Goodbye AC2, we hardly played you.

[OcellotJenkins]

As fa as people not caring about the end of AC2...it was a train wreck from day 1. How many years did it take them to fix chatting? (Did it ever work?) It is odd though to see a MMORPG sequel die while the original is still going.

Not to pick nits, but the chat system was only fucked up for about 4 or 5 months after release (which is still rediculous mind you).  By late spring, Turbine released a rewritten (non microsoft) version that worked perfectly. 

Three things killed AC2:

1)  Bad word of mouth after the first 4 hellish months after release.

2)  Lack of fleshed out content.

3)  Shitty post 50 hero system that resulted in an endless grind with little to no rewards.

I have fond memories of AC2 despite it's problems.  The main reason I quit playing was that too many good friends left the game.  There was a great deal of potential there, but like Horizons, lack of resources and bad planning destroyed what could have been an amazing game.

[Mesozoic]

I always thought that what killed AC2 was the blanket assumption that any online fantasy RPG would earn at least a couple hundred thousand subscribers for several years.  And as a sequel, they thought the money should have come just pouring in.  Lets not forget, they launched with ten servers.  A basic mis-reading of the market.

[OcellotJenkins]

I always thought that what killed AC2 was the blanket assumption that any online fantasy RPG would earn at least a couple hundred thousand subscribers for several years.  And as a sequel, they thought the money should have come just pouring in.  Lets not forget, they launched with ten servers.  A basic mis-reading of the market.

Initially those 10 servers were relatively full and stayed that way until about April 2004.  It was that month, during the peak of the chat fiasco, that a patch was released that doubled the power of most monsters in the game while at the same time nerfing multiple classes.  That was the final straw that drove off the masses.  It also didn't help that SWG came out the following month.

[Nija]

April? You're giving them more credit than they deserve. Everyone quit after the first month. The content stopped at level 34.

What was that big dragon that was patched in, at the bottom of some dungeon? When the server came up after the patch was applied, me and 3 other guys ran down there and killed it. Pathing bugs on the stuff right next to where he spawns. Writing on the wall.

Cancelled later that day.

[dEOS]

Ocellot is right. They made group monsters... "group" monsters. That killed a lot of people habits of soloing group monsters and thus getting group mob XP without sharing and group mob loot without sharing. While that isn't that bad said like that... In-game that meant that people turned around and looked at things they could do.

- Group with others to have pitiful XP shares and 1 out of 8 times the right to loot IF people in the group where respecting loot order (everyone had access to the dead mob loot, first to click-first served!)... So you had melee toons taking all the loot on a regular basis.They introduced a few months later a round-robin system...

- Group mobs were made insanely hard and dangerous. Able to two-shot anything. Yeah for painful travelling in most zones! Yeah for sucky groups without the holy trinity (tank/dd/healer).

- Lack of quests showed!!

Then they made Deimos (the big dragon). It was first exploited by using a bugged mezz (acting like a stun in fact). So the huge dragon of doom was basically harmless. They fixed that... one (probably more) month later when everyone high-level enough was running in their shinny now-impossible to get armor.

When you go through the list of things that went wrong in AC2 design wise, through the list of things they managed to fix too late or never, you are left wondering how it can be originated from the same company that made AC1. Sometimes I think of it and I think that AC1 was the result of extremely pure luck from Turbine in implementing a system taken/inspired from table games and that worked very well. Not because they knew what they were doing but because the table games have such solid fundations that even if broken a little, it was still amazing. When AC2 was designed, they did full-Turbine way and it broke apart.

AC2 inherited from AC1 only two good things:
- An original lore and world. Totally unexploited by Turbine in AC2 but the bases from AC1 were there.
- A great community. A lot of AC1 players in it. It probably counted a lot for AC2 because they thought that Turbine could fix the problems and make it shiny-shiny like AC1. They failed on both sides. They have lost for good a good chunk of their community.

d