f13.net

I think at this point it's clear aoc has big issues and most likely retention will be it's achilles heel but I'm starting this thread not to be "aoc sux lawl" but more to discuss where exactly they went wrong and to ask what they could have done differently.  imo it was a great idea and could have been a really engaging game but it just fell short.

It gives me no reason to play currently.

Thread was split by me:
1. Lamaros, you aren't a mod, don't be a tool. Also, you've been a real dick lately, calm down. Leave the personal problems at the door and stop taking your fat aggression out on f13. This isn't rehab for anyone except Grunk.

2. Cheddar you do make useless threads. You know that. Sometimes you even make them in the wrong forum. Also, you might drink too much.

3. "Why aren't you playing" and "What went wrong" are two very very different questions. The latter tries to get to the core of what made the game unpalatable for everyone and where the design went awry while the former is things like "I didn't like the run speed," "my computer is a dog and as such this game ran like ass," and "i dun liek diku, lulz." Stay on topic.

What went wrong?

1. Performance issues, especially at launch. Things are way better now but many have left already. Stuttering, crashes, game not starting at all wear people's patience down.

2. Too much soloing. Too much power to the players loners, as in the chance to play all the way solo to 80. That, in the post WoW era (when a solo-viable MMORPG was very much needed), isn't such a good idea cause everyone is a little more burnout on the genre than they were pre-wow and need solo-viability coupled with gentle and easy group-content. ie: dungeons (see below). Otherwise they'll rejoice for the solo play capabilities only to feel utterly lonely and bored after forty levels or something. As someone else said, there are better single player games around, so they shouldn't abuse of solo-friendliness in multplayer games. That backfires.

3. Lack of rewarding group-casual dungeons. Dungeons aren't fulfilling enough and they fail to provide both a social-enhancing and a gamistic-rewarding experience. They are too hard hence need full commitment, a good group with a much coveted guardian and 6 players. They force you in when after spoiling you to play alone at a relaxed pace for 40 levels. No one wants that, unless it rains rare stuff and the effort is minimal. Which is the opposite of what is required (unless you do them at a higher level). And itemization (see below) for many dungeons came too late.

4. Itemization. Itemization was so stupid in the first 3 weeks that I think the game retained more player than expected. Everything was SO brown that, realism or not, you felt nauseous about it. Now things are slightly better, but a level 30-ish player is stuck in brown mode and he has no way to think things will get any better. Nausea, disappointment, quit. Also, stats and bonus are so moronic they don't make items cool at all, not even in the numbers dept. People like big numbers, +50 Defense Bonus, so there's nothing more depressing than getting a +0.1% defense bonus jacket at level 1 and a +0.2% defense bonus shirt at level 30. Even numbers are brown in AoC, and the UI (see below) doesn't help.

5. User Interface. Totally uninspired. Icons are great honestly, but the inventory/character sheet are WAY uglier than 7 years old Anarchy Online ones just to mention something Funcom. Fonts are ugly, "rolling 3d item thumbs" are SWG ugly, inventory pages is just IDIOT and numbers are once again too sparse, too small and too brown/white. This game needed a little more coloring for item descriptions, better fonts, better icons for items (skills/spells/combo ones are fine). When you get a blue/purple item you don't want a smallish dull list of 0.6 bonus, you want some noticeable figures that stands out when mousing over it.
Non existant Guild management tools, ugly and buggy firend lists and all around plain or lacking menus stink bad in 2008. Big mistake here (yes, better one is in the works. Who cares about tomorrow? Things went wrong here YESTERDAY).

6. Lacking features. For a PvP oriented game, the total lack of incentives made is depressing both for hardcore killers and casual battlegrounders. No reasons to play leads to empty battlegrounds, or empty wins in the open areas. As much as it can be fun, too many couldn't start a single minigame due to the lack of players, and the few they participated in felt useless, confusing and not-rewarding (especially because they very much likely died in a matter of seconds). The lack of features could have been less blatant if it wasn't all about the most new/interesting/publicized aspects of AoC: player cities (not working or useless) and PvP (useless, or as we like not say "not-meaningful"). Hell, they even stopped mentioning border kingdom's Towers for smaller guilds. That's backstabbing all the smaller guilds who will never be able to fight for a BK or even just gather the shittons of required resources to go T3.

7. Bugs, so many. Playerbase will forgive you if you feed them with solutions and other things to keep them busy. It doesn't matter how fast they patch, there's a strong perception that something is lacking from the game and it wasn't patched in soon enough. Not to mention the perception that bugs weren't all squashed soon enough. Many are being forgiving with Funcom because they are neglecting the 6 afore-mentioned reasons anyway. But whoever sooner or later got hit by one of those, simply had no reason nor will to cut Funcom some slack, especially since they were paying for it.

8. Finally, Players' burnout. In 2008 no one is fresh enough to accept troubled gaming experiences, and that coupled with that old feeling of "been there, done that already, thousand times" doesn't help a game that, despite being very well crafted on some aspects, lacks some of the features that could make it different enough. In the end Age of Conan felt "old" too soon to experienced MMORPG players, especially because of one or all the 7 aforementioned reasons, and while I don't really know how new MMORPG (read Warhammer) will do in the future, I am now even more sure than I was that you really need: 1. A cool interface, 2. great itemization, 3. smoother performances and 4. a couple of SERIOUSLY new features. Conan, while being the game I am loving much more than I expected, and quickly rising in my personal all time MMO favourites chart, lacks so far 3 and a half of these elements.


It all sounds like a fiasco. I think it is definitely not. Something went wrong if everyone was SO hyped up despite all the bugs in the first 2 weeks and simply let it fall after 14 days. But all the points I made up there are fixable in a few months and I am confident they will. I wonder if it will ever be enough to gain back all the escaped players. First impression rules everything, the buzz, the hype, and the cool smart kids are pretty much done with it. The game needs ironing out point 1 to 7 so bad. It can be fixed, now they just need to stand out with what they promised and that is not just blood 'n boobs.

Oh crap. Too early in the morning. Coffee dripping down my 30in monitor. Schild you're great! That was a good laugh. Made my day.

UI - Just to many things to list but the who / or enter not taking you to your chat window input was silly. Just wispering/telling a person was insane. Launching with everything the same color, no customization, the friends list carrot orange online - tangerine orange offline.

Grouping - No PvE social community at the lower levels (honestly I played my pve mail till 55 and let my account expire had a few chars on a pvp in the 30/40's). Tortage sets the precident for solo play with no need for grouping and it really killed the game in my mind. The rest of the game I could solo a lot but I didn't find any reason to group build (take most other diku MMO's where its the same thing but there is at least one dungeon per ten level bracket).

Bored - No real dungeon till 40, broken content (hi crafting), horrible ui, I just ended grinding for little reward and didn't see any goals at the top end to accomplish. I don't think the game will win me back anytime in the near future.

Oh well I'm back playing sid meiers pirates, I'm really tired of mmog's in general.

The game's stability for myself, and many other people, has actually gotten worse as time goes by.  A crash used to be a fairly rare thing at launch but lately I can't get through five zone lines without the game dying.  Yesterday was the first day I haven't crashed or gotten the gray bug map in weeks and I think that was because I made a questionable change to my OS's memory management.

I'm still playing which is fairly rare for me with an MMO so I might not be the best person for a what went wrong thread.  The only other MMOs of the slew I have played that kept me for more than two months were EQ, WoW and EQ2 (after they fixed EQ2, I cancelled the first launch month).  AoC was very fun and a breath of fresh air for the first forty levels, it has been well worth the purchase and monthly price in my opinion but after level forty things really break down.  The main thing that drove me to eighty were the great outdoor zones, I needed to see them all.  Playing an overpowered class for the first time in my life no doubt helped too.

At any rate here are a bunch of my random feelings on the game's downsides, many of them will echo Falconeer's because he hogged all the good points :-).

The game seems to be struggling no matter how you play it.  Casual players hit a wall in the fifties and are faced with grinding, which they won't do.  Players who are willing to grind hit level 80 fairly quickly and then discover there is almost no endgame content.  Both playstyles run out of what they want to do fast.

Most of the group dungeons suck.  I was shocked by this because I absolutely love all the outdoor zones.  It's as though they had a "B" team to design the dungeons.  They are mostly just one, maybe two types of hallways that curve around and around and are filled with a bunch of mobs with bad AI and almost no scripting.

Making classes or abilities far too powerful and then nerfing them.  Beta is supposed to catch this shit.  Nothing will turn a person off of a game faster than if they go from feeling really powerful to feeling weak.  Most of the fun in an MMO comes from the combat and if suddenly you can only take on half as much you won't be happy.

The game catered to PvP players.  Now I don't want to get into a whole PvE versus PvP thing, I happen to think that there is a market for a PvP focused game and that lots of people would play it.  But making that game is going to be much harder because there are far more issues to try and work out and if you don't get it just right the players are going to bitch and moan endlessly.  Funcom does not have the talent to pull off a PvP game.  I feel they are compounding this folly by focusing on their "Massive PvP" update.  Their systems will not work, it's too difficult to get MMO PvP right.  No matter what they release the PvP players will express their disgust and continue to leave.

Crafting's pretty bad and will have to be completely overhauled at some point.  They would have been better off not putting crafting into the game at launch.  It was a terrible afterthought and very poorly done.  There was almost no effort made and even less testing.  You can max out gemcutting in five minutes (not including all the time spent zoning because of the bug which has been in since launch), all you have to do is cut any three gems per tier.  Everyone may as well be their own gemcutter.  Potions and food from vendors are very cheap and quite effective so I don't see much point to alchemy, it might be needed for high end raiding.  Your entire guild city and battle keep need exactly one architect.  Most people use one, maybe two weapons and we all know the raid drops will be/look better so weaponcrafting seems like another dead end.  Then they dumped every single other item onto the armorsmith...  Want silk?  Armorsmith.  Full plate?  Armorsmith.  Rings, shields, necklaces, cloaks, both light and medium?  Armorsmith.  It's insane, the only reasonable way to do that would have been to split the profession into tailors, smiths and jewelers but they obviously ran out of time.

There is very little end game.  Like it or not people need fake little numbers showing progress, or at least those of us who play dikus do.  No one has shown up for our battlekeep sieges, minigames are surprisingly hard to get and don't have any goals attached to them.  Gear isn't very important (aside from gimmick gem stacking stuff that will probably get nerfed anyways) so I don't see much point in raiding.  The raids seem pretty lackluster so I wouldn't bother with them for any sort of "I raid for the fun of it not the loot" type reasons.  I spend most of my time helping friends get to eighty, once they are there I have no idea what we will do...

Bugs, patches, QA and communication about them.  I'm not going to elaborate much on this since you could go on for pages.  Let's just say I am astonished by Funcom's truly heroic level of incompetence.  At first you're willing to just ignore them because the combat and environment are so good, but the bugs wear you down bit by bit.

Items aren't very good.  Some green items are better than blue, level forty blues are better than level seventy.  Everybody is wearing a skirt.  I've only ever seen a particle effect on an NPC's weapon.  The stats are a garbled mess, I guess that's fine though since most stats don't do anything anyways...

More than anything it's the pet peeves which are really getting to me now since I don't have much to do.  My only real goal is harvesting for the tier3 city.  They are all minor points but happen again and again.

• I don't like how it takes so damn long to mount but I especially hate dismounting.
  
• Whenever I get interrupted harvesting three times in a row I get pretty angry.  At the very least you should get the resource you were collecting.  Either that or make the interruption come at the beginning of the bar for fuck's sake.  Why do they have to wait until the very end of the collection process to screw me?
  
• NPC's which knock you down.  Fuck I hate that.  It would be fine if only group/raid bosses do it but any plain old mob can put you on your ass.  Bonus points if they fucking stun you afterwards.  At least the last patch added a buff to prevent chain knock downs, you could pull four mobs in Khesetta and spend half the fight lying in the dirt because they would each do a knock down.
  
• Melee mini-bosses that teleport around.  This really only happens harvesting but the insanity of it always gets me.  What is the point of teleporting ten feet away from me if you just have to come running right back?
  
• I let out a whimper each time I have to answer people's questions about the wounded child in wildlands not being there or how to reach Nimblus the thief.
  
• Only being able to send out one mail with four item attachments before I have to close the trader interface and reopen it.
  
• Having so little inventory space in a game which sees fit to inundate me with gems and alchemy supplies.
  
• Gold spam tells and gold spam mail.
  
• Not being able to complete the last resource quest I have had lying around my quest journal for a couple weeks because the NPC is broken and won't talk to anyone.
  
• The cost of the higher level horses being so arbitrarily high that no one even bothers saving for one.
  
• Getting a nice flawless gem only to waste it on plus cold invulnerability because I don't get to decide what gem to create, the effect is random.
  
• The motherfucking gray map bug.
  

1) Not enough content for those with too much time - It's been fine for someone like me, who has a couple of 31's and one character approaching 50.  They don't have enough content for those playing through faster.

2) Bugs - I've had very few game stoppers, but they could have done better.  Some people have encountered really bad ones though.

3) Customer service - The opening support was :uhrr:.  Now they have too many people playing with too many issues.  More :uhrr:.

I'm still happy and playing though.

I think this game is a disaster yet I'm still playing.  I've never encountered this before personally since I quit almost every other MMO since they all sucked.

I think one of the main things is that a lot of the users are disenchanted due to a lot of the above mentioned stuff, and along with that have lost faith in Funcom's ability to fix stuff. Every patch seems to only fix about half of what they said would be fixed, and at the same time they break about as much stuff as they fixed. And its not obscure stuff, its like "take 10 seconds to see if it works" type stuff. I am going to say that for me, the majority of my lack of faith in Funcom revolves around their ability to test if stuff works.
I mean, if you are going to tweak the spell damage coefficients, maybe some one should test and see if the coefficients are even working. This is like basic shit, and they are failing on it. Thats really the core problem for me.

Loss of faith is the big one. There's no indication that funcom has any ability to manage the game. People want something with a future. The bugs, lack of end game, friends quitting, and general disorder don't lead to a lot of faith.

Agreed. I was very optimistic at the beginning seeing the switch from beta to release (removed debugging etcetra aka miracle patch), but when they change Necromancer and other classes role to something that doesn't make sense it seems Funcom don't know what they want themselves. An MMO should be planned not only for release and "we'll take it from there" mentality doesn't work, it should be planned months and years ahead in terms of implementation and revamping. Fixes are mostly "on-the-fly" as many are unexpected bugs of course. Seems Funcom has not done this and the PvP patch implementation on the horizon is rather random at the moment.

Question: is AOC a PVP game or a PVE game?

We can argue about that, but I'll put forth my opinion: they don't know yet.

PvE main is what has been stated during development and PvP as a second.

I still intend to come back to AoC when I have time. Working life has unacceptably steamrolled my time for sleeping, eating, breathing, detoxing, epic bicycle travelling and gaming. I think there's still a lot to enjoy in AoC - everyone probably takes it too fast and wants more, more, more.

The UI --  Sucks.  Non-intuitive and difficult to mange friends/people functions.  I never figured out how to use the "find groups" tab,  if it worked at all.  It would always return no one.  There was soooo much delay built into the chat interface (and poor decisions on how to get into or out of that interface) it made chat a chore.

In general,  things were poorly implemented and designed.  Like the "quitting guilds accidently" bit that lots of people have complained about.

Combat -- This is half suck/half good evolutionary improvements.  Using the arcs so you hit more than one thing in front of you combined with collision detection was interesting.  Nice use of knockdown abilities, aoes (conal and pb).  Hots over heals.

The various combat minigames were fucking clown shoes.  Tapping in different directional arrows to get off combos?  Fuck you.  Forcing you to jab a number key to get off an normal attack?  Fuck you again.  Somehow, Funcom convinced people that tapping the same directionals over and over added some kind of player skill to the proceedings, instead of just increasing the amount of drudgery.

It turned every fight into hurriedly picking around your keyboard to stab the right couple keys to get the combo off.

DAoC combat had more depth, and TR combat managed to capture more of a "live" feel.

Whoa.
Just asking: did you PvP in Conan? And did you do it at max level? maybe with a guild group against another guild group?

What is with this trend of condeming a game 1.5 months after it launches because it isn't 100 percent functional in every aspect?  Has there been any MMO that's launched as such?  I don't think WoW can even claim that.

I enjoy the game, but I'm not blind to it's problems.  But I'm also not ready to say "ZOMG WHAT WENT WRONG?!!?!" because it's not WoW 2008 'perfect'.

Expecting the polish and content (of a game that launched 4 years) is chasing a fools game.

Oh geezus, give me a break. The game is a trainwreck. It has a very innovative combat system, but it is broken like no major release since SWG.

Be real, if it had tanks, they would fly.

I haven't purchased or played the game.

The world didn't interest me much, the classes sounded pretty old-hat, and (re: falconeer's Player Burnout) I'm not going to fork out for any of these games until I hear some good reviews. I'm interested in WAR because it seems to offer such a wide variety of experience with piles of unusual classes and starting areas. I imagine there's enough beginning-game there at the outset to justify the purchase price even if I don't make it past the first month. It won't take much to convince me to give it a go... AoC just had me shrugging.

About those good reviews: They never showed up. The word of mouth on this game has been awful. Any positive people list is invariably followed by a small army of "but"s... and not just among bitter burnouts like you guys. I heard it from friends who bought the game, I heard it on other forums, I heard it at random at work. About the best I'd hear were things like Draegan's "it sucks but I keep playing for some reason." That is NOT a selling point. I know we're all desperate to see something other than WoW and EVE and whatever else we're playing, but come ON.

tl;dr --
1. Game's gotta have something inspiring to show me... not just inspiring promises, inspiring evidence.
2. Game's gotta get good word-of-mouth.

The part that went wrong is the strange part after a month when I just didnt want to log in anymore. Not sure why, but it seems to be happening a lot around here and amongst my friends.

Not sure why, but I went back to suicide ganking in Eve.

The game has potential, but i cant be arsed to grind again.

Im just not cut out for Diku fake PVP MMOs anymore I guess.

See?  Same shit we have discussed for years. 

You cannot launch half assed, or in this case, quarter assed.  There is no recovery for a horrible launch.

I think their biggest issue has been with their customer service. Every launch to date has been marred by something, but to say you're being open and then hide things in plain sight really rubs customers the wrong way. A fair amount of their customers would have been a bit more forgiving if they were more pro-active with getting information out there and not hiding nerfs/issues.

How's that late June PVP revamp? Ever appear?

Eve is the exception.

I agree, but thats not what people are asking for. I think just a tiny dab of polish and maybe enough working content to get to max level shouldnt be out of the realm of expectation (Grinding Villas does not count).

People where plenty ready to overlook a rocky launch, but the fact is right now the game is not getting better and so far Funcom hasnt shown anything that would lead people to expect it would get any better.

Their knee-jerk reaction patches have almost universally gone way overboard. And so far each patch seems to break as much if not more than it fixes, and on top of that, half the fixes dont even fix the problems they are supposed to fix.

It is currently 1.5 months since release and female character STILL swing 34% slower than male characters. Thats a pretty fucking big problem to still be around.

Here is a decent post I read on the AoC forums about what was promised by Funcom for the release of this game.

Of course not.
It was stated n the official producer letter: late june. Then it became late june/early july.. and now that we are definitely in early july there's no mention about it at all.
That's what makes for the loss of faith.

Have they fixed crafting yet?

No. I have not played in over a week. Too much regression.

This. The level 1-20 content is so awesome that the regular MMO content starting from level 20 feels like a slap on the face. I haven't gotten to level 30 yet to see if the destiny quest picks things up.

As a developer, having your game launch go so horribly that your publisher takes a financial bath and dumps it for pennies on the dollar is not a successful business model. 

It's short.  Okay, but short.  The level 60 one is supposed to be awesome.

Edit: Quotes are hard.

My level 80 destiny quest was the worst thing I've ever experienced in this game.  It was buggy and thoroughly disappointing.

What's funny to me, I heard someone say Funcom was developing a new mmog and I laughed.  Then I heard it was a Conan mmog and I laughed more.   The only thing I can think that would shove a mmog off my radar more than a Funcom Conan mmog is a NetDevil Lego mmog, and it's a pretty close race.

So having never read anything about the game, and not ever expecting to play it, I was blissfully unaware.  When I picked it up two days after release I expected, well, a mmog.  I've played every one since UO so it's not like I don't know what a mmog looks like.  I've played almost all of them on release.

When I logged in, I found a mmog.  

I'd say where they went wrong is apparently while I was ignoring them because it was a mmog about Conan created by Funcom, pretty much the most worthless thing I could imagine, they were promising you guys a bunch of stuff that could never happen.  I came in expecting a mmog and found pretty much a slightly above average mmog, you guys came in expecting that stuff up there and exploded in a fit of nerdrage when it didn't happen.  I now understand where our different perspectives were created.

I think this board is the most horrible place to start a "where it went wrong" thread, and I pray to fucking god no one ever puts a focus group of you guys together to discuss mmogs.  You all hate them, there is a large market for mmogs (see:  Blizzard) but you guys are the anti-mmog people.  You rush into every mmog, pick it apart for not being the Baby Jesus mmog, and then leave in the first month.  Look at the gaming graveyard.  You are not mmog experts, you, for the most part hate mmogs.  You just need to sit back and realize you don't like playing mmogs and move on. ;)

Nah, I think it's just jaded mmogweariness.  It's not that folks here hate or even dislike mmogs, it's that we've all busted our mmog cherry, and are now only interested in quality experiences.  As in fun, reasonably balanced, reasonably complete and, most importantly, at least 95% working.  And there's only a couple of them that have ever existed, only one that was there at launch, and we're pretty much tired of all of them or are otherwise not interested for some other reason (pvp flavor not to our liking or whatever).

And while our criticisms may be far more picky and vocieferous than that of the mass market, that doesn't make them inaccurate or otherwise invalid.  If you compare with real-world/mass-market results, I think any consensus (or at least supermajority) opinion from this group would track very well.  And do a better job of explaining WHY something did or didn't work rather than just that it didn't work.

And because you actually believe this, I rest my case. ;)

No there are people here that are experts. Go take a look at the WoW board and read some of the end-game analyses. Same for EVE and CoH. Many of us have played these games well into "end game" phases.

It is true that for some of the games people will leave soon after trying it. It's a consequence of having played so many it doesn't take long to figure out if the game has long-term potential or not, not that we hate MMORPGs.

Your posts are proof positive that long term drug and alcohol abuse does permanent damage to brain tissue which causes warped, nonsensical thoughts to take hold.  Your opinions are entirely worthless but you are so diseased that you actually think of yourself as some sort of infallible messiah.  Tell me, do you think God talks to you cevik, does he whisper truths in your ear as you slumber, truths you feel compelled to spew out on the internet like so much textual diarrhea?

No one here "exploded in a fit of nerdrage" you overdramatic hack.  You could cherry pick sentences with profanity where funcom screwed up but the overall assessment was positive.  Very few expected to even like AoC upon logging in, it was quite a surprise that many of us enjoyed it.  Even schild liked it, I honestly never thought I'd see him post something positive about an MMO ever again.  Funcom offered hope for a slight change in how an MMO would play out and didn't succeed, heaven forbid we discuss that as a fact and proceed to question why.  The main reason people are expressing their disappointment is because AoC actually came close, the first part of the game is great but as you play more all of the problems start to overwhelm you until you want to leave.

The people on this site would make an amazing focus group, the games in the MMO forum versus the graveyard are a perfect mirror to where those games are in reality.  Worthwhile MMOs that are actually healthy and have subscriptions numbers that go up like WoW and EvE are on top, all the failed rejects are right where they belong.  AoC is being given a chance, only time will tell where it lands.  You can go to the beginning of any of the graveyard MMO games and find posts describing exactly what was wrong with the games and why they eventually failed, the posts are prophetic.  This isn't rocket science, I don't think we're any smarter than other people, figuring out what's wrong with an MMO is easy, you play it and find what isn't fun.  Fun is hard to get right though, even if you rip out all the suck you still have to create fun and very few companies can manage that.  It being so hard is why I rarely hold anything against these companies and am willing to try the next MMO they put out, hoping for the best.

And putting pathetic little ;) emoticons at the end of your bitter AoC fanboi trollings doesn't make you sound any more reasonable, we all know what you're like.  Or at least those of us who have been around long enough to have experienced your other sudden, manic amount of posts after another six month disappearance.  I anxiously look forward to the next time you drag yourself out of a gutter and deign to bless us with your presence again, I find your descent into madness fascinating.

Even a shit MMO is usually good for a fortnight of fun, which is more than I can say about many single player games.  We gripe because we care  :heartbreak:

It's true.  It's why I don't complain too much when I buy a game, play it for a month or so and move on. 

This thread was a disaster at launch, and yet, it still lives! In that spirit, go Conan! If AoC can start ramping up the good word of mouth as it progresses through the coming months, I'll give it a shot.

Instead of anticipating MMO launches, I've moved on to looking forward to what these games become six months after release.


These three points are a big deal for me- especially the bit about itemization. +0.1%??? Bah.

/crossesfingers

I think creating NA mmorpg with as much grind as AoC is outright stupid. This isn't Korea, people don't want to grind.

This.

Trolling much? Missing green? Conan is the western MMORPG with the fastest "0 to max" leveling curve ever and with at least 7/8 of the game completely questable without a group and you complain about grinding?

He's not trolling, he's saying "More questy, less grindy" I believe.   As in, fill out the content, bitches, not that it's a never ending treadmill of gloom.

I know what went wrong.  Funcom is a bunch of business amateurs who really know how to write games really well.  Unfortunately, they don't know how to run one.  The last MMO needed a 3rd party to dig them out of their hack hole.  Some big company needs to buy them.  Not SOE though.  They're too hands on, I think.  They should just sit there and write and not try to do anything else, not even chew gum.

There's a difference between "more questy, less grindy" and "I think creating NA mmorpg with as much grind as AoC is outright stupid. This isn't Korea, people don't want to grind."

Plus, don't know what your perception tells you people, but this is already the case. Conan is already more questy and less grindy, and "as much grind as AoC" sounds like sarcasm given the laughable amount of grind required to levelup.

Grind in AoC is way too much, this isn't 97 and shit like that doesn't fly. You know it is broken when you have to hit EVERY zone in your level range, finish 90% of the quests AND still just barely make it to the higher zone. On top of that there are still substantial gaps on the way to 80 where you still can only grind.

I know this is supposed to change soon, but up to 47 I have never needed to grind.  I still have quests to do, and lots of dungeons I've never touched.  Doing okay so far.

In this day and age an MMO gamer should always have a full quest log at ANY level.  Solo or grouped.  If there is only one story line to follow or one quest line to pursue, the game still needs work. 

Better yet, they should have many more quests than they can ever do (WoW is like this), so they have to pick and choose. Much better for replayability.

On top of this, though, I would argue that the game should also be fun even when you choose not to do quests at all. You should be able to level just as fast by running around exploring dungeons and areas in your level range and just killing things too. I think quests should be optional as well as plentiful; if you feel compelled to go around ticking things off a list rather than doing so because the list sounds like fun then the game has some problems. If you don't so any quests at all and the game feel empty and strange then it has problems. (I hate questing).

tl;dr

If you are trying to say it should have more and more quests, then I agree. The more the better, that's a given.

If you say shit like "I think creating NA mmorpg with as much grind as AoC is outright stupid. This isn't Korea, people don't want to grind." well that's a good and substantial example of the not flying kind. Grind isn't a factor in AoC. The leveling curve is too fast and there's plenty of quest to avoid that unless you play it as a single player uo to 80.

That said, as usual, YMMV as I left WoW 2 months after release when I was about level 40 because it was definitely too grindy for my tastes.


Bingo. It's EXACTLY like that in Conan, it's always full, at EVERY level. Thing is, some of those quests are group ones, and apparently when the time to bash Conan comes, everyone just forget about them. Group quests don't count as quests anymore apparently, they count as grind. Weeeee.....

They counted as quests up until the moment mobs got that heroic buff and people couldn't just plow through those areas if a group couldn't or wasn't desired. My toon was 60 something and had never run system or cistern because of that.

At least he doesn't post little flame bait gems like this:


Also while I think Cevik did a shitty job of making a good point he was at least making a good point.  Every one of you who /quit without it being because of some glaring error that was just too much?  Its just plain burnout.  These diku game systems are fucking old hat.  Many posters here dont like them at all anymore.  But while the MMO market continues to offer up only more saminess bullshit we keep pretending that this time it'll be different.  Instead everyone quits with even less then the half a reason they had last time around.

There is an odd delusion that I think f13 suffers from with regards to mmo's but I'm not the one to try to spell it out.

As someone who hasn't tried AoC yet, thx for the threads though, interesting read in a bunch of them including this one.

Others said it better than I expressed.  I agree with the "Put more quests than you can complete at a range" in.  WoW wasn't like this until they upped the low-level XP, and it made the game drag a bit.  Now you can skip whole zones you dislike, or quests that are a pain in the ass and not have a problem.

No, "GROUP ONLY" quests don't count as quests.  Not if you're selling your game on the soloability, as others have said AoC was doing.  I really don't know if they were or not, I wasn't paying attention since the game never captured my imagination to begin with.  It's like selling a game to PvPers and then saying "Oh, but you have to PvE for all your gear!"  It's fucking stupid.

You haven't frothed this much about a game since Vanguard, Falcon.  It's funny in a completely broken kind of way.

Thats the thing. There isn't one big glaring problem, its just that the longer you play, all the amazing little problems just build up and build up until its to much and all of a sudden you can't stand the thought of logging in.

What's your point?
I wanted to like Vanguard, and I failed.

I DO like Conan, and I am having tons of unhoped for (English?) fun.

Sometimes a game is good, what's the funny broken part?

Don't fret, Falconeer.  I find your enthusiasm sweet, even when I don't like the game.  There is nothing wrong with frothy.  Look how nice cappuccino is!

My enjoyment of your froth would be the broken part.

Very tired of foolishly paying for unfinished games.  Very tired, indeed.

(a) The inability for people to play on servers catering for people across the pond. That killed my enthusiasm from the get go and from what I'm hearing my rage was not unique. I also heard rumors of people getting banned for altering their client to play on different national servers so they could play with their friends.

(b) The jump from the great Tortuga setting to the comparatively vacant khemi. Simply losing all that great voice acting sucked all the atmosphere away, and losing the destiny quest made it all seen so pointless.

(c) The system requirements. I SERIOUSLY still think they shot themselves in the foot with their system requirements. My machine can play Supreme Commander smoothly on medium settings yet AOC stutters along on "looks like a dog" mode and is laggy responding to commands. I seriously think if they had dropped the system requirements right down there would be a lot more playability as I found the actual play is quite fun if I hit a spot where it runs smoothly. Fix that and they would have a lot more replayability.

Not just all the little things, but the fact that there are numerous live vibrant alternatives where everything actually works.

I agree. But I like to remind people that 1) Eve failed at launch and 2) it had a horrible launch and recovered. There IS a recovery for a horrible launch, but you really have to be catering to a unique area of the market or offer something very different.

Eve serves as a good example of what is possible in the MMO genre, but tends to serve only as a spectacle for those of us who like e-drama.

Personally I think eve serves as a fascinating psychological study on what people will do when they are addicted to something, not to mention the massive power of self justification and self delusion. For instance, I cant stand the thought of playing eve ever again and find nearly every other space game much more fun, but even now its takes real physical effort for me not to reopen my account and start playing again.

But, on topic, betting on getting a room full of addicted assholes into a pyramid scheme to keep your business afloat is a very unsafe bet to make, generally.

For me, it seems like it is getting more buggy with each patch. I am getting stuck while running quite frequently and need to jump to continue moving (this did not happen to me at launch at all) and lately this 10,000 ping lockup is happening more and more and that one really sucks.

What exactly do you have against the gambling industry?

This is one fairly large reason why MMO budgets are exploding into the stratosphere. World of Warcraft has set the benchmark pretty high; if you're going to do an MMO like WoW, you're going to need to deliver a *lot* of content.

3 years and 2 expansions worth at launch?

That doesn't matter.  Every MMO (and DIKUs in particular)  that launches is competing with WoW as it is now.  You don't get to move the bar and say "well, we'd do well if we compare it to the amount of content WoW launched with."  You have to launch with enough content for people to look at you as a viable alternative to WoW if your game is going to be similar enough to draw comparisons.   

It's no surprise to me that every time I play a fantasy MMO nowadays, the first thing I do after quitting is go and re-up my sub for WoW.  The most common feeling these games tend to bring out in me is "this isn't as good as WoW.  But you know what's as good as WoW? WoW."


As for what went wrong with Conan? It was released a bare minimum of 6 months to a year too soon.  I doubt they had a choice in the matter with publisher pressure, but the game lacked a singular vision/direction and the game felt like there was a general lack of QA in regards to player experience. 

All i was saying is, that may be why he says the costs are going up , trying to have that amount of "content" before launch,  i was also saying, thats its a little unreasonable to expect, even if it is what you expect.

As far as that goes, i never found AOC lacking in content. Could it use more? sure. I was of the opinion that AOC's quests were simply better. Diolog, presentation ETC.. I guess it only matters to those gamers who read them however.

I suppose if you lower the bar for quests, to one liners and fedx only, you could generate as many quests as Wow has now, in the normal 3-5 years of development.

But then we have a whole new can of worms.

I never got to read the quest text post-Tortage because you just click through that shit fast as possible or get ganked reading.  They really should've included a little transcript in your quest log if people are attackable while interacting with NPCs.

Current MMO's go wrong in exactly the same way as every business venture.  Namely, people overestimate what they're able to do given their time and budget.  Until we get developers with reasonable goals matched with investors with reasonable expectations (HA!), we're going to get the same slurry of partially finished stuff at release. 

This whole "competing with WoW after 3 years of content and 2 expansions" thing is bullshit, not even counting that yes they do have to compete with what WoW is now. Every game so far hasn't launched with NEARLY as much content as WoW had at launch. Let's review what WoW actually had at launch since I think of a lot of people don't remember or don't know.

First, the leveling experience. While there were a few small holes in leveling content (say a few levels in the late 40's) where you had very limited quest hub selection, you still could level to 60 the entire way doing quests, and MOST of that time you had multiple parallel quests hubs to choose from such that you couldn't possibly even do all the content by leveling a single character. You could skip areas you didn't like because there were entirely different areas with quests for your level, nearly the entire way to 60. Combine this with 6 unique 1-10 leveling paths (areas) and 4? unique 10-20 paths (areas) and you can see how WoW didn't just have the bare minimum leveling content.

Next, the end game experience. WoW SHIPPED with five max level dungeons, three of which were large enough and long enough to count as 2-3 dungeons apiece in the current paradigm (1-2 hour chunks) of dungeon design. There were definitely numerous flaws in each of these dungeons but they were all well polished and undeniably COMPLETE. On top of that, there were two COMPLETE raid zones. One, a singleton boss experience and one with ten bosses that was not cleared until about 4? months after launch. Again, there was small changes and bug fixes to these raids, but they shipped complete and not half-done.

So let's get down to business. If you wish to enact "fairness" rules and only compare games to WoW at launch, then go ahead. There's isn't a game that has been released yet who will compare to WoW in content under even this rule.

Yet if you read this thread, that is what is expected. People are expecting not only enough guided content for the life of their character building, but 3x or 4x as much, so that you have replayability.

So you either have a very abbreviated character development (and for people who don't get "stuck" by elder gameplay, a short subscription life) or you have a lot of content.

WoW had a lot of content. They also spent a lot of money funding it (estimates run around the $50m-$60m range). When you spend upwards of $50 million dollars on a project, you are not going to see any innovation, period. So demanding $50 million dollars worth of content means you're going to get World of Warcraft v2.3, and most likely without as much polish because the team doing it will not have the experience under their belt (the number of people who have successfully shipped a large MMO are still fairly small, and most have no interest whatsoever in doing WoW v2.3).

So is that a promise for the game you are working on?  :grin:

I don't think that's totally true Lum, I think some people did, where as others like myself expected a lack of content, but not to the extent that the game shipped with. I personally expected enough content to get me to max level with out having to grind spawn camps, or villas. I personally don't feel that repeatable content counts.

All I wanted was to feel that they hand a handle on their own game. But I see each patch bring just as many bugs and it fixes, and pretty major stuff still in existence. The fact that it took them a month to get around to saying "We will look in to the swing speed issue next week" was pretty amazing to me. That's a huge game issue, and as far as I know its still not fixed 3 weeks after they said they would look in to it.

As stated before, lack of faith is what drove me from the game. I have no faith that Funcom can deliver on half their promises any time soon. I have canceled my sub and they have 3 weeks to do some thing to change my mind, if not, then maybe I will check the game out in 6 months to a year. But then again, I probably wont. Also, I don't need to them do any thing amazing, just prove to me that they have any sort of handle on the situation.

Its to bad really, cause I wanted to like the game so much.

Srsly guys, it's Funcom. AO, see?

f13 does rock, though. Sit back and wait to see the 'What went wrong?' thread. Profit.

I think the masses want pretty and functional with enough content to keep them entertained.  Add to this a carrot or two to keep them playing and you have a somewhat successful MMO.  Yes, this is oversimplified but I think it gets to the heart of things.  Conan has the pretty part, but from what I'm reading here, lacks enough carrot in itemization and endgame as well as functionality to maintain interest.  

Personally, I prefer more tools and the ability to generate content than I do pretty and guided.  Sadly, this makes me niche.  

To bad it's not even REMOTELY comparable to AO's launch.  But of course I see very few names around here from when AO was launched (yes, I know you were there Sky) so I suspect that for the most part it's not hyperbole but simply newbs that weren't around at the time.

Either that or everyone around here has suffered some form of major brain trauma in the meantime and you are really as delusional as you sound.

LOL. Good answer, on so many levels.  :grin:

I don't think thats true. But its also something that cant be measured anymore.


Thats the thing, i don't think it lacked content, it just lacked the amount people were expecting in comparison to other games. There isn't a person on this board that can say they have done everything. In all schools of game play. PvP, Raids, Instances, crafting, city's, keeps, ETC.... Its always someone who is somewhat focused on what they do that hits the dry areas (yes, i realize fun is fun and you want what you want). But thats the price you pay when you cater to so many play styles. Its also why it is quite interesting to me, how turbine (LOTRO) has approached this the updates they do.

Meanwhile, the casuals and varied are still good to go for the most part.



Yeah, and it goes right back to my theory about knowledge being applied to new games, learned from old ones, and disappointment. It would be interesting to see, if AOC had launched without the new combat system, and everything else new and diffrent they have done (stats, gear, combat, leveling speed, mass killing of mobs, minion/prey system) if people would be complaining about content.

A huge percentage of the bitching on the main forums does simply come from people coming from other more traditional games (auto attack clones ETC..), and getting frustrated with it, because it is NOT like the others.

For instance, the gear in AOC has a very small gap in between once piece of gear, to the next, the escalation is small. This is a problem and leads to "gear is worthless" threads and complaints. When from what i had seen in my time playing, it wasn't always about increasing power, but choice in gear stats. This confuses people that play game A for years...that try to move to another.

anyway... thats about all i'm going to say about it, because i always get yelled at about it.  :?

In short: Simply to many variances from the main thread.

I think that's the big thing, as Lum hit on above.  It has enough content to go from 1 to 68 (which is as far as I've gotten thus far), but it doesn't have enough content to go from 1 to 68 x 3.  So, as I said in other threads, when people miss some of that content (because of poor quest design that doesn't force feed every quest hub to them) or when they find some bit of the content that they want to skip (because mmog players have become afraid of grouping) then they hit the forums and bitch.

Of course, there is quite a bit of revisionism to say that wow shipped with enough content to level up without hitting every major quest hub (so that content could be skipped).  I think you can pick and choose now but that's because content has been added and more importantly, quest experience has been buffed so that the same content takes you further, thus some can be skipped. 

There was enough content in wow to do 1-30 x3 or x4 at least.  But after that everyone was filtered together and given the same content.  And back at release, I had to grind a lot more in wow than I ever have in AoC.

Right here is where you tell me how the developers are a bunch meanie-heads that bad touched you and I'm just a fanboi:

I hate to bring it back to WoW when this thread isn't really about it, and when the conversation has moved on, but:


You are not correct. I played WoW at launch and did every single quest I could do and ran out. On my warlock I even jumped over to Tirisfal and did all them too. I ran out of some quests, despite the fact that some of them were grindy to the point that I did whole levels on one or two quests (Desolace Satyrs). I also hit up every instance in the game a few times. I never had nothing to do, but it is just wrong to say that people were spoiled for choice. And I often chose to grind instead of quest because I fucking hate quests. So I can easily imagine that someone else at release, who didn't do every single possible quest, who didn't run the dungeons a couple of times, and who didn't grind for the sake of it, would have met some troubles.

People forget just how much stuff has been added to WoW since original release and exaggerate.

As for these 5 max level dungeons I would be very interested to know what you are including. WoW had Strath and Scholo. And the mini-raid of UBRS. BRD was not a max level dungeon, nor was LBRS (LBRS was just below though, and did have some set gear drops). DM isn't either, but it wasn't in the game for months after release anyway (I know, I'd already quit before it was put in).

As for there being 'small' changes and bug fixes to MC; funny.

Anyway, it is at this stage mostly beside the point. MMOs comming out now have to compete with what WoW is now, not what it was back then.

As for Lum's point about having a lot on content now being required.. well. Yes and no, really. I think people are overstating the issue about there being lots of quests to choose from. Yes, it's nice, but if the game is fundamentaly fun then people will play the same content again. I've done hundreds of dungeons in WoW, repeating some of them many many times. I've done the same dungeon over 5 times in a single day. I enjoyed it and it didn't matter to me that I was killing the same boss over and over. Playing with different people and classes, learning more about the place each time, trying to get that last piece of loot to drop; it didn't really matter that there was a lot of repition because I enjoyed the mechanics.

Look at falconeer, he's still enjoying AoC it seems because he thinks the combat system is the best thing ever. Others enjoy it but it's not enough, the instance system annoys them, the percieved lack of content, and a whole lot of other issues. I stopped playing GW when there was still heaps of content I hadn't done, I was just done with the game, but if there had also been some gaps in content around when I quit I might easily have gone "yeah, content dried up, so I stopped" rather than stop and work out the real fundamental issues for stopping.

Which is not to say that people won't stop playing from lack of content, I just think it's dangerous for people to try pin it down to one issue.

Thank you for re-affirming my faith in humanity.  The rose colored glasses around here really frighten me.

Yes, combat is the best ever in a MMORPG. A game where you can draw your weapon and swing it in the air without having anything targeted just because you feel like it wins by default.

More seriously, I loved my run to 80 with my first char and I am loving the epxerience again with different classes, as I don't hit any cockblock now that I know how to do it faster.
But the thing that is keeping me addicted to Conan is PvP. Be it mini-games, open world random, or sieging, it is that fun.
Now if only they could add those friggin PvP incentives I would be very happy.

WOW SHIPPED WITH PVP REWARDS AND LITTLE TINY ROBOT JESUSES IN THE BOX ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG!1!

That's cause you played the wrong side :drill:

Horde had much less content than Alliance at launch. It was one of the common complaints during Beta. When I played I ran with 3 separate multi-box teams Alliance-side just so I could experience all the quests at their proper levels.

Elf lover.

:awesome_for_real:

Actually I had my Night Elf team, my Human Team, and my Gnome/Human team (I had a Dwarf but decided to move one of my Humans over to that starter area).

WoW needed months to get the first Battleground and about 6 months to get honour (PvP) points, right? Not that it matters, I am just mumbling to myself..

I wish Funcom had only like 1/10 of Blizzard's innate ability of making things happen the right way! Still, WoW was unplayable to me back in 2004 due to shallow PvP, lack of classes, grind disguised as questing (ie: lots of quest but shitty XP reward for completing them) and horrible visuals.

Um, NA mmorpg? As in North American?  Or does NA have some other meaning I've missed?  AoC was created by a Norweigian company and has a much larger European customer base than North American.  Still not Korean, so your main point stands.  But that NA reference confuzzles me.

Yeah, but this is f13, where we don't have to let actual facts get in the way of remembering how wonderful WoW was when it shipped!

Get with the program.

P.S.:  The Robot Jesuses in the collector edition of WoW also went to the kitchen to make dinner and drinks for you, because there was never any downtime in WoW ever so they knew it was the only way to get people to eat and drink.  Otherwise there would have been 10 million dead subscribers in the first month.

Wow, if we all suck here so much, I think its time you went back to the AoC forums. They seem to think the same things about WoW there as you are drooling all over this thread. In your fervor to rebuke everyone here for acting like the AoC trolls, you have turned yourself in to the AoC fanboy.

No one here thinks that WoW was OMG amazing at launch. Yes it had problems. I was on one pf the servers that was down for the first week of launch. Yeah, WoW had some broken quests and unbalanced classes and PVP problems. But Blizzard always made you feel like they where on it. You didnt have to worry that they would break the entire game for you by trying to fix a few % points. As far as content goes, WoW had so much more content that AoC its not even fair to compare the two games. If you took the Tortage experience and expanded it to the whole game, that would have been much closer to WoW at launch. The "facts" are that WoW was a much more polished game with a lot more content than AoC at launch.

AoC has shit for content at the mid levels. The quests are basically recycled kill 10 of these, or go run over there and kill that one named guy. And they run out quickly. Its the same shit, there is just much less of it, and if you miss one key quest you can fuck yourself out of a whole slew of quests. Now I am no WoW fanboy, but you guys are just wrong. I am not just bashing AoC without the "facts", I am stating how I feel amnd trying to put in to words why I cant stand logging in any more.

There is CLEARLY problems with AoC and thats what this thread is about, as much as Cevik wants to "tl;dr" it wont make the valid points go away. AoC has problems. Pretty much everyone I know who bought the game has canceled their account and not one of them is from f13, which you seem to assume is full of idiots. How about taking a deep breath, stop fagging up this thread and realize that some people do have some vary valid points of contention with AoC and Funcoms handling of the situation.

Cevik's point, as far as I understand it, is "AoC is a MMO; of course it it going to have all these problems". The fact that Funcom launched a MMO that appears to work is already a huge step up on AO, so they've learned something. But not enough to get things working correctly right off the bat. Or in their continuing updates.

The question is: are we surprised? Apparently, yes, some of us are.

Mark Jacobs has been given a gift by Funcom on this - I don't think AoC is going to be holding onto that many players if WAR comes out and offers a better experience (especially a better PVP experience, which is where AoC and WAR were supposed to be competing anyway).

Actually, I think most of us agreed with him in that, but then we got insulted and called forum trolls who don't base our opinions on fact. I laid out my problems with the game pretty clearly and I thought reasonably. I have elected to talk with my wallet. I canceled my subscription and I told them exactly why they where losing my business, same as I did with WoW, and also told them what they could do to earn it back.

*Edit*
Hell, I will probably still play some until my account is expired. I just refuse to pay for a game in AoC's current state in this day and age. Weather you like WoW or hated it, it has raised the bar, and people will expect shit to work.

Cevik is just a troll that goes after low hanging fruit (it's easy to fuck with us on this topic).  He's not a fanboi.  Hell, I have doubts he even plays AoC.  Lum and someone make slightly inaccurate/debatable points and lamaros (shocking!) hops on it, Cevik joins in and harps on the "WoW content at launch" angle. 

AoC is not competing against WoW (or any other MMO) at launch. Perhaps what went wrong is someone at Funcom though they were.  Game X's content at launch does not have any bearing at why this game seems to, from our limited sample size, have retention problems and isn't far away from snuggling up to POTBS below.  Because we're at now, now.

Why the fuck content must be of a kill 10 rats kind, especially considering how expensive it is? Diablo2 toyed with randomly-generated whack-a-mole content, we all know PvP is another option. Last but not least why the fuck can't we get Bring/Kill/Talk to %rnd rinse and repeat, not like anyone will notice the difference past newbie honeymoon with the game.

Unimaginative fucks.

Well, I won't claim to speak for anyone else, but when it comes to a subscription-based MMOG, what I expect at release is enough content to get my first character to max level without excessive grinding.  WoW did that, and I started at release and never had to grind anything.  I did duo almost everything, but I'd be amazed if the grouping experience buff for duoing would make the difference between never grinding and plenty of grinding! (Yes, I was Alliance in those early days)  And if they want me to keep paying that subscription, it also needs to have enough content to last me until more content is added.  Whether that is replayable content for the Alt experience, or high level content for the bored max levels, or crafting, or a robust player economy, or whatever, depends on the game pretty much.  But yes, Rule #1 is Content is King.

But Rule #0 is Quality is Trump.  Content, systems, balance, character abilities, user interface, stability (client and server), etc.  EVERYTHING that goes into the game needs to be working, and working very well.  Content that is "needed" to complete the experience without grinding but missing counts against you once.  Content that was promised but is missing counts against you once twice.  Content that is in the game but broken counts against you once if it was needed, another time if it was promised, another time if it's needed, yet another time for being broken, and again another time EACH AND EVERY TIME THE PLAYER ENCOUNTERS IT.  So never promise anything you aren't 200% sure you can deliver, and never ever deliver anything that isn't actually complete and working!

As for the polish vs experience comment, Blizzard had never delivered an MMO before WoW, whereas Funcom had.  Funcom has a full diploma from the MMOG school of hard knocks when it started AoC.  Blizzard's was just an associates degree from doing Battlenet.

From the reports, it looks like AoC's $25 bought a lot less than half of the content WoW got for $50.  And they STILL couldn't get it polished.  And Blizzard diluted their content by having side-specific stuff, meaning half the players would never see nearly a third of the content unless they rolled alts on the other side.

I have a bot that trawls the forums for minor errors then automatically sets me up with a general reply. I just have to change the names and points a little bit and then, voilà!, I'm done.

On that theme...

There is stuff to learn from WoW even if you're not competing with it, but mostly that begins with "know what you're trying to achieve" and ends with "release it when it's mostly finished".

AoC should hopefully prove an exclamation point on this subject to WAR and some other MMOs.

You sort of answer yourself there; content 'must' be in large part of "kill _number_ _specimen_" variety because we're unimaginative fucks as species, and find it hard to come up with stuff beyond fetch/talk/kill as activity for the "quest". There being 7 basic plots total in storytelling etc.

I am quite aware of what was added and what wasn't. The fact is that about 90% of the 1-60 leveling content that is there today was in at launch. Dustwallow was revamped recently (mid 30's), Searing Gorge was revamped about a year or so after release (mid-late 40's). Everything else is the same. If you ran out of content and had to go to Tirisfal (level 10-15 content) it's because you got lost and didn't know where to go, not because the content wasn't there.


I was tend to argue that people go the OTHER way in their exaggerations.


I was including LBRS and BRD as max level dungeons because they were run by max level characters as much as the others were. The loot from them was still relevant at max level at release and they were still challenging at max level. Strat, Scholo, UBRS, LBRS, BRD. Strat was basically considered two zones in one. LBRS was not commonly completed in one sitting (you could bypass and do half at once). BRD was like three dungeons in one, including the end which was almost never completed except by max level players.


MC was barely changed in its entire history. Some changes to the trash, few changes to the bosses.

Apologies for continuing this small sidetrack but laying out the reality of the release is useful to this discussion. Specifically, contrasting the differences between WoW and other MMOs such as AoC or Vanguard. WoW had plenty of content at release, more than enough to keep people busy until the the next round of content was added (Maurdon was 3? months after release. Dire Maul, a three dungeon complex, was added 4-5 months into release. The next tier raiding dungeon BWL was added 8 or so months after release). In AoC it seems that people can't get to max level even without running out of content, and max level content is nearly non-existent.

For what it's worth, I leveled to 60 in original WoW as a horde character starting immediately after release and never grinded.  And I don't randomly kill mobs as I travel, either.  I did play rather casually, though, so I did have a decent amount of rest xp.

Err. Kill quests are common because they're easy to make, not because people can't imagine more interesting things to make.

Eh, and:


People still run Gruul for the DST, that doesn't mean Gruul is T6 content. BRD was a leveling dungeon, LBRS was leveling/max level. UBRS was a raid.

Isn't the difficulty of coming up with something more elaborate and engaging at the same time part of the reason why kill quests are "easy to make"?

If "having more time" is difficult then I'd agree. But I would suggest that being limited by time or money (not being able to hire 50 quest designers instead of just a few) isn't difficult, exactly.

I felt forced to grind several times on a dwarf priest getting to 60 at launch.  I might have been doing it wrong though.  Could have been that I fell behind and many friends/guildees were EST.  Could have been all the pvp.  Could have been I hate diku-pve and skipped quests if I thought grinding might be faster.  Also I found the pve in wow to be as uninspiring as any pve has ever been since EQ1.  Oh Ehm Gees!  Quests with exclamation marks to tell me where to get them from!!  Fuck me and let me have your baby!?    :oh_i_see: 

Sounds like you people are where I was at come WoW, but playing catch up.  PvE in diku's is boring and shitty.  It sucks and therefore you dont enjoy it.  I look forward to the realization and admittance after we repeat this same pattern with WAR.  Please dont let me down and fail to blame it on some random bullshit not the fact that you are still doing killquests and fedexquests without the awesome loot system or the adhd replayability and speed runs of Diablo.

If your going to make a mmo with a gameworld, make it a sandbox or doom it to being the same type of suck.  That should be the lesson but instead we're having another thread about wow.  Gee golly we rock.

But I guess I should quit posting here if I'm only going to complain amirite?  Who the fuck posted that anyways, what a fucking retarded comment...

To be fair, I seriously seriously seriously think you guys are fucking crazy when it comes to wow at launch.  Like honestly, no trolling, I'm being serious "Me" and not "Cevik" mode here, you guys are really fucking freaking me out when it comes to what you think wow was like on launch.

But, color that with the fact that I've been playing WoW lately instead of AoC.  But to be fair to both games, the reason I've been playing WoW vs. AoC has nothing to do with either game, but more IRL things.  Yes, sadly, Cevik exists not just in troll form here, but also in real life.  It's enough to make one cry.

But really, you guys are fucking strange when it comes to what you think wow was like on release.

This.  And to elaborate...

Software developers are optimists.  My rule of thumb is take any coder's best time estimate and multiply by PI.  I've been using that formula for the past 15+ years (of my 25+ yr career) and find it's accurate to within +/-10% about 90% of the time, both for myself and for others.  The 3x factor is the difference between hacking out proof-of-concept code that works but is unmaintainable and non-integratable vs architecting real code that integrates well with the whole, is tested, robust (not subject to failure due to bad/unexpected input), documented and reusable.

Also, Project Management rules.  I'd be willing to bet serious money that Blizzard has some awesome project managers driving their projects.  If those guys aren't making well into 6-digit salaries with hefty completion bonuses and stock options, then they are being seriously underpaid and should look into finding work in the real world and stop wasting their professional careers in gaming.

Go quote one valid point from the post I "tl;dr", I'll come back when you're done.

Okay, the reason you couldn't find one is because he spent the whole time talking about how I'm an alcoholic drug abuser, as if it's something I haven't heard already heard a million times.. from my own mom none-the-less.

After that he explained how f13 would make a totally awesome focus group for mmog development.  It wouldn't.  I can prove it, someone already used you as a focus group for mmog development, the abortion that was SWG came out of it.  And the only person less qualified than the average f13 poster to comment about the state of the mmog industry is Raph "I totally thought HAM was a good idea, seriously" Koster.

Actually, I think I completely understand where Raph was coming from with the HAM thing, so Raph, if you're reading this, send me a pm, I'm always looking for a good acid dealer.

You didnt wait long enough.


I think that was a VERY valid point. In fact I think you tried to make close to the same point in a post also.

I don't think you can get away with that yet. (I tried to hold back, but quoting it again was too much for me).

That's the thing. Many of you grinded in dungeons in WoW, with a group. That was content and was advancing your characters.
In AoC, you (generic) refused to do dungeons, to form group and to basically do what you did in WoW. As I said earlier, the group content you did in WoW you just skipped in AoC and claimed it doesn't exist.
Take out all the dungeons from WoW and tell me if you hit 60 without ever grinding before the recent XP quest boost.

Other points about WoW being more polished and with more content than AoC at launch still stand.

The more interesting question would be, why were more people grouping and doing dungeons in WoW than AoC? (If what you propose is actually the situation). Getting the players to want to use and enjoy the avaliable content is just as important as having it there.

I answered that question so many times, Lamaros:

Reason 1 - WoW low-mid level dungeons were easier than AoC ones. Less stress, more instant gratification.
Reason 2 - WoW itemization was so much better that you cared about huning good equip. In AoC not so much.
Reason 3 - WoW happened in 2004, solo playing was needed but grouping in dungeons was still considered both the norm and kinda cool. Nowadays the often mentioned MMOPLayer Burnout kills it. People can still appreciate some group crawling but it better be a Free Looting Machine or they can't be bothered at all.

So he rehashed the exact same thing I had said earlier in a long rant about how my alcoholism and drug abuse entertains him and I'm somehow trying to make "valid points go away" by "tl;dr"ing the post?

So I guess I'm trying to make my "valid points go away" when I said "tl;dr" about a post that was 85% a flame because Miasma is pissed that I think he's a short bus asshole because he ranted that the dev bad touched him in a different thread and 15% a rehashing of the same point I already made.

Or maybe, just maybe, because I called you guys a bunch of pricks because of the rampant WoW revisionism around here (both in this thread and in the 1 million shipped thread), you got your precious feelings hurt and you also were just looking for a reason to flame me.

But you are right, I should be nicer, you guys are all precious little snowflakes after all.

I brought up your drunk junkie ways because they are a legitimate issue to your increasingly insane thoughts.  You are actually blaming everyone else on the board and insulting them in your ridiculous attempt to convince yourself of your infallibility.  Whenever I read one of your posts I am reminded of angry drunks sitting in the corner blathering about how everyone else is wrong and that they're the ones to blame and how they're all out to get you.  I mentioned it because no one should take anything you say seriously, they should just remember that worthless drunken relative that most people have in their past.

You're not even a good troll anymore, you're on the level of a fifteen year old stratics punk.  All you've got is profanity, a willingness to alienate absolutely everyone and the ability to overdramatize and make shit up.  I mean you just blamed us for the NGE for fuck's sake.  Check yourself in to rehab and get a nice long term psychiatrist you sad little fuck.  If you put half as much effort into getting clean as you do defending a fucking video game from the assault of other nerds on the intarweb you might actually get better.

By the way, this is all coming from someone who used to lurk, read and enjoy your articles.  I would usually think afterwards "wow, I hope that poor guy doesn't kill himself, I kind of like him".

I find a recurring theme of those who praise AoC saying that it would be a good game "If only people could appreciate it" I'm not sure how pixelated tits got to be highbrow around here but it's confusing.

Not sure who the original poster of this is, but thats basically it, for just about everyone. The game needs work, lots of it...But this isn't surprising to me. I will mostlikely be back in about 4-6 months. I am potentially the biggest supporter of AOC on this board, hopefully with out crossing into fanboy territory.
 
The game, and its concepts are great, the combat superior, the pacing of action incredible. But so many thing are buggy, or frustrating, or lack in "hook" that i have returned to LOTRO, mainly because i want to see its new changes (that are bad ass by the way, the quest window is sweet) and , its a game me and my girlfriend can play together, because i have machines that can handle it.

Thats the rub.

If you're saying that AoC is CoH combat in a fantasy setting with added itemization, then that's a large step in the right direction for the future of MMO's.  If they can manage to fill out the itemization tables while improving the worldly feel of the game, this title may gain popularity in the coming months.  Eve is proof that consistent improvements can grant rewards in customer loyalty. 

AoC combat is better than CoH's. Come on!

tl;dr

EDIT:  Actually I did read and I wasn't blaming you for NGE.

I was blaming you for the original release of SWG.  It's the virtual world you guys claim you want.  It sucked.

I don't think the major complaint is the loot tables, at least not anymore.  Those exist and there is plenty of loot for all.  Now it's "gear doesn't matter enough1!1!"

I know it's somehow become "trollish" to think that WoW didn't ship as the best game eva! but that's basically the same complaint people had with WoW loot through the first year.  It took a total revamp of both the look and the stats on Tier 1 gear and quite a few theorycrafters proving that gear did matter before those complaints ended.

EDIT:  And before I am accused of making up facts about poor little WoW, I present the wonderful look of pre-1.9 Nemesis (t2 warlock gear):

(http://common.allakhazam.com/images/a/e/ae2cab816062649fbdc7465f4fff2d88.png)

Bask in it's glory, go ahead, I dare ya.  I personally forgot that they had to revamp BOTH t1 and t2 before anyone used the stuff.  Of course, wow shipped as the best game ever, so surely I must have photoshopped this.

Well imo it's more of the same really then -- the requirement to "have more time" for not-so-ordinary quests is caused directly by the fact it's more difficult to come up with such not-so-ordinary quests. Seriously, it's easy to say 'oh they're absolutely no harder to invent' but i'm sitting here and trying to come up with something that can't be immediately simplified to "go there and kill/fetch/talk/go back" just so i can confirm to myself what you say is true ... and i can't, really. Nor for that matter i can think of (m)any quests i've done in multiple MMOs that couldn't be simplified in exactly the same manner, and would somehow break that mould.

I don't remember this.  I was in a bleeding edge, server first guild pre-TBC. T1/2 never went unlooted and unequipped (except in normal DE situations).  It was simply better for raiding than anything else out there (expecially due to the smattering of resistances).  Other gear wasn't even partially viable until DM and the 20 man instances.

Your second comment makes no sense, what are you trying to say? Initial attempts at raid gear looked bad (current incarnation of Nemesis looks pretty neat)? How iis that material to the topic here?

And while you still grab ahold of the low hanging fruit, it's all immaterial to the discussion of what went wrong with Conan.   Context.   AoC may be able to get it's itemization correct in a short period of time, but it doesn't change that it shipped with, in some people's opinions, poor itemization.  It's being evaluated in relation to the current MMO market.  I have no doubt they'll be able to turn this around in less time than it took WoW to realize they were doing itemization wrong.  But then again, they have WoW's efforts in this area to build and improve upon.   For both good and bad, they aren't doing this in a vaccuum (or in a fucking time bubble from 5 years ago, get over it).

I think they key here is go big or go home.

If you released an FPS today that had the best targetting system in the world, the best story and the best game play except that it had doom 1 graphics? It would fail horribly.

AoC got the graphics right but the principle is the same, the bar was raised and people have expectations. Are these expectations realistic? of course they are because it's a 'game' market. Players are the ones who dictate what is good enough for their money not developers and they have the final say with their wallets. People aren't saying they expect every game to be as well funded or developed as wow but they certainly dont plan on paying monthly for less.

AoC went wrong in that they were following the design philosophy of 2000 when it comes to games, rushed out the door, poorly planned and poorly managed. It's actually no fault of any one thing but a general lack of attention to all of the elements of their game.

BTW is alchemy working yet?

Not "some". It shipped with ridiculous itemization. Then it got a significant boost in like 2 weeks but that's not nearly enough and, 2 weeks or not, it technically shipped with laughable itemization.
And yes, that's one of the things that hurt subscriptions the most because perception was, and will still be for a long time, of a game with a very poor carrot at the end of the itemization stick.

I'm sorry you don't remember it.  Google it I guess.  I at least found screenshots of the equipment before.  For warlocks Tier 1 and Tier 2 were almost all stam and int before the revamp and they DRASTICALLY increased +dmg after the revamp, i.e. they took gear that was useful but "meh" and made it excellent gear.  They also redid the graphics at the same time.  Hell Tier 0.5 was considered literally worthless (at least for locks) until you could turn it in for purplez just before TBC was launched.

I'm not saying anything epic went unlooted.  Of course, I also I doubt it goes unlooted in AoC.


The current Nemesis looks fucking awesome, but that's exactly my point.  At release the Tier 1 stuff looked terrible.  Even a year after release, when the Tier 2 stuff was introduced into the game it looked terrible.  It took them quite some time to make it look awesome.  But people here want to pretend WoW shipped with all that content.

Did AoC need to ship with more?  I'm not the expert you guys are, so I won't answer the question.  My beef in both this thread and in the 1 meeeeellion shipped thread hasn't been with the people bitching about AoC, it's been the strange alternate reality revisionist history people are presenting about WoW.  It makes me cringe to see otherwise sane people suddenly try to pretend WoW shipped with the stuff that it has today.  I'm just trying to understand, why are we lying about the state WoW shipped in?  Is it somehow relevant to the conversation at hand?  Am I supposed to be a good boy and ignore all you mmog experts as you pretend WoW shipped in a state that it clearly didn't?

EDIT:  I went back and checked the patch notes for 1.9, which was the updated artwork/stats patch for tier 2:


So as you can see, Nemesis was one of the more drastically changed sets of armor, which may color my opinion about how much t2 had to change before becoming useful.  Before the Nemesis patch, there were gear pieces for nearly every slot that were considered to be better than t2 armor for a lock.

You can write about it forever but it boils down to two VERY CORE THINGS.

1) Announced all this REVOLUTIONARY AWESOME SHIT which was over-hyped Petery Molyneux style into the fucking ground.

2) DELIVERED ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THAT AWESOME REVOLUTIONARY SHIT AT RELEASE. None. Nothing worked 100%.

HOIST THE FAILURE SAILS MATES, WE'RE GOING HOME </Sinbad>

Anything beyond those 2 facts is just salt in the wound. Big fucking salt swords stabbed into a gaping wound.

While I'm not a big fan of Nija and his "exploit to win" philosophy, I Lol'd.  Dead on!

This just means you have a pretty average imagination, I'm afraid.

When you can't think of something yourself, look at WoW examples:

Bombing quests. Pretty simple. Pretty different. Pretty fun, eh? But to get a bombing quest to work they likely had to add code so that you could use certain items while mounted, and maybe other things. So to add in this new exiciting quest they not only:

1) Need to add areas just for the bombing quests (because the mobs have heaps of hp, hit hard, and wouldn't work in areas with normals mobs and the like).
2) Need to programm new funcationality to the engine.
3) Other stuff that probably needs to be done that I don't know.

The time these quests is not the time needed to come up with idea, people have heaps of ideas of stuff they would like to do (apart from you, it seems), it's just that to do a lot of them you have to create a whole lot of stuff.

Look at another WoW quest, the Warlock Dreadsteed quest:

They have an Idea of what they want to do, you have to go to this guy, he gives you a recipie list, you have to colect the recipie list, then eventually you use the stuff he makes you to summon a special boss and kill that to win.

It's really a simple quest, just a delivery quest with some collection components and a kill aspect, but compared to other quests it takes more time to make. Why?

Because more kill quests are killing something that already exists, they just point to a group of monsters or a boss and make up a reason to kill them and add another item to their loot table. This quest requires a whole new encounter to be designed just for it.
Because it has heaps of steps that tie in together and have to make sense. It's requires several NPCs, several newitems, an area for the special NPC to hide in, blah, blah, blah.

They are pretty simple mechanics you're working with in MMOs, but that doesn't mean that putting a whole chain of them together is just as easy as putting together one or two, it's obviously not. And it certainly means that when you want to do things that go beyond the boundries of what you can currently do then you need time to make it possible.

I'm certain that the quest designers at nearly every mmo come up with awesome ideas all the time, only to be told "just not possible, sorry" when they try to find a way of doing them.

I could probably find dev quotes on this topic if I could be bothered to, but I can't. I know I'm correct.

Because it's MATURE - it says so right on the box.  :awesome_for_real:

That's "go there and kill shit. with bombs".

I don't really care it took longer to make. At the end of day it's still "go talk to guy, fetch shit, kill fozzle".

We were talking of how easy it is to invent quests that are actually different. So surely, if it's so easy and if it's just me that's mentally handicapped to the point i can't think of such quests immediately ... it should be easy to either provide numerous examples of such quests already done, or invent a few here on the spot? And yet all you did was just provide me with more of the same old. And a weak imo argument that the only reason we don't see these awesome ideas the designers come up with all the time... is because it requires extra code. Well, everything in MMO requires extra code. If the developers cannot allocate some of their code-writing time to enhance range of available quests (the core of MMO nowadays) ... then i'd have to conclude that's just poor planning on their part and really no excuse anymore.

It's so amazingly simple to come up with quests beyond kill or fetch. But people don't want that. Reading text is niche.

Exactly Sky... I wonder how many people in the game just gave up on the Old Tarantia investigation quest once 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 didnt work.

It definetely isn't as easy as some people think...or else we'd have a ton of cool quests in every game. That's just not the case.

I'd hope not.  It was bafflingly simple.  And one could use brute force to get the answer anyways.

Very few people actually care enough to make good quests worthwhile, me included.  The whole questing thing only took off as an alternative for the mind numbingly boring Everquest grinding for exp system, it was simply a faster way to level.  Personally i couldn't care less wether im doing quests or grinding, ill do whichever one levels me faster as long as the grinding is fast paced.  Theres a huge difference between sitting in one spot with a full group single pulling mobs for several hours in order to get 1/20th of a level if you don't fuck up and die and mowing through entire dungeons worth of mobs 3-4 at a time by yourself for half a levels worth.  Long elaborate multiple step quests with a plot line= loot, fast kill shit/delivery quests = exp.  As long as the exp flows fast enough you don't need the second type, its just fucking grinding and running back to npcs to turn shit in.

Having exp in mmo is the root problem of why they suck. Well, right after the thousands of people. Look at the massive pile of great ideas that didn't go over because it wasn't an expedient way to 'xp'

Just admit you're there for epeen and to watch the progress bar fill up and not for the story, let the devs deliver on that for you. Maybe it could be a new Vegas venture, a slot machine that dispenses gear.

The whole questing thing took off as a way to try and inject story and lore into mmo gameworlds because nobody gave a fuck about reading books or even what npcs had to say.

It's pathetic and the main reason I don't bother with mmo much. I'll milk the few good single player rpgs that come out every year and let the masses waste their time and money in mmo.

I thought main reason Blizzard built the whole game around the quest chains was, they figured people find the game a better experience when they are given list of stuff to do and places to visit ... rather than come up with activities on their own. I.e. not for the story/lore that no one reads anyway (still), but rather as the response to ever-present "ok, so what am i supposed to be doing now?"

I'm using Blizzard here because that's probably the one thing WoW brought to the table that really shifted the paradigm.

See, I was originally going to go search for links to prove my point back there on page 2, but then I decided "ehh, why fucking waste the time?  Someone will eventually come along and prove your point for you."

This people worth listening to on this board are mostly people who were sick of mmogs by the time WoW was released.  They don't like the games and they want something new and different and very niche.  Some of them realize that (like Sky here) and stay away from most of the games, the rest of them think they are mmog experts and can solve all the world's problems by forcing their favorite little niche game idea onto the rest of us if only the developers would listen to them and give them a Focus group.  And the developers totally should do it because they are experts who know what is wrong with every mmog.

What those people fail to see is that they bitch about every mmog that releases, including WoW way back when, because they hate all mmorpgs.  And just because some games do fail it doesn't make them experts, because if you come here just after the release of any mmog there will be some large segment of you bitching about that mmog.

I think you have it right.  People like diversity but they hate risk just for the sake of risk.  When you go around grinding new things you risk not making much progress or not being as efficient at it as you were at the last place, so without some potential reward you won't do it (see: Everquest).  Blizzard understood this and gave you quest experience as a reward for giving yourself variety in what you kill.  The quest experience covers travel time and just a little bonus to cover the risk you take for going to the new place.

I think this is the most on target thing you have said in this thread. I completely agree.

Exactly. It's pretty dumb, and pretty fucking simple. But even something as simple as that requires a whole lot of time to implement. How much harder then to make something more involved and interesting.


The point was to illustrate how much time it takes to make even sort of unique shit that uses existing game mechanics. Which I did.

Do you play games? Have you ever done interesting quests in them? Why would you think, "oh, well people making quests in MMOs would never think of stuff like that"? People making quests in MMOs can borrow, steal, and imagine whatever they want, drawing from wherever they want, but what they can actually put into the game is dictated by the constraints of the game.


Where did the stupid bug bite you?

You're basicly saying "well of course those things take more time, but they should spend it!". The point is that it's not worth it for them to spend it because the return they get from that time is better in other areas, not making a couple of quests that half the people wont read or even do. They prefer to spend their time coding things like bombing runs, because that means they can churn out a whole lot of bombings quests to go with the killing and escoting quests.

Why would you spend time and money doing one thing when you could spend it on another and get a better reward. Why pay 20 guys to do a job (invent quest, code quest) when you can just pay one guy (pick generic quest, change names/mobs/rewards)? Because of the odd individual like you who is too silly to realise that if you don't like going around killing shit repetitivly then you should be playnig something other than a MMO?

When it comes to what came first, the game mechanics or the quests, you're not picking the quests. Quest limitation in MMOs is dictated by the limitations of the MMOs. To suddenly expect quests of be wildly original and exciting, but still being in those same MMOs, is just stupid. Go play a single player game, or wait for a MMO with different gameplay.


Sky isn't dumb, learn from Sky.

Sky's pretty dumb, this thread has just set the bar really really low..
Also  I agree with the post cevik quoted of Sky's, fucking exp/diku bullshit is the problem, the solution isn't making a diku that does blah.  Wich is basically what all you tards going on about WoW seem to want.

PS The avg f13 poster is too old and too young to actually play MMO's anymore.  If you dont get that, well I look forward to when you do.  Fuckwits.

 :rimshot:
 :awesome_for_real:

Ok tired of smileys, do I get credit for being drunk?
  *note I edited out bad drunk typos because I hate people who pretend they dont notice them just cuz they are buzzed*

This is so true. So true. It's dangerous to generalize but some naysayers are just scary. Everything is wrong, everything is dull, everything is broken, everything is a trainwreck and while they maybe played the skeptical act at WoW's release too, now that's their only omnipresent and subtle message, that World of Warcraft is your only god. Anything that is not WoW is broken/unfun/crap.

Lots of things went wrong with Age of Conan, I wrote about it extensively in the first page of this thread. But the snarky cheap hostility paired with generic burnout make for some awful discussions.

I'm not sure why all the vitriol is bubbling up in this thread.  I think folks are looking at it from several different perspectives:

1.  Is it fun?
2.  Is it commercially viable?
3.  Does it buy me dinner and then make sweet, gentle love to me?

For the folks interested in (1), which I think is most of the gaming public, they will make their decision based on how much they enjoy the game, period.  I think it is perfectly fair to compare the game to WoW in that respect and argue that if the game does not have at least most of the functionality of WoW and little something extra most of the casual folks are going to say "Screw this, I'm going to play WoW."  Sure a Model T was great 50 years ago, but I'm not going to argue that a newly produced model T by a different company should be driven because "Ford's first car wasn't as good as this model T."  Screw that, I need to drive a car that is modern by today's standards (unless it is super, super cheap i.e. free games).  Say what you want about WoW, but when it was released it was a huge leap forward in the genre, not necessarily because the ideas were new, but because they implemented so many diverse ideas so well.  (Full disclosure: I don't even play WoW, I play EvE and Lotro).

For folks interested in (2) launch and server stability become much more important.  Every design decision is evaluated through the lens of how it affects subscriber numbers.  Things like launch numbers and retention are important.  This is a disproportionate number of folks on this board because many people here have direct ties to the industry.

As for 3... Those folks are just crazy and are rightly ridiculed, but I think that is a smaller percentage of the people in this thread than some people are implying.

Dumb and correct. I can live with that. It's as close to a compliment as I'd ever get from ya, Hoax. Feelin' the love.

I get that point, but i'm questioning if it's really true. That is, if we can agree to presume that quests are the main way to deliver content to the player in the modern MMO, and that the "been there, done that" syndrome is the thing that hurts longevity of your game (becaues people get bored out of their skull and unsub after 5th quest to collect wolf pelts) ... then the return you get from coding more of the same old is imo absolutely no better than enhancing the base code, to allow the content makers to then deliver greater variety of quests. Also, why in your example these new mechanics would be used to make couple of quests that few people do, while at the same time exactly just as new mechanics are to be used to churn out whole lot of bombing runs? That's skewing the argument.

Not because of silly individual like me. Because of numbers of silly individuals who after a month realize that they had it up to here with the all-alike kill quests, and who do in fact unsub. While were they provided a more varied experience, they'd play longer and bring in extra revenue.

Using your argument, a fast food provider for example has absolutely no reason to pay 20 guys to come up with new things to put on the menu, ever. They'd get much better reward from having just one guy rename that same old hamburger each month. And if someone doesn't like the hamburger each day? Oh well, they can go elsewhere... but how exactly is it better for your bottom line, when the potential extra income from the mass market way outweights that money you have to invest in salaries of 20 people rather than 1?

I like the fast food reference.

Everyone is quitting WoW? Huh?

I understand your perspective, and I'd like better quests too (I hate quests, I think they are fucking stupid), but the fact is that it isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal to try and change things. So they go with what they have and then code in some new quest types for the expansions to give those who play MMOs for the quests something 'new'.

Supposedly bombing quests are a huge success, so they're making a whole lot more of them in the WotLK expansion. I expect they'll introduce another couple of new things and flog them to death too.

Your fast food example is an excellent one. Fast food chains have absolutly no reason to make recipies for individual stores. They come up with generic recipies and flog them off at every store at once. They don't go "hmm, let's put a couple of recipie a here, and a few recipie b there, and get some guys working on 300 more recipies so each store has a unique one, to keep things intresting for the consumers". They have the same fucking product list everwhere.

If you want something that's got a whole lot fo variety then you go to a good resturant that has a real chef that changes the specials all the time, or you go to a different resturant every time you go out. You don't go to the same fucking fast food join and complain because they're not putting different lettuce into your burger.

Fast food stores (mmos) are good for some things, but quality and variety of food (quests) are not it. It's just stupid to think that going to a fast food store and complaining about that lack of quality is a decent point. It's a fucking fast food store.

Bombing quests = new recipie for fast food store. Still shit because the basic foundations of the meal are shit. Don't expect anything better from a fast food store. You want a quality meal go to a fucking real resturant.

Well, i suspect like with any other MMO there's a churn rate at which people do eventually quit WoW  and get replaced with newcomers, yes  :-)  They're actually interesting subject in this regard, because given their size even small changes like being able to keep interest of say, 1% of playerbase for another month cycle... can result in extra income that dwarfs associated development costs.

On the fast food analogy thing, i guess we see it a bit different. That is, i'll certainly agree that the provider doesn't bother with detailed offer, but rather pushes the new dish/quest type (if any) to whole chains/servers. However my point was more along the lines, there's still incentive for the provider to vary their one-for-all-and-same-across-the-servers menu ... because if they neglect that entirely, the competiton who doesn't will draw that extra profit and customer base from them. And so a game that has nothing but kill quests (burgers) even in a dozen of slightly different variants, is likely to lose part of the players who prefer more options (burger one day and chicken sandwich another i.e. kill quests and something else?) ... if another provider appears that offers them such choice.

But that's the limitation of analogy really and yeah, i can see it from the point of view you list there too. So guess can leave it at that.

Hmm.. I'm not sure on this part. Half of me says it is possible this happends if somebody releases an MMO which will feed everything and another part of me says WoW is the CounterStrike of MMOs. Its already deep establishment, availability and high population will make it never die nor really substantially lose a huge amount of customers. I'm seeing 14 year old girls in Norway playing WoW and its certainly following the popularity of CounterStrike. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

EDIT : Eventually the only proper replacement might be itself, meaning a second WoW. If that.

Ahh but that's a different thing from what i talk about, at least if i read you correctly. What you talk about is the overall size of playerbase that is a sum of fresh people coming and bored people leaving, while i'm thinking about 'lifecycle' of individual player -- comes fresh and doe-eyed, plays the game for some months, reaches the endgame or maybe even not and eventually one day quits having realized the game just isn't fun enough to keep paying for it, anymore. For some this lifecycle can be longer than others and it'll obviously vary from game to game too (average 'lifespan' of EVE player was said by devs to be ~8 months, e.g) ... but i think there's no reason to consider WoW as free of this pattern.

After reading many complaints about how AoC goes wrong someone provides a fresh perspective.

Anyone feel he's wrong in his assessment?

It's this blogger's opinion that much of the criticism of AoC's later game can be traced to this abrupt loss of a sense of side-taking after Tortage. The player goes from being a hero of the Resistance to being an aimless mercenary rattling about in an enormous, indifferent environment. (http://www.massively.com/2008/07/11/the-tortage-effect-unravelling-the-magic-of-the-early-aoc-level/)

Anything that starts with "It's this blogger's opinion" is automatically wrong.

He's not wrong, but these are problems with the medium, not the game. You are a runner of errands, not a potential hero. You're running those errands alongside thousands of similar characters, and even when the story is about you it's not a story anybody else wants to hear ... because it already happened to them. Heroism is, almost by definition, unusual; making everyone a hero makes it feel like nobody is. The civilians in CoH add a level of casual heroism to the player's actions -- they are a terrified, grateful, and visible majority in the world -- but they never completely disguise the fact that you're just an average, everyday superman in a world of supermen. The reality of MASSIVELY-multiplayer games requires it!

To an extent this falls under a larger gripe I've had with the whole DIKU framework as it's been established. You start off more powerful than you finish -- not in terms of skills available or damage done but in terms of the tasks required of you. In the beginning you fight alone against overwhelming odds, and succeed! By the end you're grouped up with forty other people and a single slip-up can (and does!) get everyone killed. Isn't the hero supposed to develop the opposite way? Their tales start with a string of near-failures, they gather a group of companions and, after a great struggle, accomplish the impossible by means of cleverness and cooperation. After many such adventures, and finally in their prime, they stride through waves of enemies like vengeful gods. They fight alone, occasionally with as many as two other heroes (VERY rarely more), or lead armies of their inferiors (to distract the minions of the opposition) while they do the REAL fighting against the commanding forces of darkness.

That's how the stories go, right?

So, do factions add to quests' sense of purpose? Sure.
Does PvP feel more meaningful when it's not arbitrary? Absolutely.

But while the exit from Tortage into a the massively-multiplayer game may have been a uniquely poignant betrayal, it's just part of the generic MMOG bait-and-switch. The dream is sold as "Be a Hero" but the reality is faceless, undifferentiated army. Flaws specific to AoC lie elsewhere.

In other words, in MMOs, the real hero is bicycle repair man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxfzm9dfqBw

There is a reason I like sandboxes over diku.  Everyone laughed at the existance of Sim-Beru though.

They are two different genres, and if we could convince everyone the only thing that dikus and sandboxes have in common is that they both have a lot of simultaneous players then the world would be a better place.

In the meantime, you sandbox people keep getting your shitty "games" in my dikus and I hate you for it.

HAHAH that blogger is too funny. Seriously I just had a bust up with a friend over the same thing. I didn't play the grind quest anymore and he msn'ed me to come back

"Why aren't you playing anymore?"
"I'm bored of the grind man"
"Dude your class will rock at 65"
"I'm only 35 , fuck off. I'm tired of this grind shit, if I want to feel special I'd rather go play Single Player games, if I want to be a super hamster on a treadmill watching other fat asses gasping for air on the other treadmills next to me , I'd rather go to a gym"
There was a long awkward silence before he just mused "So..if you're not playing anymore, can I have your stuff?"

 :awesome_for_real:

Not sure if he's talking about things that went wrong or right, but there's a Erling Ellinsen's puzzling interview at Massively (http://www.massively.com/2008/07/15/e308-erling-ellingsen-talks-patch-timeframes-for-age-of-conan/) with interesting insights and "behind the scenes" like this one:

(*digs up old bit of this thread - apologies*)

But... should you pull it off - congratulations, you just got a license to print money. Hundreds of millions of it. Heck, even billions.

You need to invest big, but the potential returns are just as big. There are investors willing to pony up hundreds of millions for all kinds of enterprises that have a rather modest (%) return for the investment. Why not MMOs?

The problem with today's MMOs (recently released and upcoming) is that almost every single one is woefully underfunded and understaffed to make any remotely realistic attempt to dethrone Blizzard. Teams of idealistic people with great ideas, trying to pull off something that needs 10x the resources to develop and polish up.

I can't wait until we get one that truly makes a dent at WoW - competition is good, and I think the lack of it is making Blizzard a bit lazy. They were never known for being daring or innovative, and in the current MMO market, they don't need to. They dominate, partly because they have a clue, but mostly because with MMOs right now it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

AoC showed that there are tons of people eager to jump ship for something else... *anything* else. AoC's shiny newbie island and few "exclusive" paid (or clueless) hype-reviews sold close to a million game boxes, but sadly no amount of marketing will make people to subscribe to a turd in the long term - and it's the long term interest that allows you to print all that money.

What I'm afraid of is a potential trend - package a piece of turd in a shiny box, polish up a newbie island and do some marketing, sell a million boxes to all those jaded WoW players who buy it all, hook - line - sinker. Then leave the game on minimal life support while you laugh all the way to the bank with all the cash you made from those million boxes... Fool all those people enough times, and they'll permanently attach to Blizzard for their digital addiction.

*shakes the walking stick*

I tell you kids... I was there, at the launch of Anarchy Online. Waited outside the local game store at 10AM for the doors to open on the launch day, bought the box straight from the cardboard box as the staff was unpacking them, took the day off and ran home only to find out that the servers were not up yet. Waited as things were delayed, first by an hour, then by two more hours... Then early afternoon, watched it all melt down when Funcom finally flicked that switch...

Age of Conan was a perfect launch compared to AO. It's still one of the worst western MMOs in the recent years, but it's launch was perfect compared to the utter horror that was the launch of Anarchy Online. People yell Epic Fail this and that, but Anarchy Online was EPIC FAIL before the whole term was invented.

With AO, NOTHING worked. The registration page to make your account didn't work. Billing didn't work. Game client didn't work, Servers didn't work, Zoning from the tiny instanced newbie area didn't work... it was months before you could actually play the game long enough to determine that, yes, even the gameplay under all that fail sucked.

Still, Funcom did manage to pull out of that death spiral. Somehow. AO is still around. It hasn't aged very well, but it's still there, and they are actually planning to retrofit it with a new graphics engine.

For a time - around 2002-2003, after the Shadowlands expansion, during the years before WoW and all these "unrealistic expectations" of shine and polish, it was a passable MMO. Sure, it was mostly about running up and down the edges of high end Shadowlands zones while grinding Hecklers. Or hunting for blueprint bits (with ridiculously low drop rates) required to summon pocket bosses that in turn dropped symbiants ("epic" implants), or grinding Redeemed/Unredeemed faction. But it was something you could play for a few months, while having some fun.

At least Funcom learned one thing from AO launch - AoC account creation, billing and game servers stayed up. Of course they messed up with the product keys printed for the collectors edition boxes, but that was possibly a piece of fail out of their hands.

Maybe for their next MMO, they figure out the need to have a fully fleshed out game, all ready to go when the boxes go out of the door. Hey, the newbie area was pretty good...

I agree with the lurker.

AoC's launch had NOTHING on AO. AO was a clusterfuck of epic proportion. AoC was just an unfinished game, with a dev team that still seems unable or unwilling to actually test the patches they are releasing.

Maybe they rely on people logging onto test servers to test stuff rather than logging on to find bugs they can exploit.

Ahhh so its the players fault. Nice.

Yeah. I was reading from the programming depts notes for the next management meeting   :drill:

Also, the registration page to make your account was not secure (no HTTPS). They put up a standard HTTP page where you were asked for credit card details.

This thread is funny with all of its 'omg WoW had this and didn't have this and this and that and the other thing at launch omg'.

The thing is, very little of that matters at all.

When it released, the first time you sat down to play WoW, was it the best MMO you had ever played to that point? For many (most?) people the answer is 'yes'.

How many people are answering that question 'yes' for AoC? If they're not answering 'yes', and they're not crazy multi-subscription people (I suspect most MMO players are not) why wouldn't they go back to whatever game is stopping them from being able to say 'yes' to that question for AoC?

I'd say that a surprising number are saying yes.  The more interesting question is why don't they feel that way a couple of weeks later?

It's like that new car smell.. once it's gone, you never get it back.

When does this game hit the graveyard?  (http://www.cosgan.de/images/smilie/engel/e020.gif)

Because ive played that other game for going on four years? It doesn't really matter that one game is better than another, you can't play the same game forever.  I think wow is a great game, much much better than aoc, i simply dont want to play it anymore and im having trouble getting into warhammer because its too similar to wow, even if its also better than aoc. 

You *could* play the same game forever (I still play nethack, after all), but that's why they make expansions. Do you see yourself sticking with AoC when Lich King hits?

I tried playing warhammer which i guess you could call wotlk lite and i simply could not stomach the wow style combat anymore.  AoC has a lot of problems and i dont even know if i will last till witch launches but fighting just feels so much fucking better in a completely visceral level that i dont see myself going back to wow or warhammer.

LOL

Might as well be there already, as far as I'm concerned.  I'm just a vulture circling overhead in hopes of harvesting lulz.

I keep asking myself WTF happened also. I thought the game was fun as hell for about a week, then all of a sudden for no reason I can put my finger on I lost all urge to login or play and went back to LoTRO where I am leveling alts and griding rep on my main. ~shrug~ maybe WAR will be better but still I am glad I bought a lifetime sub to LoTRO since it is always there for me to fall back on even if the next new shiny turns out to be a gilded turd.

Which makes me glad I didn't buy it. Very shortly the price will drop to about $30, maybe even $20... or the 10 day trial will come out, and I can experience all the game has to offer without paying anything at all. Yay.

The game feels heavy and sluggish to me. Its not simply a matter of mechanics or quests or grind or anything like that, but a more fundamental matter that loading zones takes forever, getting places takes forever, you can't alt-tab without hosing your graphics (on my machine, anyway), and the more than occasional red-ping and crash makes the whole thing go from light-hearted wow-like questage straight to ugh.

I got cut off from my AoC gaming by life circumstances. I was enjoying myself. Now that I have the chance to go back, I realise it has absolutely no pull whatsoever. I can't think of one thing in AoC that I'm itching to do. I hate WoW and there are things I want to do in WoW.

Meanwhile the hundreds of people in my all-MMOGs-since-1999 guild are on their 8th month of the EQ2 raiding game and still insisting we should all be joining them.

They made horses cheaper and the wagoneers have more places they go now.  You can get directly to the resource zones from the main city hubs and it sounded like the same was possible for further into the adventure zones.

So that's one thing they're addressing at least.

Thanks. They really need to put stuff like this in bold in the patch notes.

My 'Out of my Ass' opinion about what went wrong with AoC? Nothing! Well, it obviously has technical issues and content issues and those things, but what I am referring too is it's base design.


AoC = Hardcore

It was marketed as a Hardcore game in every regard. You need a hardcore system, it has 'hardcore' action game play, it has HARDcore 'adult themes', blood guts and glory and DARK GRIT DARKYGRITNESS.

It succeeded, people came to be hardcore, realized they weren't and left. Or they didn't realize it yet, but left anyway. Or they tried to be, but were out done by the much smaller actual hardcore segment and were driven away directly or indirectly.

It's a game made for it's target audience, receiving it's target audience.

An audience that likes mediocre games with poor development?

AoC is getting the audience it deserves.

Jesus man, did Gaute piss in your wheaties or something? Did Funcom gangbang your mom?

I stopped playing but FFS man, get a grip over your obsession. The comments you make aren't witty, it's mainly angst-filled bullshit and has been for months. It's not healthy.




And to answer the original post - a similar thing went wrong with some other guys here...I went from having fun to not caring to log in like overnight. It was quite strange. Maybe it was my subconscience telling me 'dude, even if you get to 80 there isn't shit to do and the sieging is completely borked'. I think I'm pretty much done with any non-sandbox MMO, I'm just burnt on Diku in general I suppose. Bummer they claimed a PVP MMO, when in the end it was built a PVE MMO with tacked on PVP.

Basically, the same here on all accounts. There is a lot of hate for the sake of hate, thats odd.

Anyway, my friends and i had a long conversation one evening about what we liked and disliked about the game. All in all they (devs) are making strides to correct things on our list. so i suspect that in about 4-5 months, we may be back. This also gives me time to get a computer up to snuff for my girlfriend to join us, this is a major consideration for me. Currently back to LOTRO for my mmo needs, it really is a fine game deserving of another look to any who enjoyed there time before.

The level 50 Phoenix Medallion quest is broken. This is a central quest that everyone has to do at 50, no if ands or buts, and its seriously bugged. I had to kill Mithrele 4 times to get it to finally work, and the reasons for it not working were entirely random. I talked with players in my guild that reported the same issue.

THAT is the type of thing that saps the enthusiasm for the game out of players. Its a serious, serous WTF.

While this maybe true to a small extent, I do not believe this is the underlying problem with the game that is causing people to leave in droves. I am going to say at this point the things that drove me from the game was the bugs, and Funcom's seeming inability to test even the simplest changes in their patches. They just break one thing after another, over and over again.

I didnt leave because I am not "hardcore" enough, but because of all the bugs and broken crap.

I haven't commented on aoc in weeks, wtf?

Besides my angst is more directed at fordel's ridiculous assesment that if people were just hardcore enough to appreciate such a hardcore Extreme game like AoC with blood and tits and adult stories about sex oh and did I mention there were tits? 

I don't hate the game, just the players and clearly slayerik, since you don't play anymore you just aren't hardcore enough to understand.

I enjoyed the game, i disliked the bugs and unfinished state. Hardcore has nothing to do with it. In that respect, i was "hardcore" enough becouse i liked the game, and all the things you listed and more..

I've never even played AoC. Didn't even consider it, it wasn't built for me.  :oh_i_see:


My point was people are rarely as hardcore as they like to think they are. Be it ganking, atmosphere, leveling or even just System requirements. It's been shown time and again these hardcore styles of play just eat themselves from the inside till nothing is left. The rampant technical shitcockery just sped the process up for a large chunk of people.

I'm saying they were leaving anyways, they are just leaving faster because of the bugs, but they were going to leave even if AoC was a pristine technical masterpiece.


 :awesome_for_real:

You're wrong. The game wasn't marketed for you. Really, it isn't that hardcore. Especially if you play on a PVE server. I can say pretty securely that the ratio of people leaving due to bugs and design flaws and lack of content to people who are not "hardcore" is probably around 25:1.

I let my subscription run out because of the following, in order of importance:

1)  Outright lies about content
2)  Unintended patch changes
3)  Intended patch changes
4)  Unbalanced/unfinished PvP

I am looking forward to trying WAR.


Were Guardian repair costs ever lowered?

I cant speak to that specific, but i do know Guardians have had updates and additions to the class.

A little - the cost for repairing heavy shields is down to the same level as light shields. Other than that, I do not think anything has changed. At level 47 with some twinking I'm chiming in at ~250 silver per repair. That's given I've waited until I have a few red and some yellow items. Although, it's worth noting that repairs overall are down 20% as repairing in the kinship's homestead is discounted. I have no issues coping with repairs at the moment, in either case.

There are tits in this game?  Why are you people quitting it?!?

Dude, chill.  After the dozens of posts in this and other threads that detail the many ways that Funcom failed to deliver, for someone to claim that everyone who left AoC just wasn't hardcore enough was insulting and absurd.  It sounded like something straight out of the fanboi hymnal, and Lakov's snarky response was downright funny, in a gallows humor sort of way.  You go apeshit every time anyone says anything bad about AoC.  You really need to relax, before you pop a blood vessel or something.


/derail

I really wanted to like LoTRO.  And I did, kinda.  But not enough to stick around after my wife gave up in disgust at how they treated crafting.  So have they done anything about each of our main issues with it?

Did they ever make combat seem less like you were fighting underwater? 
Did they eliminate the cockblock quests that prevent crafters from progressing until their adventuring level exceeded their crafting level?

You fuckin chill, DUDE. If I wanna tell Lakov to piss off with his usual comments, he doesn't need you to defend him. His comments about AoC are as tiresome as mine were defending it. His comment was shit, almost as shit as yours. If I recall correctly, I can't remember of a game you actually have liked. All I hear out of you is ...everything sucks. You fit in great around here.

The funny part is, you are pretty much right. MMOs suck. Well, Diku sucks anyway.

My crafting level has always been higher than my adventure level. Not sure what you are referring to on that one. I never felt the combat system seemed like i was underwater. But i do know they have done multiple animation passes and a number of combat tweaks. It does feel diffrent than when i played before. Instants are more instant. Classes like champion (the tank) have had diffrent stances added to increase utility.

The water comment, i wonder if people who say that didn't get as far as getting the class traits that reduce things like induction times ETC... *shrug* Combat in LOTRO has always been just as fast as in Wow to me. But way more fun IMO.

Hey. I hate WoW, but come on.
Actions are delayed. You press a button... and some time after that something happens. How fast is that?

P.S: I hit 50 very fast in Lotro.

And here I thought that f13 was losing that nerd-frenzy appeal.

Guess I was just reading the wrong threads.

 :drillf: :drillf: :drillf:

Whats the question here?

If a Nerd falls in a forest, do the birds laugh?

What the hell is that nerd doing in the outdoors?

He heard there was porn in the woods

Midget clown S&M porn no less.

Did you say Midgets ?!!1!?

You need a faster weapon. You have two swing timers in LotRO, one for auto-attack and one for abilities. Some abilities are instant and disregard the swing timers altogether. I got three of those on my Guardian, for example, and they can all three execute within two seconds. A faster weapon will let you activate stuff faster but deal less extra damage, while a slower weapons get more bonus damage but can execute abilities less often. A faster weapon consumes more Power, of course, for the same reasons.

Tarami,

As I said I played lots of Lotro, so I know perfectly how it works. It doesn't matter the weapon, combat still plays "slow" and underwatery to me. The weapon speed thing is true, but doesn't really change the substance: a combat where slower, heavier weapons give crappy unsatisfying feedback is just full of fail.

I loved Lotro for a couple of months, I really wanted to see the world and complete all the quests and I did it. But combat was definitely underwhelming. I think it pales in comparison with WoW's.

I think its exactly the same. I don't see a difference, never have when people say that. *shrug*

That's fine Falconeer and I'm not arguing how you feel about the combat. However I'm sort of on the same page as MrBloodworth here, I can't say I felt too much of a difference between them. Maybe a little, but personally I think it makes more than up for it by being leaps more interesting than the ability cycling I used to do in WoW.

yeah, Utility.

I agree completely.

I couldn't stand more than a few days in LotRO because of the slow combat.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I wasn't defending Lakov, just chiding you for making things so personal.  :grin:

But are you sure you're responding to the right Count?  I actually like WoW a lot, just not the end game. So eventually I quit when I got tired of alts.  But I drifted away satisfied, rather than angry or annoyed or feeling betrayed or cheated.  I also like EQ2 and frequently recommend it to anyone tired of WoW and looking for something else.  And I really did kinda like LoTRO.  My only attacks on it have been about the delayed reaction combat and general lack of somethingorother.  Other games which I've trashed for their stupid shit I've also cheered for their brilliance.

And thanks, I do feel comfortable here.  Even though I trend more towards over-analyzed critiques, I enjoy Lakov's and others comments that point out the lack of clothes on the emperor of a game that wasn't everything it's most dedicated supporters gushed it would be.  And your inevitable apopleptic frothing hissy-fits in response generate plenty of amusement as well.  Although I must confess I find his snarky comments more inherently funny while your personal attacks on anyone who criticizes the current target of your fanboi loyalties are only really humorous when juxtaposed with the knowledge that they actually emit from a presumably rational adult.  But hey, it all mixes together for plenty of entertainment so it's all good.

All that said, it is ironic we do almost agree.  MMO's (mostly) suck!   :awesome_for_real:

I musta missed those threads, I just post the general impressions I have of people...maybe I should have took some time to research your last posts and shite, but that's a little overboard. I still recall you slamming most any game coming down the pipe, but maybe I have mistaken you for someone else. In Lakov's case, it has been tiresome for quite some time...just as you probably felt some of my defense of it was.

I find myself doing the same thing you do, taking jabs at the guys I disagree with. You just try to do it with fancy prose and witty retorts. Why the fuck not? I like sticking to the basics, though. It saves me time from having to bust out the thesaurus.

And by the way....I juxtaposed my balls on your chin.  :inluv:



Seriously, anyone that uses juxtapose in a sentence deserves that :)

Stock is crashing...
Not sure if the site has any credibility but Funcom sure hasn't any left.
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Funcom-Investors-Jump-Ship-as-Age-of-Conan-Founders/ (http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Funcom-Investors-Jump-Ship-as-Age-of-Conan-Founders/)

Sifting through the comments I think these 2 are the most relevent to that

That guy is obviously a lunatic with an axe to grind.  That said I'm sure the investors will be unhappy with the retention rate.

Isn't that the same site that had the slam piece, then fluff piece in response to its own slam piece?  :uhrr:

But ya, what Miasma said.

(http://gza.gameriot.com/hub/logo_portal_2.gif)

Not only is it the same site, it's the same poster.  Come on, lets stop linking to this guy, he's trolling you for ad revenue.

P.S.:  Go look at what's happened to the entire stock market since AoC launched.  ZOMG!1!  FUNCOM WRECKED THE WHOEL STACK MAREKT!!!1!

IMO, the lack of a decent death penalty is a deal breaker for a PvP game.  Depending on respawn sites you could end up killing the same person until your fingers bleed.  Games like Eve have got the death penalty worked out to a t  ...  it's a hassle but not bad enough to have you quit the game.

AoC should reassess this aspect of the game

Comparing Eve to AoC is doing it wrong. More than that, anyone complaining about lack of death penalty being a deal breaker is basically too hardcore for words. That's a poopsocking dayjob type thing to say, and frankly, results in bad game design. Eve is a unique beast and recreating it's absolute luck that arose out of player politics will be practically impossible unless That Particular Playerbase picks up camp and moves entirely to another game.

EVE's Death panalty is utter lunacy. Only compleate idiots would have gone anywhere near it. "hassle but wont make you quit the game" My ass. I literally spent weeks replacing ships, and I literally had no job and no life at the time. Now that I have a Job there is no way I would have stood that crap. I'd have stuck to T1 Frigs or quit

If AOC had an eve like death penalty the suscrber numbers would have crashed to 1 person inside a week.

(http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y166/EdRacer71/eyeroll.jpg)

If you can't handle the death penalty in Eve, don't play it. It's not lunacy if you think it actually makes sense in a PVP game. Also, if you are defending your home you can quickly be back up and ready...it all depends on circumstances.

Item loot on death is lunacy too. Somehow both these work, so more power to Eve...the sandbox powerhouse. More sandbox, less Diku shit please.

Yahtzee made a review. (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/138-Age-of-Conan)  Not as good as his others but still entertaining.

Damn you, beat me to it :)

Ultimately AoC was just a nice break from WoW for me. I was a bit worried the melee combat would spoil me from autoattacking, but I'm back playing WoW and having fun, and AoC is pretty much forgotten as a half remembered dream at this point.

I dont know why this needed a seven page thread, what went wrong is that there was absolutely nothing to do at 80 and apparently for some people there wasnt enough stuff to do on the way there.  When city building/raiding/crafting/pvp/loot are all broken and/or simply dont exist you are going to have severe retention problems, its really as simple as that: nothing fucking worked.

Oh, the irony of having a huge Conan advertising campaign in the background...

It's not about being hardcore, It's about "hey I just killed this guy 8 times and he comes right back in 8 seconds" 

I demand genuine rolling eyes in that pic. :)
Oh I could handle the death penalty. it was all the "dying with no chance to win and the death penalty being crucifying to most people and a mild inconviniance for the rich with 3 accounts or happening to have a 10/10 complex" Bullshit that annoyed me

I don't mind dying. I just want a general fairness to everyone, not to be paying entertainment for those higher on the pyramid scheme and not having to work for weeks to recover whereas the other guy would not even blink should he somehow lose.

(and I killed like 6 billion isk and lost 2 or something, so drop the carebear crap)

But it doesn't matter. The point is that if AOC had something as harsh as that people would have left in droves.


So? theres other ways to handle that other than "hey you just lost all your loot and 2 levels" Teleporting to your home city would fix that, or bouncing him to another instance. And if your sick of killing him you can just wander off. Whats he going to do, kill you?

I got a question: how hard is AoC on the PC? 

I know one of the reasons my wife and I grew tired of LotRO was the constant fiddling and dumbing down of the video to get it to work.

I thought after EQ2 people we're going to give up on photo-realisms. 

I'm runing LotRO at Ultra High, I ran Conan at something like Low. A machine that's struggling with the former will be slaughtered by the latter.

Agreed. I have to set it at brown-with-brown-and-brown-with a hint of brown shiteovision and it still chugs a lot for me.

Its probably the hardest game on a system I have ever seen, and I played through the whole of Crysis. This game is a BEAST on your system. Also its a 25gb install. If you need to fiddle with your setting for LotRO, AoC will cripple you.

Yeah if AoC was an FPS all the graphic card sites would use it as a benchmark along side 3DMark.

My server, Deathwhisper, has seen massive attrition of all existing guilds as well as the departure of quite a lot of established guilds. I am not going to guess how play players they are retaining, but I know the PVP servers (which they said were the most popular) are bleeding massive amounts of people with each stupid patch.

What's driving the people off the PVP servers is:

1. Arenas that don't matter
2. Sieges that don't work, or teleport whole raid teams out of the zone constantly
3. No PVP system
4. No way for smaller guilds to get involved in end game pvp (i.e. no towers to fight over)
5. Constant class nerfing that is sudden, extreme, and wastes lots of character investment time

There will be a big sucking sound in AOC when Warhammer is released.

I dunno, I'm not having much faith in Warhammer either, and i was really hoping that it would be good.

I heard that phrase about Conan.

The Next Big Thing will never casue the flight of the Isrealites, kids...

'Cept for WoW, of course.

I hear comments like these from people and i don't really remember WoW combat well (was in beta then) so that got me interested enough to ask... LotRO combat has the auto-attacks thrown in at regular intervals (based on averaged weapon speed), and all skills have their associated animations that take while to play, so the queue is there to let you enter next attack before the current one is fully finished animating. This does indeed frequently cause visible delay between your button press and actual execution of move.

But thing is, iirc WoW also has both the cooldown based on weapon speed that's there to stop players from stringing their abilites into 'too fast' chains, as well as global cooldown on the combat skills ... and the skills themselves also have animations that take a while to play. So how exactly does WoW handle these while managing to avoid the same visible delay between key press and the action, due to either previous skill being animated, or the global cooldown preventing the ability from being used too soon..? I'll accept they do something different otherwise people would either not complain about LotRO system or complain about WoW system just the same... i'm just curious what that something is.

WoW just plays the animation of the ability you just used and stops any previous animation.  If you press mortal strike or whatever, it plays the mortal strike animation even if it means interrupting an already-playing animation.

(Actually, technically I think it plays the particle effect and a "wind-up" animation for the ability on your hands instantly, and then once the server responds that you successfully used the ability, plays the animation, which ideally is about .3 seconds later-ish.)

Personally I think that's a much better solution.  Going for crazy animation fidelity in an auto-attack combat system is odd.

Oh, and no, there's no cooldown related to auto-attacks in WoW.  There's nothing that stops you from using an ability and an auto-attack and exactly the same time.

Ahh no i meant a cooldown that prevents using abilities one after another in too quick succession. It's apparently 1.5 sec according to article on WoW homepage ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/combat.html )

Also, how does it handle the slow swing weapons (according to the same article the weapon swing time also acts as cooldown of sorts on the abilities) ... i mean, seeing how the swing time on something like 2-hand sword is 3.5 sec or even more, doesn't that create couple seconds of delay between click and actual attack if you use abilities very fast one after another? Say you activate one ability and then a second later hit another, but there's still considerable gap before it's allowed to execute... or is that just for auto-attacks and the abilities are only limited by the 1.5 sec global cd thing?

Yeah, weapon speed only affects auto-attacks.  Abilities are always on the same 1.5 second global cooldown (with the exception of abilities that aren't affected by the global cooldown, although those are almost always not attack abilities).

There are some abilities that occur "on next hit" though, so you'd hit that and then it takes effect on the next auto-attack.  There aren't too many of these though, but they are definitely the most unresponsive aspect to combat, imho.

Also there's no queuing system, so if you hit an ability and it can't execute, it doesn't wait and then execute later.  It either does something immediately or not at all.

A good deal of your abilities (I'd go so far as to say a vast majority) either happen instantly or begin the "cast time" instantly, so that there is immediate feedback.  Some occur "on next swing" but it's very few and usually only to add damage.

This makes a huge difference for something like interrupting a spell cast, where, when you see the caster casting you can immediately interrupt and you don't have to wait for the next swing (potentionally 3.5s away!), which, imho makes combat require more "skill" and less luck, i.e. no having to worry about having just swung and needing to wait 3.5 seconds where you can do nothing at all before you can hit the interrupt on that guy casting a 2.5s spell.

Here's my cancel mini-rant I sent as feedback.

"Ok your combat is great and your world terrain is amazing.  A couple dungeons are very good.

BUT the UI is terrible, terrible!  The fonts are even annoying, the skill buttons are too large and the quickbar layouts were bad.

Some of my skills didn't work, like Fire Pots and Tracking only half the time. 

Items-This is just horrible.  Magic items with a .02% increase to a stat?  Why bother?  It's just as effective to run around naked as it is to wear any of this silly gear.  I realize that you are constrained to make items look gritty for this IP BUT give us a reason to wear them!  Use a snazzy font (see WoW and WAR) and give them meaningful stats.  I have NO interest in playing because I know I will not find any good items. 

Crafting was too hard to do, everyone camped the few spots out in the world.  I see you have added nodes to the radar, but it's too late for me, my interest has already faded.

Money-I am lvl 44 with 65sp.  I still can't afford a mount (down to 75sp from 2gp!).  A single health potion at Dinoq in EM costs 65sp!  Your prices are sky-high, can't buy anything.  Frustrating.

World-There is none.  There are zones but no sense of a savage world to explore.  Just a few quest hubs.  Only one real city, a village and an ALLEY.  Yes, the mighty Stygian kingdom is reduced to an alley. 

This game has little polish and was published in a beta state and I am tired of paying to play a beta.  I did have some fun while I lasted and there is a lot of potential in this IP and this game but for right now I am going to move on.  I will keep an eye out for when or if you fix the above issues and if so I will be back."

The game has slowly sucked the will to play it out of me.

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

What we were playing back then WAS awesome, just because we got to the yet undiscovered shitty part doesn't mean we suddenly changed our minds.

I swear, I was tricked!

I want my money back!  Two dollars!  TWO DOLLARS!

Can I say I told you so yet?  :oh_i_see:

More seriously though AOC blew me AWAY for the first couple weeks and I think the only difference is those who had danced this dance before saw all the warning signs, they saw things coming. I don't think some of us here are snooty mmo snobs like has been said but out bullshit detector is just a bit more honed.

In fact I would say the MMO audience in general is becoming more honed to notice what is good/bad/etc to see when and where things should work and don't or when they feel content is lacking or mechanics horribly flawed. This is a direct result not of wow specifically but of the genre as a whole growing.

This is change we can believe in.

So I'm coming late to this party, partly because my comp finally got upgraded earlier this month.

I see a lot of "yeah, that's it" in this thread, stuff I agree with. Part of it comes down to something simple: Funcom doesn't know what it's doing at the basic design level. It's the same thing I felt about the Pirates of the Burning Sea devs, except Funcom has a higher level of graphical and design mastery at the purely technical level.

This is the thing that depresses me, really. I'm sorry, but guys: there has been a lot of ink spilled at this point about virtual world design and MMOGs, and a lot of the shit that Funcom screws up in Conan isn't about bugs or anything simple like that. It's about having a clear picture of what this form is, what is wrong with it, and what even at a simple level, barring magic tech, could be doing to make it more engaging and fun.

So when I'm running around in Tortage, right off the bat here's several things that just annoy the fuck out of me:

1. Spam droppage of useless shit, with me having one bag and only one bag. What's the point, really? They did it because DikuMUD designs have it. No one thought about it, asked, "Why are we having 20,000 fucking useless tunics and shit drop?" They just said, "Oh, that's what you do, right? Every mob drops crap. because it's supposed to."

2. First 20 levels, here's your chance to impress people. So, ok, they put some effort into the destiny quests. The non-destiny quests? Totally un-Conanesque. I'm a fucking necro walking around with six flayed corpses behind me, and people say, "Hey, could you go get my thimbles for me, I'm a lazy fatass". Ok, fine, the actual Conan stories HAVE FED EX quests in them. Really. Only Conan does them because he's got no choice, the people asking are vicious cynics, and they usually end up killed by Conan or by some demon or thing or at the absolute best, flung into a pit of shit. But here I am, walking around a town with DEAD FUCKING MEAT BAGS trailing behind me, nobody says boo, and they ask me to go grab them some lemonade from some cellar without any fear that I'll rip their faces off. I don't even get a cynical, "I don't know who I am, I have no choice, but someday I'll rape your soul and send you shrieking into the netherworld for this" response in the non-destiny quests.

It's not that I'm a lore freak, but it's that the game has this weird, slavish dependence on MMOG conventions that doesn't serve it well in any way at all. It doesn't make it more fun, or more immersive, or work better. All it screams to me is, "We're a bunch of dumb fuck designers who don't know what we're really doing, don't care much about the lessons we should have learned the first time around, and really just want to get paid off by reskinning WoW, because that's about all we can handle intellectually."

Sure, say it all you want.

A change I can believe in is make a PVP game with ....here comes the shocker...PVP in mind!!! If I felt I had any reason to get through the grind, any light at the end of the tunnel, I mighta trudged through some shit. But the game is just fundamentally broke in the endgame. Well, the mid game too but who's counting :)

Its called Battlefield. Your welcome.

 :rimshot: ?

You are hilarious man!

This, more than anything else, is why I stop reading quest text in games. It doesn't matter how interesting the story it tells is, it isn't my story... it doesn't even parallel my story. It actively DAMAGES my story.

"I have an idea," said my Orc Warrior, "I think I'll go kill a bunch of animals to impress some random dwarf I met in the jungle."

No.

"I have an idea," says me, "I think I want some grinding that's not quite so grindy and has rewards at the end."

The sooner those quest screens disappear the sooner I can get back to leveling. Raph says we see through the narrative to the mechanics underneath... but part of that is because we want to tell our own stories, not hear somebody else's, and the mechanic isn't quite up to the task yet.

Yes, but I think the mechanic could be up to the task, in several ways. The hard way would be a more agent-based approach to NPCs and enemies coupled with longer, more immersive designs for combat so that some of my levelling would happen not because I'd been told to go get 45 boar spleens, but because I needed to make my way through a jungle where a few dangerous creatures and people abided, in which those creatures and people had their own agent-based goals and behaviors. Give me the same result in terms of progression from a two-hour traverse of that jungle that I'd get from doing 10 mechanical FedEx quests, maybe with four or five longer, more involved, more dramatically intense battles during that time. Maybe I've even met one NPC agent who I could negotiate or trade with rather than kill during that time, if its goals are compatible with my needs.

That's the fantasy. The reality is that even in the narrow, utterly conventional design that Funcom is trying (often failing) to implement in AoC, they could create a better sense of immersion, and that's one of only two conceivable selling points for their game. Either it feels different as a fiction or "skin" over a WoW design, or it has sub-mechanics that are different enough from WoW that they create a new kind of fun. AoC's combat is trying to do the latter, and it gets close--it's more fun when it works. On the former, though, it's mostly a pile of fail. I just got to the main city of Stygia with my necro and holy shit, that's embarassing. This is one of the major cities in the game, that's supposed to get me involved, draw me in? That's all?

But Khaldun... nobody's doing that agent-based thing in SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. It looks good on paper, but nobody has seriously attempted it because it's an absolute bear to design in the first place and, in the few toy projects that have even brushed against it, pretty embarrassingly inept anyway. Add that to the challenges inherent in a MMOG? That's not even a fantasy, that's a Wish.

What simple things could AoC have done? Let's see some concrete examples.

Sure.

Let's start from this basic insight. If you're going to build a Diku-type MMOG and borrow the standardized conventions that Blizzard has established (exclamation points over quest mobs, etc.), even if you're better programmers and better resourced than Funcom, you're still going to have technical issues and less content than World of Warcraft at launch. So what conceivable hooks can you have to keep people playing until you fix the technical issues and add some content?

Only two things: the mood, storyline, visual look and so on have to be markedly different than WoW (and coherently so), and some aspect of the repeated, extended game mechanics have to be markedly different than WoW (and equally or more fun: different and annoying doesn't help you at all).

Let's concentrate on the first one: mood, storyline, visual look, with a slight nod to game mechanics. We're talking now as if none of that matters, that quests are pure game-mechanical contrivances that everyone skips past, and the "skin" of the world is something that players barely notice or take in. I think that position is wrong in general, and specifically wrong about World of Warcraft. It may be *now* that the players of WoW treat quests as purely game-mechanical, but I think we're forgetting about everyone's first 1-60 experience, where content, visuality, and character did matter for a lot of players. It was the "hook" that kept them around while more content was added and technical problems ironed out, and more importantly, while social bonds in the game became more "sticky". Moreover, WoW's visual presentation was extremely consistent, aesthetically coherent, and worked very well with the text and character elements to create a sense of a single world or experience. (Unlike EQ2, let's say, which went for a mishmash of photorealism, off-the-shelf fantasy, etc.--no sense of aesthetic coherence).

So, Age of Conan. Funcom's designers read the stories, and they sort of understood the mood or feeling of the source material, because the destiny quests get at it somewhat. What makes the Conan material distinctive isn't titty or decapitation, though. It's a pervasive cynicism, a feeling of corruption. It's actually very well-suited for standard quest design, in many ways--read a lot of the REH stories, and you'll see a pacing and structure that could easily be represented as a standard character-progressing questline. But here's the problem even with the 1-20 destiny quests: some modest branching would do a tremendous amount to help the game both establish the Conan mood AND be a game-mechanical innovation. This is vastly more the case with the non-destiny quests in Tortage, which often don't even seem to recognize the baseline narrative that the destiny quests establish for all players, or they miss payoffs that are in plain sight. A simple example: there's that bitch Red Hand guard, Delia. The quests with her are actually very well written, and classically Conanesque: you have to do completely amoral things to please her because you don't really have any choice: you're an amnesiac being manipulated by forces beyond your control. So in the final destiny quest, there she is. In a classic Conan story, this is where Conan feeds some asshole his own intenstines (or where the asshole in question gets caught in a trap of his own making and suffers gruesomely). In this case? You kill her peremptorily and move on to the silent-movie silliness of all the friendlies and hostiles running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I don't think it's that hard to write many standard quests with two branching dialogue trees that allow for the expression of different personalities or attitudes, and in some cases, slightly divergent outcomes which have some game-mechanical reality (such as faction gains or losses). World of Warcraft has a view; Conan could use a lot more. There *are* a few standard 'noble' fantasy types in Conan's mythology, but only a very few, and they tend to look like idiots. Most of my dialogue options, quest actions, and game-mechanical activities should be cynical, dark, self-interested. I shouldn't be fetching thimbles--I should be sending a reanimated corpse to rip open a nobleman's throat in a dark alley at night, and take his purse for myself.

Funcom used a lot of utterly standard quest-templates with matching utterly-standard noble fantasy trope dialogue because they don't really understand what they're doing and how to carve out a marketplace niche, not because those are hard to make. Also because they stupidly thought they could slow players down with standard-issue collecting and fed ex'ing. Wrong. All of this gets vastly worse, imho, when you get out of Tortage--Tortage at least has some quests that feel right or are slightly original in their structure.

---

As far as other kinds of game-mechanical originality? The combat in AoC has at least some different ideas in it, but often badly implemented, or crippled by bugs and inconsistent class design implementation. I guess if they ever got the endgame PvP working, that might be different, but Warhammer and WotLK look to have some of that covered. So mostly this just seems to be a clueless, floundering design. Funcom didn't understand how to make it *feel* or *experience* differently, and they didn't really have a solid vision of game-mechanical innovations or twists. Not to mention that they're technically screwed-up and that they have about the worst attitude towards community management of any MMOG designer I've seen.

They also hide the good quests behind unpleasant chains no one gets around to doing.

The most glaring example to me is Tarisha, the ghostly woman in the final Tortage mission who rises from a circle of flame.  How many people even know about Tarisha's story?  It requires doing the Xantia's Wrath arc which involves running back and forth the drunkard Genzio in the Acheronian ruins.  It takes more back and forth to get to the meat of his quest than killing the bat god which explicitly ties to the destiny quest.  Then you've got to do it several more times for Tarisha's arc, if you even find out about her quest line.  To top it off, you can't choose to do anything but watch an idiot grasp at straws instead of taking action to change how things turn out.  (Imagine being able to affect the final story quest by choices in previous quests!)

I did the grenzio part of the quest were she jumps in the fire, i still didnt understand why she came back though.  Was there more to it i missed? i THOUGHT i did every single tortage quest the last time around, took me to lvl 23, but that still confused me.

Funcom certainly has a litany of errors in AoC but slamming them for FedEX quests (due to lore reasons or whatever) is silly. It's a problem that's endemic to the genre, not a specific title, and at least they did move the bar a little bit with the Destiny quests. If you think upcoming titles will remove this kind of kill 10 rats questing and be lore-true I think you're in for disappointment.

Certainly post-Tortage has issues content-wise, but I get the feeling some people here are OUTRAGED! OUTRAGED I TELL YOU! because a Conan IP game has fetch quests.

Honestly - it's the least of the games problems.

EDIT: And it's not a re-skinned wow to make money hats mechanic. It's a core mechanic to every MMORPG ever released. Hence the issue. I never expected Funcom to be able to resolve this problem, hell I don't think Blizzard or Mythic can. So, you know, let's get stuff like attack animations and loot that matters fixed and I'll let repetitive fedex'ing slide...

No, that was it.  Why she came back wasn't entirely clear.

She does appear at the spot Valerius stands during the day, and with all the talk of souls and Set it could tie into that.  Or Mithrelle manipulating things, or the sorceress Valerius hired.

Most people don't even know that much though.  They never meet her until she rises out of the fire, so it makes no sense at all.

As I said, Fed Ex quests are even lore-appropriate to Conan. Some of REH's best Conan stories are basically elaborate Fed Ex quests of some kind or another. The point is, though, Conan doesn't do them because he just wants to help the old guy out with his thimbles, or get some fish for some fucker who is hungry. He does them because he's got no choice, because he's stuck in a bad situation, because he's greedy. And mostly that's how everyone in Conan's world operates: out of self-interest, cynically, playing games of power and fate.

You can disguise a lot of the quest templates for MMOG in various ways that make them at least momentarily interesting. The bombing dailies in World of Warcraft are just "kill 10 foozles", but at least the first time you do them, you say, "Hey, that's fun". You can surround fetch quests and collection quests with an interesting story that fits the setting or mood of your game. You can introduce some element of competition against other player or a race against the clock to add urgency to them. You can make them visually interesting. You can use them as short fillers in between more intricate or involved questlines.

AoC doesn't do much of that EVEN in the fairly carefully designed Tortuge non-destiny quests. And yeah, a few of the better designed ones probably go overlooked simply because there's so many robotically, mechanically designed ones.

As easy as branching quests seem to design, they too are rarely done even in single-player games. It's not a matter of technical difficulty so much as ease of experience. When players are given branches they tend to assume one is "right" (most beneficial, the least hassle later, the best rewards) and will be frustrated if they make the "wrong" choice... or be suspicious that they already have. If, on the other hand, it turns out the choices are illusory don't have consequences... players can  be even more disappointed. Best case scenario: options cost excess effort that anybody going through only once will never see.

Until somebody figure out how to get this functional in anything other than sandbox RPGs like Fallout, it's not going to appear in MMOGs.

Now we're talking! This is something designers have no excuse for failing to address. They ought to do the same thing with quests that they're supposed to do with graphics: Use them to establish a consistent theme. The buildings should match the trees should match the animals, so the quests should match the dialog should match the backstory. Creating a generalized framework...  not only of what the various NPCs want, but also what sort of characters players will want to portray based on their understanding of the game world.

The players don't get to play exactly the story they want to, but at least their story fits the world they've come to understand.

Yeah. There's certainly some Conanesque NPCs in Tortuge, but there's plenty who wandered in from generic heroic fantasy land, asking for generic fantasy heroic favors to be done for them.

It's a solid game but...

It's all been done before.  I loved it for 2 months straight.  Then it's like I hit a fuckin' brick wall where I didn't even want to log in.  Just hit me one day.  Went from "this game is a 10!" to "ugh" overnight.

Same here. I think both the PvP imbalance, the bugs, memory leaks and lack of content at certain levels hit me at the same time and it was no more to do after that.

So I've been back in Eve the last day or two.  One reason I like it so much at the moment is because it's just so different.

The thought of running my little fantasy character around and pew pewing with a bow (I've always played archers in MMORPGS except UO and WOW where archery is lame) for the 100,000 time in the last 8 years is simply not entertaining anymore.  AoC account is active until the 19th and I probably won't log in.

Cruising around in a ship in 360 degrees and blowing shit up may be fun only because it's new and different for me (yet to be determined), but it is currently fun whereas the idea of a fantasy MMORPG makes me want to puke.

whoops, double post

To much solo grinding. Sorry but this bores me to death. Group grinding is fun when you actually have real class dependacy, that forces classes to work together, the system has to force you to do this… period.

Every day I logon, I take bets which of my characters will be fucken useless… guess what? They are all nerfed to fucken hell… and no the grunksta aint rollin no bs healer… it sucks, my barb use to be fun… my necro was good (for one week lol)… just cant deal with this shit for much more and it kills me. I actually like this fucken game and FC has simply become one with the fail
(http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/kb7rky/FARK%20Photos/failboat3.jpg)

Barbs are currently the most powerful class in the game and should still be getting a few more nerfs to get them in line, what the fucken are you talking about.

Can you not read his title?

My God, It's Full of Stars !

(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2126/2353281088_4ec3075edb.jpg)

Does this mean it is no longer game over for all MMOs?

I think it means hes saving up the sunny-d bottles again.

Is there anyway to nominate Grunk as f13's official mascot?

Think of him more as our liaison from the VN boards and Xbox Live.

This is a fitting thread for this... thing:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm?THREAD=192300&PAGE=1&BHCP=1&bhcp=1

This inspires me. What better to bring back your faltering client base than GMs payed to cyber! It could be set up in those in-game brothel houses that are so non-brothelly. It could stabilize the economy, reduce the number of hornballs actively adventuring, etc.

Tonight we gathered 30 friends and attacked a Battlekeep. There are just 8 of them on any server so getting one is like the biggest (empty) goal achievable right now.

90 minutes worth of sieging and fighting, money spent on siege weapons, time spent aslong freinds to postpone their stuff to be present and... FUCKALL.

We won the siege, we ended up having more points than the defenders and when the time ran out we didn't get the usual "YOU LOST" message, nor did we get the deserved YOU WON. We got nothing. And... surprise... the Battlekeep is still owned by the losers we destroyed.

We petitioned, and the answer is:

1) It's a known bug, sometimes it happens.
2) No I can't read logs and give the BK to you.
3) No I can't read logs and give the PVP points back to you.
4) No I can't read logs and refund you money spent on siege weaponry.
5) I can't do anything, I can just tell you that I am sorry and "Is there anything else I can do for you tonight?"

HOLY FUCK. I am leaving tomorrow for 2 weeks of random Europe traveling, and this is the only thing that is saving my subscription. Which won't last a day when I'll be back, unless a juicy miracle patch will greet me and bake me some doughnuts.

I support having grunk as the official f13 mascot.

As long as we can get him neutered first.

I've had my AOC box for 2 months and just got around to installing it on Saturday, patched overnight, and played for 2 hours Sunday night. Got to level 10.

I'm pretty sure I'm not logging in again.

Can I have your stuff ?

As in. Would you like to delete your billing information and send my your account information ? That might be the only (cc-less) way to have a look at this game.

Crazy idea, I know.

I blame the coffee...

[_]?

 :awesome_for_real:

Give me a few days. If I decide I really do loathe it, we'll talk.  :drill:

Check your PMs, Helm.

Got it.  :awesome_for_real:

I hope it does not wreck my pc   :ye_gods: