Rubi-Ka 2001 Tracker

A simple tool to help track progress when pretending to play Anarchy Online from its original release date of June 27th, 2001.

Latest release here.

The tracker starts on June 27th, 2001. It tracks play time and advances the (pretend) date by a day when a configurable number of hours have passed. I chose 4 hours as the default "hours played per day" because that seems like a reasonable estimate for what an adult player with a job would've been able to do back in 2001. This value can be edited by hand in the exe.config.

Discussion

Properly pretending to play AO back as it was in 2001 will be tough. It might even be impossible for some professions depending on how they were affected by rebalancing throughout the years. And of course it won't be possible to recreate all the crazy bugs and server instability. Here are some useful links:

Patch history

Old AO forums

OLD old AO forums

Old patch discussions

There are some huge differences that everyone who played the game back then probably remembers:

• No towers/perks/research (no expansion content).
• No daily missions.
• No dyna bosses.
• No team missions--have to use a mission key duplicator and only the pulling person gets a token.
• Only 1 token per consumable mission token no matter your level (so 1000 missions for a 1k board).
• XP permanently lost upon death and items sent to reclaim terminal (these later became mail terminals).
• Health and nano rechargers and health and nano first-aid kits were separate and significantly less effective.
• Composite buffs didn't exist, making early NCU management more difficult.
• Lots of buffs had really short durations.
• Lots of weapons and armor didn't exist yet (like carbonum).
• Tons of changes to nanos that will take careful investigation using the patch numbers on aoitems to fully understand.
• UI was more limited--only 1 hotkey bar allowed I'm pretty sure. Not sure about multi keybinds.
• Big 3rd party tools probably didn't exist yet (aomainframe, auno, ClickSaver, NanoNanny, ItemAssistant, chat bots, better in-game maps).
• Overequipping had no negative effects for a while, and I think hotswapping implants was possible for a little bit.
• UVC wasn't self-only which had a huge impact on the weapon's people would use.
• Had to do body pulls (aggression enhancer caused social aggro).
• Fall damage and sharks in the water!