[AngryGerbil]

I only briefly played AO but it always did leave a good taste in my mouth, so to speak. Of course, I never got into the upper echelons of the game, and when I played, I had 2 other RL friends who played with me in a persistent group, but there was a lot I liked.

Alot of the little things I liked about it were just general MMO tweaks from my EQ days that have since been done 100 times in other MMOs, but at the time, I REALLY appreciated it. (A few things really but specifically, the quests told you what to do instead of cryptically hint at it ala EQ).

The level of character customization was nice. Implants were a bit confusing to me, but I still appreciated the fact that they existed. In this light, WoW is pretty much no improvement over EQ. It seems augments/charms/etc are inc for WoW, but as they are already in EQ and as both came/come to pass WAY after AO's implants, hats off.

Little things, the GM's were not only existant, but helpful and curtious. Now, some of the grizzled AO vets on this board may speak to the contrary on this and they may even be right, but my first impression of the GMs at AO was a very good one the day I got stuck behind a map somewhere and found my way back only to find I could not interact with the world in any way. GM was fast, curtious, helpful, and even chatted with me a bit.

And I will certainly second the motion on the floor that AO had and still has the best death system ever. You basically pay a marginal fee to "save" your character (they call it "insurance") at one of the terminals in town. If you die, you simply revert back to that save with a rez effect. It gave you the option of how much money you wanted to spend. If you wanted to, you could chance it and go run an instance without saving and hope you don't die and save yourself a few bucks. Or, if you wanted to, you could spend the money and save every 3 seconds. Simple, effective, not too weak, not too harsh. I liked it.