nicely reported by massively : www.massively.com/2008/09/05/massively-goes-to-dragon-con-2008-funcom-qanda/

follow the link above to read many more questions and answer (hit next page at bottom in green)

 Thank you Avery. Was a nice read on what they are working on:)

..Those poor bastards.. like the captain, going down with his ship

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

nicely reported by massively : www.massively.com/2008/09/05/massively-goes-to-dragon-con-2008-funcom-qanda/

 

Q: Any plans to merge the servers? A: No. What we have looked at is ways of letting people play across servers, but we haven't made any plans to merge servers. Working with the tradeskill guys a lot lately and the resource team and we're designing new quests and areas for resource gathering and building and things like that. Tower objectives and so forth, they're the next step with the battlekeep system, so I work with the action dynamic team, who are the guys who do the massive PvP and Siegeing. Our first priority at the moment is to get 48v48 sieges running perfectly for everybody. Second priority is to get the next step out, which is Towers, so the guys are working on it.   Q: What are you doing to get new players and bring old players back? A: We know there's issues with the game. If there's bugs, we're fixing them. To continue, we've got the five dungeons that are coming out before Christmas hopefully. People who played Anarchy (Online), we've been supporting that game since 2001 and we're going to keep supporting it into the future. Age of Conan is no different for us. As a game company, our philosophy is, we make a game, and we stick with it until we've got it where we want it to be, and that never happens. MMOs just keep going. We're in for the long haul. Q: Any plans on making unique fatalities for all classes, and perhaps even team fatalities? A: Team fatalities have been discussed, but it's so far into the future. There should be unique fatalities all throughout the game. We really put a lot of effort into that. We spent almost two years getting those fatalities just right. Q: What are the plans for the roleplaying servers? A: We just got done with finalizing the RP ruleset. We're still reviewing them. We wanna take time to look at it and make sure that we did something that a lot of other roleplayers really wanted to follow. We took feedback from a lot of the top roleplaying guilds and made sure that what we wanted to put out there as guidelines were actually something they wanted. We'll probably be pushing them out sometime later next week. These are rules that the GMs will follow.

follow the link above to read many more questions and answer (hit next page at bottom in green)

Same old hang in there and keep wasting money on us and maybe someday possibly if we get lucky you might get a game that works possibly but we cant be sure when LOL.
 

I can't believe this crap has been going on for 4 months now and nothing changes (game keeps getting worse, people keep leaving) but the date players might maybe see some content.

They dont really have an option if they wanna stick around as a company, at least as a company that makes MMO's. The only way they can save themselves at this point is too keep working on AoC and making it better, hoping that the hardcore will be vocal enough to point out any progress that is made into the future. They should shelve the secret world for the time being, I wouldnt be surprised to hear that is the case in reality. Who would honestly buy another FC game at this point?

If they work hard on bugs and content, fix existing systems and revamp, like they plan with crafting, put out DX10, all of sudden the attention will sway back there way and they might recover some credibility, maybe even some subs.

Have then sign a legally binding contract with the blood of their first born and they might get some people start beleiving them.

I love that they finally got around to RP rulesets. When does this game go live?

At least I see where the five years was spent. They only had 3 years because they spent two on fatalities

its just more of the same bs weve been hearing at funcom.  blah blah blah blah.

Originally posted by Imjin

They only had 3 years because they spent two on fatalities

O man and it was worth it :)

Oh man, that was really eye opening. I'm convinced mergers aren't going to occur because of the battlekeep ownership. I wish they would just admit to their lack of foresight. So now the players have to decide if they should abandon all their hard work for a battlekeep to go start all over on another, more populated, server. Lame. If they charge for this transfership expect another exodus.

They hired someone new to overahaul the tradeskills- it's about freaking time. Anything other than what they have now will be an improvement.

Drunken brawling doesn't sound promising. Why couldn't they give this explanation for the lack of drunken brawling before instead of dangling it like a carrot?

I like that they are moving forward and improving things. What I don't like is the lack of explanation for why the game is in the state that it is.

Originally posted by Mattius

They dont really have an option if they wanna stick around as a company, at least as a company that makes MMO's. The only way they can save themselves at this point is too keep working on AoC and making it better, hoping that the hardcore will be vocal enough to point out any progress that is made into the future. They should shelve the secret world for the time being, I wouldnt be surprised to hear that is the case in reality. Who would honestly buy another FC game at this point?

If they work hard on bugs and content, fix existing systems and revamp, like they plan with crafting, put out DX10, all of sudden the attention will sway back there way and they might recover some credibility, maybe even some subs.

 

 

 

 

Not sure about the comment of Secret World, it's not like Funcom only has staff to be working on ONE game, Secret world has been in development quite some time now, and I honostly hope the will continue working on that game as that game has got my intrest, AoC never had my intrest, untill I played it in OB and bought the game, have enjoyed it for near 3 months but the game just not offers me enough to satisfied my mmorpg needs, same with WAR, for now I enjoy the game but don't see it as a long term type of game for the playstyle I have with MMORPG's. Secret world is atleast something totaly different ...that is so far from what I read over the years they been working on the game. Full judgement will come day of release and as far I can tell that's still some time away. And I hope the put the WORLD into Stargate Worlds, but betting it's just gonna be another online game with a large IP and if you been with gaming as long as I've been then atleast for me combat is NOT what I look for with MMORPG as they use to be so much more, I have tons of other games that do combat allot better and not have seen a MMORPG that could satisfied my combat needs, but like I said MMORPG use to be so much more, shame the masses seem to rely on combat and graphics, polished and stable I can understand and is the same experiance I want but combat ...............

About server merge, i never understood this, if I wanted to play on another server I do so, I did so with pre-cu SWG< where I had several characters on Chimaera with lots of "work" put into it, but unlike a real life job it is just a game, sure I invest time and energy on it, but if the server of my choice isn't the right one I have the choice to either stay or move to another server, I moved to Farstar, all this pohaa about all my stuff and work been done is when people put far to much into a GAME, and yeah I am a MMORPG with passion for the genre, but still use perspective.

In my opinion another huge mistake...  Server merges are 100% necessary as the game will not survive even if they add great pvp if there is nobody to be found on the servers.  With all the servers and the rapidly dwindling numbers of players this should be a priority so that they keep critical mass for when they actually get the game fixed.  With warhammer coming out I'm afraid it will be too little too late for AoC....

And what people often (none of you of course) don't realize is that Age of Conan spreads its entire population across 49 servers. 

Even with 300,000 subscribers that is pretty sparse...6,000 people a server?  With admittedly an older playerbase that does not log in as much? 

It just doesn't work. 

And I'd be very willing to put a significant chunk of change down that AoC does not have 300,000 subscribers.

Originally posted by Litigator_AB

And what people often (none of you of course) don't realize is that Age of Conan spreads its entire population across 49 servers. 

Even with 300,000 subscribers that is pretty sparse...6,000 people a server?  With admittedly an older playerbase that does not log in as much? 

It just doesn't work. 

And I'd be very willing to put a significant chunk of change down that AoC does not have 300,000 subscribers.

 

 

300k would be a dream.  I'm certain they are below 150k and wouldn't be surprised if they are below 100k.  spread that across 50 server and you got about 3k subs per server.  figure an optimistic peak of 5:1 subs to logins and you got maybe 600 people peak logging in.

pretty slim numbers.

I've been doing some rough number work using a couple parameters to determine a revenue whisper number for Q3.  I will of course wait until Sept 30th before I make any predictions, but I've narrowed down my estimation to 15.75 to 17 million dollars for Q3.  I'm leaning towards the higher end of that right now...but we will see.

Preliminary: Right now if i had to guess I'd stick it at 16.75 million @ 220,000 active subscribers as of Sept.30th.

AoC == AO

Heck, even they are now falling back on that comparison.

What a mess.

Funcom stock has droped again from almost 14$ a share to now 9$ a share if this keeps up you will not have to worrie about mergers they will shut it down.