What went wrong?

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

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?

[Rasix]

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. 

[Mrbloodworth]

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."

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.

[Sparky]

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.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Trouble]

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.

[Lum]

i was also saying, thats its a little unreasonable to expect, even if it is what you expect.

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).

[tazelbain]

i was also saying, thats its a little unreasonable to expect, even if it is what you expect.

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.

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

[Morfiend]

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.

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.

[Sky]

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 AO.

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

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

[Nebu]

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.  

[cevik]

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 AO.

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

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

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.

[Sir T]

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.

What exactly do you have against the gambling industry?

LOL. Good answer, on so many levels. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Every game so far hasn't launched with NEARLY as much content as WoW had at launch.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[cevik]

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.

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:

[lamaros]

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 could skip areas you didn't like because there were entirely different areas with quests for your level, nearly the entire way to 60. [snip]

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.

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.

[cevik]

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.

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

[Falconeer]

Look at falconeer, he's still enjoying AoC it seems because he thinks the combat system is the best thing ever.

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.

[cevik]

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!

[Trippy]

You are not correct. I played WoW at launch and did every single quest I could do and ran out.

That's cause you played the wrong side

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.

[cevik]

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.

[Trippy]

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).

[Falconeer]

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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

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

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.

[cevik]

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..

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.

[Morfiend]

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..

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.

[UnSub]

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).

[Morfiend]

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.

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.

[Rasix]

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.

[sinij]

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.

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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

i was also saying, thats its a little unreasonable to expect, even if it is what you expect.

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).

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.

[lamaros]

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.

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.

[tmp]

Why the fuck content must be of a kill 10 rats kind (..) 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.

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.

[Trouble]

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.

[Abelian75]

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.