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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Age of Conan  |  Topic: General Assessment of AOC - PVP Server Perspective 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: General Assessment of AOC - PVP Server Perspective  (Read 3533 times)
waylander
Terracotta Army
Posts: 526


on: July 02, 2008, 11:49:53 AM

LotD is closing in on a full Tier 3 city, and we've held a battle keep since the first day they became available. I have a level 80 Tempest of Set, and a level 60 Necromancer at the present time.  Overall I think AOC is a decent game, but I do think its going to take a big subscriber retention hit if it doesn't get some things fixed by the end of the 3 month mark.

Character Advancement

AOC has good character advancement up through about level 55. From there the rate of advancement slows considerably because there is no bridge from the level 55 to level 60 content. The next exp bottle neck happens at levels 70-80 as everyone is packed into a single instance of Keshetta. In Keshetta there are only 3 spawn locations that provide a decent rate of exp for character advancement, and that is with a PL grind group. Without a PL grind group I'd probably hang myself.

Solo content is especially weak after level 55, and PL grinding from level 20 to level 80 is five (5) times faster and more rewarding than leveling via the quest system.  They need to beef up the questing xp, rewards, and make the quests more efficient.

The game needs a lot of good solo instances that are good for leveling, loot, offer limited interference from random exp PK's. As I predicted to others, bored level 80's rolling exp groups for fun makes the server populations go down.

Class Balance

What can I say because Funcom never did much testing above level 20. Most classes still have top tier talents that don't work or don't work right.  Also Funcom expects players to keep shelling out for respecs due to their class balancing, and some players report respec costs of up to 8 friggin gold right now.

I expect several more months of Funcom trying to buy a clue as far as class balance goes.

Guild Cities

It takes a huge amount of work to build a guild city above the Tier 1 level. This is where I see small guilds pretty much pushed out of the game because they won't be able to craft high level stuff without access to the top end crafting buildings. 

Border Kingdoms and Battle Keeps

Small guilds will never own a battle keep. Funcom stated that Towers would be added in to the border kingdom areas, but so far they are not in there.  So at this point there is no role for a small guild in end game PVP.

On the higher end of PVP, AOC performance in large battles is spotty. Each patch either moves game performance forward a notch, or sets it back two notches. Right now the game croaks if you try anything higher than 48vs48, and croaks a lot of the time even trying to support regular 48vs48. They have got to fix this soon, or seriously adjust their expectations for end game PVP.

Arena PVP is a joke, has no meaning, no rewards, and no ladders.

Resources/ Crafting

Resource gathering is the most boring thing on the planet. Having to do quests and farm rare resources to go from T1 to T3 resource gathering ability is even more ridiculous. I think Shadowbane had a good idea when they created resource mines that would auto gather, and then give players a small objective to fight over. Too bad AOC didn't take a page from the SB book when they put in their resource system.

Guild Management

This is TERRIBAD, and needs improvement asap. We're stuck with preset guild titles that make no sense (chillotyses, etc), people quit the guild by accident all the time while trying to close the MOTD interface, there's no guild tools to set a tax, etc.

Honestly I would have expected a next generation guild management interface from this game, but it simply hasn't delivered that. Instead I feel like I've been warped back to 1999.

Verdict

AOC has a lot to do and little time to do it. Warhammer might be called a WoW clone by some, but its still more PVP oriented than WoW. Therefore if its relatively bug free and mostly feature complete (as advertised) at launch it could siphon off a lot of people from WoW as well as people who are fed up with AOC by that point.

The game has a lot of promise, but I think its too soon for the Community Manager to be calling AOC "steak" and WoW "McDonalds".

Lords of the Dead
Gaming Press - Retired
Morfiend
Terracotta Army
Posts: 6009

wants a greif tittle


Reply #1 on: July 02, 2008, 11:59:24 AM

I agree with the majority of what you said. The guild tools are fucking horrible. No other way about it. They are pretty much worse than the tools UO launched with. Also, Friends list and Guild list and Ignore list in one fucking window. Who thought that was a good idea. I will also harp on the guild/player search. It. Fucking. Sucks.
Hell, even back in NWN on AOL pre 1995 you could do /who "name". Gah.

I will also say I think the combo / caster system is flawed. Casters hit one button, and if the target is in range at the time of casting, spell will hit (or resist). Combos are broken. You have to wind up the combo, most of the time in PVP leading to running around swinging at thin air, and then trying to land only that last triggering hit. Also, as you level your skills up, the combos take longer to wind up, yet they dont scale upward in DPS due to the longer wind up. Also, several melee classes have 1 hit abilities on casters, this also is stupid. No one likes to get one hit, ever.

I wont even get in to the completely stupid Stamina/Spring/Blocking mechanic cause I have ranted about that enough.

It seems to me that the more I play, the more I am seeing the cracks in the game. The shiny has worn off very quickly, and they need to get their act together. I *want* to like this game, as I really enjoy the fast paced combat and the lore and graphics, but the constant missing content and flaws in the system are really driving me away.
Mrbloodworth
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Posts: 15148


Reply #2 on: July 02, 2008, 12:12:55 PM

Really agree with a lot of this.

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
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LK
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4268


Reply #3 on: July 02, 2008, 12:18:24 PM

I already quit after so many bugs with the quest system.  Honestly? This game came pretty close but not quite to being a decent MMO.  But I applaud them for at least doing way better than other group's efforts.

"Then there's the double-barreled shotgun from Doom 2 - no-one within your entire household could be of any doubt that it's been fired because it sounds like God slamming a door on his fingers." - Yahtzee Croshaw
Miasma
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Posts: 5283

Stopgap Measure


Reply #4 on: July 02, 2008, 12:26:50 PM

One of the things keeping me subscribed is that the AO people who actually kept playing past that launch claim that the game got a lot better in time, hopefully the same will happen here.

I'm on a PvE server and it looks like only my guild and one other have battlekeeps.  My guild has hundreds of people so we were able to gather the resources and gold fairly easily, they are a much smaller raid guild so they probably went all out with their efforts.  Neither of us have attacked eachother yet awesome, for real.  Maybe if they allowed us to actually schedule defenses in primetime instead of stopping all seiges at 6:00PM EST...
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