If you look at old AoC videos you can see the people working on it saying something like "this will be cool, players will get this" and so on. Funcom did a big misstake by talking too much. The hype was big and then the game comes out with bugs, and more then half of the game empty. Everything was under construction.

They then do same misstake again! They remove all the "trolls" from the forum and keep saying "this will come soon. Post after post trying to make all the angry players happy.

When they try hide the misstakes, they build there own grave. 

Funcom/Failcom will now have problems with MMORPG for a long time.

Myself, I'm not going to buy games made by them for a very loooooong time.

 First of all i`m not into that who is menagers ,director etc. .....I`m more considered what would product that they got theyres respective names on it bring to me and AOC has dissapointed me very hard.Was reading few topics about how game is good optimised now and how people are all hapy and active nice comunity and on the other hand I thought are we talking about same game that needs a super computer and owr 30Gb of free space to be installed I didnt had anyproblems with it but I know pwople who bought new computers just to play the damn game .
I guess that i`m dissapointed in Aoc more because that game wrealy had potential but with lousy patching etc I didnt saw that game has mowed from point zero some 2 -3 months after release so i quited it guess they can rewrite history but dont wrealy care reputation is build with years and if they screw me with things like AOC I wrealy dont know why should I even bother now....

Originally posted by cpoustie

There are 2 kinds of people:

1. People who have morals and principles and will never again give money to a company they feel has lied to them and 'stole' their money.

2. People who don't have morals or principles, don't give a shit about anything but their own short term satisfaction, and will bend over and take in whatever the devs give them.

If more people would belong to group 1, we as customers would get much better MMO's and less BS.

If Funcom survives from their initial failure, it will send a message to all the developers: Treat your customers like crap, lie to them, take their money and in the end you will be rewarded for that.

This is a scary world we are living in.

 

Sorry but when I read this I couldn't help but respond.  The only problem with that statement is varying degrees of skill.  You see, if you lie to people and steal their money with enough skill, they call you 'Mr President'.  If you lack skill you're Funcom.

Oh, that is SOOooooo going in my sig.

Originally posted by Bafucin

If you look at old AoC videos you can see the people working on it saying something like "this will be cool, players will get this" and so on. Funcom did a big misstake by talking too much. The hype was big and then the game comes out with bugs, and more then half of the game empty. Everything was under construction.

Funcom/Failcom will now have problems with MMORPG for a long time.

Myself, I'm not going to buy games made by them for a very loooooong time.

What I (and others) found astounding is that this is EXACTLY what they did with Anarchy Online. The template was identical. The pre-launch hype and hysteria, right down to the rabid fanbois and the belief in the "magic patch" that was about to fix everything.

The lesson here is that when Funcom manages to latch onto the next IP, swindle the next batch of investors and churns out the next piece of garbage MMO in 6-10yrs = most people won't remember how bad it was or will forgive and forget...the cycle of hype and fanbois falling to bitter disappointment will repeat again.

Funcom is living proof that you don't need to *make* a good game so long as your sales, marketing and investment reps can *talk* a good game.  

Originally posted by ericbelser

Originally posted by Bafucin

If you look at old AoC videos you can see the people working on it saying something like "this will be cool, players will get this" and so on. Funcom did a big misstake by talking too much. The hype was big and then the game comes out with bugs, and more then half of the game empty. Everything was under construction.

Funcom/Failcom will now have problems with MMORPG for a long time.

Myself, I'm not going to buy games made by them for a very loooooong time.

 

What I (and others) found astounding is that this is EXACTLY what they did with Anarchy Online. The template was identical. The pre-launch hype and hysteria, right down to the rabid fanbois and the belief in the "magic patch" that was about to fix everything.

The lesson here is that when Funcom manages to latch onto the next IP, swindle the next batch of investors and churns out the next piece of garbage MMO in 6-10yrs = most people won't remember how bad it was or will forgive and forget...the cycle of hype and fanbois falling to bitter disappointment will repeat again.

Funcom is living proof that you don't need to *make* a good game so long as your sales, marketing and investment reps can *talk* a good game.  

The only difference is that the Game Director responsible for the 2  failed launches is no longer there and finally parted the company.

With Gaute G. gone I already have a lot more faith in Funcom getting this game around (wich already showed in the shocking quality improvement in patches since Craig took over) and that they actually will do better with The Secret World.

Gaute G. had probably great vision and great ideas, but he was just plain unfit for the job of Game Director. It clearly showed with Anarchy Online and it showed again with Age of Conan.

He had no sense of direction, no sense of priorities, no sense of planning and lacked any people skills.

4 VERY VERY important qualities you NEED to posess to be a succesful game director.

4 important qualities Craig M. clearly does have and it shows.

I won't resub just yet. I want to wait 1 - 2 more game updates. But I have regain faith that Funcom will be able to pull it off and turn this game around.

Want to add a different perspective on AO/AOC. Started AO about six months after launch, no massive performance issues at that time. Notum Wars AO was a brilliant game, best computer game pvp experience I've ever had in 27 years of computer gaming. Little grind other than the level treadmill, only one boss mob of note in a super cool dungeon (tarasque) that was also a pvp zone.

Enter SL, and at least for me, exit the fun. Locked zones, less emphasis on pvp and player controlled assets, lots of bosses and grindy raiding. Left soon after alien invasion. FC had the magic formula for a SF lover, player controlled assets that mattered, and blew it on the stale EQ model. Could have been something different and original if they had maintained the focus on player asset pvp and ironing out mass battles.

Hear about AOC a couple years ago, massive player asset pvp, guess someone is still smart at FC, and wait with bated breath after playing Shadowbane and realizing that this is the true future of MMO fun, not the EQ/WoW raid/grind model.

Get into AOC a month after launch, and boom, headshot! FC had lobotomized the complexity of AO and very obviously had not a clue as to what the game underlying the very pretty graphics should be. So it was, and is a hodgepodge of mediocre design. Bad (can't overemphasize this) resource gathering model fueling a poorly designed crafting system. Unoriginal, boring raid mobs with the asinine "one script to kill em" Wow model and horrible loot system. Lame skill trees with loads of imbalanced or alternatively underpowered skills leading to cookie cutter toon design (compare to the rich depth of the AO implant system). Could go on and on here.

And then there's the pvp. Instead of starting out small in the player asset dept., they insist on starting with these massive but one-dimensional 2 raid sieges. No choice of what direction to attack, as the SIEGE ENGINE PLACEMENT IS STATIC (cant emphasize the boneheadedness of this enough either).  One of the beauties of notum wars was the flexibility of placement of the towers while maintaining certain boundaries. Gigantic BKs and cities that are thoroughly ONE DIMENSIONAL in how they can be constructed and defended. Why o Why didn't they start off with bites they could actually chew, smaller assets. Lame simplistic minigame system with mazelike maps instead of interesting terrain for strategy (compare to the arena maps in guildwars for how the minigames should have been done). Then you have an added mega grind of a long overdue pvp system added in in which the basic highly advantageous gear takes eons of grinding to get (the worst ideas from WoW pvp writ large). Class balance is ridiculous also, a total rollercoaster needlessly, and I had 5 toons to 80, so I know from whence I speak.

So, I never had a problem with the performance issues, expected them even. It was the utterly horrible and unintelligent underlying game that killed it for me together with the feeling based on the awful roller coaster gem and gear nerfs, and inattention to exploits that NO ONE WAS AT THE HELM. My guild, one of the most powerful on the server, pulled up and left, as so many others did after giving things a solid effort for several months. NONE of them left due to performance issues, but poor, stupid design elements. We all CRAVED for this game to be better, wanted it to succeed. AOC had a huge contingent of the best MMO players in the world to start, and chased em all away. Few decent players remain, mostly scrubs. Maybe this kind of undemanding audience was what FC wanted all along, who knows.

 I got news for all you apologetic fanbois, it wasn't all about GG, and nothing in the underlying very poor design has really changed, and I really don't think it will. They had a near perfect model in AO NW and blew it bigtime in AOC. Just my opinion, but wanted to chime in that it ain't all about performance and patching with AOC, the game reeks.

I kinda had a feeling that AoC wouldn't be able to maintain the success it started with, but good to hear that they're consolidating their servers, sucks to play on a ghost-town server. I'm looking forward to giving it another chance when they have a free trial up.

Originally posted by sanskrit

Want to add a different perspective on AO/AOC. Started AO about six months after launch, no massive performance issues at that time. Notum Wars AO was a brilliant game, best computer game pvp experience I've ever had in 27 years of computer gaming. Little grind other than the level treadmill, only one boss mob of note in a super cool dungeon (tarasque) that was also a pvp zone.

Enter SL, and at least for me, exit the fun. Locked zones, less emphasis on pvp and player controlled assets, lots of bosses and grindy raiding. Left soon after alien invasion. FC had the magic formula for a SF lover, player controlled assets that mattered, and blew it on the stale EQ model. Could have been something different and original if they had maintained the focus on player asset pvp and ironing out mass battles.

Hear about AOC a couple years ago, massive player asset pvp, guess someone is still smart at FC, and wait with bated breath after playing Shadowbane and realizing that this is the true future of MMO fun, not the EQ/WoW raid/grind model.

Get into AOC a month after launch, and boom, headshot! FC had lobotomized the complexity of AO and very obviously had not a clue as to what the game underlying the very pretty graphics should be. So it was, and is a hodgepodge of mediocre design. Bad (can't overemphasize this) resource gathering model fueling a poorly designed crafting system. Unoriginal, boring raid mobs with the asinine "one script to kill em" Wow model and horrible loot system. Lame skill trees with loads of imbalanced or alternatively underpowered skills leading to cookie cutter toon design (compare to the rich depth of the AO implant system). Could go on and on here.

And then there's the pvp. Instead of starting out small in the player asset dept., they insist on starting with these massive but one-dimensional 2 raid sieges. No choice of what direction to attack, as the SIEGE ENGINE PLACEMENT IS STATIC (cant emphasize the boneheadedness of this enough either).  One of the beauties of notum wars was the flexibility of placement of the towers while maintaining certain boundaries. Gigantic BKs and cities that are thoroughly ONE DIMENSIONAL in how they can be constructed and defended. Why o Why didn't they start off with bites they could actually chew, smaller assets. Lame simplistic minigame system with mazelike maps instead of interesting terrain for strategy (compare to the arena maps in guildwars for how the minigames should have been done). Then you have an added mega grind of a long overdue pvp system added in in which the basic highly advantageous gear takes eons of grinding to get (the worst ideas from WoW pvp writ large). Class balance is ridiculous also, a total rollercoaster needlessly, and I had 5 toons to 80, so I know from whence I speak.

So, I never had a problem with the performance issues, expected them even. It was the utterly horrible and unintelligent underlying game that killed it for me together with the feeling based on the awful roller coaster gem and gear nerfs, and inattention to exploits that NO ONE WAS AT THE HELM. My guild, one of the most powerful on the server, pulled up and left, as so many others did after giving things a solid effort for several months. NONE of them left due to performance issues, but poor, stupid design elements. We all CRAVED for this game to be better, wanted it to succeed. AOC had a huge contingent of the best MMO players in the world to start, and chased em all away. Few decent players remain, mostly scrubs. Maybe this kind of undemanding audience was what FC wanted all along, who knows.

 I got news for all you apologetic fanbois, it wasn't all about GG, and nothing in the underlying very poor design has really changed, and I really don't think it will. They had a near perfect model in AO NW and blew it bigtime in AOC. Just my opinion, but wanted to chime in that it ain't all about performance and patching with AOC, the game reeks.

Amen Brutha!