good EXP as grouping, but it's the best solo exp you can get...more or less. When you have access to the grid this will get even BETTER! You need 100-150 comp lit skill, but it will be so worth it- it won't even be funny. This is definately a technique available to you for the entire game. If you have anything to add, please feel free. Plutarck aemuli@yahoo.com

Funcom answered the question of whether or not there would be compensation for the poor gameplay experienced so far: Compensation by Funcom Support 2001/07/03 01:12 UTC/GMT We have been getting a lot of questions from people who wonder if they will be compensated for the problems we, and you as a player, are experiencing. Our official reply to this is; Yes, you will!. We understand that we are using your time, and we wish our customers to be happy and satisfied with our product. We are still in discussions on how and when we will do this, but we promise you that we will compensate you. Again we would like to point out that we are working in overgear to fix the problems we have. Thank you very much for your patience and your support.

The guild Winds of Rubi-Ka has posted up some nice guides to AO, including some useful profession guides. Check them out at this link.

This was recently published on the official AO site: The registration pages for Anarchy Online accounts are now protected by SSL encryption. Since the release of Anarchy Online these pages have not been secured by this encryption system and the little key or padlock sign would not show up in the browser. The SSL sertificate for register.funcom.com was applied for several months ago, but for reasons beyond our control we still did not receive it in time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Due to the huge demand for getting accounts registered and the pages beeing hosted on highly secured servers we decided to leave it open from the start.