* AO has lots and lots of content, there are tons of unique quests and a load of dungeons. Not just for high-levels either, there are dungeons and quests for all level ranges and you're never limited to leveling in just one field or dungeon, there's always dozens and dozens of places you can go and dozens of dozens of things to kill no matter what your level is.
* Mission system, AO was the first MMOG to incorporate the whole dynamic mission system and it still has the best one. A lot of you may have played the original missions which had too little variation, it was revamped a few months back making missions a lot more varied and unique. The Alien Invasion we call forward when we lower our cloaking shield is probably the most fun version of this system.
* Outdoors, a really under-appreciated thing about AO is the ability to just run in the great outdoors and do whatever you want. There's always plenty of wandering mobs, interesting static spawns and dynacamp bosses around.
* The music, atmosphere and story in AO is amazing, better than most single-player games. Fallout and Planescape: Torment are the only two games I feel that rivals it. Due to public demand Funcom actually released a CD soundtrack and I have most of it permamently on my playlist
* None of the 1 char per server crap that most hate from SW:G, the character per server limit is no less than 8.
* There's no gay item decay or miles and miles of running to get to your corpse. When you die, you spawn at the insurance terminal you last insured your clone at and get your items from the reclaim booth. In fact, there's no item loss at all, nor any real XP loss! Upon death the XP you've earned since you last insured gets placed in a pool and each kill from then on you get a percentage of that pool added unto the regular XP until you've earned it all back. This way, death is still a setback but not the heart-wrenching ordeal of losing 3 hours of xping because you were too lazy to run back and save.
* Flying ships, I think my best online experience ever must be the first time I got my yalm and could just take-off and fly. I think I've spent more time flying my ship than I've spent doing anything else in AO. The latest expansion added more yalmaha's who are just and easily equipable unlike the stiletto's. There are also at least 3 more yalms coming.
* A very large and active RPG community supported by Funcom, there's writers at Funcom who's job is creating a fake newswire and advancing the storyline. The reports come from various outlets like Omni-Tek Press Corp, Independent Reporters of Rubi-Ka and Free Journalists of Rubi-Ka, all with their own slant and bias. It's fun and interesting even if you're not a roleplayer. The articles come often, sometimes multiple different ones in a day and you get alerted in-game if you've subscribed to the wire/channel. In addition Funcom often does quests, and they're not gigantic once a month quests for higher levels exclusively, or pre-announced. I've often stumbled upon a guy with a green name (Colour of event team) by accident and he has led me on a quest
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