Once you’ve left the training area and entered the Real World, it’s a whole other ball game. No longer are you simply running around a small, relatively safe area simply attempting to kill things and level up a few times–now you’ve got literally a whole world to explore and virtually limitless options at your fingertips. More importantly, death now means something. If you die and haven’t scanned in (saved) your character recently, you’ll lose experience, something you’ll want to avoid as much as you can. In this section, we’ve put together some tips and strategies that we’ve gathered in our time playing the game.

How to Use Your Pets

Shame on Funcom for not including any information whatsoever in the manual pertaining to pets–the creatures that meta-physicists, bureaucrats, and engineers can create to do their bidding for them. They mean the difference between life and death for these three professions. However, unless you know how to use them, they’ll stand around doing nothing.

Control
The most basic command you can give is “/pet attack,” which will cause your pet to attack the currently selected target. If you’d like your pet to go after enemies that are engaging you or your team, input “/pet guard,” and your pet gladly obey. For some personalization, type in “/pet rename newname,” replacing “newname” with whatever you would like your pet to be called. To let the pet roam and attack on its own, use “/pet hunt.” You can free or kill your pets with the “/pet free” and “/pet terminate” commands.

Combat Tips
Use your pets! One of the simplest commands that you can give a pet is “/pet attack.” Often you will end up on a team with newbies who either never issue a command to their pets or, for one reason or another, just tell it to guard them and then ignore it. People who fight like this–and make no mistake, they are doing a lot of the fighting even though they shouldn’t be–would be better off as enforcers.

To make the most effective use of your pet, get in range of the enemy. Once you are able to select it, order your pet to attack it and then back off. After you do this, the enemy should begin to attack your aggro pet instead of you. If you like, you can let the two of them duke it out; however, it is better if you assist your pet. Simply shoot the enemy from a distance or fire off offensive nano programs, depending upon what you have, and you will find yourself able to take down enemies with ease.

In addition, if you would like to sit and avoid the combat altogether, when you are in an area that isn’t too difficult you can sit down and order your pet to hunt. You will want to have a backup ready to deploy in case the pet that you have out gets destroyed, providing that your class allows for a backup, but otherwise this can be quite effective. As long as the area you are in is relatively safe, you can rack up quite a bit of experience even when you get up to run to the restroom or get a drink.

The most difficult thing about either of these strategies, however, is remembering to do them. If you aren’t used to abstract combat, then chances are you should take a more direct character like the soldier or enforcer. If you are able to handle giving another creature orders, then your pet can become a huge asset. In fact, you may even end up able to rely on your pet alone most of the time.

Here is a bureaucrat taking on an enemy with his droid. Notice how the bureaucrat is keeping his distance and has even “rooted” the enemy before firing the offensive nano.

Follow the Leader

When playing in a team, it can be fairly difficult at worst–tedious at best–to keep track of and stay with the team leader. To make things easier on yourself, target your leader and type “/follow” into the chat box. Your character will now automatically follow your teammate. You’re free to chat, move the camera around, use inventory items or nano formulas, and attack; you’ll continue following your leader until you press a movement key. This can also be used to close in on a cycled target whose location you don’t know. In addition, if you get lost but are still fairly close to your team, you can click on one of your teammates in the team window and type “/follow,” and you will automatically run to them.

Cycling Targets

Regarding cycling targets, press the Tab key to cycle through nearby enemies. Press Ctrl+Tab to cycle through friendly targets. Combining this with the “/follow” command will let you easily find and attack enemies. This is an especially valuable technique for team leaders to learn, as they can quickly and easily bring their group (which should be “/following the leader”) to suitable enemies.

Sharing the Booty

Bring order to chaos within your team by having the team leader set “/team loot alpha.” This will force teammates to take turns looting vanquished foes. Alternatively, “/team loot all” leaves the booty as a free-for-all, going to the first looter.

Macros Are Your Friends

You can create macro objects–essentially shortcuts that will execute long commands for you simply by pressing a single key–at any time by typing “/macro macroname command,” where macroname is the name you want to give the macro, and command is the command you want the macro to execute. This will create an object that you can drag into your quick action bar, and then use like any other item. For example, a popular macro is “/macro NxtTrgt Next Target: %t,” which will read your current target, and send it in the form “Next Target: Current Target” to the chat box. This can be used to quickly tell your teammates what to attack next.

So Are Scripts

Creating scripts requires a little bit more work–and familiarity with Windows–than making macros, but you can do a lot more with them. In Windows, open up Notepad (click Start, then Run, then type “notepad”), and type in whatever commands you like, with each command on a new line. Save the file, with no extension, in a directory called “Scripts” within your Anarchy Online directory. (Create it if it’s not there yet.) Then, while in the game, type “/scriptname” to execute the script. For example, the script…

/me is hungry.
/eat
/delay 3000
Still hungry…
/eat
/delay 3000
Man am I hungry!
/eat
/delay 3000
Uh oh; ate too much!!
/puke

…will tell everyone that you’re hungry, then eat, wait three seconds for the animation to finish, declare that you’re still hungry, eat some more, tell the world once again that you’re hungry, eat even more, then cry out that you ate too much, and show the puking animation.

Scan Often!

Nobody likes losing hours’ worth of time, experience, and looted items, and if you go out hunting indiscriminately, that’s exactly what you’re asking for. Every time you level up, your character will automatically be saved. However, if you’ve been out and about for a few hours and haven’t leveled up, you’d be wise to find a scanning terminal and save your character’s state. The credit cost is well worth the peace of mind.

Speak Your Mind

But speak it to those you want to hear you. Simply typing text into the chat box will only send messages to those around you. To increase the distance at which you’ll be heard, prefix your words with “/shout.” To decrease the distance, use “/whisper.” To quickly speak to only one person, type “/tell playername,” where playername is the name of the person to whom you want to speak. When on a team, click the “friends” icon on the upper-right hand corner of your screen, then click “team” on the subsequent menu. This will cause all of your regular text to be sent to all of your team members. If you’re looking to sell an item or for whatever reason want other people to be able to view its information, you can simply drag the item to the chat box and hit Enter. People will then be able to Shift-click on the item’s name in the box to view its description. Finally, if a friend is not online, you can leave him or her a message by using the “/tell” command. Your friend will receive the message the next time he or she signs on.