From the sounds of it, the re-evaluation program has been a success so far.

Erling Ellingsen, Funcoms director of communications reports to Videogamer.com:

"The results of the campaign are really good with server activity booming, and entire guilds have made their return to the game," said Ellingsen. "The feedback from returning players has been really good so far, and it seems that the game's massive changes since launch is making a big difference for them. We're very excited to see the renewed interest among former players!"

Via Videogamer.com

Have you noticed your servers activity pick up since the re-evaluation program commenced? Let us know in the comments!

People play online games for different reasons. I find AoC quite immersive. It takes time to do things and that is more realistic than constant battles. However, a friend I invited with a buddy key, doesn't like the slow style of gaming, and prefers fast action games.

I rejoined AoC to see what the higher levels offer now. I had reached mid 50s and gameplay had become sparse in the first release. I don't like PvP, nor a lot of raiding. So...I will see.

He is right, the servers are booming right now, a 400 person guild resubscribed in it's entirety on Wiccana last week and has been playing actively, preparing for the new update.

I also have resubscribed and so have some of my friends, we've been enjoying the new content as well as old content, the class revisions are nice, and the items and statistic revisions are nice. Performance is great now, and FunCom has done a wonderful job of communicating to the community both via the forums, and participating in player events in the game.

Maybe eventually I'll give it another shot 

Hi, I'm Bob and I'm an AoC launch victim...

Lawl, but all kidding aside, I did recently try the 14 day re-eval.

I must say it's is a much better game than launch, the gear especially feels much more rewarding.

However, I won't be renewing my subscription and here's why:

1. The world is still HEAVILY zoned. This completely destroys immersion for me, I get no sense of how the zones are layed out in the world or how far apart they are. Bugs me to no end.

2. FedEx quests that seem to go out of their way to rub your nose in just how heavily zoned the world is.

An example of this is a Stygian quest you can pick up fresh from Tortage to take half a mans ashes to his first wife. Four zones and three loading screens later I find her standing next to a wall in the middle of nowhere. I turn it in and that's it, no quest hub, no follow up quest, no "hey why don't you talk to that guy over there", nothing. And now I have to trudge back through 4 zones and 3 more loading screens or burn my recall.

I found a half dozen of these quests before I hit 25.

3. If you want to use the innovative 3 button combo combat system you'd better roll a melee class, because casters get jack for innovation. Casters are stuck with the same old "select target, cast until dead" system that every other mmo out there uses. This might change at lvl50 with spellweaving but I'll never get that far to find out. But that's still 50 levels of crap compared to what melee get waking up on the beach.

If you're going to design an exciting new combat system, make sure it applies to ALL the classes. Or at least make sure each class has something equivilent at the same level as the other classes.

Unfortunatly, 1 and 3 would take a massive amount of rework to fix, and I don't think 2 will ever be addressed because most people won't see it as that big of a deal, especial players that are already at end-game.

So that's my 2 cents, if you don't care about heavy zoning and you want to play melee (or don't mind missing out on the innovative combat) AoC might be the game for you. It's definately not for me.

Originally posted by Siris23

Hi, I'm Bob and I'm an AoC launch victim...

Lawl, but all kidding aside, I did recently try the 14 day re-eval.

I must say it's is a much better game than launch, the gear especially feels much more rewarding.

However, I won't be renewing my subscription and here's why:

1. The world is still HEAVILY instance. This completely destroys immersion for me, I get no sense of how the zones are layed out in the world or how far apart they are. Bugs me to no end.

2. FedEx quests that seem to go out of their way to rub your nose in just how heavily instanced the world is.

An example of this is a Stygian quest you can pick up fresh from Tortage to take half a mans ashes to his first wife. Four zones and three loading screens later I find her standing next to a wall in the middle of nowhere. I turn it in and that's it, no quest hub, no follow up quest, no "hey why don't you talk to that guy over there", nothing. And now I have to trudge back through 4 zones and 3 more loading screens or burn my recall.

I found a half dozen of these quests before I hit 25.

3. If you want to use the innovative 3 button combo combat system you'd better roll a melee class, because casters get jack for innovation. Casters are stuck with the same old "select target, cast until dead" system that every other mmo out there uses. This might change at lvl50 with spellweaving but I'll never get that far to find out. But that's still 50 levels of crap compared to what melee get waking up on the beach.

If you're going to design an exciting new combat system, make sure it applies to ALL the classes. Or at least make sure each class has something equivilent at the same level as the other classes.

 

Unfortunatly, 1 and 3 would take a massive amount of rework to fix, and I don't think 2 will ever be addressed because most people won't see it as that big of a deal, especial players that are already at end-game.

So that's my 2 cents, if you don't care about heavy instancing and you want to play melee (or don't mind missing out on the innovative combat) AoC might be the game for you. It's definately not for me.

First the only thing that is instanced is the dungeons, everything else is not instanced.  I can verified this by the multiple times I got ganked by real players in this rooms, i.e. the world is not continueous as in other game like WoW or WAR.  So it may seem instanced because of that aspect, but by in large it is not instanced. 
 

Now, I honestly can't verify anything you say about the combat UI because I did do melee classes and it did work okay for those classes.

Originally posted by Drakonus

First the only thing that is instanced is the dungeons, everything else is not instanced.  I can verified this by the multiple times I got ganked by real players in this rooms, i.e. the world is not continueous as in other game like WoW or WAR.  So it may seem instanced because of that aspect, but by in large it is not instanced. 
 

Now, I honestly can't verify anything you say about the combat UI because I did do melee classes and it did work okay for those classes.

You're right "instanced" isn't the right word, "zoned" is better. fix'd.

And while casters do have the directional attacks for melee, they don't have any combos. And, honestly, when's the last time a demonologist decided to run up to beat on you with his stat stick rather than casting a spell.

There is already a thread about this here

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/244930/Funcom-Conan-servers-are-booming-with-activity.html

Originally posted by patrikd23

There is already a thread about this here

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/244930/Funcom-Conan-servers-are-booming-with-activity.html

 

Considering this is the original news thread posted by the community manager, I think it's an appropriate place to discuss our opinion on the "boom" 

I' ve been revaluating myself. It is a game with a huge potential that i am sure is going to be appreciated  in the months to come!

The only thing is that in Hyrkania RP-PVE server i didn't notice so much action yet..

Yeah, tell them to give us an update in one month...

you see when you resubscribed you were offered 20% off (for those in the UK, it was just over £7, compared to the £8.99 usually paid by us for other MMO's) plus a free gift from a choice of 3,  hell at one point they were giving away snow mammoths like they were candy.

Thing is, that offer was pretty much too good to pass up, although some people did pass and realise later that you didn't get the offer again it was a one off from that screen. Me, i didn't care... not much of a AoC fan anyway.

Still i presisted, it was that or play WARs "please play me" option (tome of knowledge reading being the only worthwhile thing in that game)... *shudders*, although AoC's stability had improved, seriously it is frankly awesome. With a mid rig you can easily hit over 50fps at medium settings... however some of the same problems were evident. meh i will give some info though on other things.

Barbs, or melee hot keys are your friend.. if you're a clicker pick a mage class, seriously combos still lack the "click here to activate function" you ARE going to have to double click every combo to get it to work. Hot keys don't  have that problem [instant] (tried with my logitech and normal mouse from dell, same issues with laptop or tower pc)

Crafting is still a bore, there's still lag during siege like you wouldn't believe, and the PvP mini games are a waste of time and useless to anyone but the most bored. PvP servers are best played with the chat turned off, and PvE servers are best played in Tortage.... okay i'm kidding there some places have much life, and there's little need to grind Villa quests as much now ;)

Still dull, the amount of changes is.. well this is how it should have looked at launch, it's what was promised. So if you're new to it go ahead... but Funcom already killed any fun i'd ever have with it. It may be "mature" and have an "18" rating, but like most movies with that sticker slapped on it's a bore fested game that tries to be cool, without ever achieving it.

I give it 6 months before Funcom try the item shop approach.

I originally played at Early Release up until August of 2008 or so on an EU PVE server. Our guild of 100+ members had pretty much all left the game as did many other guilds. I did however resub about 2 months ago in anticipation of the 1.05 update. The few guild members I did convince to come back and try the game didn't stay for more than a few days. I found myself a new casual lvling guild, and did notice the huge influx of new/returning players with the free trial and reactivation offers, but even though we recruited tens of new players each week only a handful are still playing. However this seemed to bring with it more game lag (on the Crom EU PvE server). Since I already had a lvl 80 character and not being a Raider I rolled a new toon who's in his 70s now. I must say the new zones Ymir's Pass and Tarantia Commons did a good job of filling in the lvling gaps that were there before. However I've found PvP minigames in all tiers to be scarcely populated. Our guild is too small without enough lvl 80s to enjoy battlekeep sieges (and rebuilding a T3 city after having done that on release without as many players is almost an impossible task that I'm not keen on doing again). I did take up crafting on a few of my toons, and even though crafted items are actually useful now (unlike at release) the regular crafted gear still looks terrible (same as the cheap white armor that you buy off of merchants). The newly introduced crafting recipes that make half decent looking armor are so rare that only lvl 80 characters with farming toons can afford them and by then you could just get better looking/stat gear from raids (only if you raid though). PvP gear is also difficult to come by on a PvE server due to lack of activity in minigames. Melee combat is still more fun than casters for me however it's much more work than just standing and clicking spells, and I was really hoping that they'd address this. Spellweaving in it's current state is not an answer in my opinion as it's only usable in instances or raids and even then only in certain scenarios.

Sorry for the long rant, but it's just that I had always hoped for this game to be something different and amazing. Much has improved since release, but with the many upcoming releases of new and more interesting MMOs I don't find AoC to be all that attractive anymore. It took them over a year to bring the game to a state where it should've been on release (DX10 is still in beta/testing phase though). I for one will not be renewing my subscription at the end of this month, and am looking forward to the release of Champions Online, Aion, and other upcoming MMOs.

The sad thing is that it's taken AoC so long to get itself in shape that the new games coming out will suck away their much-needed player base. The servers may be booming now, but wait a couple months to see what happens. Players will be happy to flock to a new title simply because they have no real reason to remain loyal to AoC.

-w

Originally posted by wyrde

The sad thing is that it's taken XXXX so long to get itself in shape that the new games coming out will suck away their much-needed player base. The servers may be booming now, but wait a couple months to see what happens. Players will be happy to flock to a new title simply because they have no real reason to remain loyal to XXXX.

-w

And Mr Doom&gloom, you can pretty much say that about any game so just quit MMO's now while you are ahead.

I'm seriously considering joining...well I actually won an account so I guess I have no excuse haha. Apart from my crappy PC that is.

AoC servers 'booming so much they had to drop from 49 servers to less than 20 :p

Game as crap as it was at launch.. unfortunaly..

I came back for the vet re-eval, but I'm not staying. I just don't like the low fantasy setting. Otherwise I think it's a fine game, and I hope it keeps improving for the folks who enjoy playing it.

I hate to see any MMORPG close down (execpt SWG) because there is always some who like it. It's odd how so many people want to see a game shut down simply because it didn't live up to their expectations. SWG is differnet, SOE changed the entire mechanics of the game. SOE should have to eat crow for betraying it's subscribers, as a warning to other developers.

 I tried the re-eval out. The former 10k latency issue seems to have been replaced with a 5k latency issue.  Outside of OT, it wasn't bad.  I really didn't see much in the way of itemezation changes. I traded in my used iron skirt for a different one with better stats. I kept swapping back and forth and couldn't  see any visible differences. I tried other pieces of armor and only saw very minor changes.  The gear is still bland greys and browns. Gameplay doesn't seem to have changed much if at all to me. Part of my dissatisfaction stems from the server merges... all of my characters were moved to Wiccana -- the unofficial RP server. And I detest RP. Sure, I can move a character for free. But I have 4 that I invested a lot of time in and I have no intention of paying to move the rest.  Before I picked a server at launch, I did my research to make sure I didn't accidentally pick the unofficial RP server (seems like there is always one in a MMO that doesn't identify them officially).  And now my 8 characters are all there. I put in 5 days and then gave it up.

Originally posted by Brixon

I came back for the vet re-eval, but I'm not staying. I just don't like the low fantasy setting. Otherwise I think it's a fine game, and I hope it keeps improving for the folks who enjoy playing it.

I hate to see any MMORPG close down (execpt SWG) because there is always some who like it. It's odd how so many people want to see a game shut down simply because it didn't live up to their expectations. SWG is differnet, SOE changed the entire mechanics of the game. SOE should have to eat crow for betraying it's subscribers, as a warning to other developers.

I totally agree.  Just thinking about SWG makes me grind my teeth.  I loved the game as it was released.  I can't believe SOE got away with the things they did (but I absolutely love EQ2, so I forgive, but I'll never forget).

As for AoC, I am re-evaluating and enjoying it as much as I did at launch.  The reason I left was because of Warhammer Online, not because I was frustrated with AoC.  I don't know yet if I'll stay.  Depends alot on community and it appears that my server has a good one so far.

Ok, let me get this straight.

They merge about 75% of their servers

Then they have a free trial

And during that free trial, they say the servers are 'booming'.

I would hope so, people are playing for free on servers that already have 3-4 servers worth of people on them.

This is the same guy that in July of last year said AOC had the most successful launch of any MMORPG to date.  :)