What went wrong?

[Lakov_Sanite]

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.

[photek]

It gives me no reason to play currently.

[schild]

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[bhodikhan]

Thread was split by me:
1. Lamaros, you aren't a mod, don't be .... except Grunk.

2. Cheddar you do make ..... you might drink too much.

3. Stay on topic.

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.

[fuser]

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.

[Miasma]

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.

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.
  

[Lantyssa]

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 .  Now they have too many people playing with too many issues.  More .

I'm still happy and playing though.

[Draegan]

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.

[Morfiend]

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[photek]

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.

[Numtini]

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

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.

[photek]

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

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.

[Tale]

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.

[Johny Cee]

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.

[Falconeer]

DAoC combat had more depth

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?

[SnakeCharmer]

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.

[Numtini]

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.

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.

[Tale]

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

[pxib]

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.

[Slayerik]

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.

[Cheddar]

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.

[NiX]

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.

[Numtini]

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

[UnSub]

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

Eve is the exception.

[Morfiend]

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

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.

[Morfiend]

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

So far, this game has been one giant Bait & Switch. We were promised many features, and given few. This is a post dedicated to outlining those features, in the hopes that they get fixed. I don't hate Age of Conan, but I do believe that we've been sold on something that we aren't getting, and that's something that I'm hoping will change in the future.

-We were given voice acting and a copious supply of soloable quests to play with during the public beta and first 20 levels of the game, yet the "real" Age of Conan lacks these features past newbie island.

-We were told that questing would be more time effective for leveling than grinding, even when grinding at 100% efficiency. What we get instead is a game that mandates all players to grinding if they ever hope to reach 80.

-We were told that this game would provide thousands of different cosmetic armor choices for the various classes. Instead, most classes get one armor choice at 80.

-We were told that this game would have "massive" endgame PVP, Battlekeeps worth fighting over, sieges, mines, mini-keep towers, PVP zones, and more. We were told that owning a Battlekeep would require a massive investment, but that smaller guilds would serve a purpose too. Instead, we get Border Kingdoms that are carbon copies of the gathering zones, but devoid of any resources or NPCs. We get Battlekeeps that are impossible to victoriously conquer, siege attacks that have no attackers, and a game that grinds to a hault when more than two raids engage one another. We get a game where BK owners have to sit on their asses for hours every week, "defending" their BKs against attackers that never show up. We get a game where you gain nothing from having a battlekeep, where there is no PVP content worth fighting over, and where only the biggest guilds are even capable of participating in this so called "end game".

*Hey, here's an idea! Let's replace all of the battlekeeps with giant E-Peen statues! I don't think the players should notice much of a difference, because currently, that's all the BKs are good for.

-We were lead into believing that this game was going to have a revolutionary combat system, yet it doesn't. It has a casting system that's identical to any other MMORPG that's been released, and a half baked melee system that hinders melee more than it helps.

-We were told that this game would have revolution mounted combat, where velocity effected damage, mounted combat is effectively non-existant.

-We were told about a revolutionary spellcasting system, where spellcasters could weave their spells together to create new, powerful spells. Instead, we got a limited-use nuker stance.

-We were told there would be no tabbing, no targeting, and no need for a 1 through 0 skillbar. Instead, we got the exact same targeting system & user interface as every other game.


Basically, we've been given a bullshit watered down MMORPG that provides nothing new to the genre, aside from access to FFA PVP servers. We've been sold HYPE, and while hype might sell boxes, it unfortunately does not sell subscriptions. Funcom needs to get their game in gear, fix PVP, and deliver and experience worth subscribing to. As it stands, this game is circling the drains, and if nothing is done, it will be on life-support before the end of the year.

[Falconeer]

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

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.

[Trippy]

Have they fixed crafting yet?

[schild]

Have they fixed crafting yet?

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

[tkinnun0]

We were given voice acting and a copious supply of soloable quests to play with during the public beta and first 20 levels of the game, yet the "real" Age of Conan lacks these features past newbie island.

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.

[slog]

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

Eve is the exception.

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. 

[Lantyssa]

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.

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

Edit: Quotes are hard.

[Miasma]

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