Here are some things why I think AoC failed. Now I played the first 3 months so Im sure some of these things have been fixed but for the most part this is my opinion.

Stats didnt work.

banning people with too much gold a week in with no proof of exploiting.

voice overs were only in at lvls 1-20

some pieces of armor had better stats at 20 than they did at 70.

gear...all gear looks pretty much the same.

many buged quests

nerfs, nerfs, and more nerfs. They even nerfed mounts!

class imbalance.

cities broken

poor crafting

very poor customer service.

banning or suspending accounts with legitimate questions on the forums (me included).

not enough quests

no quests between 50-60

horrible pvp system

awfull combat system

lies and deciept to its paying customers about an unfinished product.

end game dungeons lacking skill (all tank and spank) to complete with no real difference in gear compared to gear being able to be looted outside of dungeons.

NO END GAME CONTENT.

Im sure I missed a few but here a few things right off the top of my head why I think people quit in droves and why the game will most likely be shut down sometime in the next year.

First, performance.  Hard to get beyond that.  Don't underestimate how discouraging 7 fps can be in a major city.  There were some posts in the tech forums that went over 1000 posts.  The problem was widespread, especially for ati users.

Second, flawed game design.  People like good loot, but crap drops and stats were broken or so insignificant they did not matter.  Then there was the instancing.  Zoning with load screen is bad enough, but instancing is bad, very bad. I was in one instance that had 23 copies. 

After that, incomplete launch and very buggy.  A lack of customer support, disrepectful, dismissive and eerily silent customer service.  GM's that cyber with players.  Spin doctors telling us everything is rosey. 

game for me and wife duoing diff char combos was:

* Great graphics

* Very lonely, we seldom saw other players, hard to find groups.

* Not groupfriendly, many quests only one person could loot and so on, had to do it over and over til all got their stuff

* Poor assistance with problems, they tried usually but most common answer: We are aware of the problem.

Sad but true, was fun tho

Originally posted by Kerebo

game for me and wife duoing diff char combos was:

 

* Great graphics

* Very lonely, we seldom saw other players, hard to find groups.

* Not groupfriendly, many quests only one person could loot and so on, had to do it over and over til all got their stuff

* Poor assistance with problems, they tried usually but most common answer: We are aware of the problem.

 

Sad but true, was fun tho

Point 1 - I agree

Point 2 - Mostly due with the foundation of the game being mostly Instanced.

Point 3 - Largely due to heavily Instanced game with poorly thought out quest mechanics.

Point 4 - Poorly trained Customer Assistance.

Alright well the number one reason, in my eyes at least........

Was the fact that whatever little community there was,

had been extremely immature,

or just all around bad.

Originally posted by Yamota

I think most people can agree that the subscriber numbers are low, now if they are 50k or 200k doesnt really matter as for a game that uses the hugely famous IP of Conan it is rather bad specially considering that they have steadily lost numbers since release. Most successful MMORPGs actually either gained or kept the sub. numbers steady from an initial high (look at the estimates of how sub numbers of Lotr, WoW, Eve, EQ, Lineage etc have developed over time at http://www.mmogchart.com)

 

EQ 2 from the same chart website shows steep incline followed by decline then incline again. Lineage had a high and then steadily lost 200k subsover time. It's like that for a lot of esitmates on there. But EQ2 is different it shows a sharp increase at the end.

I won't comment on your points as its really been done to death sorry.

Originally posted by Kerebo

game for me and wife duoing diff char combos was:

 

* Great graphics 

 In my view (as a programmer) the graphics isn’t really very good. Yes statically it can look good at times however overall the graphics engine is extremely poor. A good engine has to be efficient and deliver a reasonable frame rate with reasonable hardware. Also lack of a seamless world is clearly a step backwards in technology. Their engine is simply a brute force implementation and as such the zones are chopped up and feel somewhat claustrophobic compared to other games.

In my opinion this is why the game cannot be fixed to the extent where it would be truly successful. It is based on old technology. They can add content. They can fix PvP, They can add itemization bla, bla, bla. They might make the game passable. But you will still be playing in a chopped up over instanced world and that situation cannot be fixed without a complete rewrite.

For those that aren’t bothered by the crappy engine, you might give the game a try a few months (years?) down the road when they have some time to fix the fixable issues. However for me it will always be a steaming pile of crap.
 

Originally posted by polypterus

Originally posted by Kerebo

game for me and wife duoing diff char combos was:

 

* Great graphics 

 In my view (as a programmer) the graphics isn’t really very good. Yes statically it can look good at times however overall the graphics engine is extremely poor. A good engine has to be efficient and deliver a reasonable frame rate with reasonable hardware. Also lack of a seamless world is clearly a step backwards in technology. Their engine is simply a brute force implementation and as such the zones are chopped up and feel somewhat claustrophobic compared to other games.

In my opinion this is why the game cannot be fixed to the extent where it would be truly successful. It is based on old technology. They can add content. They can fix PvP, They can add itemization bla, bla, bla. They might make the game passable. But you will still be playing in a chopped up over instanced world and that situation cannot be fixed without a complete rewrite.

For those that aren’t bothered by the crappy engine, you might give the game a try a few months (years?) down the road when they have some time to fix the fixable issues. However for me it will always be a steaming pile of crap.
 

We knew what the game would be like a few years before release in terms of instances / zones. I am sure if this bothered some they would pass by the game as its not their cup of tea.

The game engine itself does get you great graphics at decent framerates:

http://conanvault.ign.com/wiki/index.php/Age_of_Conan_Video_Optimization_Guide

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/8077-age-conan-hardware-performance-review.html

Things have improved a lot for people since last patch too.

Its like looking at a piece of art - either you like it or you don't, either you like the zones or you don't.

For those that do improvements to the core parts just make the game better and better in both hardware performance and core performance.

There are some pretty big zones out there, but I can understand feeling claustrophobic compared to open games. They are just that open. AoC was designed from the ground up to be the way it is. If you check out some of the tech hardware sites they use AoC as a benchmarking tool, because with everything on it used to punish your system, now it is just getting better over time.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

 

If you check out some of the tech hardware sites they use AoC as a benchmarking tool, because with everything on it used to punish your system, now it is just getting better over time.

LOL, That's the LAST thing you want to hear as a programmer. If it punishes your system it is poorly designed. I'm sorry but good programmers write code that DOESN'T punish your system. Look at it this way. WoW came out years ago. It has nice smooth graphics and an open world with a lower polygon count. With hardware gains there is nothing stopping a good team from providing the same functionality with a higher polygon count. That’s is of course if you are spending your money where it counts (i.e. not on animated quest givers) and aren’t trying to recycle an old engine which may end up making your game a failure. Sound software is always key. If you skimp you lose.

They never ever listen to to their detractors.  AoC has to be one of the worse at not taking critism.  If you remember the beta forums they were told not to release this game.  And after release, the quickest way to get forum banned was to start a critism thread.

This collapse is the personal fault of that egomaniac Gaute.  Trying to blow smoke up the butt of everyone while doing everything he could to silence his critics instead of working on the problems, aleinated the vast majority of players. 

What's worse is the opinion that you can get players back after they left.

I hope AoC can make money off the remaining players because there is little hope of attracting new ones.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

Its like looking at a piece of art - either you like it or you don't, either you like the zones or you don't.

Oh, and by the way. That's a crappy excuse for lazy programming and it's why AoC is failing. Almost everyone who is honest (i.e. Not fanbois) is going to like an open world better. The only reason for not doing dynamic zoning is that it's harder to implement. You can’t BS me on that one. Funcom should get off their asses, stop making stupid excuses and start doing some serious algorithm development. Despite all the crap you read on these forums (my crap included), if Funcom where to come up with a truly good game they would still get customers and all would be forgotten. As it stands now, they seem more interested in their advertizing budget than their development budget.

Even with guesses of 100k-150k subscribers I would not call AoC neither a failure nor dieing. FC should be able to pay some 300 employees, offices and the like with sub numbers like that.

However IMO AoC was far from the success it could have been.

I was driven away from the game after the first "free" month mainly because of:

1. An incredibly arrogant company that kept lying even if all the problems were obvious to most.
2. A rather lousy community that seemed to turn the label "mature" into a joke.
3. A program (with patches) that was SCREAMING poor structure, nonexistant quality assurance, defective version control and a host of very bad design choices: Basically the game was rushed and the client could hardly be described as ready for open beta.

I later re-subbed for a month but left again because:

1. The community was smaller but still as lousy. (I am not talking "fanboy/hater" here, rather: Immature, hysterical and hostile towards fellow community-members)
2. The client was performing better but the basic design flaws were still the same. I am not talking about flaws in game mechanics. I am referring to the fact that the basic game design leaves a lot of important choices to the game client. This makes the whole game extremely vulnerable to cheating/exploits. (Take positional information as an example: All developers of multiplayer games should know that they can never trust client-reported positions without at least some form of sanitycheck.)
3. The game was basically fairly boring/generic to me pve-wise and pvp was mostly a mess without any overall purpose.

I may re-subscribe some time in the future but I need to see some solid proof and not just a plethora of patch-notes and more or less believable 'Erling-reports'.

And no: I do not, and have not played either WoW or Warhammer...

Originally posted by Halandir

Even with guesses of 100k-150k subscribers I would not call AoC neither a failure nor dieing. FC should be able to pay some 300 employees, offices and the like with sub numbers like that.

However IMO AoC was far from the success it could have been.

I was driven away from the game after the first "free" month mainly because of:

1. An incredibly arrogant company that kept lying even if all the problems were obvious to most.
2. A rather lousy community that seemed to turn the label "mature" into a joke.
3. A program (with patches) that was SCREAMING poor structure, nonexistant quality assurance, defective version control and a host of very bad design choices: Basically the game was rushed and the client could hardly be described as ready for open beta.

I later re-subbed for a month but left again because:

1. The community was smaller but still as lousy. (I am not talking "fanboy/hater" here, rather: Immature, hysterical and hostile towards fellow community-members)
2. The client was performing better but the basic design flaws were still the same. I am not talking about flaws in game mechanics. I am referring to the fact that the basic game design leaves a lot of important choices to the game client. This makes the whole game extremely vulnerable to cheating/exploits. (Take positional information as an example: All developers of multiplayer games should know that they can never trust client-reported positions without at least some form of sanitycheck.)
3. The game was basically fairly boring/generic to me pve-wise and pvp was mostly a mess without any overall purpose.

I may re-subscribe some time in the future but I need to see some solid proof and not just a plethora of patch-notes and more or less believable 'Erling-reports'.

And no: I do not, and have not played either WoW or Warhammer...

 

 

Very well said.... MrB any comments?

Originally posted by Decadentia

Originally posted by SailorCallie

The problem is that AoC's content requires DirectX10, and you must have a Vista-capable PC in order to have DirectX10+. For those who only have DirectX9, such as XP users, and wish to play AoC requires your XP PC to be modified with additional memory so it would have Vista installed, with DirectX10+ and you can play AoC without any problems.

 

This game doesn't require DirectX10.

My bad. :(

Originally posted by SailorCallie

Originally posted by Decadentia

Originally posted by SailorCallie

The problem is that AoC's content requires DirectX10, and you must have a Vista-capable PC in order to have DirectX10+. For those who only have DirectX9, such as XP users, and wish to play AoC requires your XP PC to be modified with additional memory so it would have Vista installed, with DirectX10+ and you can play AoC without any problems.

 

This game doesn't require DirectX10.

 

My bad. :(

No dont be sorry here.  The game was touted as a DirectX flagship game. They pulled it days before the game went gold.... Another reason the OP was after........