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Age of Conan - Fictional Update Notes

So, I see we're on version 1.0.2008.520. With Metal Gear Solid 4 coming out, I wanted to take a breather. But since it comes out Thursday morning instead of Wednesday morning, I've taken it upon myself to pound out fictional patch notes. Feel free to consider this a 'how to fix your game.' I've never really done this before, so if the language isn't quite right, feel free to tell me. Also, for Funcom – I relinquish all rights to anything written below. I simply want to see it all implemented to turn a game I like into a game I love. Furthermore, any posts in the thread following this that may have things that should be added are also free for you to use.

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UI

* It's now easier to copy your preferred UI layout to other characters because we have decided to actually identify individual character's settings folders by character name and not some god-awful indecipherable server hash code.

* You're only in your current guild so you can someday clean out their bank and sell that shit on eBay. None of those fuckers are really your friends, so to reflect this your Friends List will no longer default to your god damned Guild List. The Guild List now has its own Tab under the Guild Menu. Your Friends List (which probably has only the name of the alt you are mailing shit to on it) will be much more manageable.

Tortage

* Destiny quests will no longer leave you in a situation where you are stuck at Level 13 needing Level 15 and stuck at Level 17 needing Level 19 to continue. We underestimated how many anti-social people play MMO's, but if you were a social person, you wouldn't be pissing in a bottle under your desk right now, would you?

General

* When zoning into a resource gathering zone, instead of entering the least populous zone instance, you will automatically enter the instance that has the most resources available at the moment you zone.  Sometimes the underpopulated zone instances are underpopulated for a reason.

*Chat - We realized that we are not in the early 90s and so have added the /who command. Just kidding. Good lucking finding your friends idiot.

http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=41567

OP posted my notes with a small link at the bottom with no explanation. Copy and pasted the entire thing. Made a wall of text in forums which drives people fucking nuts. I don't even want to get into the comments. Can some EU type get in there and set the fucking record straight.

I never in my life thought I'd be called a WoW fanboi. That's just surreal. Apparently particle effects on weapons came from WoW. CRAZY. I DIDN'T KNOW THEY WERE THE FIRST TO DO IT.

More of this sort of thing. Very good immersion idea. Hell, MUDs have been doing it for years.


Funny presentation. Honestly, I think I'd prefer to have the patch notes of games presented in that manner. Telling players to figure it out is essentially what happens anyhow, so come straight out and make the game even more of a game. From administering MUDs in the past, I can tell you there are a lot of achiever types playing these games who love to have the devs shit on them. They view it as another challenge to overcome, and they often do. So make these players work for you. It'll keep them playing and paying. ;)

I lol'led. At you.

Good frontpage "article" though. Has the review been shitcanned?

Oh the comments in that thread are GOLD, everyday I lose faith in humanity a bit more.

I just thought it was fantastic that they said whoever wrote it must be a rabid wow fanboy. In fact I think I "loled irl".

I think you should put that as your forum title Schild, "WoW Fanboy" and see what kind of reactions you get.

Honestly the responses in that thread weren't that bad; there were some fanboi's attempting to circle the wagons but I'm glad the OP lifted it and dissapointed in the lack of laughs it being lifted provided.   More comments from the WoW invented particle effects guy.  I'm not sure I agree that weapons need shiney effects to denote what magic "type" they are myself but I haven't played AoC yet so I can't say one way or another.

If you hadn't posted anything about class balance I think there would have been even less "he's an idiot" stuff.  Class discussions always make everyone fucking retarded.

@Schild:  I like this, hope we see a news item like this for WAR as well.  Though I suspect it might end up being a bit more of a chore to write.

So why should rogues have Hide exclusively? I thought it was sort of generally agreed that having stealth be exclusive was dumb.

Because they're rogues.

Is this a joke?

What the fuck is a hiding priest gonna do? Jump out and smack you with a cross of mitra necklace? Hiding is for rogues. ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGUES. ROGUE. It is the definition of Rogue in fact. Rogue (noun) - Hiding.

I lol'ed at the thread. :awesome_for_real:

Fanbois are funny.

In terms of PVP balance, smart one. The ability to choose whether or not to engage is a pretty powerful one, and quite obviously runs the risk of making the class binary.

PVP is the minority and balancing for PVP just fucks up the rest of the actual game.

You don't balance for PVP. That's for FPS titles and Fighters. Not MMORPGs.

Rogues hide. Other classes do not.

Do Rogues have greater Hide/stealth detection abilities than the other classes? I'd say that's a fair trade over what the other classes get.

If I were a cloth wearer, I'd at least like the option to duck and cover, PvP and PvE alike.

Someone provided a jump on the U.S. forums, but didn't copy and paste the massive text. As a result, there's a lot less hate in the thread and little to add from contributers as well.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=80691 (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=80691)

All in all, I thought the patch notes were a good read. Patch notes are fun.

Assassins hide too, right?

Assassins are Rogues. Rogue is an archetype. Assassin is a class. And you're posting about things where you've done no research.

Because the ability for the mega-damage tanking plate wearing class to choose when to engage is equivalent to the ability for the wad of tissue paper to choose when to engage?

PVP is the minority in your head.

You do balance for PvP. Don't be a fuckin' tool. Just because you don't like PvP doesn't mean its not a damn worthy thing to balance for. Especially in a fuckin PVP game. Don't push your 'PvE is important' crap on me. :)

Yeah that popped into my head a bit after I posted. But it was a serious confused question not a snarky one; you're right about the latter bit.

No thanks.  I like going to populated instances when I want to PVP, or gank or whatever you want to call it.  I like being able to control which instance I go to. 

The rest of the article was awesome.  I need UI rescaling, and I need to be able to take all that gay scrollwork off everything.  Just give me transparent boxes.  I like my boring box art.

Slayerik, don't be a 2-dimensional fuckwit moron. There's a fraction of PVP servers and as you said, most of the Cimmerian folks are peaceful. The PVP Balance is encroaching on the PvE game, and that's just Not How You Do It. It IS in fact "Doing It Wrong" as we say. You know it, I know it, and let's not pretend otherwise. So don't push that PVP is A Notable opulation Crap on me.


See above. Considering I don't have to make a commercially viable game for a fraction of the population, I don't care how you get your kicks from ganking. I'm simply not catering to you. I'm catering to the vast majority. Not the incredibly vocal minority.

I DEMAND CHARTS.

The funny part is, you decide EXACTLY what you can do on a PVP server if one of the instances is bad. Just like what Draegan said.

You guys are so funny. Maybe you should try something before you mock it.

Is there a minute amount of PVP servers? I never really looked. My guess is there is a good amount of them, since this a PVP game after all :)

(http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll177/edog420420/Schild.jpg)

Jesus christ, trim that down.

Also, the pink should be labeled 'reality.' I'm sorry dude, you can scream from the highest mountaintop and pick pinks even pinker than that. It still makes you a bizarre outlier.

So is this game not designed to do something similar to EQ2, where balancing stuff for PVP doesn't affect PVE, or vice versa?  Seems like the obvious thing to to for every mmo.

Its all of 26kb, I cant be arsed to resize it now....sorry mate.

Actually, its kinda cool to be on a server where I'm not handcuffed. Happen to see that idiot that's been spamming OOC ? Time to bitchsmack em. But yeah, schildy, you are right as usual. I am some sort of rare MMO gamer. Someday my kind will be extinct probably, huh? I think otherwise, and I'm guessing as people realize they are stuck on easy mode servers they may take the plunge into PVP and like it. It's slowly happening already. Even with WoW, where it is SLIGHTLY less FFA the PVP servers were heavily populated and desired by people buying characters.

As usual, we can agree to disagree.

Carebares are so funny.  Cute little guys.

Questions, please note I've yet to play 5 minutes of AoC:

-Why is it bad in pve if all classes have hide?  Why is it bad at all?  Rogues dont feel like special snowflakes?  I dont get this.  Unless there is content you can only get to by sneaky means and rogues are sad that they can't monopolize it I'm not sure why this is an issue.  Also fuck rogue players anyways.  Fuck them.

-The d2 tele-pad thing makes more sense but there has been a pve and pvp reason brought up not to make that change.  Would it cost that many more litres of imaginary dev sweat™ to when they code in the auto teleporter thing make it a clickable option instead of the defacto way it is?

Its not really. Its that other aspect of the game where everyone having hide is annoying.

I just max perception. Works great.

I haven't played a rouge in this game yet. I have friends that do.

Why does every MMO have to be the same as the one before?

To keep the post short - Rouges get all manner of better stealth abilities, they are better at it. I don't see why Rouges has to be the same through all eternity and no game developer should be allowed to change that - it is written....

I don't get as much use from stealth as my Rouge pals - it works pretty much as intended an brings more to the game.

Had some laughs reading your "notes" and a few "gulps" when I thought that they might implement something and that would lessen the game experience for me.

Cheers.

(http://www.mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander/images/Le%20Rouge.png)

I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say that that was on purpose.

It's been 12 years since UO, Slay.  There has been PVP since the VERY beginning of MMO's 30 years ago with MUDs, and in pretty much every major release since then.  There isn't going to suddenly be a cultural revolution.

Hey, we all wanna change the world!

Locksley wants to paint it red.

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/Bikejesus.jpg)

Leaked Patch Notes (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?p=986680#post986680)

lol @ Post #5.

So true, that guy should post here.

Wow, how come the AoC official boards aren't a total wall of evil noisesuck?  I mean that was downright civil.  That wasn't even the EU forum was it?

Yes it was the EU forums...

uhm no.

About the whole "Hide should only be given to rogues" thing.

The current implementation of stealth in any given MMO is invisibility. This is bad for PvP.

…

What? I have to justify that?!

Giving a minority of players complete invisibility (in the form of a “stealth” ability) on the battlefield, heavy burst damage, large positive modifiers to already massive damage dealt from stealth, a range of instant escape tools that are difficult-to-impossible to counter by a majority of players, and excellent survivability out of stealth is foolhardy.

Would you rather play a class that can do heavy damage at range, but cannot see his target, or one that can do equivalent melee damage to targets who cannot see him until he has already incapacitated them? Would you rather play a class that can take a beating, or one that can choose which fights to enter and escape at a whim if things get too rough? It would be stupid to choose the former in both cases. Stealth coupled with the assorted survival tricks designers normally grant stealth classes will determine the outcome of nearly any PvP engagement.

I am not saying that stealth/invisibility should not exist within the context of massively multiplayer PvP; I am saying that giving any player stealth who also has combat functionality beyond stealth, such as damage or healing, is radically overpowering that player to the point where hostile interactions with other players cannot possibly be balanced.

My solution to the problem of stealth — some of you may not agree that it is a problem; oh well — is to completely eliminate it as a special ability. In my ideal MMO, in which people run around on the ground and occasionally take flight but are still affected by gravity pulling them toward the ground, as opposed to EVE Online, in which people fly around incomprehensibly vast expanses of empty space with no discernable vertical boundaries, combatants function just as they do in Real Life. If Real Life had magic. Which could not make one invisible.

Stealth tactics, in this ideal world of mine, are Counter Strike tactics. If you don’t want to be seen, hide. If you want to set up an ambush, find a choke point and hide in some bushes. Unless a player is blind and deaf, it ought to be exceedingly difficult to ambush him in the middle of the [insert generic compound fantasy name here] Salt Flats.

To that end, you cannot see the names of a non-friendly player unless you specifically target that player. There are no giant rainbow-colored names and guild tags floating above hostile heads to mark exactly where they are (just in case you missed the eight-foot bull-man with flaming watercoolers on his shoulders charging your position).

In my mind, an ability that can be a tactic instead should always be. Yes, this means that everybody can “stealth.” Is that really such a bad thing?

Stelth is in MMO's becouse true sneaking using the environment cant happen (one day, mabye).

See my name over my head, tab to me if you cant see it.  :grin:

Stealth worked great in UO.

Then again UO wasn't a diku with tab selection. How about no targeting or health bars at all?
1. Flora: off
2. ...
3. lol

The posts by the OP make me wonder what made him think he would like AoC in the first place.

WOW is a PvE game with PvP thrown in as an after thought.  AoC was built with PvP in mind from the beginning. 

Personally I play for the PvP, and if I could skip PvE I would.

Those fucking carebears and their constant whining for features that work...

Exactly.