General Discussion

AC2 was a fun game out of the box.  Almost immediately, Turbies started waving the dreaded "tweaking" bat and nerfed their player base into non-existance.  From this exerpt of Q&A, I can easily tell that they STILL don't get it!

People want to ENJOY games - they play them to have FUN - not to WORK.  People want their characyers to evolve at a noticable rate.  People don't want to go slow - they like to move fast.  It was fun in beta, and it was fun until 8 or 9 months after release.  Then it became the same ol' same ol' "lets nerf everybody till they are the same.... God forbid a Defender sholud be able to **gasp** solo!"

If Turbine doesn't start putting the "fun factor" back in (and I give them kudos for doing so in AC 2 beta) and leaving it in, (like maybe let your build team have some input on the maintenance team),then both LoTR online and D&D are as doomed as this once great game was.

We can only hope that Turbine has learned from AC2, and doesn't repeat some of the same errors in their upcoming games. Unfortunately for AC2, it was caught in the middle of a power struggle between Turbine and Microsoft, and simply never recovered.

AC2 didn't really break any new ground for MMORPGs. Sure, the graphics were awesome, but everything new about AC2 (compared to AC1) was not really new. Yes, beta and the first few months were fun, but once the server consolidation took place, the handwriting was on the wall. It tried too hard to rest on the AC name, but really didn't live up to anyone's expectations of a sequel to Asheron's Call: In the final analysis, it stole place names, race names, and a tiny bit of the lore from its parent--but didn't live up to the promise.

RIP, AC2.

I'm a 5-year subscriber to AC1. I did the AC2 beta and subscribed for a couple months at release, then again a year or so later. While the game had some great tech going for it, it was still really broken for a long, long time.

First thing that comes to mind was the rampant "perching" of tyrants, huge creatures with tons of XP. Players could get them stuck on the landscape and rack up big. Turbine allowed this to go on for much too long, just like they allowed XP "chains" to go on in AC1 for years. The XP chains were just the player's response to a core feature of the game, which allowed players to swear allegiance to other players of equal or higher level and "pass up" a percentage of their earned XP. Trouble was, the XP snowballed "up the chain" so that entire hierarchies of players amassed huge pools of experience for almost nothing.

Granted, this is old news and Turbine eventually fixed the problems, but not until both issues changed their respective games so much that content had to be tailored for these hyper-advanced player populations.

I only hope Turbine has learned some lessons for their upcoming D&D Online and LOTR Online.

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So they are counterproductive, unlike sequels in other game genres where they can be really successful.

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This one causes a palm plant. No, I wouldn't call sequels counter productive. What I would call counter productive is making a sequel that's so different from the first as to be something completely different, not to mention down right cheesy.

AC1 was a fun game back when I played it. There's a lot of good things about it. It wasn't some hokey game with characters running around beating drums as an attack.

I mean no disrespect to anyone who actually enjoyed AC2, but from my point of view the game was cheesy and boring. It deviated so far from what I saw as the AC1 spirit and fun that I had no desire to continue playing it.

Sequels counter productive... heh, what was counter productive about AC2 is that it was lame.

~Me

I played from jan '04 till last weekend, will cancel my account this week.

This was and still is the best game for me, a skillsystem that really is fun, you can play solo as well as in groups, you don't have to hunt mobs to advance, there are enough quests to do, it all was good, except: Marketing.

It's funny to read that Q&A, I'm not surprised at all, that ac1 is still going on, and ac2 is not, Turbine never meant too. The answer were they told us, that they advertised on websites and magazines, it's simply not true. I read a lot of magazines, most of them lately to check if anything is written about ac2, and it wasn't. And I only found 1 ad at an website, and that was an ac2 fansite, how should that attract the attention of retired or new players?

And one question was really good, you feel really tricked, if you buy a new addon for the game just to hear a little later, the game is going down. I think providing ther servercode, to make a playerrun server is the least they can do, and if the game is really unrescuable, than what do they fear for?

Good luck for those who will play LotR or DDo, I won't be tricked a second time by Turbine, there are other games out there, and even if they will never be what AC2 was, they aren't at least Turbine games.