Age of Conan

After months of watching the trainwreck from the outside I finally got the opportunity to see it from the inside. Friday night I started downloading the client and when I got up early Saturday morning other than about half a gig of patches it was ready to go. I threw the kids out of the living room and fired AoC up.

HOLY CRAP! It was amazing, I don't think I surfaced until after sunset. The graphics were incredible and I was constantly yelling for my wife to "come see this!" I started with a guardian but realized I'd rolled a tank and after 13 levels I rolled a ranger so by Sunday afternoon I hit level 20 on the ranger and it was time to head out into the world...

That's when it all went to shite. I had to restart the game every hour or so because my maps would go gray or the textures would go blurry and by early Monday afternoon I was crashing with out of memory errors every 15-30 minutes. After every restart (crashed or intentional) I would get a message saying my data might be corrupt and the launcher would start downloading files again, sometimes a couple hundred megs worth.

After the initial euphoria wore off I've realized that the instability of the game isn't the only problem, here are some observations in no particular order:

What community? I rolled on Wiccana since it seemed to be a relatively active server and I've interacted with maybe 4 people in the three days I've played. OOC chatter is almost as mind numbing as the official forums.

The official forums. There's so much fanboy noise that it's difficult to find the information I need, and that's in the stupid tech support forum ffs! The people who love AoC are so nasty that I'm surprised they haven't run absolutely everyone off.

Bewbs, they're too low. I don't mean they're saggy, they start mid chest and there doesn't seem to be a way to raise them. I spent extended time comparing my toon boobs to my wife's, AoC's just aren't in the right place.

Federal Express, I don't want to work for them. Short little "run talk to this guy" missions are one thing, "run through half a dozen zones then come back" quests are just crap.

I'm tired of wearing a sack already. I got my ranger to level 30 before I gave up Monday night and with only minor variations she's still wearing potato sacks for armor. A lot of my gear is "blue" which I assume compares to the green/blue/yellow system that I vaguely remember from Vanguard and it all looks like junk. The visually stunning environment is significantly degraded by the presence of all these people running around in brown garbage bags.

There are some truly ugly collision issues with hair and armor that should have been ironed out long ago.

Capes... are you kidding me?! I've been playing City of Heroes/Villains for almost a year and those people know how to do capes, by comparision AoC's capes/cloaks look like boards.CoX is four years old already, surely Funcom had the technology to make a cape blow in the breeze and look like fabric instead of a sheet of MDF.

There are a lot of other issues but the bottom line is this: Did anyone actually beta TEST this game or was everyone in the beta just running around ganking each other? I don't care for medieval/fantasy games but this really has (had) potential to suck me in but between the technical issues and the community I'm just not interested, I'll play out my trial but I'm not putting any money into this mess.

Oh... and someone mailed me 100 bales of cotton on my first night, that was odd.

Originally posted by aeternavita

 

Oh... and someone mailed me 100 bales of cotton on my first night, that was odd.

That was likely from a GM. it's customary to send a gift before the courtship and cybor begins.

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Originally posted by Zorvan

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Originally posted by aeternavita

 
Oh... and someone mailed me 100 bales of cotton on my first night, that was odd.

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That was likely from a GM. it's customary to send a gift before the courtship and cybor begins.

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10/10, made me LMAO IRL.

Funcom's last ditch subscriber retention policy:

"Send them 100 bales of cotton, that'll keep them paying!"

The thing is, given how flawed Funcom's entire game-making process has been, I would not be surprised at this logical disconnect at all

"Revamp Black Castle instead of putting in all the promised endgame content, that'll keep them paying!"

"Fix the voice-overs and lighting in the Tortage inn instead of working on the PVP system or fixing the bugged raids!"

Where can i get buddy or trial key from funcom?I keep hearing ppl get them but i didn't.I am really intrigued with it.

Originally posted by aeternavita

I'll play out my trial but I'm not putting any money into this mess.

That's OK.

You will still be counted as a new customer for the Funcom Q3 financial report.

Originally posted by Shaulys

Where can i get buddy or trial key from funcom?I keep hearing ppl get them but i didn't.I am really intrigued with it.

I got mine because I used to play Anarchy Online. I imagine when Warhammer goes live Funcom will give away trials... my cats will probably even get trial offers.

They've patched up a bunch of stuff and finished 2 hours early today. I've played another hour and haven't crashed so they might have fixed something. I tried some player supplied tweaks and am now playing at 1680x1050 with everything maxed and am getting about 40-50 fps in the cities. Of course I had to dig through pages and pages of people calling each other names on the official forums.

BTW, I played Vanguard for two months when it launched and only quit because the population crashed so my game standards aren't all that high.

I used to play anarchy too :( hey all funcom spy agents: madandrius@gmail.com

Originally posted by Shaulys

I used to play anarchy too :( hey all funcom spy agents: madandrius@gmail.com

When you quit AO did you turn off "contact me about more of your junk" in your account screen? My wife and I each had AO accounts and we only get funcom spam from one of them. I think I shut the other account off in disgust (at funcom's notorious customer service) and probably clicked every "go away and die" button I could find.

lol and i can't find "come back and give me trial" button there and you don't like funcom customer ser