So what's Mass Market Again? Conan hits 1M (shipped).

[Montague]

Whoever runs that blog with the fake AOC numbers better have a good attorney.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It was not open-pvp that killed Darktide, it was all the crap that gets brought along with it.

Some would argue that all that crap is part and parcel of open-pvp and computer games.  Design for it as a dev, or find your players cheating to do it for themselves and creating a hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots." Then you get to spend more time chasing down the hacks and stopping them than you do developing your game. 

That's funny, I thought players cheated in any game they could...PvP or no. Hell, my friend was guild leader of Bloodsworn (one of the top PvE guilds in WoW) that were carpet banned for cheating in AQ40. PvEers will find ways to cheat to max out fastest.

I think the point is C'thun isn't going to get fed up with wow and quit because some people cheated to gank him, other players however will get sick of peope hacking to kill them VERY quickly

[Montague]

WoWRiot dude comes correct.

Oops, my bad

[sam, an eggplant]

So I guess he didn't have an agenda, instead he was posting made-up numbers from an untrustworthy source. I see "game journalism" is alive and well.

[cevik]

WoWRiot dude comes correct.

Oops, my bad

The internet frightens me.

[photek]

WoWRiot dude comes correct.

Oops, my bad

And again he is dead wrong. Quoting this :

Age of Conan's Launch Much Smoother Than WoW's

One player offered this particularly telling insight:

"WoW had two hour queues, horrible lag, constant crashing & VERY limited end game content in the beginning"

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes, game was stable and ran at high FPS with my mediocre PC back then and the two hours queues are an exaggeration at best. There was queues on high populated realms several months after release during peak hours and that was it.

Not that AoC release was terrible by any means (beta was in many ways), it was far better than any of us would have though, but the turncoating like this makes him look clueless. And AoC still has memory leaks, lots of bugs, feats that don't work, spells that don't scale amongst other things, but it just got released. Why can't people just put the torches down and accept there is room for several MMO's?

[cevik]

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes, game was stable and ran at high FPS with my mediocre PC back then and the two hours queues are an exaggeration at best. There was queues on high populated realms several months after release during peak hours and that was it.

There was loot lag, if that's what he means.  As a Warlock, everytime I killed someone with Soulburn the game would be unplayable for 30 seconds or more.  And that didn't get fixed until right around when TBC was released, so it was a persistant bug that lasted for years.

As far as rubberbanding and other types of lag in WoW, it happened.  It was no better or worse than any other online game, but it certainly wasn't something that didn't exist. 

I think as far as server stability goes, AoC is a better launch than what my server was like at WoW's launch (I've never seen an AoC server crash).  But as far as client stability goes, WoW was better than AoC.  I'd say it's a wash.

EDIT:  I guess my WoW experience is different than most, since I played a Warlock pretty much from release.  I see AoC's classes as unfinished and needing improvement, but I'm used to it.  My experience with WoW at release was that my class was completely unfinished and needed improvement.  Hell, WoW Warlocks just before TBC was released vs WoW Warlocks at release were entirely different beasts.

[Montague]

WoWRiot dude comes correct.

Oops, my bad

And again he is dead wrong. Quoting this :

Age of Conan's Launch Much Smoother Than WoW's

One player offered this particularly telling insight:

"WoW had two hour queues, horrible lag, constant crashing & VERY limited end game content in the beginning"

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes, game was stable and ran at high FPS with my mediocre PC back then and the two hours queues are an exaggeration at best. There was queues on high populated realms several months after release during peak hours and that was it.

Not that AoC release was terrible by any means (beta was in many ways), it was far better than any of us would have though, but the turncoating like this makes him look clueless. And AoC still has memory leaks, lots of bugs, feats that don't work, spells that don't scale amongst other things, but it just got released. Why can't people just put the torches down and accept there is room for several MMO's?

WoW experience at release was time and server dependent it seems. Cenarion Circle did well enough at non-peak times, but I remember a two-three week stretch where logging in at peak time was painful thanks to queues and server lag. I also remember there was a certain cluster of servers that routinely crashed and was often down for maintenance for the first few months, but the names escape me. The problems WoW had in the beginning were generally network and server related - the code itself was pretty solid as far as showstopping bugs went.

[cevik]

The problems WoW had in the beginning were generally network and server related - the code itself was pretty solid as far as showstopping bugs went.

Either way, WoW's launch wasn't nearly the rosy picture that is being painted.  I know on my server we were having lag that would make the game literally unplayable at peak all the way until late 2006. 

I'm not saying that WoW was a worse (or better) release than AoC, but to say:

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes,

Is extremely misleading and, well, downright wrong.  I can remember dozens of raids that ended because either the game was unplayable due to lag, or worse, because the server crashed after a boss died and we lost the loot.  And my guild was WAY behind the curve in raiding, so that means it was well after release (we were a pvp guild for the longest time, we didn't start raiding until late 2005 at the very earliest).

EDIT:  And as far as "code" stability goes, there were weeks where my server crashed at least once per night.  I mean at least one server (not client) crash per night for 3-4 weeks in a row.  I hardly call that stable code.  At least, if I checked in that "stable" code here at my job I'd be in deep shit.

[Lightstalker]

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes, game was stable and ran at high FPS with my mediocre PC back then and the two hours queues are an exaggeration at best. There was queues on high populated realms several months after release during peak hours and that was it.

• In the month of release there certainly were +2 hour queues on popular servers, and a wild influx of new servers in an attempt to mitigate the crushing load of popularity.  Frostwolf, by no means the heaviest load server at release, had 45 min to 2 hour peak queues depending on the day but that only tells part of the story as the login server would drop your client and you'd kick back to the end of the queue - if you even bothered to requeue.  Queues really didn't clear out for us until February, others were queuing until much later.
• The login, world, and instance servers frequently went down at release preventing players from getting into the game or locking those out (or apart from their guildmates) once in - again, this sorted out once the crushing load of popularity was spread out.
• Some new instances and raid sizes/compositions can create unplayably low FPS or even unloadable situations for machines that have otherwise performed admirably with WoW for the last 3 years.
• Loot lag persists today.
• WoW still CTDs and throws unhandled exceptions with each new patch cycle - on the release servers.
• Just last month we watched a guild mate log in all his characters and get three of them stuck joining the instance server for steamvaults.  He took a screenshot of the three characters 'running' next to each other...

Yes the game is generally reliable for most users in common scenarios but it doesn't take much (any) poking to find defects today, much less at release when they would stab you in the eye.

Maybe I just missed the green in the above post and have fallen into the Chasm of Xar.

[photek]

The problems WoW had in the beginning were generally network and server related - the code itself was pretty solid as far as showstopping bugs went.

Either way, WoW's launch wasn't nearly the rosy picture that is being painted.  I know on my server we were having lag that would make the game literally unplayable at peak all the way until late 2006. 

I'm not saying that WoW was a worse (or better) release than AoC, but to say:

Sigh. I played WoW closed beta, played the Korean / EU / US beta, played US retail and EU retail. There was never any sort of lag, extremely few crashes,

Is extremely misleading and, well, downright wrong.  I can remember dozens of raids that ended because either the game was unplayable due to lag, or worse, because the server crashed after a boss died and we lost the loot.  And my guild was WAY behind the curve in raiding, so that means it was well after release (we were a pvp guild for the longest time, we didn't start raiding until late 2005 at the very earliest).

EDIT:  And as far as "code" stability goes, there were weeks where my server crashed at least once per night.  I mean at least one server (not client) crash per night for 3-4 weeks in a row.  I hardly call that stable code.  At least, if I checked in that "stable" code here at my job I'd be in deep shit.

Of course it is an individual experience, however I can confirm some of your points that several of my raiders had. We started raiding once Molten Core was out basically and most of the problems with World of Warcraft lag were related with the providers / ISP. In Europe, Telia has been a major factor for the lag caused to many EU players, Slovenians had major issues with lag due to their ISP (can't recall the name), British players on another ISP had problems with disconnecting randomly, Norwegians had lag issues and timeouts due to Telenor. That was not World of Warcrafts fault. Those people represented about 10% of my guild and it was always the same crowd and other players from the same zones that had the same issues.

Late 2005, heh.. No wonder you lagged. That was when Blackwing Lair was released, every guild and their grandmothers were in Blackrock Mountain. There was pathways of corpses from the flightpaths to Blackrock and inside Blackrock you could easily find thousands of players. Some to raid, some to engage in PvP, at this point, yes servers went unstable for a small period as expected. Another points when servers were laggy was during our 400-500 man raids (Yes 400-500 players) from city to city, but Blizzard sorted this out one patch later (around Tarren Mill / South Shore times servers were rock solid, only issues you could have was some lag issues).

In AoC a mediumsized raid on the Battlekeep and a player with top notch PC had 2-3FPS. Memoryleaks are all over the place, crashes to desktop, alt+tabbing is not doable while loading and causes graphical glitches and errors amongst other things. Sure servers are stable, but there is still lots of downtime and on EU release the servers weren't even up. We even had to plea to get new servers, they didnt have plans on putting up new PvP RELEASE servers on release and wanted us to roll on the early access realms until they were full. And how many people are on each server ? Very few compared to what was on WoW.

Lightstalker : Individuall experiences affecting 0,5% of the mass compared to issues that affect 90% of the playerbase cannot be compared. Be realistic.

[cevik]

Of course it is an individual experience, however I can confirm some of your points that several of my raiders had. We started raiding once Molten Core was out basically and most of the problems with World of Warcraft lag were related with the providers / ISP. In Europe, Telia has been a major factor for the lag caused to many EU players, Slovenians had major issues with lag due to their ISP (can't recall the name), British players on another ISP had problems with disconnecting randomly, Norwegians had lag issues and timeouts due to Telenor. That was not World of Warcrafts fault. Those people represented about 10% of my guild and it was always the same crowd and other players from the same zones that had the same issues.

Late 2005, heh.. No wonder you lagged. That was when Blackwing Lair was released, every guild and their grandmothers were in Blackrock Mountain. There was pathways of corpses from the flightpaths to Blackrock and inside Blackrock you could easily find thousands of players. Some to raid, some to engage in PvP, at this point, yes servers went unstable for a small period as expected. Another points when servers were laggy was during our 400-500 man raids (Yes 400-500 players) from city to city, but Blizzard sorted this out one patch later (around Tarren Mill / South Shore times servers were rock solid, only issues you could have was some lag issues).

In AoC a mediumsized raid on the Battlekeep and a player with top notch PC had 2-3FPS. Memoryleaks are all over the place, crashes to desktop, alt+tabbing is not doable while loading and causes graphical glitches and errors amongst other things. Sure servers are stable, but there is still lots of downtime and on EU release the servers weren't even up. We even had to plea to get new servers, they didnt have plans on putting up new PvP RELEASE servers on release and wanted us to roll on the early access realms until they were full. And how many people are on each server ? Very few compared to what was on WoW.

Lightstalker : Individuall experiences affecting 0,5% of the mass compared to issues that affect 90% of the playerbase cannot be compared. Be realistic.

I'm sorry, I thought you were living in reality.  I didn't mean to intrude upon your fantasy, carry on.

[photek]

I'm sorry, I thought you were living in reality.  I didn't mean to intrude upon your fantasy, carry on.

Please elaborate, that has no context whatsoever with what I said. I merely reflected on personal experience and I played the three most populated realms at that time. Also note, I played dominantly on EU realms, say about 99% of the time after summer 2005. I'll put it short in case I was misunderstood: Several of the errors written here that occurred in World of Warcraft were either players PC / hardware, ISP or third party (antivirus, firewalls, bad drivers) related. It had the general bugs and server downtime at several times during the summer of 2005 due to many factors, raid and honor system introduction being one massive factor. Age of Conan bugs are caused by the Age of Conan client and bad coding.

The server downtime / auth server downtime was due to mass population, not due to generally unstable servers. Also WoW was Blizzards first MMO. They went from Battle.net to MMO. Funcom had, as they claim, tons of experiences learned from Anarchy Online.

EDIT : Of course WoW has some flaws and bugs still in it, but they are so minor and rare that they affect a very small audience and are / should be harder to generally spot compared to mass errors that is directly in the client of AoC.

EDIT2: Like the AoC bug that probably half of the melee population does 25% less damage than the counterpart. Yes, the female bug, been in since beta. How long would this last in WoW ? The nerdrage on forums would spawn a hotfix on the fly.

[Mrbloodworth]

My game is better than your game.

[lac]

Warcraft lag were related with the providers / ISP. In Europe

Very true. We often had all the Turks or Swedes disconnect at the same time.
That doesn't change the fact that the servers would 'desync' now and again for hours at a time. You had people stuck on zeps, raid bosses moving at half speed (awesome for progression), all the looting horror, invisible mobs, bugged ore deposits, disconnects while zoning, insanely lagged instances, the freakshow of AQ bugged bugs....
Ah, the good times.

[cevik]

Please elaborate, that has no context whatsoever with what I said. I merely reflected on personal experience and I played the three most populated realms at that time.

Okay, I said "the servers crashed" you responded "sure some people had bad isps, sucks to be them."  I'm talking about server crashes, literally every single person on the server being logged off.  You know, server crashes.  Not ISP issues.

Then, in your scary schizophrenic post, you quickly switch too "ohh, besides it's unfair to judge Blizzard during that time frame, it's when they were releasing stuff."  Without even remotely seeing the irony of your position.

But lastly, you're just flat out lying.  There were clear issues with WoW and lag and server stability.  If you are going to lie and claim there were no issues, there just isn't much I can do to help you.

Let me put it this way, you'd look at me funny if I suddenly said "AoC doesn't have a single FPS issue, there is no memory leak, and it currently has 2 million subscribers, so there".  Yet somehow I'm supposed to retort against your lies about WoW and pretend they have some basis in reality.  If we are just going to lie to make our positions stronger, there isn't much I can do.

WoW's release simply is not the rosy picture you are painting.  AoC is no better, but certainly WoW just isn't what you claim it to be.

[photek]

My game is better than your game.

I'm not defending one or the other more than it deserves, I'm subscribing to both. I got three active WoW subscriptions and two in AoC. I'm just sharing my personal experience from the realms I have played, and they are many. And hours invested are shameful to elaborate. Yes of course WoW had server issues, but you seem to misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm saying this : Its different having an unstable server with 25.000 players and a 3000 player one and the majority of the problems were caused by ISP's which Blizzard can't change on the fly.

But lastly, you're just flat out lying.  There were clear issues with WoW and lag and server stability. If you are going to lie and claim there were no issues, there just isn't much I can do to help you.

No, I am not.  You are misinformed and spend too much time reading WoW forums and biased if you believe that. There was issues with HIGH populated realms at certain times and server instability, but they were ironed out. Again back to my point, there is a huge difference with issues that affects a minority for a small period of your playerbase versus the majority for extended periods without feedback.

[Mrbloodworth]

My comment was only about what this thread has come down too.

[photek]

My comment was only about what this thread has come down too.

This thread got out of hand looong time ago  I predict next page will be about NGE.

[Brogarn]

I don't think you're lying, photek, I think you've glossed over your memory. WoW's release was no better than AoC's. Different bits of instability and issues, but definitely equal at the very least.

[photek]

I don't think you're lying, photek, I think you've glossed over your memory. WoW's release was no better than AoC's. Different bits of instability and issues, but definitely equal at the very least.

EU release was very smooth. That was Feb 2005 so they had a few months since US late 2004 release to polish. I still recall a few US server issues, but they occurred when masses started streaming to the same servers and when people started seeing WoW for what it was. Right now the AoC servers are stable, but how many players are playing on each server ? I am level 66 with my Tempest and I have played ONE total minigame of Capture the Skull since level 19. And I'm queued most of the time. Its 10-15 players searching and always "8 matching your search". If AoC pulls of some miracle and acquires a few million players, then we can make fair server vs server compare. However in terms of bugs and issues AoC is the king of the hill by a longshot currently.

[veredus]

Completely random question. But how the hell do you queue up for the pvp minigames anyway? Never seen anything on how to do it in game and kinda figured at 26 i just hadn't gotten to that stuff yet.

[Simond]

Cevik, did you start on Mal'Ganis or one of the other dozen or so insanely overcrowed launch servers by any chance?

[Ratman_tf]

Awesome article!  

Age of Conan Sells Like Hotcakes Around the World

Noteworthy, but other games have taken the shiny spot and then faded off the radar.

Untapped Markets: Much More Room To Grow: Asian Market, XBOX360 Market

But will the asian and X360 markets take to AoC? Or play their existing types of games?(Korean grindups, console shmups) Time will tell.

Gamers Upgrading Their Computers

Not something to bank on IMO. Users will eventually be forced to upgrade, (system requirements for OSes, the latest Flash Player XXVII doesn't run under Windows XP, etc...) but the majority of them (the non-hardcore gamers) do it reluctantly and slowly. And not for a single 50 dollar game that they may or may not like.

tl;dr. Let me know when AoC gets to about 5 million subs. Then I'll consider it to be a potential WoW buster.

[Miasma]

Completely random question. But how the hell do you queue up for the pvp minigames anyway? Never seen anything on how to do it in game and kinda figured at 26 i just hadn't gotten to that stuff yet.

One of the circles in the upper left opens a window with a PvP tab in which you queue up.

[cevik]

No, I am not.  You are misinformed and spend too much time reading WoW forums and biased if you believe that.

I'm talking about personal experience, not reading Forums.  Don't get me wrong, I was a happy (if somewhat bored) customer at Blizzard, but you are just wrong, WoW had it's fair share of issues.

Simond, I played on Llane.  Which in no way is a high population server.

[Numtini]

Hmm. I don't remember any real issues with WOW other than server queues (and occasional crashes while they tried to figure out what queue was what I'm guessing). It wasn't like I didn't look or even pray for them. I hated WOW in beta and still think EQ2 at any point in time was a better game than WoW at any point in time. But the problems just weren't there.

I'm not saying that there wasn't a small percentage of people having AOC-esque problems in WOW, but I'm unconvinced that there is a small percentage of people experiencing a WOW-ish smooth ride in AOC.

[Simond]

Simond, I played on Llane.  Which in no way is a high population server.

OK, fair enough. It's just that I've heard from more than one person who complained about bad server performance in WoW at launch then followed up with "I was on Mal'ganis" when questioned. 

[cevik]

I'm not saying that there wasn't a small percentage of people having AOC-esque problems in WOW, but I'm unconvinced that there is a small percentage of people experiencing a WOW-ish smooth ride in AOC.

My guild made a series of videos of us running around in full raids as naked gnomes on various PvP servers.  Each one of those videos were made because either our server crashed as we were part way through clearing out a raid dungeon or because lag was rendering raiding on our server unplayable.

Again, I'm not talking about a couple of people having problems, I'm talking about everyone I knew, from a variety of raiding and pvp guilds, all of them, every single person, having lag issues or being kicked off the (obviously crashed) server.

And Llane was far from the worst server.  In fact, Llane was a pretty stable server compared to some.

EDIT:  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying WoW was a trainwreck of a release like AO or WWIIOL or, well for the most part, every other MMOG release I've ever been in.  I'm just saying that WoW did have it's share of issues, and I'm shocked to see the revisionist history here.

EDIT2:  I'm pretty certain I posted at least one of the naked gnome videos here.  Though I am unable to find the link at the moment.

EDIT3:  One last thing, my guild's very first raid was in ZG, so it must have been early 2006 when we started raiding, well after the release of BWL, iirc.  We moved from ZG to MC and beyond.

[Merusk]

At launch Alleria had a few server crashes, usually just Eastern kingdoms(which still happens).  However, we had TONS of loot lag, and those gimpy mining nodes that forced you to logout to get out of the "looting" position.   None of it was enough to stop anyone playing more than 3-5 minutes, however.  The game certainly wasn't perfect, and the majority of problems were traced to: "Oh, we thought we could have servers share databases.  Silly us there's a shitload more querys than we originally planned for."  It took them about a month and a half to get Alleria working properly, and some servers, like TIchondrius, never did until some heavy hardware upgrades were made.

The complaints being lodged against AoC seem to be of the "hay we can't do core portions of the game because, y'know, FPS sux."  You know, like Shadowbane.  What remains to be seen is if Funcom can fix it/ pull it out of it's hat.  It's certainly not any worse than WoW was (based on anecdotes, not personal experience.) but it DOES pose a bit of a bigger problem as it's not an 'inconvenience' but a question of properly working core mechanics.

[cevik]

The complaints being lodged against AoC seem to be of the "hay we can't do core portions of the game because, y'know, FPS sux."  You know, like Shadowbane. 

Anyone who would compare AoC's launch to Shadowbane is just trolling.

[veredus]

Completely random question. But how the hell do you queue up for the pvp minigames anyway? Never seen anything on how to do it in game and kinda figured at 26 i just hadn't gotten to that stuff yet.

One of the circles in the upper left opens a window with a PvP tab in which you queue up.

Ahh no kidding. Thanks.

[tazelbain]

Are their people playing it? Is it any good?

[Merusk]

The complaints being lodged against AoC seem to be of the "hay we can't do core portions of the game because, y'know, FPS sux."  You know, like Shadowbane. 

Anyone who would compare AoC's launch to Shadowbane is just trolling.

   Turn down the Fanboism, Cevik.  It's not a "zomg aoc=shadowbane" it's a "Hey, we've seen what happens when core shit doesn't work."  Would you prefer Vanguard? Matrix?

[Surlyboi]

Jeez, this guy may be off his bi-polar meds.