f13.net

Source (from the Norwegian):

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl=en&u=http://e24.no/boers-og-finans/article2445187.ece (http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl=en&u=http://e24.no/boers-og-finans/article2445187.ece)

Not bad. depends now on how many of their players they can hang onto.

Not many unless they get to patching all the missing and broken shit.  Fun combat can only keep you around so long.

http://www.massively.com/2008/05/26/funcom-boasts-400-000-players-in-age-of-conan-so-far/


So what do you think will happen after the honeymoon ? How many players will be around in a month or two ? Fire up the speculation wagon!  :awesome_for_real:

EDIT : Also, how the fuck do you review an MMO on release ?

None of the members of press got to level 40, obviously.

I'm going to rip them an asshole.

The honeymoon won't stop if they learn to communicate and fucking patch. The first isn't likely as the CRM and PR at funcom is probably the worst in the industry. The latter is likely.

I think a whole lot rides on the next 2 weeks.  If they don't get at least banks, mail, traders, guild cities and crafting where it should have been at launch, that 400,000 is going to 150,000-200,000 for month 2. 

As it stands, the game seems like it has less content than WoW did at release.  I think there's going to be a large contingent of people that burn through it in 2-3 months and never look back.  Especially if they get on the Blizzard 2yr expansion cycle. 

I'm seconding this. Also the bugs and issues need to be sorted out within this week. Also balancing issues. I play a Barbarian on PvP server and have 276 kills - 19 deaths. I'm lvl 35 and have killed lvl 46 Herald of Xotli and I steamroll most classes, even multiple of them.

PVP Being balanced is the least of my concerns. MMOG FFA PVP is just uber gay. I will not be touching on it in my article.

I'll tell you honestly why I rolled on a FFA PvP server. Cause im 99% sure the ruleset will change over the next months to something more... accepted by the common crowd. Only problem I encountered now on the server is seeing lvl 40-50 people ganking lvl 20's. When I'm bored I sneak around the small towns looking for gankers and kill them. Also graveyard campers are KOS for me. Lvl 10 or 50, GY camping sucks.

A lot less, it feels like, especially in terms of breadth (like, multiple areas at a given level).  Probably in depth, too, but I'm hesitant to go past level 40-ish so I can't be sure about that.  This is really the first MMO since WoW (and at all, really, other than WoW) that I've felt willing to actually play the "whole" game, and it's begun to strike me just how much goddamn content WoW had at release.  I just did the Sanctum dungeon in AoC, and it was a pretty cool first dungeon, especially artistically, but I get the impression I can't currently look forward to anything matching that dungeon.  I don't get much of a "I can't wait to see more!" feeling from this game, but only because I suspect there isn't much more.  But damn, I wish there was, and I hope there will be, because the actual game is really fun.

And fuck, I know it has been said five hundred thousand times, but it SUCKS just having one starter area.  Even if it IS a really good starter area.

For me the next couple months are going to make or break this game.  It's either going to be a really huge thing for me or I'll lose interest quickly, we'll see.  I really want to love it it so, so many ways.

It's worked reasonably well for CoX.

Moved to MMOG Discussion since it's of general interest.

They don't have bank storage in yet?  :uhrr:


Hasn't every MMO since like... ever, have bank storage?

Blah blah blah

Uber ghey = PvE servers

Just saying.

You split between Galaxy and Liberty pretty quick though. And AoC's already blown past what CoH ever got :-)


Did they keep the feature where you could auto-level new characters to 20 once you reached 20 on your first character?

If there is, I'd like to know.. i've gotten two characters past 20.  I will not be doing that again.

..

You spelled gay with an h. You lose.

Too many blows to the head...

Which is why I have no interest in playing with people who don't want 24/7 FFA PvP.

It's not "uber-gay", it is THE BEST THING EVER IN A VIDEO GAME.  But let in people who don't want to be there, and it turns into a pile of suck as they bitch to everyonem, especially the devs.  I'd rather have a game that caters to carebears with a good ruleset on the PvP server.  See early AC1 Darktide, or early UO:Siege Perilous.

Believe me, there are sooooooooo many sheep who see themselves as wolves that we don't give a fuck if one carebear ever sets foot on one of our servers.

No, 24/7 PVP is the best thing ever in an FPS. In an MMOG it's not nearly the best thing ever. But you keep thinking that. It's not like you're not in the minority or anything. Or hell, a minority of the minority.

We'll never have another early AC1 darktide, just deal with it and move on.  FFA PvP HAD a place in MMOs, now? Meh.

I joined a PVE server so I wouldn't have to deal with 14 year olds compensating for the size of their 6 inch little finger. I had enough of that crap in Eve.

back on topic I do agree that it needs a bit more outside-ness to really make things stick. Fun combat will get them a long way and fast leveling will at least help people compete fairly in the long term. Good questing will help too. But they need other things to do like trading and what not.

Actually having a decent customer services dept will go a long way.. and for the love of god kill the volunteer monitors stone dead.

Something about this thread...  So different, yet so much the same...

*covers his crotch* what are you suggesting?  :pedobear:

So someone finally did tap into the "If I can get just 5% of bored WoW players my game will be  :awesome_for_real:" market.  Will be an interesting one to watch.

Heh, no, he's right. As always, the PvPtards come out when they think they're gonna get a game that lets them be "free to kill anybody, anytime, 'cause it's just so real, man!" And then the anti-PvPtards, (myself included) come out and laugh at their tiny e-peens that they need to bolster by killing people that can't play the game as well as them.

I predict AoC will go the way of LotRO if it hasn't gotten a considerable playerbase and does'nt suck by the time WAR/WotLK come out.

Exactly what is the way of LotRO?

Boredom and loss of interest after about 3 weeks?

On the topic of content amount. I put forth that the quests are better, and the contend is simply better than Wow launch content. I don't read shitt in Wow when i play, i have read just about every quest i take in AOC. As far as PvP, to each his own, but for one, i don't think classes are imbalanced. balance is a lie. A barbarian should kill a caster quickly, if he targets the caster... Casters are hard to play in this game, and are support roles, the are not first sting combatants, all casters can do some sick nasty things to others...IF they are supported and not focused on.

Also, lets not forget that most of what people post is only negative, I was very skeptical about FFA PvP in this game after the OB. But i have played on a RP-PvP server for a few weeks now, and its IS nothing like OB in terms of spawn ganking, or load ganking (EDIT: as in, its dosnt happen). Infact just last night i Role played a Necromancer getting robed by 4 thugs (They initiated it, walked up and demanded money), I killed 1.5 out of the 5 level 25's, while i was level 26.(i love my fear, but its not sustainable like in Wow where i have it on a foot pedal (http://www.atpm.com/9.01/images/kinesis-foot-pedal.jpg))

It was possibly one of the best times i have had in an MMO in years.

Now possably, PvP, and RP-PvP have attracted different types of players, but i am really enjoying the Rp-PvP, and have not had any issues with random ganking ETC..

They will at least run up and tell you they don't like the cut of your jib before attacking. :grin:

I haven't enjoyed PvP in an MMORPG since Shadowbane, which I simply loved.  I haven't tried yet in this game but I will at some point, if I can sustain interest.  I like large scale PvP much, much better than one on one, though I injoy the odd skirmishes that lead up to war.  48 X 48, unfortunately, is not what I had in mind, although I'll give it a go unless it turns out to be a huge slideshow.  In which case, I'm disappearing myself.

I am not psyched to level a second character even to 10. Fast levelling and limited replay will hurt retention eventually. Funcom got the first half of MMOGs right. Now they need to show they can accomplish Act 2. Act 3 will be the first expansion.

Maybe for the veteran crowd. My point was that LotRO didn't fail as was implied, it merely niched itself as a super-casual Diku. Just like CoX hasn't failed. Will Conan become a niche game? From where I am standing - likely. Does that make it a failure? Maybe it could be considered a success if becoming niche, atleast to the players enjoying it despite its status. It's all swings and carousels.

Paraphrasing Darniaq, every MMO that doesn't shut down is successful to an extent. I don't see the purpose of predicting the number of subscriptions for the sake of being right, which is largely what's honked around here.  I'm all for discussing the future of the genre aswell as its current state and games. But anyone can pull predictions out of their ass. It takes no effort at all and creates a Nostradamus effect - have enough guesses and you'll get some stuff right.

We are accepting your Excel charts now. May not be based on anything tangible. The jury's families, coworkers and SirBruce are not allowed to participate.

You can skip the entire destiny quest, as the beginning or between each arch is the option (Talk to bar NPC's). However skipping it means you get nothing, nada, zip.

I hit level 61 last night, and we had our first member hit 70 yesterday morning. We're on a full PVP server, but its remarkably tame considering past games with FFA PVP environments.

Quick observations:

The Bad

1.
They need further client optimization. Even on rigs above the recommended settings its a toss up on FPS performance. I cann't see how even 48vs48 battles are feasible at this time.  I have a core2duo, 4 gigs of ram, a GF8800GT card, and at times I drop down to 12 FPS for no apparent reason.

2.
Quests should be repeatable.  After you've done a quest, there's 0 incentive to want to help others do theirs. They also involve a lot of running around, and should be more rewarding.

3.
Loot drops are pretty bad.  When you help lowbies level (apprentice someone within 10 levels of yourself), they get no loot they can use either. Loot tables need serious adjustment, and items should have a level range (+/- 10 levels) to match with the apprentice system.

4.
Travel is pretty rough. People have taken to dying on purpose just to help them travel through a zone faster.  Personally I think the rez pads should be used as a teleport system, and you should be able to click one to teleport to a location within the zone. The cost of a horse is ridiculous, and I hear you have to waste a talent point to learn the skill too.

5.
When people are learning a new game, they should be given free respecs. Money is tight in AOC, and the cost to respec gets very expensive very quickly. IMHO they should give 3 free respecs, and then 1 free one each major patch.

The Good

1.
Because you can hurt other people outside your group with spells (at least on PVP servers), it forces you to have to pay close attention to detail when coordinating multiple battle teams. You can't go blindly charging in blasting AOE's like in previous siege games (DAOC/SB) or you'll kill your guildmates.

2.
The classes are fun. Healers flat out suck in other games because healing or buffing is all they do. AOC healers will heal, cc, and nuke well enough to where you can consider them a threat. It makes the class more fun to play, and HOT's (heals over time) create a different level of strategy in PVE/PVP encounters.

3.
There are plenty of instance adventure zones for players to enjoy solo or with a group. They can be found in the main cities as well as the adventure areas.

4.
The game is viable for both solo and group based character advancement. Solo'ing will take a little longer, but not obscenely longer like past games.

5.
The quest lines are actually pretty interesting, and there are tons of quests to do. The good thing about questing is that you can see where the quest NPC is, where your objective is, and you don't waste a lot of time wandering around like you did in past games.

6.
The apprentice system is a great concept. Basically you can group with someone 10 levels higher or lower than yourself, and still contribute something to the group while getting good exp.  The only problem I see here is when the game is older, and people aren't leveling so much. Under those circumstances, newbies or alts will have to solo/group it to 70 before anyone can really help them.

7.
Player cities are cool, and they provide benefits to guild members. It would be nice if there were NPC's in each zone that allowed you to access your guild city though.


Overall AOC's been a fairly good game with a decent launch. I think with a few tweaks here and there that they'll be able to hold on to most of the original subscribers at release, but right now their biggest obstacle is getting the game running decently on a wider range of PC specs.

No items/cash, or that as well as no exp?

NOTHING.

Boo... i want something that lets me skip the first 20 levels, and start at level 20.

They should have stuck with the whole solo to 20 thing.

Come on, who are we trying to bullshit?  LotRO was a flop.  The fact that almost none of these games get unplugged doesn't mean that they're almost all successful.  Turbine acquired what was looked upon as a Holy Grail of IP for the genre, developed an A-list game around it, had at least one executive talking smack about competing with WoW, and then ended up with about as many subscribers as EQ1 or CoX are still limping along with years after their primes.

Honestly, I'd have to agree. It probably makes money, though with the amount of venture that Turbine has eaten in the past few years I'm not certain of that. But for the franchise and the amount of cash people have tossed at Turbine, ending up a little below the three years older EQ2 (itself considered a failure) isn't I think what they were looking for.

Conan has an incredible start, but I just don't see it building on it. I play the game and I have a really good time. But when I think of all there is missing from it, how clue free the devs seem to be, and the limited content, I just can't see how they can successfully build on this. If this had maybe 50% more content, all the quality of life stuff, and was bug-free, I could see it easily hitting a million. But with all that's done and funcom's apparent inability to address so many issues after a development cycle this long, I see it fading not growing.

I won't play AoC beyond the initial month. Lotro is way prettier on my system, and flop or no, the super-casual niche seems to be my favourite place.

And on my part, I'm fairly convinced LotRO was a moderate success for Turbine, despite the lukewarm subscription levels. They recently received more venture which I find unlikely to have happened if LotRO, being their most recent game, was a financial flop. We can only speculate. Thing is, it seems that for a game to succeed beyond EQ2/LotRO/EvE levels, it needs to actively rob WoW of subscriptions which no game has done yet. Being on top has, as always, intrinsic advantages. LotRO got as many subscriptions as it could without hitting that critical mass.

As for Conan, I think it's too early to say anything. Speculation without a confirmed patch schedule is like playing darts wearing a blindfold.

I'm playing LOTRO right now with my wife and some real-life friends.  Even though I think the game is in many ways superior to WoW, I would still have to agre that based on subscription numbers it is a flop.

Having said that, they have made it into a wonderful little flop.  The character outfit and housing system is terrrific.  They have a lot of little touches you would never expect.  They do suffer from a linear storyline and a lack of non-grind content, although they are pretty good about putting in new zones/content on a regular basis.

What is best about the game is the stability and graphics, its not cartoony,but it is not too hard on older systems either.  It is incredibly stable and I only have trouble in large PvP contests (and even then not so much, and thats with hundreds of folks running around.  Hopefully AoC and WAR can achieve the same.

You still can with the Destiny quests, because at Night, it is a solo game.

It's if you choose to not bother with the Destiny line that you're dumped back into the massive.

Riddle me this.

If I'm a mage, and I'm in the night quests, why are most of the loot drops stuff I cannot use?

They put absolutely zero thought into this game.

Because most of the rewards given at the end OF THE SOLO QUESTS are better and specifically for your class.

They put an asston of thought into this game.

No, the only reason they gave you class-specific rewards for the end of the night quest is because you're going to be wearing those items for the next 20 levels!

They should do it all or none. Make it so the warrior NPC drops all of his shit, so you can pick through it, or he only drops shit that is relevant to you - as far as single player night missions go.

uh, what?

Do quest = Get reward.

Nitpick:  While Eve is in roughly the same bracket in terms of subscriptions (although well above LOTRO and EQ2) it's not fair to compare them.  Eve really is the little game that could, having slowly built to success from obscurity, as opposed to being a hyped-up flop.  I know it doesn't alter your point at all, that's why I labeled it a nitpick.

I believe Nija is referring to the drops that mini-bosses in the night quests drop, such as the ring from the final battle and similar. To which I agree, to an extent.

True enough. I would elaborate on some points, but it has mostly been said and this is not the place.  :-)

It's an itemization thing. You get buried in useless drops from the Day side, and may be lucky enough to get useful items from the Night. And after that luck, it depends on the class you chose.

I'm pretty impressed with how sold-out it is locally.

I'm still planning on waiting 3 weeks before I buy to see if people are still playing.

Mordred.

It's funny that you mention Mordred.  It was proof that, on some level, pvp servers are more about mentality than ability.  The best played groups in DAoC rarely (if ever) came from the pvp servers.  So while people love to comment on how hardcore they are to play on pvp servers, it seldom translates into higher quality pvp gameplay. 

Yeah because PvE servers have all the cutting edge PVP guilds on them.  :uhrr: I'm not sure if you think that is true today or not, or maybe this is just bizarro world again.

The best 8v8 groups in DAoC were all from PvE servers.  It wouldn't surprise me to see this in other games as well.  Wanting to avoid mouthbreathers doesn't mean that you're bad at PvP by the way.  It means that you wish to dictate how your time gets spent. 

I avoid PVP servers because they make no RP sense whatsoever. If I'm standing in front of a guard or other witness with some asshat bashing my skull in, there should be repercussions within the game world. I had that happen to me on a few occasions on both of the 'dreds and just finally gave up. It was, at that point, no long an RPG but an FPS and that's not what I wanted to play. I far and vastly prefer DAoC's RvR. Both siege and 8v8 were fun and made sense within the virtual world and I was allowed to play PvE at my leisure. Good stuff there.


edited because English is hard.

How can you prove any of that, even remotely? Sounds liek another PvE dude generalization to me. The main logic though, to me, that would lean towards you being correct is sheer numbers...When you have a hundred groups of 8 on PvE servers as opposed to ten coming from PvP servers, chances are most of the top ten would be from the PvE side.

You'd think that, yet somehow they got venture capital AND two big fantasy licenses (LOTRO and DDO) when their last release (AC2) had been a critical, technical and financial flop of epic fail proportions. Never underestimate the desperation of venture capitalists.

Aren't you invalidating your own argument here? Yes if all teams were EQUAL it would matter which server had the majority of players entering a tournemant because by sheer odds the winners would most likely be from a pve server. If you are saying however that pvp server players are in general better at pvp than it shouldn't matter how many pve server teams enter, the pvp server teams should have a clear and distinct advantage and skill which would propel them to victory.

Having a million americans in a race doesn't lower the chances of one kenyan winning it.

From my own experience he's right though, as much as pvp players want to consider themselves hardcore I have seen them routinely get stomped by pve groups in other games that allow x-server pvp.

in short server choice != pvp skill.



get over yourself.

Was the gear equal?

Your assertion is only right if success is random.*  If success is random, then you are wrong about PvP being skill-based. You lose two ways.

*If I pull 1,000 men off the streets of NY and ask them to play one set against Andy Roddick, he is going to beat them all.

A valid argument and one often brought up "pvp players have a harder time getting gear because of A. other players or B. Not as much interest in pve"  I can at least say in the case of wow, where all dungeons are instanced and therefore only hard to get to(summoning stones and warlocks make it even easier) that many pvp players have just as good gear if not better than some pve servers or conversely server choice != pvE skill.  Many pvp servers on wow hold the forefront of content pve-wise and that is a proven fact.

Never underestimate their greed, either.

From your own experience means shit to me, no offence. You've probably never played a PVP+ game in your life.

Nija makes a pretty good point though, but mine was basically when there is a basic skill cap you can reach in a 8 vs. 8 PVP type setup, the side with 10 to 1 odds will win a heavily paper-rock-scissors type match.

Anyways, if you guys wanna say people from PVP servers suck at PVP compared to those from PVE servers...I'm over it.

What they're saying is that playing on an FFA server does not necessarily make you a better PvP'er. Not that PvE PvP'ers are superior. If you  :heart: the gankfest environment of an FFA server, go for it. I have no problems with that. It's the superior attitude that sticks in the rest of our craws.

It might just be that people who tend to frequent FFA servers (me) don't like large groups or large guilds.

In Meridian 59, I'd just duo.

In UO, if there was more than 5 friendlies on the screen I felt uncomfortable.

I've quit everything else very quickly or not tried it at all. (edit: or not play past beta) 8v8 was a clusterfuck and I never even considered playing DAOC.

I'm a minority in these games, but opinions are equally worthless across the board, so there it is.

Maybe other people on FFA servers share my feelings.

Every so often the DaoC test server was converted to use the dred rule set. So to satisfy all there collective E-Peens the best (or most vocal) 8-man groups from the 'blue' servers and the Dreds would copy over to the test server and duke it out.


This almost always ended with the Dred teams being a lot less vocal about how awesome they were, especially after losing, even with having the 3 realm class spread 8-man against the single realm Blue server team.


The other thing that would happen would be a 8-man team from a blue server, would reroll onto the Dreds, spend a few months farming the old MagMell loop, be the top earner for their time spent, then either quit the game entirely or go back to their old server, deciding farming zergs IS actually more fun then ganking spawn campers and having ignore lists longer then dictionaries.

LOTRO was hardly a flop, it's doing quite well. It didn't live up to the developers' hopes, but then what does? AoC didn't either; they hoped to sell through 700k in the first month and I reckon will end up doing around 500k, which still makes it the second most successful major western MMO launch ever. Remains to be seen how well they retain customers, from all I've heard the game is pretty rough past level 45 or so so some of that good will may start drying up.

Now DDO and AC2, those were flops.

For any high-risk venture, anything other than great success is a failure.

Some people here obviously think just shipping a MMO is some sort of success. Wth standards so low...

Given the money reportedly spent on AoC I'm sure they wont' be happy with a LotRO outcome.

How much did it cost btw?

[edit] Oh shit, around 70 million.

Hmm...

(49.99 * 400,000) - 70,000,000 = Whoops

Did not quite follow this patch server 'tournament', but when I was on Modred, Wrath was the strongest team/guild and they were utterly dominant. There was a top team (Bedlam I think) that rerolled on Modred, but they still lose most of the time to Wrath. Wrath's setup was caster heavy, mixing 2 enchanters for the fire resist debuff/stun and their leader is a fire wizard who nukes for unearthly damage with the debuff on. I don't think that such a combo is possible with realm class restrictions.

Having played on RVR servers first, the only other team that really impressed me was Rel Por. Their exploits were the stuff of legends back then. I honestly believe that most of the regular RVR teams would have been destroyed by Wrath.

Hey, it'll only take them 8 years to hit profitability at 400k users.. with no other costs and 100% of sub fees AND box revenue going to pay it off. That's fine, right?  ;D

I kid, I kid.

The game supposedly cost closer to 40mil, they sold out of Collectors edition and had 100k ish people pay $5 for the early access

Bruce has it at around 150k subs, and while I wouldn't call his chart reliable, neither is it known to be totally wrong.  That's just a touch more than he has listed for CoX, and a bit less than he has listed for EQ1, although the EQ1 numbers haven't been updated in a year.  If you have a better source, I'm all ears.  Because an "EQ1 in 2007" subscriber level for a new A-list MMO with a high-value IP is fucking failure.

((100,000*89.99)+(300,000*49.99)+(100,000*5))-40,000,000 = Whoops.

LOL

Actually, considering that a publisher only gets a percentage of the suggested retail price...



(((100,000*89.99)+(300,000*49.99)+(100,000*5))/2)-40,000,000 =
(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/abouttofail.jpg)

They fought eachother directly on the test server.  Funny thing is that they either had equivalent gear or the PvE teams were from the classic servers and actually lacked ToA gear and abilities (which is a significant disadvantage if you consider ML abilities). 

I personally playeed on Andred, Mordred, and Pve servers.  My experiential evidence was similar to what happened on the test server. 

With finance theory like that, I hope none of you ever try running a business.  All that matters right now if is the cash flow from the subscriptions will cover operating and development expenses. The answer to that is clearly yes.  Whatever it cost to develop the game is now irrelevant. The money is gone so you ignore it for any evaluation of Funcom as an ongoing operation. Investors will certainly look at Funcom's track record of delivering returns before financing future projects. Investing $40 million over three years to get a $10 million income stream is a good investment. If that investment stream is only $5 million, not so much.

Funcom is a public company, as many of you know. It has a market value of about $525 million. That implies they will earn about $40 million a year for the forseeable future (using an 8% discount rate [40/0.08=500]).  That is an optimistic expectation at this point, but not insane.

Don't bother, some people want it to fail so they will say it's failing regardless of how long it goes on.

People say Eve is a failure or EQ2 is a failure or etc...  It's a stupid argument because it's almost always relative.

Thank you for doing your part to keep the stock market moving forward.

I think the game is fun. I'm having a good time so-far.

They do have a problem however. The main quest is never really explained very well, and it isn't immediately clear that the first town is a "Starter" town. I know 2 people that quit playing because they thought the entire game was like guildwars in that, they just popped into instance zones to play. Not realizing they would eventually get out of the 1st town. Also, it's not clear you need to put points into your skills. And, being a scout class, I was almost totally crippled without "Hide" to complete the main quest.b There should be constant spammed, pop-up windows every 10min until you go to the skill screen and use at least 1 point. Usually you level in the middle of a fight, the "Make sure to use your skill points" window appears, but your fighting so you just clear it. Little details like that are going to lose them subs pretty fast.

 :awesome_for_real:

Obvious joke was obvious.

If it doesn't shut down and maintains enough subs to keep going, it's not a failure.   This isn't business theory, this is a web board for making snarky remarks... usually very UN-informed snarky remarks no less.*

*Ed to clarify:  Uninformed in regards to MMO & game development.  You can practically hear the eyerolls from the Devs who bother to come by anyomre.  :oh_i_see:

Before the AOC release NPD thought LotRO is the 3rd biggest MMO in the US: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10377&Itemid=2
This is US only so does not include Europe where LotRO has also done fairly well. However because it does not include Europe, Eve does not show up. I find it interesting that EQ2 (or EQ) does not show in the top 5. So many say LotRO is a failure. What about EQ2?

The accuracy of NPD numbers can be debated but a portion of the buisness community will except them. In other words venture capital will use the NPD numbers even if they are flat wrong.

I doubt that it costs just 40 mill. Unless you cut back advertising and infrastructure costs.

I find it highly dubious based on the number of servers and the number of players I seen on them that LOTRO has more than 500k subs, which would be what would put them above FFXI. I believe the research firm may have fallen for the "4 million characters created" stuff.

Yep, our standards are incredibly low and yet still some manage to shit out an MMOG that doesn't even meet those standards.

EDIT: Because our != are

And once again their data is US. I did not mention it, but is in the link provided, the data is PC only. 500k for FFXI is worldwide and includes PS2.

A lot of people in eve have 2 or more  accounts (they even have a deal where you can get a second account at a lower price for x months) so you can take EVEs "subscription" numbers and slash them by half

Uh, those are website rankings.

You're going to correct basic finance theory by saying "if it covers its running costs now it's a success"? Good luck running a business champ. Just because you cover current costs at one specific point does not mean the enterprise is ultimatly successful one.

"We lost three mil last week, and looks like we'll lose three mil next week, but this week we made 100k profit! We've done great!"


The answer is clearly yes? Please point me to the figures that back up this statement.


Again, provide the figures to back up the $10million scenario. And back up the strength of the expected investment stream (will it last 1 year, 2 years? 10 years?), et cetera.


So basicly you have no idea what you're talking about and are just as stupid in saying "it'll be a success!" as others are in saying "if it can't hold or improve these numbers for a good while it'll fail".

The fact is that Funcom's development costs, running costs, and expected return (number of subs over a certain timeframe) should be considered, not the fact that another company might be able to survive over the long term with similar sub numbers. Given the assumption that all these costs are much higher in Funcom's case than in the other exmaples provided (EQ1 has how many subs over it's life? UO cost how much to make and is still running? Both these cost how much to maintain now?)--which may or may not be unreasonable--you're in jhust as silly, or worse, a position in saying it'll make a go of it.

BTW: I didn't say LotRO was a failure. My reference was to similar sub numbers in the future: If AoC cannot get it's shit together by the time WotLK and WAR come out that it is likely that it's subs will drop to LotRO numbers. This does not mean failure, but it would seem very likely to be much less of a success, and closer to failure, than LotRO was because it seems (and this is an assumption) that AoC cost more.

No, you can't.  Subscriptions equal income, regardless of who owns how many of them.  And the reduced price of a second account probably doesn't even faze CCP, since the guy who owns them is still only using one person's worth of bandwidth.

Basically, my solution to the "Well we don't know how many people own those X number of accounts!" problem is to not give a shit.  Subscriptions are money, and money is what the industry pays attention to.  If some game can double it's sub count by getting everyone to buy two subscriptions, that's what they'll do, and that's what others will look to copy if they can.

I havn't seen this discount for multiple accounts anywhere, or any way to link accounts for that matter.

You CAN pay for your subscription with in-game money though, through Eves brilliant RMT system.  Buying money from farmers is illegal and it gets taken away (and CCP is quite adept at finding everyone who buys and taking it away, though it may take a few months), however you can buy a game time card, and then securely sell it through the forums and a tool in the account section for in game money.  This motivates people to play 2, 3, sometimes 4 or 5 accounts, as -they- don't have to pay in $$, some other schmuck who can't earn ISK at even 1% of their efficiency spends their hard earned money on a timecode, and sells it.  Fucking brilliant, and kudos to CCP to doing it.

However, WUA is correct in that it doesn't matter if it's 200,000 seperate people, or 50,000 people with 4 accounts, they're still getting paid, and that's all that fucking matters.

From the perspective of the bottom line yes, but if you're using it to guage popularity or market penetration or even just number of players you can expect to be playing the game, it's not accurate.

It's an offer they run every once in a while not a permanent thing, as far as I remember.  I can't even remember what the damn program is called, though. 

I am not asserting any facts about Funcom's business model. I did not claim that losing money one week and making it the next is a good business model. All I wrote is that if Funcom has sufficient revenue from subscriptions to maintain a profitable existence, then the company will be fine regardless of how much they spent on initial development. Then I laid out a very simplistic mathematical test of what current investors expect as an earnings stream.

Then you got ornery and started demanding sources.

If it is more than covering its running costs, it should keep going. Which is a success from the point of view of the players and the employees. Only the investors are getting the shaft. Which doesn’t matter as long as there are enough investment successes to keep the gamblers laying the bets.

Amount invested is irrelevant when it comes to deciding if you should pull the plug on a MMORPG. If you invest $50 mil in a factory and it is barely breaking even, you should pull the plug. Because you can sell the building, machines, office desks etc to get a good chunk of your money back.

But in a MMORPG, most of the investment has gone into art and code specific to that game. Typically, that stuff has zero market value. So pulling the plug won’t get you your money back. A MMORPG investment is a bet, the house doesn’t give you your money back. The gamblers know that.

Investor opinion is important.  They are deciding which MMO's get funded.  If they think your pet MMO is failure you are less likely to more games like your pet MMO.

I wonder which business school teaches that "keeping the lights on" is success.

http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/ (http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/)

It wasn't mine. I didn't assert that. I apparently failed to make my point that in judging Funcom on a going forward basis one should ignore the cost of initial development of AoC. That was all I was trying to point out.

By that logic the Microsoft's and Sony's consoles weren't a success and should have cut them because they haven't made back their initial investment yet after 2+ years.

I doubt any MMO that isn't WoW made back their initial investment in the first month, instead it's a business model that's meant to build up loyalty and revenue over time, where soon enough their month to month profits will exceed what was originally put into the game. 

Also remember, just because they claim ti took 40 million to make AoC doesn't mean that it was $40mil of funcom's money.  Publishers usually (on non-mmos at least) pay the development house for the rights to sell the game

You people are strange.  As long as the business makes enough money to service their debt and pay their expenses it's a success.  It's that simple.  Some of the most successful businesses in the world have done just that plus a couple of percent a year (not even that for non-profits) for generations.

They don't need to pay back 40 mil the day after the product launches, they don't need 100% returns yearly or any other such nonsense.

Its about investors not creditors.  Creditors are just happy you pay off your loans.  But Investers are going want to return on their investment to justify the high-risk endevor like an MMO rather than do something safer with the money.

Anyway, I am not trying to doomcast AoC. I am just trying to say that just because company doesn't shutter the servers mean that game is success.  In regards to AoC, they have a solid start.

Funny you should say that... by themselves many consoles don't make their costs back. But they're good longterm investments for the companies because of the residuals.

Which is the case for MMOs. Yea, it's nice if you can recoup your upfront investment from box sales alone. But I would imagine that has not been common in recent years. And really, not doing so merely means you're amortizing the investment over a longer period of monthly subscriptions. So you account for that when assessing team size and resources for the Live game.

 I'm wondering which universities teach that getting a good job doing what you trained for is a success? Most of them I think. For most of the people at Funcom, keeping the lights on, paychecks rolling, and customers happy is a success. You are confusing "a good investment" with "a successful game".

Even if only a fraction of MMOGs pay off big as an investment, that will keep the investors investing. Provided the payoff is big enough, and the payback on the big wins is big enough. MMOGs are casino capitalism at its finest. Not every bet is going to win. The industry just has to produce enough big investment wins to keep the gamblers at the table.

Funcom's shares are 51 per cent up on 12 months ago according to this site:

http://www.sharewatch.com/norway.php

So I reckon some of their investors must be pretty happy.

You are confused, or quibbling over semantics that are pretty much identical in meaning.  The investor is simply, and only, trying to find a higher return for his investment than he could have gotten though other means.  The higher the return, generally the more risk.  The investor IS a creditor.  Often with the stupidity of accepting stock as a collateral, rather than a tangible asset but, creditor nonetheless.

If you own a crap load of stock in a company you are more than happy to watch it grow, no matter how slowly.

This tangent is all well as good but can someone can please point me to the bit where someone said "if it doesn't make back it's money in 1 year it's a failure" or "if it's not making heaps!! of money now it should be taken offline", and all the other 'points' you financial gurus are arguing against?


And this is where we come to the point about expected revenue (box sales & subscribers make the majority of this, I expect) against expected running and startup costs over a projected period. The people saying the AoC has this in the bag would do well to raise and defend such projections.


Exactly. You said "you guys know nothing about business, funcom will be ok because of assumed information". No one was making a general point about running a business that required you coming in to enlighten us about, so provide some basis for your position or take your pedantry somewhere relevent.

The relative success of AoC to other mmos is not something that you can just assume. Unless someone has figures and projections, info about the investment and et cetera then it's all hot air, and it's as stupid to assert that AoC will not be all that sucessful as it is to assert that it will.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/a-qa-with-mark-jacobs-eas-chief-warrior-on-warhammer-online/

So if I understand MJ...  If you spend 25mil you need 100k subs to make money and 250k to be a hit.  I assume once you pay off your orginal debt, the theshold drops.

From that article:


Put my ass in beta then, motherfucker. Shit, how long a brother gotta hold out for that?  :oh_i_see:

You're already signed up. He said signups, not ninnies running around Not Betatesting. :grin:

Where he writes "creditors" I think he means "lenders" or maybe "owners of Bonds issues by the company"

I'm a Betatesting Ninny fool. I just have nothing to betatest.

If you get Conan you can /bugreport all day long! :awesome_for_real:

Million. (http://hopey.netfonds.no/release.php?id=20080606.Hugin.1225739)

EDIT: (go figure, I am late. There's a thread about it)

Well, we can update this thread with the fact it's 500k players now rather than 400k. Call me crazy, but I bet they send out an email that says 600k players in another week.

This is shooting the hell out of our "after WOW games will need to be stable and finished" ideas isn't it.

Well, this was a pretty stable release that they patched often (and well), which resulted in a fair amount of server down time.  All told, one of the more stable launches.

"Complete", on the other hand, is worthy of some conversation.  I'd say that the equation is; "complete enough" + patching frequently (and well!) = worth a sub

I don't recall WoWs launch being much more stable or complete than this.  I recall long, unexpected server downtimes and complaints of little high-level content for WoW at launch as well.

I'm sure if we looked around we could find our launch thread on it.

Horrible server queues cause my old guild to have to switch to a different PVP server in WoW, but in all it was a good launch.

I'm pretty sure they had tons more problems than Funcom did with their account/billing page. So kudos to FC on that one.

And......

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12021.msg399518#msg399518

I called it ... It is a fun game and it will hold 200k+ subs in 12/08   :drill:

I remember queues and I think some server crashes? For that matter, don't they still sometimes have extensive downtime on some of their servers. I don't remember billing problems. I did have problems with setting up an account with funcom, but I think that was limited to people who had AO accounts.

I don't remember any problems with WoW's launch on my server.  I know some other servers were crashing under the load but mine seemed fine.  WoW was definitely a smoother launch, Funcom make a lot of annoying decisions with timing, delays, account management etc.  WoW was also finished when it launched and had radically fewer bugs and problems.  My only main complaint was that the horde side was less fleshed out than the alliance.

That said I honestly didn't think AoC would manage to keep their servers up, I thought it would be an epic trainwreck far worse than Hellgate but better than AO and I was wrong.  Funcom did a lot better than I thought they would, but of course my expectations were incredibly low.

Fun trumps all.

I wonder if the are having good patches because they have left the closed beta servers up and are getting things looked at before they go to live server?

Their patches aren't good.  They introduce almost as many bugs as they fix.

Edit: And they don't list the most important nerfs/changes in the notes.

It's holding me away for now...

Those patches have had more stealth fixes that worked flawlessly than things they advertised. The number of broken things is nowhere near the number of fixes.

The broken things have been....highly visible though - like buff/debuff stacking and cotton breaking. Though, they said they turned cotton off. Which I suppose makes sense. Whatever, point being, they don't break as much as they fix.


This is a huge problem.

Well fuck. I made the mistake of reading the subforum, and now I'm considering wasting my money on this.

You have ten minutes to convince me otherwise, or I'll likely end up buying it at lunch...

Why would anyone convince you otherwise?

It's very, very hard to find any serious flaws in the first 40 levels of the game, unless you're a mage.

After that, it's a crapshoot. 40-50 seems well-filled out, particularly if you're a soloable class. After that, well, let's just say the level cap is 50 right now.

It's F13.  Things always go good for the first 2 months. Give it another 3 weeks or major game release then see where things stand.

So I like the magery stuff they had in the earliest levels. Does their power suck after that? I'm looking for a good ranged DPSer that uses Magic. I really can't recall what I played near the end of beta though that I was enjoying. ToS maybe? Does Lightning and Fire. Thoughts? I just bought Mass Effect, which is freakin' awesome, but I still have hopes for AoC and wouldn't mind getting leveled up before the inevitable "balancing" begins. It's fun to play good games when they're broken enough you can advance fast and amass wealth :grin:

Then play a Priest of Mitra or Tempest of Set if you want to get someone leveled before nerfs. Or a Ranger.

So your suggesting I don't play a mage because they are bad currently, or because they are due to be nerferd? (I bought it at lunch of course)

They're bad. You want to play a mage, play a priest. Better mages anyway.

I really like my demo,,,,,,,,,havent died nearly as many times as my necro. LOL

Of course I really like my ranger and my assasin and my dark templar and my ToS.

God I love my Priest of Mitra.  I am going to be shattered when they nerf us.  They seem to care more about PvP balance though so maybe we won't get hit since we're not overpowered there.

All I want to do is repulse->move to the side->lance over and over.  I'm grinding in the cannibal cave and still liking it.

You havent leveled with a necro or demo AE group have you?  I havent played one but after getting from 47 to 50 in about an hour with some guildmates i think they are damn near OP.  Maybe not very good solo but they are a must have at higher levels for grinding.

Just to give you an idea of how regular players are, here's my commentary on a group I'm leading:

[11:44] f13dotnet: holy crap
[11:44] f13dotnet: i'm leading a pub group to sanctum
[11:44] f13dotnet: figured I'd do a good deed for the day
[11:44] f13dotnet: a 45 and a 46
[11:44] f13dotnet: neither have done it
[11:44] f13dotnet: don't know where it is
[11:44] f13dotnet: I forgot how bad casual players are at games
[11:44] f13dotnet: the Tempest of Set I'm with didn't know he had a second skill tree
[11:44] f13dotnet: while the conquerer is wearing level 10 gear

-

[Group] [Cthylla]: you can't really miss it once you see it
[Group] [Cthylla]: nemedians are the valley under the bridge
[Group] [Cthylla]: heh
[Group] [--]: im unfamiliar with coordinates
[Group] [--]: i'm right on the corvo green dot
[Group] [--]: coming up on wold hills res site
[Group] [Cthylla]: hit M
[Group] [--]: err wild
[Group] [Cthylla]: and put your mouse over the map
[Group] [Cthylla]: you'll see the coordinates

Yes. Yes. Please keep up the AoC talk.

*scratches arm and watches the clock*

3 hours at least until I can play.

*taps vein*

Please... just one more hit thread...

 :grin:

Schweet. Think it was Tempest. I remember the PoM not working for me because I kept expecting DPS->Melee->selfheal and instead got DPS->gimped HoT->dead. But that was awhile ago.

You're kinda gimped until you get Radiance and then the feat that makes healing yourself damage the enemy. My heal spell is my strongest attack spell at this point. And it heals for a shitton. It basically ends battles at whatever level.

TOS has the same sort of heal spell and gimpy HoT, but it doens't hurt enemies.

So I found that place with no problem... that make me irregular?  :ye_gods:

I ended up having the guy kill himself and I walked back to Tesso and led him there. I gave him the coordinates before. I'm still trying to figure out how he killed himself west of Sanctum in the wildlands at level 45 >_<. Crazy shit.

I don't even want to talk about how this group turned out. It was not great.

after all your bitching, the fact remains the same.

This is the only mmo that is actually trying to push the genre. now b4 u all go ape shit and say "but SWG had that" guess what, none of them was able to actually pull it off and put it into an actual fun game. Sure EvE has all kinds of great features but the game is ZZZzzzzzZZZ boring as shit.

This game is really good, sure got lots of bugged abilties, they nerfed my barb and my necro ... all kinds of bugged mobs... but the fact remains.

THE GAME IS FUN. and for you schild who rolls on a pve server, your dont even play the same game i do, so w/e.

You know, I don't mind that he's ragging on anyone because we all know he's retarded and/or absolutely insane.

But I really wish even the insane would read everything. At least he doesn't use ellipses.

Yeah, schild, stop being such an AoC hater.

My bad. I must've blacked out for 150 hours over the last 2 weeks.

I think grunk caused one of my neurons to sprain. Because I feel like I have an ice cream headache after reading his post. Is this common? I mean, I've lurked for a while, but have only recently really started getting into these forums. Anyways... off for some Tylenol.

Grunk! is our mascot.  I don't expect him to be clever or profound, I just expect him to stay Grunky.

Please shut down all neural functioning prior to entering a thread touched by Grunk.  Use this experience as a reminder of a very important posting safety habit in the future.

I just want him to write "fucken" 5 times in one sentence again. I seriously loved that and it is not the same when anyone else tries it.

Noted. And thank you.