Hi SirPaco. As Always enjoying your dedication on this topic. Following your thread closely to see if there is any improvements on sieges. However. As I read more I get the impression that the problem is more severe on Fury than on other servers and also Sil has given a very elaborate answer to how they are working and prioritising the problem. 

http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=1551626&postcount=26
link 

Do you think this is good enough for the PVP crowd or will they start to leave again? Maybe the more dedicated PVP'ers simply will transfer to a different server?

 Works fine on my laptop:

Win 7 - 64bit
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7450 @ 2.13GHz
RAM 4,00 GB
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650
 

Did have some problems saying that my graphics card driver wasnt updated, after last patch but these went away. 

 I have recently returned as well and having good fun. Started from scratch and I am glad that they have made it easy to finish Tortage. It was fun without being tedious, eventhough i have played it way too many times.

Now finding time to play will be the challenge for me :O

Originally posted by Malickie

Originally posted by MisterSr

Too bad I can't read the file format... what was the F2P initiative?

 

Basically an approach similar to Free Realms, mindless game-play you'll find on your closest cell phone.

Its a MMO for kids

http://www.petsvsmonsters.com/ 

...... for the PVP hungry crowd there is some good news as Funcom will increase focus on this in the future. .

 Age of Conan – Product focus
Product expansion
• Additional competitive ‘player versus player’ features designed to
enhance retention
• Introduction of over-time benefits
• Content updates
• Expansion pack with more content and deeper RPG systems
Continue to improve trial distribution
• New launcher technology
• Reduced client size
• Advanced streaming options
• Improved

As for the actual result they are on target from what they predicted 3 months ago. Not very good, but the stock is one of the winners today on the Oslo stock exchange (up 12.85%) and the general feedback from the market is that there are two good things about this report.

1) there are no surprises in the development process of their ongoing projects, most importantly RoTGS and TSW. 

2) they have been very good at cutting cost and will be able to run the company until their income increases due to the abovementioned games. 

All in all Funcom is running a tight and well managed ship at the moment. Both financially and projectwise. 

On xfire they have a "Game store". if you look at www.xfire.com and see the list over most popular games in their game store, you will see that AoC is number 2.

So even if they dont sell too many boxes in the shops they have other channels to sell the game. The actual numbers of copies sold pr month i dont know. ..

Originally posted by svarteryttar

Yeah true but I didnt say that wow got its growth from PvP but I said it remained big becouse of the PvP. What do people do when they have finished the PvE content and dont whant or dont have time for raids all the evenings/weeks, they PvP. So when the majority thinks of leaving an MMO becouse they feels they hit the wall there is still PvP until the next ex-pac. This isnt true in a game like AoC where the accessibility of sigies are even more remote to most typical gamers (casual players who have like 1-2 hrs) then a typical raidrun since the sieges are inbetween guilds (and the extra invited friends) and they are typically on the off-times like 24:00-0200 am or 0900 on a saturday morning etc.

I think you are comparing apples with oranges here. The typical casual player who has a couple of hours inbetween, will hardly ever finish all the PVE content. Therefore a fully built PVP environment in a MMO is not that important for such players. It simply ads flavour to the gameplay and some additional excitement.

Focusing on PVE is most important for a MMO that wants to cater for the more casual player. However having your l33t players that PVP all the time is also important as they show off videos and they add a lot to the community in form of drama and competition. They are the ones who will leave the game if there isnt enough PVP content, however they are not the big "cash cow" group of players and therefore prioritized lower than the casual PVE focused player, who enjoys the occational PVP. 

I think Craig Morrison got his priorities right. I also think that PVP players will receive more content in future patches, however they will make sure the PVE crowd is happy before they work on the PVP part.  

I am glad that I appreciate that 17 hours downtime during a major patch is compensated with 48 hours extra playtime.

Originally posted by Elsabolts

Fool me once " Shame on Funcom ", Fool me twice " Shame on Me " !   Let the buyer beware.

 

Funcom fooled their customers almost 2 years ago. They have since then spent 1 year and 9 months trying to amend their mistake. I feel they have done a very good effort as the game right now is really nice.

Now, I would be more careful buying TSW than I would be buying AoC, as AoC now is live and you can easily find out how the game runs and plays. As for TSW it still lots of smokes and screens. The future will tell if they have learned from the launch of AoC.

I just did (last week) and I am having fun. Still at lower levels, but lots of activity last night. Tortage has become really easy now so you can easily get to "the real Hyboria" in a few hours

Yeah, its a taste thing. The first stages when they are pets, look really cool imo. However at the mount stage they remind me of the genetically mutated shark from Jaws 3.... oooo ;-)

 Check it out.

http://www.onlinewelten.com/games/videos/9295-age-conan-rise-godslayer-exklusivtrailer-tiger-wolf/

Personally they look too mean for me....

Disclaimer: Ok, its an assumption. If the game is growing please enlighten me.

I have been reading the Aion forums from time to time and read many oppinions on the game. However I have the impression that the playerbase is slowly being reduced.

When Aion launched it was hailed as one of the most polished MMO releases in a long long time and the fans were besides themselves over how good it ran and how much fun it was.

Nowadays there is not much positive feedback. From what I read Aion has a couple of problems

1) Grind - many enjoy it, while even more people hate it.
2) Bots, hackers, goldspammers, etc aka - illegal activity.
3) Poor customer service
 

Now my question to the community is:

Will this decline stop? And if so, how can it be stopped?

Originally posted by Deewe

While it would need an insane budget or too much time to fix the major flaws, like lack of seamless world or have the full game with voice over, thus creating an AoC 2.0, what do you think would help a lot the game?

 

I'll start:

• Fix the UI:
  • All key bindings remapable
  • Fully resizeable UI, in game
  • Auto switch tools bars when changing weapons
  • First / 3rd person view toogle
  • Redo the trade UI
  • Redo the chat functions
  • Full support the Xbox 360 controller
  • Open the UI API valves (c.f.: WoW)
• Fix the graphics
  • Social clothing tab
  • Clothes dyes
  • Move the NPC dialogs to the black borders (too often unreadable) 
  • Fix the color palette: pink/violet hats, bright blue priest robes, etc...
  • Fix the poorly done textures: linen is one of them
  • Less triple E mammal implants on the female characters
• Housing
  • Instanced houses and apartments in NPC cities
• Transportation
  • Flying mounts
  • Multiplayer mounts
  • Pesonal runes of teleportation set to the player's choice location
• PvP
  • Optional perma death ruleset server

 

Would you bite?

 

You obviously havent worked with software development. 

Most of your issues are design elements where Funcom has made a consicious choice on how they want the game to run and feel. THESE ARE NOT THINGS THAT NEED TO BE FIXED. Its simply your request for other features. 

One can argue that the design choises were wrong and that one should have done it one way or the other. Youre statements are like saying that "Aion should fix their weapons so they look more realistic. " you can like or dislike it. 

 There is a whole thread about siege performance on the EU PVP forum where Sil has provided several answers. 

http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=139380&page=3

Here are some quotes for the lazy:

8th January 2010, 09:21 #25
Silirrion
Game Director

The performance in Siege gameplay on certain servers (Fury being one of them) is something that we are not satisfied with and is a continued focus for improvement.

The issue is more severe on certain servers, and the solution may be further optimizations or it may be additional infrastructure adjustments, or a combination of both.

There are code updates in almost every major update version (the next being 1.06) that are intended to improve performance there and we will most likely be making some hardware adjustments to improve things as we go through the upcoming merge process. (which should actually allow us to put more physical hardware in certain areas).

So the issue does not go unnoticed and it is an ongoing concern.
__________________
Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison
Game Director

8th January 2010, 09:40 #27
Silirrion
Game Director

The hardware can be used to compensate if specific dimensions (what we call server clusters like Fury, Crom etc) generate greater load than others, or specific game-servers (the individual physical machine that is running a playfield). There may be some things we can do there to improve the performance in addition to the code updates, so we will try something there as well.
__________________
Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison
Game Director
 

8th January 2010, 12:09 #33
Silirrion
Game Director

8th January 2010, 12:45 #35
Silirrion
Game Director

Quote:
Originally Posted by Saburolol
So the problem is that complicated that it couldn't be fixed in more than a year by now?
That's the thing, it is not a single, easily identified 'problem' that can be 'fixed'. It is a combination of many hundreds of events that under certain circumstances sometimes cause the server performance to bottleneck.

There have been many improvements to the system over the past year, some have helped and we have already removed many situations where that bottleneck could occur, resulting in less lockups than we had a year ago, so a lot has already been done to optimise this area. However there is definitely more that needs to be done. Certain servers suffer from the issue much more notably than others and that is indeed not satisfactory. We will continue to work on further optimisations so that we can get performance there up to where it should be.
__________________
Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison
Game Director
 

The main issue with this particular area is that it is not one thing that contributes to the issue. There are many interconnecting things coming into play here and that means that a definitive 'resolution' or 'single fix' just doesn't really exist.

The performance issues are most likely caused by a combination of game actions, scripts, player behavior, hardware infrastructure and code infrastructure getting bottle-necked under certain conditions. That makes it much more difficult to just instantly resolve if it was a single bug.

We could also take some more 'mitigating' actions like reducing the number of participants or changing the way certain abilities, spells and combos work specifically in PVP or specifically in sieges, but we have stayed away from that for now as I would prefer we exhaust all other angles first before we compromise anything to accommodate something that we should resolve and improve instead.

So it is an ongoing process.

In the long term, after the expansion, we do have the possible option of revamping the system more comprehensively (so far the resources required to do so has been prohibitive to doing so) and in effect re-write the underlying infrastructure. The original was designed without as much real time data from how players actually approach siege game-play as we have now, so this option may be appealing once the major milestones coming up are done and dusted, but it certainly isn't an approach to be taken lightly and would likely take some time to implement, but it is an option if the currently planned optimisations don't work out satisfactorily.
__________________
Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison
Game Director

 I think the pain (read technical problems) and grinding is pretty much gone now.  You can try it out for free and see how much you like it after a weeks playtime.  The most common critizism you hear now adays is that the sieges are broken. 

Dont know about the hacking but I havent read any complaints about it on any forums. 

As for armor have a look at yellow gremlin for armor looks

Here is a list of the best PVPrs and their current armor, in my oppinion it looks really cool

http://aoc.yg.com/profiles?rnk=1   (click on the names)

Originally posted by raystantz

 What are they doing with the zones?

In RotGS they will have larger zones that are right next to each other on the map so you can see from one zone to the other in order to make the world look more connected. 

Originally posted by SirPaco

FYI

I participated in 4 sieges this week. All of them crashed (attacking and defending). Some crashed after only a few minutes.

All of them had insane lag.

 

Also, there were other sieges that happened on Fury, they crashed also, and had crazy lag also.

 

Huge fail...

Its nice to read unbiased critizism from a player. Free from the regular love/ or hate relationship that is often displayed on these forums. Thanks for the update. 

Originally posted by Mortemia

Just got an email from Funcom saying if I don't reactivate my AoC account, they'll delete all my characters below lvl 20. Woot, there goes my auction characters and all meh GOLD!

Well, it's not like I'm going to reactivate my account for that. The game is gone. I just think it's funny, the way they threaten you! :)

There is no threat. 

If you dont want to loose your gold you can re-activate FOR FREE, and clean up your auction house character etc and move the valuables to a charachter thats higher than lvl 20. So with very little effort you can preserve your valuable items and have the game on hold for later on.