News Across the Universe

By Cariadast

AOU experienced some unexpected issues during a recent server update, which caused some of the images in the guides to be broken on the live end of the site. We have swapped out leets and the hampster rolls on! This issue has been corrected and all images should now appear normally.

Thank you for your patience in this matter and good questing!

By Saavick

The celebration event for Anarchy Online's 22nd birthday has started today, 23 June! Although no end date has been announced, last year it started at the same date and ended on 16 July, so that may be a good indication. Should an announcement be made by Funcom later, I will edit this post. Edit: our Community Manager AndyB has just made a post on the official forums. The event will run stay until 17 July.

Have a look at our guides to learn about things to do during the event:

• The Desert Rider, Desert Nomads and the Carbonum Bull
• Loren Warr
• Special level 300 incarnations of classic Rubi-Ka bosses

Tomorrow, Saturday 24 June at 6 pm GMT, GridStream Productions will throw a party in the ICC Assembly Hall. You can paste the following waypoint in game for a map marker: /waypoint 3335 950 655

By Cariadast

Today Umbrols from FunCom, in the Customer Support area announced the discontinuation of our beloved ARK (Advisors of Rubi-Ka) program. You can read the details on the FunCom forums: https://forums.funcom.com/t/future-of-t ... ram/230929

We at AOU are at a loss for words as to why this would be happening, so the only words we can offer are THANK YOU to ALL of the Advisors of Rubki-Ka, present and past, for the dedication you showed. As well as the hard work you gave, and the unconditional support you provided to this game and its community.

Thank you for carrying the needs and concerns of the players through the years, and helping players when times called for it. AOU has appreciated and enjoyed working with you over the decades and is proud to have had a number of you counted in our staff and ranks here at AOU.

You will be deeply, regretfully missed.

We will not forget!

Update: Message from Spacequest

Spacequest — Today at 7:14 PM BST (GMT+1)

Transmission online…

I need keep quite, incase they hear me, but I saw a new Alien ship, I thought i would investigate before putting out the call to arms.

Upon entering the ship I lost all my powers and had no defence, the door shut behind me.
Quickly I ran to hide behind some strange alien containers, their I could see a new type of alien, never seen before. If I move I could be seen and disintegrated.

Oh no! I feel the ships engines starting, I am trapped!
My comms is loosing power, what is this ship.
I must say this quick before my comms fails.

This maybe the last transmission to you all.

All I can say is you are the best and I have enjoyed every moment and event with you all, I hope myself and the events team have brought you a smile into your life. I must tell you something really important before my comms fails. What ever you do don't ………….

End of transmission…

By Cariadast

There was a patch today.

The game play servers are back up. It appears Character creation has been Patched and it is once again possible to make a new character. Test it out, and let us know!

By Cariadast

***AS OF Monday June 5th 11:40 am EST log-in servers (RK5 and RK19) are currently UP!***

Both Anarchy Online's game-side log-in servers (RK5 and RK19) are currently down. There is no word on when (or if) they are coming back up. Much speculation is running rampant but please all try to be patient until FC staff is back in the office Monday, Jun 5, 2023

*If you're in game things seem to be operating as expected, however, if you log out, you will be unable to log back in at this time.

Update: FC is aware of the issue and is investigating the cause. No ETA on resolution. Monday, Jun 5, 2023 11 am EST

By Cariadast

From their announcement:

For those of you who haven't participated before, Ironman is a challenge to level and take down bosses with only the assistance of other Ironman players. This means we don't use OSB, paid items, and we obtain all of our own loot!

As always Ironman is a PvM challenge at heart, we welcome everyone to take part in the classic Anarchy Online Ironman experience!

So join the Discord to join the fun! AO Ironman Community

Once you join, there you will be greeted by a Code of Conduct you must read and agree to as rules to follow throughout the challenge.

You'll find "Event Details" directly underneath the AO Ironman Community server header. Clicking the green Event Details gives you current information as needed.

If you have any questions regarding participating in Ironman be sure to ask a Moderator in Discord!

Best of Luck to all the Ironman Participants!

By Saavick

The in-game Valentine's Day event has started today! No end date has been announced, but last year it was 1 March. I'll update this news post in case any new information becomes available.

For now, maybe have a look at our guide about Adrienne Lefebvre and Qi Qiao Jie for all the details about the event content.

By Khuri

2022 is nearing it's end and I've been asked if I could show some numbers regarding this website and it's usage, how relevant it still is in regards to the age of the game.

We've removed the direct in-database tracking of guide visits some years back already, however based on pages called we can still see trends on which guides are the most searched after this year.


Visitor numbers

Absolute visitor numbers are a bit difficult to gather unfortunately. I'll split these numbers up based on their sources.
For one we have since several years now a Piwik/Matomo tracking on the website. However due to cookie policies and additionally modern browsers own do-not-track-me features, which the Matomo tracking respects, this tracking only registers a fraction of visits on the website.
The second tracking we have is the webservers internal logfiles, which register every page call. It does not however recognize "coming back visitors" as such. If two page calls from the same user are 30 minutes apart, they get registered as a new visit.

So much for the techniques behind the tracking, let's talk some numbers.
Matomo tells me that in 2022 we had over 123k visits on the website. These numbers have been going down from 2021 (125k), 2020 (148k) and 2019 (301k). Keep in mind though that with more strict browser privacy policies, Matomo might not see all visits by default.
Now the internal server logfiles show a little bit bigger numbers. According to them in 2022 we had over 1.5 million visits. There's a very interesting surge in visits starting with July 2022 where we went from an average of 80k visits per month to 190k, which continues throughout December.
This trend in rising numbers also reflects in the Matomo tracking, with a surge in July 2022.


Who's visiting?

Let's talk some about who's visiting this website.
The majority of visitors come from Europe (58 %) and North America (34 %). Based on country, first place goes to the USA (31.5 %), followed by the UK (10.3 %), Norway (9.4 %), Sweden (5.4 %) and Germany (5.3 %).
These numbers also get backed up by the Google Search Console, which just registers things happening on the Google Search Results in regards to our website. There the most impressions and clicks also come from the USA, followed by the UK, then Norway, Germany and Sweden.

The majority of visitors use a Full HD resolution screen (42.6 %), followed by QDH (9.3 %), and then come a variety of odd laptop and mobile device resolutions.
The vast majority visits using Chrome as browser and Windows 10 as OS (76.9 %), followed by Android OS (9.6 %).


When are you visiting?

For this I had a look at the Google Search Console and I can very confidently that a majority of players are playing and looking at our guides on weekends. Every saturday/sunday there's a high peak in impressions and clicks.


Hot Topics

The most interest in guides goes to the Classic AO guides (31.7 %), followed by Shadowlands (24.4 %), Alien Invasion (8.4 %), then Legacy of the Xan, Lost Eden and lastly Notum Wars.
The classic raids are where most visitors come looking for guides, namely the Condemned Subway, followed by the Temple of Three Winds, the Inner Sanctum Raid and the Dust Brigade.
Those also show in the Google search words, where the top searched topics include "subway", "inner sanctum" and "totw".
Guides regarding the Dust Brigade quests have been the most search after using our internal search engine.

And lastly for some more numbers on how we're doing on Google in general. We've had 1.39 million impressions in search results, with 224k clicks leading from those impressions to our site.


All of this tells me that despite the age of this game, it still has an active and interested community.
Also since we started accepting Paypal donations to support this website with it's hosting, we've reached the yearly goal every year, thanks to you generous people.
This year we've gotten 138 € in total (excluding Paypal fees), which covers the set goal of 120 € per year. A big thank you to everyone who donated!


In the name of the AOU team I'd like to thank everyone who comes visiting, interacting and supporting this website and the community around it, as well as the game itself.
I wish you a Happy New Year and hope you'll come by again in 2023!


Cheers,
Khuri