A couple of weeks ago, some friends at a game development channel finally got me to try Anarchy Online in order for me to get a better idea of MMORPG game design. (They NEVER let me hear the end of how much I like Ragnarok Online. @_@;a ) It's just a trial "free to play" account, though. Funcom's letting people play the "vanilla" version of Anarchy Online for free, but keeping expansion areas pay to play. The veteran AO crowd doesn't seem to like it too much; they call free to play players "fr00bies."
Some of my fellow guild members from the Crusaders of Rune-Midgard are now playing AO themselves alongside RO after I mentioned that to them. One of them has even paid for the game outright ... Tristan, just for the record, you scare me. I've yet to set up my trial account in AO, but I've seen that AO's got some monsters called "Leets." For the AO community, leets hold the same special place as porings do here. Leets have the added bonus that they're a rip on the lamers we love to hate. Leets talk, and they talk in typical lamer netspeak! That's how this comic came about!
Oh, and if you're wondering why all the lamers shown have Novvy's facial expressions, well ... Novvy's an idiot. A relatively benign one, but still an idiot. In Ragnarok Wisdom, lamers/idiots are given that eyeless, blank look, as well as the lowercase font. Speaking of, remember when I was griping about Open Beta 3? The kind of clowns here are why I dreaded the announcement so much, but the fat dude representing the botters turned out to especially be the case. Although I'm sure everyone who's played Open Beta 3 can remember, I figure I should explain it for everyone else—there weren't just people botting their way through the game. There were also lamers who deliberately tried to floods the server with dozens, even hundreds of bot accounts.
Yeah. That's pretty low, but par for the course given where these people were slinking around (places such as RO-World, where griefing a la mass dead branching is not only condoned but applauded). Learning about the leets seemed like poetic justice. One of the beginner tutorial areas even has a sign that warns everyone that leets are vermin and need to be shot on sight! I totally agree!
