It was to be expected. The Anarchy Online (AO) community has fully embraced bots and spawned entire development teams. It was only a matter of time before bots pop up in Age of Conan (AoC).
After spending some time sniffing data, decyphering packets and digging around the RDB files with a hex editor, I managed to create a fully working prototype that connects and interacts with the AoC chat server.
My goal of this article is to make the transition from AO bots to AoC bots a little bit easier. I will outline the large changes on protocol level.

Out of the box your AO chat library will not function properly on AoC. However, you don't have to throw it away completely. With a few modifications which I will outline in this article you should be up and running in no time.

This story began many years ago, in the year where Google wasn't evil and IE5 was considered a fine browser.
I was young and in possession of a "HTML in 24 hours" book.

It had occured to me, I was in need of a website. All the cool kids were doing it, I certainly wasn't going to get left behind.
Content for a personal website was fairly easy back then, so I headed straight for the drawing board. I grabbed my freshly pirated copy of Photoshop and got down to business.
Many hours later, I finished it. It was ugly, bloated and possibly deadly for anyone with a weak stomache. I was proud like a father.
I fired up an FTP connection to my also freshly created Geocities account and uploaded my very first web design and a few pages stating "Content coming soon!". Burned out after all the hours I already put into the design, I instantly forgot all about my grand plans and left the site online as it was, without content.
Unknowningly, I just set the first cycle of design vs content in motion.

A month later, I had a brilliant idea, I finally thought up some worthwhile content for my great personal website, I was going to get famous and obtain at LEAST 30 visitors per day!
I fired up my browser, typed in Geocities and the name of my account and hit go. I was instantly blinded by the uglyness of my previous creation. It was terribly, not a snow flake's chance in hell that design was worth my brilliant ideas! I was going to get famous, bigger than Microsoft! I couldn't possibly show myself to the world like this.
Once again, I went straight for the drawing board. Having learned a 20 point bevel is not pretty, I completely redesigned my website. I worked for days to find the right tutorials and copy cool looking tricks from other websites.
My effort had been rewarded. After all this hard work, there it was: website layout version 2 dot 0. Eagerly I created an "under construction" page and uploaded the whole bunch to geocities. "I'll start with the content tomorrow" I said to myself.
The next day, I firing up my advanced html editor, notepad, and started blankly at the "under construction" line for a few minutes. Then it struck me, my brilliant idea wasn't that great after all. It actually was pretty dull and boring.
I closed my advanced html editor and left things as they were.

This cycle of content vs design repeated itself 7 more times. Some iterations there was a little bit of content, in others the design didn't even get finished. But all cycles had one thing in common, the site never got finished.
After 7 times, I figured it was enough. I wasn't going to break the cycle, I wasn't going to complete any personal website.
Years passed by, I got into different kinds of programming, I worked in web development for a while and I'm currently following a course on game development.
I was free of it all, no longer would I be stuck in this vicious cycle again. I had matured to a point where I could do without!

Or so I thought... The year is 2008, the design is fresh and the content says "under construction".
Welcome to Vhab's site of stuffs.