I played this game and had 5 level 80's and tbh I had a great time of it with my friends.  I didn't quit because of the game, I quit because it became a ghost town.  

It seemed to offer a lot of things that people here on these forums are begging for.  The first few levels were linear but after that, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.  The graphics were good, the story was good imo.  

I liked the different combat style -- it was frustrating at first but tbh a challenge, at least for me.  

Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

back at launch it was highly anticipated game as one of the most graphically dazling, mature rated, low fantasy, innovative mmo (combos). sadly the launch was pretty horrendous. there were a ton of bugs, server stability was abysmal, you would litteraly crash every hour and then have to go through a lengthy client repair process. Trying to finish any instance with friends was almost impossible. lag was horrendous for most people too as the optimization was really bad. class imbalance was retarded with people stacking enchanting gems and one shotting everyone.......it was really frustrating and a lot of people left.

it really took a good 2 years before AoC was in  a good playable state, but by then many had written it off as a piece of crap.

i myself played at the beginning but left for about a year. when i came back it was great fun. AoC is still one of the best looking, low fantasy mmos. however, the heavy instacing, combo system, and resource hog engine it's not for everyone. a great game imo that everyone should at last try.

why did i leave?

i disliked the heavy instancing. i disliked the heavy dispaity in gear especially in pvp. the combo system was never my favourite aspect of this game, i found it just a bit too complicated to be incredibly fun. Getting pvp levels back then was insanely hard. i wanted to siege but in order to siege you had to be part of one of the big guilds on the server, of course the big guilds had a lot of people and you would only be selected if you had amazing gear ,as spots for sieges were limited, so i rarely got picked. My computer was never fanzy enough to run this game at it's optimum so i suffered from quite a bit of lag.

Originally posted by allendale5

I played this game and had 5 level 80's and tbh I had a great time of it with my friends.  I didn't quit because of the game, I quit because it became a ghost town.  

It seemed to offer a lot of things that people here on these forums are begging for.  The first few levels were linear but after that, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.  The graphics were good, the story was good imo.  

I liked the different combat style -- it was frustrating at first but tbh a challenge, at least for me.  

Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

open pvp game. alot of people can't stand this.

and those who claim they can usualy are just trying to show off...

Originally posted by GwapoJosh
For me it was lack of content after Tortage.  I was bored out of my mind trying to grind to 80.

Agreed, there werer times, like lvl 40 to 50, that you were left without a single quest and you just had to grind it out. It got better with time. The second reason is that it gave you this amazing experience from lvl 1 to 20 and than took it away. Made the rest of the game seem cheap.

Originally posted by Thane

Originally posted by allendale5

I played this game and had 5 level 80's and tbh I had a great time of it with my friends.  I didn't quit because of the game, I quit because it became a ghost town.  

It seemed to offer a lot of things that people here on these forums are begging for.  The first few levels were linear but after that, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.  The graphics were good, the story was good imo.  

I liked the different combat style -- it was frustrating at first but tbh a challenge, at least for me.  

Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

open pvp game. alot of people can't stand this.

 

and those who claim they can usualy are just trying to show off...

Only on PvP servers. The PvE servers have allways had a higher pop.

It was unpolished, unfinished, had severe stability and performance issues and the quality of PvE content took a nosedive after Tortage. And personally while the melee combat was something new, the casters were horribly boring. The whole skills sytem with its Fireball 1, 2 & 3... was also very arcaic and unimaginative. Builds and character development were rather bland aswell. Additionally, the game hadn't delivered all the features advertised, which is a big no-no.

It shouldn't come as a surprise why it didn't "take off".

Apart from the bugs and UI design nightmare where chat was a nightmare, group finding a drag, the travelleling was just far to slow.

Fighting was boring with dungeons just consisting of endless hitpoints mobs with ZERO boss mechanics, so you just ended up piling the entire group on top of each enemies, endlessly beating away while bitching about how crap the game was until an enemy that looked no different from the rest was dead and you had "won".

Crafting was just plain bad.

When fighting bigger enemies and you pulled a fatality move, the enemy would shrink to your size to match up the animation.

Small zones/instances. Constantly being send all over the place.

And the whole combat mechanic was just plain retarded. No skills, instead having to hit multiple buttons instead to fire skills. Oh so novel! "Save us from button masher games Funcom! By giving us MORE buttons to mash", screamed twitch games and then failed to play the game.

It wasn't that the idea itself was so bad, but with normal mobs, it was quicker to ignore the silly mechanic and with thougher enemies, it was pointless as you were never in any danger other then dying from boredom. 

The game final error was to try to appeal to PvP crowd. That is a fickle crowd and a crowd that demands a PERFECTLY balanced game. AoC was not well balanced, this resulted in nerfs, upsetting the PvE crowd.  The PvE crowd was let down after the tutorial city and the PvP crowd was let down by all the missing elements.

That killed the game. The lesson to be learned is that you GOT to deliver a finished game with a clear goal and fun combat.

Shocker eh?

OP i felt the same as you my guild transfered to rift when it launched and was too depressing with no one around

One word  "combos"

The unrulely button wasting combo system was the complaint I heard from most everyone I knew that played and quit.

I played AoC from launch for 8 months, played on a PvP server up until my guild was dominating the entire server and it became very boring as there was no competition, and we did all the raid content already. Was a huge blast despite all the bugs, IMO, the game really stabilized after about 3 months. 

The original combat system was awesome, I am not sure why they dumbed it down... Oh well it was awesome at release for me, the game might be stable now, but its not as good.

Short version: disastrous start of an incomplete game.

- Crafting was buggy/not implemented

- seiges were not working/inplemented

- missing content after tortage

---> many players left, game over.

Originally posted by allendale5

I played this game and had 5 level 80's and tbh I had a great time of it with my friends.  I didn't quit because of the game, I quit because it became a ghost town.  

It seemed to offer a lot of things that people here on these forums are begging for.  The first few levels were linear but after that, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.  The graphics were good, the story was good imo.  

I liked the different combat style -- it was frustrating at first but tbh a challenge, at least for me.  

Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

Game launched and the first 20 levels were polished,...they there were bugs, but the end game was nadda.  The pvers had nothing, and the pvpers basically just had pvp where everyone was red to one another, no sieges, or reason for the fight.  They added stuff later, but in todays market...you can't launch like that.  If you at least say the game isn't done, you can I guess...but they hadn't even addressed anything in the future for the game.

Quite simpe... it wasn't ready to be launched.

These days, with the amount of competition in the MMO industry, you only have one chance of making a good impression, and that is at launch (well, there's also a second chance on the F2P launch, but depends heavily on the impression that the actual launch made in the first place). When AoC launched, it just wasn't complete. Lots of features that were listed on the box weren't implemented, including big things like raids and sieges that were huge selling points for the game (I remember funcom reps stating in the forums that they didn't believe that people would get to those as fast as they did), and some of them (like drunken brawling) were just never added to the game at all, lots of quests were buggy or badly implemented, and there were at least two points during the game where you ran out of quests and had to either grind mobs or the villas (solo dungeons that scaled with level) over and over for like 6 or more levels until you were high enough for the next quests area, and the PvP servers became huge gankfests because there was no consequence of killing lower level characters, and the game spawned the players in the zones before they finished loading in their computers, and since spawning and res points were heavily camped, you usually just finished the loading dead without any chance of fighting back (later they implemented a temporary invulnerability when loading into a zone or ressing), not to mention that the ranged magic using characters had a huge advantage when it came to PvP because of the combo system.

Most of those issues were fixed in the months following the launch, new questing areas were added to aleviate the leveling gaps, most bugs were fixed, and actually by the time I returned to the game (after it went F2P) it was in a very good shape and very fun... but by then the damage was done, most of the players had already left and the game (and funcom as well) had gotten a bad reputation, that followed them all the way to TSW.