It's still fun, and why I give it my time at least part of every year.
Best tips I can think of:
- Stay away from tower wars and AI stuff. the former is just org vs org epeen stuff, and the latter isn't really important until very high end anyway.
- Don't level past 24 without going to your faction's Subway instance. Find a team, and run that dungeon all the way to the end. You'll thank me for telling you this.
- make sure you have the following bookmarked:
AUNO Anarchy Mainframe USeful AO Tools
(Clicksaver and Nano Nanny are must haves)
- If you get SL for the $5, make sure to visit Rubi Ka and do some missions to get a feel for the whole game.
It is a fun game and has some cool things in it for sure. I bash FunCom for what they do badly, but AO is full of cool stuff, so FC does make a fun game, jut steer clear of the borked stuff and it's all good.