Hold on to your hats.

I am no fan of Avery or how FC has handled AOC but he did ask some questions that were out of the fanboy realm. I didnt pay attention to who was asking the questions until the end and thought there was a mixture of softballs and some questions that could have led down a negative path given the incompetance at FC. I did question someof the answers but I think the person responding was being honest from their perspective.

No 10/10 Avery but I will give you a 7/10 based on your position and the fact you could have thrown up 100% softballs.

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The bottom line is: every class has an advantage (or disadvantage) over another class; however you can overcome it if you are a good player which I find simply amazing. I like the way gear only gives you an edge over someone else as opposed to making you godlike to a player who has inferior equipment compared to yourself.

However I have read that FC intends to change this so that gear makes some 45-50% of your character (as opposed to 25% that it does now), I do not like the change and many of the players I know will be disappointed as well. This is catering to people who refuse to learn the weaknesses of other classes and want to rely on gear to win. This is not what AoC is about (or what it was advertised).

Hopefully the changes will not be so major and let’s hope I'm not right.

PvP should be about skill, timing, using the tools at your disposal, knowing your enemy and exploiting his weaknesses and not about gear. People who want to spend time raiding, should, as the bonuses simply give you an edge, if they expected WoWlike differences in equipment, this is not for them. I fear that it may very well turn into that…

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This response was DEAD on, and IS the crux of many of the games issues/reception. Decimals and percents, confusing Wow fans for over 5 years.

Originally posted by courtsdad

Hold on to your hats.

I am no fan of Avery or how FC has handled AOC but he did ask some questions that were out of the fanboy realm. I didnt pay attention to who was asking the questions until the end and thought there was a mixture of softballs and some questions that could have led down a negative path given the incompetance at FC. I did question someof the answers but I think the person responding was being honest from their perspective.

No 10/10 Avery but I will give you a 7/10 based on your position and the fact you could have thrown up 100% softballs.

Thank you for the feedback, appreciated. Part two will have the same questions as was wrote at the same time. Moving on though, I'll look a bit more at it. I think the questions themselves are pretty balanced and P.I. does show integrity in stepping up and showing criticism where due from their perspective. As we all know one mans server is different from the next and thus all I'm trying to do is bring that difference of opinion from those playing the game.

Originally posted by Bodeus

heh. the smaller the population the easier to be "king of the hill" Im sure some people are happy to be the big fish in the little pond. As for paid transfers . FC would have to be out of their mind clueless to not at least offer a limited time free transfer. Afterall the mess AoC is in now is all their fault. They should suck it up and do what it takes to make those players they still have happy and wanting to stay.

Or..perhaps they are not as desperate as you think..

i see nothing wrong with avery's questions and i think its wrong to flame him for decisions that funcom made and he had no control over, like waiting 2 weeks to post that interview.

That being said, i do think the guild member interviewed was a bad choice(not because of guild size) he was clearly biased with regards to funcom, character classes, his dislike of crafting and raiding in general and his opinion of the AoC community members. He was far from a neutral party therefore his answers, opinions and ideas are totally meaningless unless you happen to have the same biases and views he does.

And as far as Funcom and AoC go, i think the game would be much better, have way more subscribers and happier players if they simply listened to their customers and did what they asked(within reason)instead of ignoring them and providing no tech support or feedback of any kind while making constant bad decisions, horrible patches that stealth nerfed things and didn't mention it in the notes and usually broke more and more important things than they fixed(which always confused me to how often it happened since they have an in house test server and test team which if running they same client as the live servers and are even semi competent should never have missed most of those huge bugs) also they took down all servers at the same time and applied the patches to them all at once without ever once testing them on a live server after the patch passed the in house team, therefore afflicting every single server with whatever new bug was created, instead of staggering the servers dowtime and doing them in batches so that people could always be playing and they would catch the new bugs before they crippled every server and made the game unplayable for everyone at once, i remember one particular patch during the early access time that bugged every server and extended the dowtime, and then they couldn't fix it and they extended the downtime again and again and again and eventually after the initial estimated downtime had been extended 4 times and almost tripled in length they finally got them up and if i'm not mistaken that downtime of close to a full day fixed 1 single bug with a trader when all was said and done.

And who could forget all the crashes to desktop from memory leaks and downloading of 12 gig patch files for no reason, and my personal favorite which finally drove the nail in my AoC experience and caused me to bail was the neat gem socketing crafting bug that caused my level 42 character that had taken me 11 days of my 30 day subscription (and all 3 days of the 5 day early access that got nearly cut in half due to patches and bugs) to become completely unplayable and crashed my client everytime i opened my inventory, just because i wanted to try out the sorry excuse for crafting they had, at least it only took them 9 days from the time the bug started to fix it, and they were nice enough not to make a hotfix or disable gem socketing or even listen to my multiple posts asking them to please make a sticky thread about this bug so others don't have to experience it, so hundreds of people got to have their main character bugged and could get no support for the problem or any feedback acknowledging that it was a known bug and was being worked on. They blatantly ignored the problem and refused to warn people knowingly letting them bug their games, it was like they refused to admit that the bug existed and it kinda makes since because i found out later that this bug was a known bug that had existed since beta and had been reported but ignored and not fixed and then they put gem socketing back into the live client  shortly after the retail launch with a known and reported bug that could bug your character making him unplayable and left it there without warning people until they could fix it with a patch 9 days after it was introduced, and it didn't even seem like it was a priority for them to fix because they patched the client 3 times after the bug happened before they fixed it, at least they were important patches, i believe one of them let you dance and do dancing combos thats surely a fair trade to losing 30% of my 30 day trial to a known bug they put back into the game.

i really had high hopes for this game and supported it and played through beta and early access into retail launch but after all this i feel betrayed i personally feel like Funcom bent me over and reemed me in return for my money and support. They advertised the game and hyped it on such features as directx 10, seiging, guild cities, over 2000 pieces of armor, none of which were available at retail launch, except for guild cities which didn't work right and gave you none of the buffs and features. I know a few people who were all gungho about playing in directx10, since it was promised and it was written on the retail box as being included, but it was nowhere to be seen, then it was promised as being definetly ready by the beginning of september, its now just about the second week of november and i do believe its still not ready. It was also nice to see all those amazing seige videos in magazines and on gaming sites and game conventions being one of the main selling points of the game but when retail rolled around its like oh seiges no their not ready yet. They more or less blatantly lied to the public and their customers and released a very buggy, very unfinished, completely missing promised advertised content beta version as the retail client and are basically making people pay to beta test a game that was released a good half year to early and provided no tech support or help of any kind to the thousands of people who could not even get the game to run even though they had paid for it and their subscription time was active. they also seem to not really care about their customers and their opinions and problems and are in no real hurry to fix the important problems with the game.

People figured that they would have learned from the horrible launch and problems with Anarchy Online and not make the same mistakes again, but about a month after the game went retail i read an old article reviewing anarchy online and its launch and i swear to god you could have replaced the old date with the current date and replaced any instance of anarchy online or AO with age of conan or AoC and it would have been 100% accurate, age of conan suffered the same horrible launch problems, like buggy unplayable client for many, numerous different account issues just like the AoC ones, severe lack of tech support.

Someone over at Funcom is either really stupid and continues to make bad decision after bad decision, or is making decisions for shady reasons and knowingly released the game as it was purely for financial gain and is trying to milk as much money as possible out of people while doing the very minimum they have to do to keep people paying and keeping their operating costs as low as possible, it would explain their complete lack of tech support and reliance on volunteers for forum mods and gm's, not to mention the fact that the inhouse QA testers seem to be understaffed or underqualified, and the fact that most patches seem to concentrate on not adding missing content or fixing game mechanics but on things that are time sinks and will keep people around to try them.

Thats pure speculation though, but whatever the reason it doesn't change the fact that they obviously didn't learn from their mistakes, they don't listen to their customers or make an effort to help them, they more or less used false advertising and released a product way too early that wasn't working properly and wasn't ready and was missing a lot of important things that it was advertised as having upon launch, if it was any other sort of product that you saw advertised and went out and bought and found out it didn't work properly and was missing pieces that it was labelled as having, at the very least you would get your money back in full and the company would be legally forced to change their advertising and box labelling to accurately reflect what it contained.

I will never buy another Funcom product and i will feel no remorse whatsoever(and possibly a little joy) if they went bankrupt and ceased to exist, i didn't totally mean it how it sounded, i would feel bad for the employees who need the money and job and are the cogs in the wheels of Funcom, i would not feel remorse however for Funcom as a company or for the executives and whoever is responsible for making all the bad decisions that continue to shaft the customers.

Sorry for the longwinded rant, but my AoC experience still leaves a bad taste in my mouth and i really hate when people pay good money expecting something and get shafted because of someone elses greed or need to make money. 

[quote]
 
Avery:
Please stop throwing month old interviews that are full of outdated information up here on MMORPG, that is just sad. How old is the 2nd interview with the guild from Norway..I mean EU that you are going to put up later?
But the interview was very well written, so good job on that...[/b][/quote]

I'm not exactly Avery's biggest fan here, but I gotta back him up on this one. I've written an article or two for this site over the years (nothing recently) and it takes a significant amount of time from submission to posting for the articles to show up.

I was reading and reading and all i saw was PVP talk?did i miss something?.

It seems to me from the whole interview that AOC just like WAR is relying on such a thin crowd>>PVP.

I like to think there is still a lot of us old school players that do enjoy crafting/partying.IDK maybe not ,maybe what is left of us is playing EQ1/EQ2 and FFXI?oh and some/few playing Vanguard.

I know this interview kept talking about how skillfull the PVP can/should be ,but some how i just can't see it.It sounded to me it was more about ,out healing the damage that wins out not so much about skills.

The interviewer even said crafting was sort of useless,the exact same trhing is happening in WAR.I believe this sudden surge of PVP in our beloved MMORPG's is ruining the genre,and taking every aspect of a MMORPG OUT in favour of PVP.PVP will only survive if there is some way each player can REALLY exploit another or have some easy way,like RMT activity to buy gear that puts them over the top with no effort or skill needed.If they try to make PVP  equal and fair relying more on skills ,i would bet the majority will leave ,because frankly most just want to win at all costs they can't or won't accept anything challenging.This where the RAIDING comes in,players will RAID to no end if it means they get some gear that can make them instant PVP kings[especially a complete set] ,no matter they play like a noob or not,the gear will save them.

Pssst... :)   We can give you everything you want to know about the current state of the game PVP and PVE wise.  We have gotten 4 server firsts in the past month and a half so we are well aware of the good things and the bad things with PVE currently.  Also, we only have 2 keeps left to take down before we have taken down every keep on our server so we can shed some light on the current happenings with sieges.  You know where to find me Avery if you want to talk.

Haroo!