I miss did not quit option :/

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Originally posted by Terminus-Est
I had been considering coming back too. I had originally left because of the huge amount of ganking. I like PvP and I want to PvP, but it was impossible to get anything done. You couldn't progress towards higher levels because you were constantly being ganked by people who had gotten there first.
Zone in to a new agrea - ganked!
Talk to an NPC - ganked!
Get low on health fighting a mob - ganked!
Arrange to meet a pick-up group outside the dungeon - ganked!
Try to solo - ganked!
As I said, I had been considering coming back, but threads like the one below have put me off again:
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=108536

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Well you can go on PvE servers if you cant take the PvP.

The fact is leveling in Age of Conan is very very fast compared to any other game out on the market.

The items are not making as much impact as in any other game so level 70 can kill player that is level 80 fully equipped in epics or pvp level 5 items.

Maybe you could try to transfer your character to PvP RP servers as players there try to stick with certain polices and rules.

What you must take in consideration is that PvP levels/XP is completely different story as thats the real grind compared to PvE part of the game.

Btw when I say roll to PvE server it not offensive as with the upcoming patches players on PvE servers will have a lot of options to PvP.

Atm on PvE servers you can only PvP at:
- Mini games
- Siege
- Border kingdoms. <- quite pointless atm

Important upcoming changes.
- PvP resources (for battle keep.. build/repair) that are only available in cimmerian end border kingdom.
Players will be there to grind the resources and also those resources will drop if you die in PvP.

- Guild points/Siege schedule changes with War declaration
Guild will be able to declare war on other guild and you will receive points for killing members of the enemy guild. ( latest patch notes say that later on it will be enabled on PvE servers too .. not straith after the patch )

So for all those that wanna PvP at their own terms and dont wanna be disturbed while leveling etc.. PvE servers will be violable option that will have enough PvP content.

As for PvP servers its dog eat dog as it should be.

Imo they did not add that much however they did fix a lot.

Check patch notes from May till now at: http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6

There is probably few thousands lines what was changed / fixed etc..

Funcom being Funcom you may expect AoC to really shine 2 years after release.
So far they are doing great job especially since September when game director was changed.

There are still some issues but game changed a lot since release.

The only major flaw for majority of players that AoC have is skilled based PvP and not item driven .. on paper that sounds perfect but in reality players like to grind and grind as hell for items that will make them uber.

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Originally posted by Zorndorf
Xfire blabering ... 

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Now add to that advance calculation Dofus on 66 xfire place with 1222 players

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Tuesday, October 7. 2008
NOTED: Dofus has 10 Million Players, 1.5 Million Subscribers... not bad for a Flash MMO
Dofus, the French MMO from Ankama Games, has reached 10 million players and 1.5 million subscribers paying GBP 3.5 (just over $6) per month.

Which is better - a low cost subscription (with free option) or pure Free-to-Play?

Both Runescape and Dofus seem to have a 10% plus subscriber rate which is pretty good. The nice thing about subscriptions is that you can take advantage of the "Health Club Effect" where people continue to pay long after they cease to regularly play your game.

R. Purchese (2008), "Dofus reaches 10 million players",

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=254622

As you like to say:
What we KNOW know you cant deduct how many subscribers any MMO have based on Xfire stats.

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Originally posted by AmazingAvery
Hows you guy's keep going IK ?

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Tier 2 now :)
We defended it twice and we won and we did 1 attacking siege and won as well :)
To bad you cant claim more then 1 keep .. thinking about doing it with our 2nd guild ( a spare guild with tier 3 city ) but other will think we are to pompous.

Btw since the merge Cimmerian end and Border to Kush are laggy as hell when it comes to sieging, for some reason Aqulionia is ok.

I think they did not cluster enough servers for fury as people are rushing in like crazies .. several large guilds from germany, france, spain move there as well.

By large I mean anything that have more then 50+ players online at prime times.

We also have some nice activity now and its great when you can have 2 pve raids and still enough people for open world pvp.

btw The reason for so many online was mainly cause it was just before the siege and when it comes to that we are pretty strict if members are not there when we need them well they get booted.

Like i said before we have some real nuts in the guild with average daily play time 12h+ heh and people say there is nothing to do in AoC ... killing other players is always good :)

p.s. My average play time is like 5-6h cant keep with all those nuts we have.

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Originally posted by indiramourn

Actually, I think what Octa was talking about is money and time.  You're limited time on this planet.  On your deathbed will you be wishing you had spent more time at work or more time gaming?

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Well with that kind of attitude I suggest you never preorder or start playing any game at release time.

I have yet to be sorry for any game i started and I played most of them.
If I did not want to waste money and was unsure well its simple do not preorder and wait for few months so you can see player responses.

btw on death bed you will think about family lol not work or gaming.

Never forget never forgive well its should apply to:
never forget NOT to preorder or start immediately after any game is release
never forgive myself if i break never forget rule.

Some games recover some games become niche and still very nice so if that happens to AoC why would you retry it. ( especially if they give free time )

p.s. Most players are like sheeps and if any game improves and improves a lot they will be back. lol i remember all the drama Eve online had at release and 1.5 years into release.

Well based on their last Q03 2008 financial report

Cash balance of TUSD 34.779 as of September 30, 2008 and low interest bearing debt. Payment from Eidos for box revenues in Q208 has been received after Q308.
( btw didnt they spent around $40m in 4 years for developing AoC )

Funcom does not need any external funding in 2009. Most of Funcoms cash and cash equivalents are being held in NOK.

Dont think they will bankrupt any time soon.

Its hard to judge now after the merge how many new players there is as you see a lot of new faces you did not saw before.

Maybe after 3 months it would be a bit easier especially cause people are not so scattered among countless servers.

Current activity is really really high on server I play ( Fury EU ) but I guess there is also plenty of people that came just to check it out in 3 months time things will settle.

You can do proper search and get all the players online ( errors those logging on/off while you preform search )

Basically to do it right you need to set each filter separately.

Filters:
- Map
- Race ( Aq., Cimmerian, Stygian)
- Class Demo, necro etc..

And even then you can hit bumps like i tried to see how many necros are in khessatta but it was always maxed page (50 players max )

Unfortunately Necros are always Stygians so you cant break them by class.

I dont know how US servers are doing but on Fury EU there are daily fights 30-50 vs 30-50 vs 30-50 in kheshatta.

Same goes for Sieging if guild is not hiding the keep at some wierd AM times its definitely getting sieged.

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Originally posted by OrionMan
half a dozen receips? Come on just the first patch included 24, than you have all the receips that have been stuck inn after that. Get you facts straight dude.

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You can add 1.000.000 recipes and that would not change the fact that crafting is far from good. Certain changes are needed to make crafting system decent.

Crafting / itemization will come with patch 1.05 the game changing patch.
The problem is who knows when that one will be deployed maybe 1 month maybe 6 months from now.

There are some good changes with upcoming 1.04 but the game is still far far away when it comes crafting / itemization and stats.

Personally Iam more in PvP so I wanna get 1.04 changes as fast as possible.

On the negative side some of the classes are a bit unbalanced and they wont change anything till new itemization+stats are live.

Well they are fixing bugs like Line of Sight for Necro death grip and spellwaving delay.

Well if they continue to apply patches like they do now the game will be quite amazing by the end of the year. For now is fun but lacks variety when it comes to end game.

If you want to have fun for a month or two its worth trying if you wanna MMO that you will play for years well then you need to be a bit nuts to stick with it. ( nuts here ... playing since beta Oct 07 )

For ultimate fun you need to be in a guild with lots of nuts that wanna kick ass all day long.

Here is few latest screen shots of our guild post server merge.

Note: Class Active in last 7 days is only for level 80's.
[ The number /239 in ingame friends window is not matching with bot statistic as not everyone was registered by our chat bot yet. (we remove inactive members/alts if they are away for more then 14 days without posting about it on our forums )

You can do some pretty amazing things with AoC chat bot.

Some of the spies will be happy now getting our stats :)

We play on Fury EU and no we are not recruiting, except if you are really PvP nuts and very very active.

At the end it all comes to what kind of guild you are as once you hit level 80 AoC can become very boring game but with a lot of nuts around there is plenty of things you can do for fun.

We could play tetris together and still have fun its the community and not the game )

If I were playing mostly solo and only with few friends most likely I would quit AoC after around a month after hitting level 80.

Believe it or not I dont have alts I only have 1 level 80 character and always playing that one. Its ranger and I played the same class since beta Oct 07 :)

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Originally posted by foliot
Wow...  They killed that wall/gate/w.e with friggen swords.  There should at least be some sort of battering ram..

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Well you dont do that much damage with swords and the wall was hit by trebuchet too.

The best was to destroy wall/buildings is with siege weapons and siege mounts aka Mammoths and Rhinos.

As for Siege objectives:

01. Attacker need to gather more points then defender.
As attacker you receive shit load of points by destroying buildings.

02. Once attacker have more points then defenders they need to destroy Keep.
Destroying keep is a bit harder as defender have rezz point next to it and attackers rezz is around 400h meters away. (200-250 from outter siege camp )

Owning a battle keep its giving all members a nice invulnerability ( piercing, slashing etc... ) especially at tier 3.

To be able to build Tier 3 Battle Keep you need to hold a Keep for 1 month ( if keep gets destroyed you are back to start )

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Originally posted by EduardoASG
y they merged 49 servers into 18.
Problem is that in Europe for instance only 1 of each localised language servers remain even with very low populations. My guess is that all those lonely specific language servers will be merged into the only 4 english servers  remaining, lowering even more the total number of game servers.
Not that i am very surprised with this.. those who plant winds harvest storms as we say here.

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It wont happen those servers will stay and they are far from low populated well at least German and French ones not sure about Spanish ones.

btw together is 22 servers you forgot they open 1xPvP, 1xPvE in US and EU.

Well if the title was different I would maybe read whole wall of text.

Blind fanbois are doing most harm to AoC.

I mean come on wtf If i was one of the ex players that wanna check how AoC is doing now and saw topic AoC is 10 times better then xx etc..
I would just quit reading and move on.

Rather post what changed, whats the population after server merges, in what areas AoC still lacks the features .. bugs etc ...

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Originally posted by Guillermo197
 I tried the game for a little week now with my level44 Guardian (leveled it up to 45 and a half or so).
And I must say that I can run the game extremely smooth now with all graphic settings completely maxed out.
No hickups, no Disconnects, no crashes. So that's a major improvement for sure.
The only gripe I have so far, is that the EU RP-PVE server wasn't merged and thus is still very low populated.
So I parked the game again for now and wait a couple more months for the server pop to hopefully pick up a bit, now there are far less servers.
And that the DX10 patch is in and the crafting revamp patch after that is in as well. 
 
But overall I have to be honest here. The game has improved a lot! Especially performance / stability wise. Wich was frankly my biggest gripe and reason I quit last year.
Cheers

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Plenty of people will be moving to RP server as soon as Funcom give free character transfer option.

I know that quite few of the Twilight ( cultural server ) players where unhappy with the merge to PvP server and they plan to move to RP one.

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Originally posted by Guillermo197
Lord of the Rings has still around 250k subscribers these days.
On XFire LOTRO has around 3k XFire users playing per day average.
So that means that Age of Conan still has roughly 100k subscribers, doing some simple maths here.
Cheers

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You cant compare Xfire stats to determine how many subscribers game have.

Whats with people and Xfire, all you can see is how game is trendy for Xfire users and nothing else.

Really getting sick of posting same thing over and over again but lets see Dofus is claiming they have over 10m players and 1.5m subscribers and Xfire rank is #71 with 1524 player

So lets do the math:
1.524 Xfire players X 1000 = 1.524.000 subscribers

Lol at calculating subscribers based on Xfire stats.

Who the f*ck cares you either enjoy the game or not, with the merges that happen there are no ghost servers and population is great.

Ask yourself would you love/hate AoC more if it had 10.000.000 subscribers.

I guess Alicia Keys with her album "As I Am" is the best singer ever as its top selling album in 2008 so even if you dont like it you are WRONG pfft.

Only d*mb as*es would decide if they wanna play XXX game based on how many subscribers it had.

The valid question before server merges was if xx server have decent population.

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Originally posted by admriker4
even if they fixed the balance issues, the stats, the lack of unique looking gear, etc I wouldnt play it.
The game is inherently flawed. mirrored instancing, too many loading screens, and 100% focused on quests.
Add in some non-combat classes, get rid of all the loading screens, take away that ridiculous 50 player cap per mirrored zone, and id consider resubscribing

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Lol @ player cap of 50 per zone.
I cant tell you know we had over 150 in today's fights.
( 40 only of our guild members ... and there were plenty of guilds with 30-40 players to fight vs )

Well let me add yesterday EU players had some good fun on test live servers and today it was quite Epic on merged servers.

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Originally posted by Azrile
It sounds stupid, but history has proven it accurate for the last 3 years.

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Btw why is dofus so low on $79 place ?

Tuesday, October 7. 2008
NOTED: Dofus has 10 Million Players, 1.5 Million Subscribers... not bad for a Flash MMO
Dofus, the French MMO from Ankama Games, has reached 10 million players and 1.5 million subscribers paying GBP 3.5 (just over $6) per month.

Which is better - a low cost subscription (with free option) or pure Free-to-Play?

Both Runescape and Dofus seem to have a 10% plus subscriber rate which is pretty good. The nice thing about subscriptions is that you can take advantage of the "Health Club Effect" where people continue to pay long after they cease to regularly play your game.

R. Purchese (2008), "Dofus reaches 10 million players",

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=254622

About what history are you talking again ?

All I can say is LoL at Xfire.

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Originally posted by Jackdog
Kind of like the Nielson ratings only sample a small fraction of a percent of TV viewers or polls sample a couple of thousand people out of the entire population of a state or a country or of all the people who use soap for a opinion.

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Even with monitoring trends its a problem cause for Nielson rating they choose random household.
Nielson rating would fail completely if they let say monitor people who like soap operas and then monitor how many of them like to whats scifi movies .. the trend would be completely wrong.

Xfire is showing now and it show in past that is wrong or do you have any good explanation why dofus is so low .. even if dofus lied about subscribers by 10times and they only had 150 subscriber well they are still waaaay to low on xfire.

Dofus is not the only example where Xfire is way way wrong .. finial fantasy if one of those too and many more.

Xfire show us some trends how many Xire users are playing a game and not much much more .. if they gave us more info we could say how many more WoW, Lotro, FPS players are playing AoC too but thats it.

p.s. AoC could easily have only 60K subs but basing that on Xfire is just lol.

How about the bad news ?
Here is copy/paste of my post from test live:
The Cradle of Decay is no longer a social dungeon. - WRONG

I mean seriously we need more social dungeons don't close people in some small instances .. even the raids should be social.

People should fight for the right to farm them.

This is really disappointing instead of getting one nice dungeons where you will actually meet ( and then kill ) another players is becoming a private instance .. maybe that's ok for PvE servers but really for a game that promotes PvP 99% of all dungeons are closed ones.

Can someone explain me whats the reason behind it ?

This game really needs some world bosses if you are unable to change the current raids .. Iam getting sick of private instances where people are always hiding on PvP servers.
We have instances, we have zoning and of top of it DO NOT CLOSE US in some other "private" instances ...

Really unbelievable when I finally thought things are going in right direction you change duengon from social to private.
Is this Massively Multiplayer Game or just Multiplayer Game ... if i wanted to play the latest I would choose far more better ones.

Rather think how you will change the raids .. BRC is quite OK designed for it as the doors close once boss is attacked.
Put the bosses on constant timers and allow the guilds to fight for them.
As for PvE servers well if border kingdom is open pvp area dunno why the raids should not be too.

This kind of change would bring A LOT of content to AoC and interest to fight .. if people would just like to raid privately well WoW, LOTRO and other games will provide much much more fun with it ...

I mean think about it.
You waste I dont know how much time to make a dungeon that people will finish as soon as its open then do it 2, 3 times and get bored with it.
How much more fun would be if you need to fight for it how much more times would you go there .. it would prolong the fun out of the dungeon by 100x times.

The new game director really need to get ingame for 4 hours a day and stay with 1 level 80 char to see why those changes are needed.