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alt title(s): Ace Online Air Rivals , also known as Ace Online, and previously known as Space Cowboys way back when Gpotato ran the servers, is an MMO-style flight action game that can best be described as a mashup between World Of Warcraft and Ace Combat. In the game, player characters pilot "Gears", multipurpose flight-capable combat vehicles, for either of two nations: Bygeniou City United or Arlington National Influence.
The war takes place on and around a Phillon planet colonised by the Decaians, a breeding ground for Space Bees, Space Whales and Rodents Of Unusual Size. The planet is currently at war, since BCU's motivation is to wipe out all alien species on the planet- causing ANI to form from exiled political dissidents and attack BCU, on the basis that BCU is performing cruel an unjust acts against the "Non-Decaians".
Several third parties, the Shrines, the Phillon, and the Vatallus, all have their own agenda concerning the planet, and interfere with the war in their own ways.
The game has 4 playable classes, known as Gears or Air-Frames:
A-Gear: The Artillery Unit/Flying Tank
- Beehive Barrier: A-Gears gain a "Barrier◊" once they reach the mid-30s in experience, which shields against all missile attacks for 15 seconds - particularly useful when a B-Gear is flying overhead.
- Cold Sniper: Some experienced A-gear pilots tend to find good, semi-concealed locations to unleash Siege Mode upon unsuspecting enemies from. The better ones quickly move aside before the inevitable response from enemy B-gears.
- Most of the time, A-gears simply land and shoot from afar, using barrier when a B-gear approaches, or when the Bawoos are just about to hit.
- They also use barrier when silenced by an I-gear to prevent damage from any missiles they cannot see.
- More Dakka: What the Siege Modes are all about.
- The very best A-gear Standard Weapons often end up with at least twice the regular rate of fire (a combined reattack bonus of -50% or more). This is an example of a typical well-enchanted weapon, while this is a Game Breaker.
- Standard Status Effects: The Snare ability slows down the target, which makes it easier for chasing missiles to hit the enemy. WARNING: you can snare yourself if you're not careful.
- The other Status Effect usable by A-gears is the Shield Paralyze, which prevents the target's shields from regenerating. Essential for downing enemy M-gears.
- Wave Motion Gun: "Hyper Shot" can instantly cripple just about any Gear within the (large) blast radius of the shot.
B-Gear: The Bomber
- BFG: The Charged Shot, which fires a single, Quad Damage shot from your Standard Weapon.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Equipped with two bombing modes: Ground Bombing, and later Air Bombing, both attacks fire a large salvo of missiles either towards the ground or straight ahead respectively, with attack power ramped up at least 5-fold, more than enough to scrap most airframes on a direct hit.
- Invisibility Cloak: A pair of angel wings flap and then surround the Gear, subsequently turning it invisible to radar and vision. Certain items and skills belonging to the M-Gear can reveal the cloaked B-Gear. Also, missiles retain their lock even after the Gear cloaks.
- Lightning Bruiser: At level 86 B-Gears can equip an upgraded engine, making them slightly slower than a level 86 I-Gear, but a lot faster than any other gear (including a level 84 I-Gear).
- Self Destruct Mechanism: "Big Boom." On par with the A-Gear's "Hyper Shot," except that the B-Gear is destroyed as a result of using it. The power of the explosion is based on the amount of Energy (armor hitpoints) your B-gear's armor has.
I-gear: The Fighter
- Fragile Speedster: As interceptors and chasers, I-gears have powerful Jet-series engines that let them have extremely fast boosted top speeds; unfortunately, much of this speed comes at the price of precious armor and shields. Special mention must also be made of their unique skill Overbooster, which makes them shoot forth at 600m/s for a few seconds, faster than any other gear. Also, their agility can be built to be so high that with the right buffs, their evade is well over 100%, and almost nothing that is a missile can hit them.
- Glass Cannon: Pure-attack I-gears die very, very easily, but compensate with their withering volleys of highly-destructive missiles.
- Macross Missile Massacre: at a certain level, the skill "Frenzy" increases the amount of missile volleys fired (which, coupled with a decent missile, will make for some nice damage).
- Not to mention the final skill, " Berserk" (during which a demonic, red aura surrounds the gear), is the very embodiment of this trope.
- "Silence" Status: One of the lesser-known abilities of the I-gear is that it can temporarily block enemy gears from hearing missile warnings and seeing missiles altogether.
M-gear: The Medic
- Dispel: Their Purify skill, a staple when dealing with overbuffed enemy air-frames.
- Stone Wall: High level M-Gears are capable of tanking a barrage from up to 3 enemy Gears at once, coupled with a constant healing ability.
- Shoot The Medic First: M-Gears, being the backbone of many formations in a war situation, are often the primary targets.
- Summon Magic: the ability Call Of Hero lets M-gears summon formation members to warp from another map straight to where they are.
- This is sometimes abused in tandem with the B-gear's Big Boom.
The player's Gear(s) are equipped with:
- Standard (rotary guns or cannons) and Advanced (missiles and rockets) weapons
- Armor (Each type of Air-frame has its own type of armor)
- Radar (Which affects weapon lock-on range and the object-sensing abilities of the mini-map)
- Engine (Which is statted for many aspects of its performance, such as maximum/minimum speed, turning angle, and Booster speed.)
- CPU (which adds stat-points to your pilot's RPG-style stats)
In addition, there are three additional equipment slots which are not critical to getting the Air-Frame operable:
- Permanent Adhesive (a fuel tank and/or a Armor or Shield enhancer; Nation Leaders are gifted with a 10,000 Shield-Point adhesive commonly called a "diaper")
- Temporary Adhesive (a timed charm which may either give stat bonuses or a buff to experience and/or item drop rates)
- a holographic Mark (a purely decorative sign that appears over a pilot's head while in town.)
Tropes present include:
- Ace Pilot
- AI Is A Crapshoot: The Core of New Bark City is a prominent example, as the player must shut it down during one of the story missions.
- An Adventurer Is You: Each of the Gears does something different:
- The Brandy Burg is The Jack, with balanced all-around performance. Only craft capable of dropping bombs. Of note is the fact that it can almost equal the Idle Sniper in speed or turning depending on engine choice.
- The Anima Mortar is The Tank, literally. Heavy firepower and defenses, with plenty of dakka. Also somewhat of a Nuker.
- The Idle Sniper is The DPSer. Heavy weapons but a very light frame.
- The Meadow Burgle is a cross between The Medic and a Stone Wall-style tank. Very tough and loaded with skill points, it's not as well armed but can still hang around for a long time. A definite case in point of Shoot The Medic First.
- Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever: Most of the local wildlife. The largest enemies are over a kilometer long.
- Bribing Your Way To Victory: Some players have been known to buy hundreds of thousands of cash credits to load up on stuff from the cash-item shop.
- Of special note is a behaviour referred to by players as "Kitting", which is to rapidly consume many energy and shield kits as you fight (and take damage). Kitters are disrespected in one on one combat and even in odds reasonable for kitting, such as ten versus one.
- Call A Hit Point A Smeerp: Hit points are divided into "Shields" and "Energy." Skill usage points are simply referred to as "SP".
- Charged Attack: The skills "Hyper Shot," "Charged Shot," and "Big Boom."
- Christmas Mode: as well as Valentine's, Thanksgiving, and even Chinese New Year - these Holiday Events are much-loved by some veterans.
- Cool Planes: You get to choose from a Vic Viper wannabe, a high-performance supersonic intercepter, a spiritual descendant of the A-10 crossbred with a C-130, and a flying tank with lots of firepower.
- Critical Annoyance: The "Missile Lock" and "Low Energy" warning sirens will irritate many a pilot.
- Critical Existence Failure: Subverted due to the fact that the player's Gear will begin smoking and eventually catch fire as the player loses Energy. If all Energy is depleted, the Gear explodes and dives towards the ground, where it stays until the player respawns.
- Played straight in that player's vehicle performs as normal up till the last point of Energy is depleted.
- Crosshair Aware: A warning sound is activated and the radar flashes red when missiles targeted towards the player are fired.
- Development Hell / Vaporware: Episode 3.2 (and updated 3-2-2) was released pre-bundled with Japanese Ace Online and have been released for all other variants (Vietnamese Phi Doi, Russian Ace, and American Ace) from early summer. As of this entry's writing, October 30th, the European Air Rivals is still stuck with Episode 3.1
- The Development Hell part comes from the fact hat EU Air Rivals gets to have a patch that is rebuilt and recustomized as opposed of American AO's wholesale translation from Japanese AO. This fact made the estimated deadline be around 2010. Naturally, people are quite anxious upon whether or not Air Rivals is going to be updated and conspiracy theories about AR closing at the end of 2009 has been a pervasive rumor, especially with CoMa Hyatt confirming that the testservers need to be taken down wholly.
- Death Is Cheap - So cheap that it often costs less to die than to go to a Supply Shop and repair yourself. When you die due to wars or duels, respawning is free.
- However, death will cost Experience if you're broke, so be warned.
- Deflector Shields
- Demonic Spiders: Bishops, the boogeyman mobs that GMs sometimes threaten to feed misbehaving players to (and specifically warn about in the version 2.2 shop-skill descriptions). They also float around freely in the map called G-ark inside a swarm of missile mobs with itchy trigger fingers (most of the time firing more missiles then you can roll without the I-Gear only Chain Rolling skill). They are "farmed" regularly by some servers.
- As of Episode 3, the mobs of the newly-uncovered Pandea maps are nearly all aggressive and farsighted (aggro at 2km, well out of a player's weapon lock-on range), relentless, and have monster levels starting in the 70s (although lv 68+ B-Gears can grind in the ANI Atus map if they have high probability weapons). Players who aren't either daring, skillful, or suicidal only enter Pandea with the help of Stealth Cards.
- Feathering and barrel rolling or a damage output that allows you to kill mobs one by one before they can attack you are all that is required to survive in these maps.
- Most players would not waste Stealth Cards on Pandea maps, typically saving them for the aforementioned bishops.
- Most mobs do not aggro from far away, but some, such as the Bonebat recolours and certain Vatallus attack craft, which have been observed to acquire players as their targets from as far as 1700-2300m. Even then, their attack range is not as far as their lock-on range.
- The Bipin is another famous example, as it has a charge shot that does quite a bit of damage.
- The Bipins charge shot only does around 1k damage by itself so when faced up against just one the gear trying to kill it can win (that is if all the missles hit quickly and do not go through the lock on point and begin to circle around) but when faced against 2 or more, it's best to run away fast or get some formmates to help take down the others around you.
- Escort Mission: Mothership Offensives or Defensives, depending on whoever's on the attack. Every once in a long while, when the nation's score hits 100,000 NCP on the Subagames server, they will force the opposing side to spawn a Mothership that must then be defended, as well as numerous Strategic Points the Attacking Nation can destroy to create warp gates to help drive their offensive closer - Anubis is the Bygeniou Mothership, while Horos is the Arlington one. The winner gains the benefits of several exclusive maps, Stealth Cards, lots of War Points, and SPI capsules for every Strategic Point they destroyed.
- Said Strategic Points in themselves are escort missions too, at least for the defenders. They remain active for about an hour after they are spawned. Unfortunately, Offensives againsts said SPs are usually easier than Defensives.
- Elite Mook: Gold Mobs, which have nice rare items to drop... sometimes.
- Fake Difficulty: The game is notoriously laggy.
- For some although most don't experience lag of any kind while others get network or system lag from having below required specs
- This issue is mainly confined to the North American version at present. Apparently their server is missing some important hardware.
- Floating Platforms: "Supply Pads" all hover stationary above the ground or in space.
- Most supply pads in the normal chain are grounded.
- Fun With Acronyms: Why does the word ACE is ACE Online is always capitalized? One source has it that ACE stands for Air Combat Extreme.
- Game Breaker: Any Legendary weapon. To this day, there also still exists some in-game bug exploits that rogue players will use to disrupt gameplay (one-hit shots on major in-game bosses, etc).
- Any Legendary Weapon? Try a weapon like this.
- More mundane upgrades that make players cry foul include Advanced Weapon Speed Cards (which make missiles fly faster), Engine Cards◊ (which can improve a player's engine well beyond it's normal abilities, if you get lucky and succeed in enchanting your engine several times), and any weapon which has a ridiculous quick-fire bonus (e15 Bigsmash/Arrow with a grand total of -60% reattack thanks to superior fixes, anyone?).
- Nearly everybody has a weapon with at least decent quick-fire or damage bonuses. 5% is not that much of a difference.
- Additionally, pierce cards, which make a weapon's damage bypass even more armor than normal.
- Radar cards, that let you enhance weapon acquisition range so you can try to hit stuff from even more ludricous distances than normal, may also began annoying players once they get sniped repeatedly by I-gears from 1900m and beyond.
- Final skills often add large bonuses compared to previous skill levels. Final siege mode, for instance, can actually triple a gun's rate of fire. Balanced somewhat by the amount of Level Grinding needed to get these skills.
- Game Breaking Bugs: A recent example - This recent Bloody Valentine's event saw Elusive Scout Guards spawn for each nation in the various faction-aligned maps; these Elusive Scouts were aligned to the native nation, and were only enemies for the opposing side. For the Horos Mothership Defense of February 19, the Elusive Scouts on the ANI side formed such a dense cloud, they greatly interfered with the movements of the BCU pilots due to the sheer clouds of missiles they would launch at the poor Bygeniou Regulars trying to attack the Arlington Mothership, even downing a few unlucky pilots and winging many others.
- On the bad side of things, those same Elusive Scouts spawned in the Safe Maps as well, where the enemy nation could not cull them. This resulted in a critical point where the Relic map of ANI was full of nothing but Elusive Scouts◊, filling the map's mook-quota and preventing normal mobs from spawning, thus stopping the poor ANI pilots from doing missions in the safe zone.
- An earlier bug from the early days when this game was still called Space Cowboys was the Dupe Bug, which let players duplicate items. The result of the debacle was a server rollback, and the offending dupers were fined of all of their SPI.
- The Goomba: The mobs encountered while still under FreeSKA are all mostly harmless.
- Grey And Gray Morality: Neither of the two main factions are outright good or evil.
- Heroic BSOD: Whenever a player breaks a high level weapon or armor, this usually is the reaction you see from players.
- The common reaction to having this happen too often is the RAGE-quit.
- Hollywood Cyborg: the mechanized Rocks present at the Rock's Nest, which were altered by the Shrines as research to develop fighters better suited to the atmospheric conditions of the Phillon Planet.
- Humongous Mecha: Mecha◊ armours◊. Needless to say, these are only available in the Japanese version at present, although GM Echo in North American Ace Online is holding a poll on how to implement them.
- Also a good example of lolicon Fetish Fuel, which is quite possibly why they're only available in the Japanese version.
- It's been revealed that the artist behind these armours has been fired as a result of opposing the implementation of these armors. At this point it's highly unlikely that they will appear in other versions.
- There has been some vocal refusal from European Air Rivals as well.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Not to mention the fact that the player can simply stop their Gear in mid-air and completely refit it, from the missiles, to the engines, to the Gear's computer systems, right down to the physical air frame of the Gear itself.
- The cargo carried, but not equipped, by an air-frame has no effect on the loadage weight. Carry 20 or more heavy Guarders and Binders in your inventory, and you won't feel the least bit sluggish.
- Infinity Plus One Sword: Again, the Legendary Weapons.
- Irrelevant Sidequest: There's an entire list of so-called "Standard Missions" which are your run-of-the-mill "kill X amount of monster Y for cock-head Z."
- Item Crafting: How players obtain upgraded weapons, armor, and Legendary equipment. Some advanced alloys can only be manufactured by crafting.
- Just Add Water: Have the materials needed to upgrade your armor? Just cart it along to the factory and the fabricators will do the rest...
- Joke Item: Or rather, joke armors. No we're not talking about the newbie armors, we're talking watermelon plane armors◊
- Latex Space Suit: Any female character◊.
- Lethal Joke Characters: Some iterations of the Evil Snowmen that spawn for Christmas Events are strong enough to count as minibosses or Elite Mooks, with enough hitpoints to survive a few direct B-gear hits and well over 3 continuous barrages by a single A-gear.
- Lethal Joke Item: Pumpkin weapons. Literally, guns that shoot pumpkins. Their stats are on par with legend weapons.
- Level Grinding: AR is a Korean-developed MMORPG, and comes with plenty of it.
- The grind is bearable until level 75 is reached, then the amount of experience needed to gain more levels snowballs.
- From level 69 to 74, the amount of experience required to level up doubles.
- Lost Forever: Anything that breaks during upgrading or enchanting.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Don't even get me started.
- Magikarp Power: The chief example of this is the "Ancient Arrow" weapon, which spans several missions across even more levels, and cannot be thrown away, traded, or sold until it's completed.
- Money Sink: Taxes and bills for repairs, ammunition and fuel ensure that inflation is controlled.
- Mordor: Several of the episode 3 maps, particularly Sunshine Born.
- Old School Dog Fighting: Battles tend to result in lots of close-combat fighting, especially observable in battles between I-gears.
- Ninja Looting: Often attempted, both by pilots from the enemy nation and by treacherous dogs on your own side.
- Nitro Boost: in combination with Sprint Meter. Also, there exists a skill for I-Gears only called "Overboost," which uses SP and blasts the Gear forward at 600 m/s for 3 seconds.
- Patchwork Map: Partially subverted by the fact that "warp gates" connect the maps, which techincally means none of the maps are right next to each other. They just seem that way.
- However, the Rock's Nest climates alter quite impressively as you climb from sea level to the middle-range mountain chains, then to the peak of the tallest mountain in the region. Granted, you are reaching rather impressive altitudes as you travel along this chain of maps.
- Perpetually Static: The relations of Arlington and Bygeniou never degrade below ordinary warfare, and yet it never improves beyond a grudging truce (which the players presumably disregard because they are effectively mercenary privateers!)
- Player Killing: While you can't shoot down fellow members of your nation (except when you accept a challenge to duel), those fellows from the other side are always fair game.
- This sometimes results in high-level pilots diving deep into enemy territory to harass newbies who were foolish enough to go
grinding training in the non-safe areas.
- Portal Network
- Promotional Powerless Piece Of Garbage: Mostly averted, the majority of event items continue to remain useable out-of-season, including the several-years-old chocolate from an old Valentine's Day event. Those are some amazing preservatives they have there.
- Randomly Drops: And how! Gold Mob drops, Boss Mob drops, Boss Armor which must be completed...
- Real Money Trade: Forbidden by the GMs, on pain on banishment.
- Reporting Names: Anima Mortar, Brandy Burg, Idle Sniper, and Meadow Bugle; no prizes for guessing which name fits what gear.
- Scunthorpe Problem: While Air Rivals has an excessively draconian filter that bleeps out entire sentences, the Ace Online filter is rather more lenient, only ***ing out the offending word or fragment.
- Space Does Not Work That Way: The outer space maps of the game have the same mechanics as the terrestrial ones, which results in...
- Spin To Deflect Stuff: Do a barrel roll. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop an A-Gear in Siege Mode from turning your airframe into a colander.
- Status Buff: All Gears have a set of stat-increasing skills tailored to that specific Gear, though M-Gears harbor the main set of party-affecting skills.
- Take Off Every Zig
- That One Boss: When a player talks about Bishops, he almost always means Bishop Red.
- Sekhmete, which might as well be using Berserker.
- In Pandea's middle-ground field, Sunshine Born, the Boss there is fully capable of delivering a crushing 10,000-point attack. Even an overbuffed M-gear with 300 Defense and buffs with be smarting after such a powerful strike.
- That One Sidequest: Ruler of Eopi. You have to kill a high level boss that only spawns every 24 hours. Most players will never even see it.
- The Ridill: A common cause of most of the infighting between brigades within a nation, as well as a common ignition point for conflict between ANI and BCU. Brigades have disbanded over arguments over killstealers within the brigade taking boss drops and refusing to hand them over to brigade members who felt they deserved it.
- Time Keeps On Slipping: Players can observe a day/night cycle while warring on the Phillon Planet. What it does is affect the spawn rates of certain mobs.
- Twenty Bear Asses: Many of the game's missions instruct you to gather samples from biological and mechanical enemies, with slightly wonky translation.
- Waste Of Time Story: How many players actually bother to read the background story about the colonisation of the Phillon Planet, the defection of Arlington, and the sinister machinations of the Shrines?
- The fact that you have nothing to do while playing a video game means the story must be incredibly terrible.
- You ALL Look Familiar: There are a finite amounts of air frames (Veils, Binders, Guarders, and Defenders for B, I, A, and M Gears, respectively). There are even less character designs to choose from when making a character.
- Customization is limited to changing the in-game textures of the Gears or characters, but the player is the only one who can see these customizations.
- The airframe paintjob shop has been deactivated recently on the Suba servers, in an effort to combat lag due to ongoing work and various related issues.
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