I'm so happy that you decided to post about this. It has been a long time since I thought about AO but it was a pretty damn amazing thing when it came out. Everyone had heard of Everquest and Ultima Online, but they didn't really have mass appeal.

I do not remember the name of the type of character that I had, but it was one of the ones where you had these floating minions that would fly around with you. I've always liked classes with minions even if they were rather weak. The main reason being that if you were soloing, the "aggro" would be on them most of the time and all you would have to do is stop attacking if that situation changed.

Looking back, I attribute it to the loss of my then-girlfriend and the missed opportunities during my twenties.

The exact same thing happened to me. It was a combination of AO and Dark Age of Camelot and looking back I can't believe that this super-hot girl that I had at the time was somehow trumped by an online game. I would stay up all night camping the same spots leveling up (Ding! conga-rats!) and end up missing classes and basically completely ignoring my social life. I vowed off MMOS after that time but enjoyed it a great deal (obviously) while it was going on.

The bugs at the start were tough to deal with and I am surprised I stuck around. The amount of times that I would see a toon running in a corner in a city because they went "link dead" was pretty humorous to see, but then again, it would happen to me just as often.

One thing I didn't like about AO was that there was really no reason to strafe or seek a good position, perhaps they changed that later. The hits and misses were obviously completely determined by RNG and trudging through leets for a couple of hours before you joined the real world was mind numbingly boring. But we did it anyway because we didn't know any better!