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Originally posted by openedge1

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Originally posted by Blackwell99

The point is that  you can buy 2 or 3 AoCs for the price of 1 expansion pack for games that are  older than dirt.
Because of the fact they are new, and offer more content for games that have already dried up in their content for current players, meaning that the player is desperate for anything to do, since their game is getting old? Of course the original players will buy that, no matter the cost.

Good thing AoC sold more copies in one month than the original LOTRO sold in a year...or the fact that AoC was able to chart as a top 10 selling game for 2008, while WAR missed by a hair..

Makes it much easier to go ahead and mark down the game...they call this good business sense. Cheaper copies sell better.

And really, does this matter, when no game will ever sell like WoW anyways?
The moral of the story is:
Some haters will do or say anything when desperate to prove their theories, no matter how incorrect?

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Honestly, I wouldnt go around posting that AOC sold more copies in one month that LOTRO sold in a year, seeing as currently LOTRO has about 125k more subscribers than AOC does. What that actually indicates is that LOTRO is able to sell it's game and retain it's customers while AOC can sell it's game but loses 80% of it's customers.

Clarifaction:The part that I underlined was a comment made by Openedge1 and not by Blackwell99

Alchemy was slated to be included in the game in Beta 2 and Beta 3 but was cut out. It has been tossed around to be added sometime in the future. Cooking is another skill that will most likely be added.

I may be mistaken but it seems like you are referring to the free month of play as a free trial. SOE gave folks who play other SOE games a free month(January) of play in Vanguard. This was not a free trial. The free month of play allows you to have full access to the game. Now, the free trial only lasts for 14 days and it only gives you access to a starter trial island.

With that said, I wouldnt put it past SOE to screw up. It is highly possible that when the end of the January free play ended and SOE shut down the accounts that were only opened for the free month and inadvertently closed all of the 14 day trial accounts as well.

Actually, I can think of quite a few games that will give you bonus experience when you group with 3+ players. Something like +10% exp for each player in a 3 person group, 15%-20% for 4 person group, 30% or so for a 5 person group and like 40% bonus experience for a 6 person group.
This was a concept that the original Everquest came up with and alot of MMOs today has adopted in their own game.

Being able to buy AoC for under $2 is great. You get 1 month of free play with that too so that makes AoC well worth the price that you paid.
In fact, that is pretty much the best deal of any MMO out there today(except for those MMOs who are giving away a free month this month).
I hope that you continue to like the game. Obviously it isnt the game for everyone but for some people it is great.
BTW, Tortage was my favorite of the game.

I remember Brad McQuaid posting on the beta boards that he was looking at each server holding around 12k accounts per server. He was using a formula that suggested that anywhere from 1/5th to 1/8th of each server population would be online at any given time. At 1/5th of the max population being online at the same time, that would give you around 2300 to 2500 players online, and 1/8th(the lower end of what McQuaid was expecting) would put it at around 1500 players.
Those are the standard numbers that most servers these days are also capable of holding without rish of crashing the server.
Now, whether or not the ingame content could support these numbers, well that is a different story. The actual land mass would be able to support well over the 1/5th of maximum server population but the world of Telon doesnt currently have enough variable content spaced out over the land mass in order to allow people to play in a specific area without it being way over camped.
If VG had about 3 times the current content which would be spaced out evenly through all levels then I think that VG could easily hold 2500+ simutanious players without the feeling of being over crowded.
How cool would that be if VG ever got to that point, eh?

All old VG accounts have been reactivated and will be free to play until the end of January. I think this started sometime around the 3rd or 4th week of December.

Here is also something to think on. Since I have just seen AoC selling at $8.99 in the Target bargin bin, i'd be willing to bet that the gold farmers are actually buying multiple copies at the very low price that the game is selling at. Now, instead of buying 1 copy of the game at $50 they can now get 5 or 6 copies and open 5 or 6 more accounts than usual in order to better sell their gold.
Now, I am not saying that this is what is happening but if I ran a gold farmer business and I could increase my farmer accounts by 5 fold for no additional cost then that is what I would do.

Well, I visited the VG forums every now and then and VG does have new players joining every day so it isnt just a monthly charge.
I was in Target store a week ago and saw AoC in the clearence bin for $9.98, which would put it as the same price as VG.

I look at the comparison between VG and AoC like this:
Vanguard went from 240k subs to 50k subs in about 6 months. That would come out to be roughly 1 out of every 5 players stayed with the game.
AoC went from 800k to 50k-150k in about 6 months. That would come out to be roughly 1 out of every 10 players stayed with the game.
If we look at it that way it would seem that AoC failed even more than VG.

You may not agree with me,and thats alright, but FC is just as bad as SOE and both companies are looked upon as "game-killers" in the MMO industry.
In pretty much every aspect, AoC is just as bad as Vanguard.
Coming up on the 2 year aniversary for VG and the game is still around the 40K sub mark. That is still about a 20% retention rate from Launch.
AoC is currently at about a 10% retention rate from their Launch numbers.
Some people may even say that AoC has fared more badly than VG ever did.

Is the Conan movie somehow linked to the Conan MMO(other than just sharing the same name)?
Just wondering if a movie type forum would be a better place for this thread seeing as it isnt a MMO and this is a only MMO forum.

I think that it was fairly accurate when it was said that AoC is the Vanguard of 2008.
Initially AoC sold about 800k copies and about 6 monthe later it is down to roughly 100k subs.
Initially VG sold around 240k copies and about 6 months later it was down to about 50k subs.
Both games are niche games.
Both games are slowly but surely fixing it's problems.
Both games promised more but delivered less at Launch.
Both games will never be able to shake it's reputation as a crappy game despite all the improvements to those games.
Both of the games creators had to leave the company in shame.

SOE and Funcom are the 2 names in the MMO community that will keep people from playing their games, no matter how good those games are, just because they are developed by SOE or FC.

On the bright side, the new year is just a week away so maybe there will be another gaming company that will launch a new game that will be even worse than the AoC launch and people will have a new company to trash and give FC a break for awhile.

I see some people suggesting that you play on a PvE server. The biggest problem with PvE servers are that they currently have very low populations so it will be kinda hard to get a group unless you are in a pretty big guild.
Personally, I would suggest that you grab a copy of WAR and play that game until Darkfall gets released.

IMO, a player trying to transition into a new MMO shouldnt have to go to a forum to get tips on how to have fun in the game. If a player is having a hard time trying to have fun in a MMO then most likely that game isnt for him.

Voted WAR as well.

I think it would have been much easier to make a poll for which game was the worst in 2008.

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Originally posted by Capn23

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Originally posted by Vespers

Im sure AOC is seeing new subs, just like every other MMO out there is seeing new subs. The problem with this comment is that even though people will continually try out various MMOs and thus seem to increase the population, there will also be people continually leaving the same MMOs. New people who want to try out a game will usually do some research first to find out which server would be best for them to play on. In a game with substantually low server populations these new people will go to the biggest population servers and give it the illusion of increasing population overall when in fact the low population servers will keep getting smaller and smaller because no one wants to play on low population servers so they leave and no one is there to replace them.
I was saddened to hear that FC, yet again, failed to live up to it's promise of merging servers in December. End of January or beginning of Feburary is the timeframe that they are now going with(until they push that date back as well)
For people who are wondering when the best time to come back to AOC, I would say wait until the server mergers for new players and for old players who have quit, I would suggest coming back when they come out with some free time for the cancelled accounts.
 

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Did you read the circumstances behind why it was pushed back? They were having problems that would have affected people's items and they didn't want to rush the server merges just to have even bigger problems pop up.

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It doesnt really matter what excuse FC gives as to the reason why they could not follow through on their promise to merge servers. In business the only thing that matters is the end result and making your deadline.
Do you think Funcom's investors like seeing FC always postponing a deadline? No, of course they dont. If investors and players dont have any confidence in FC to do what they say, when they say, then FC will continue on their downward spiral.

Funcom, dont give excuses, just give results when you promise them.

Im sure AOC is seeing new subs, just like every other MMO out there is seeing new subs. The problem with this comment is that even though people will continually try out various MMOs and thus seem to increase the population, there will also be people continually leaving the same MMOs. New people who want to try out a game will usually do some research first to find out which server would be best for them to play on. In a game with substantually low server populations these new people will go to the biggest population servers and give it the illusion of increasing population overall when in fact the low population servers will keep getting smaller and smaller because no one wants to play on low population servers so they leave and no one is there to replace them.
I was saddened to hear that FC, yet again, failed to live up to it's promise of merging servers in December. End of January or beginning of Feburary is the timeframe that they are now going with(until they push that date back as well)
For people who are wondering when the best time to come back to AOC, I would say wait until the server mergers for new players and for old players who have quit, I would suggest coming back when they come out with some free time for the cancelled accounts.

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Originally posted by Samuraisword
Since Vanguard was originally supposed to be the game for old school hardcore players, but has now been dummied down by SOE, how many of you are looking forward to Darkfall?

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If Vanguard looses 2% of it's population to Darkfall I would be surprized.
Vanguard is pretty much a PvE game with 1 FFA PvP server.

Darkfall is going to be a hardcore PvP game.

The people who currently play Vanguard are mostly PvE players and have no urge to play a hardcore PvP game at all.

You might want to ask the question of AoC and WAR though. I would think that those 2 games would take a much bigger hit than Vanguard will.

It looks like alot of people who were skeptical of FC actually doing the very needed mergers on the announced timeline stated, "I'll believe it when I see it".
It seems that FC has yet again found a way to weasel out of their promise. Now Craig is saying perhaps sometime in January. January what? The 30th? That is almost 2 months from now. What happens when the end of January gets here and still no mergers?
Is there some sort of problem that os keeping the mergers from happening? Well, this is the excuse that Craig is giving. Do I believe him? Well, FC has a very strong history of saying one thing and doing something exactly opposite.
It just looks like FC is still leading it's players around with that Carrot on a stick. Always promising the players "If you stay we will get XXXXXX ingame by XXXXX date to make your play more enjoyable" or "Just give us a little more time to prove that we can make this game work".

Some people may want to listen to Kenny Rogers when he sings "You need to know when to hold em, and know when to fold em"

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Originally posted by AmazingAvery

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Originally posted by Elsabolts

Avery you still think these guys are gonna pull this thing out of the grave. Man you gotta start adding things up and its not good.

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Yes there were no WMD in Iraq.  The Russians are not invading etc etc. Same principle. Time to take the shades off. The 360 version has been going for a while, more people than the DF dev team working on it. Whether it happens in 2009 or not is another topic. 360 is growing in popularity each day and there is a market for this type of game. Whether people still want to call sinking ship every other month like since the start of the year is ok, but FC is still here and the fact is money is still in the bank to support the development of this. Re-structuring of staff to better provide service is also feasible and I havent read of any direction correlation since staff went directly effecting players in game. Same as when they let the same titles of those staff that went in September too.
Microsoft already gave the green light on 360 AoC.  There is nothing more to say than it is still in development and they are not ready to release more info than that at this point in time.
The company is re-assuring that the cuts won't effect either, just like they assured us they would staff up because there was a need in these area's - and they did. There is nothing to go on to think otherwise imo.

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Uhhh...Avery, you DO realize that the article reference that you posted was 2 years old, right? December 2006 post date hardly qualifies this as current and viable imformation.

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Originally posted by Ngeldu5t
This is what IGN and Game trailer said about a month after the game was released.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU1oPqxye0s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL1V1AUUZ8U&feature=related
I don't understand how people missed these reviews! I decided not to play after the so called OB then waited for 6 months and now I`m giving it a try.
Don`t tell me those who were in CB did not know the State of the Game before release and yet they chose to pre-order the game.
If there is someone to blame,players should blame themselves for pre-ordering CE/ rushing on every single MMO released and then they whine for missing content
 

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Actually, I was in AoC Closed Beta for quite awhile and I can tell you right now that and overall majority of Closed Beta testers absolutely knew that the state of the game at Launch was going to be horrible. There were numerous post on the Beta forums begging FC to not launch the game because of all of the problems it was having.
Yes, the Closed Beta testers informed FC ALL THE TIME about ongoing bugs but these bugs never got fixed. Towards the end of Beta, FC started to acknowledge that there were alot of game breaking bugs in the game but that they had a "Miracle Patch" that they were going to put in right before Launch that would fix the majority of bugs as well as increasing game performance. Well, that "Miracle Patch" actually made the game worse.
Also, there were numerous posts on the Closed Beta forums asking the testers if they were going to pre-order the game and 80% of these testers voted that they would NOT be pre-ordering this game due to all of the issues that it was having, however they would consider buying the game about 2 or 3 months after Launch when the game got tweaked a bit more.
So, for those people out there who try to put ANY blame on the Closed Beta testers. We tested the game well and we documented all the bugs that we found and set them in like we were suppose to. If FC chose NOT to act of that information then it is solely FC's fault that AoC is in the stae that it is today and not the fault of poor testing of the game during Closed Beta.
Also, FYI, the Closed Beta group were always kept separate from the Open Beta crowd. Also, the Closed Beta testers were different from the Technical Beta(PvP testers) group as well.
If I remember correctly, the Technical Beta group were able to test the PvP content 3 or 4 times before Launch(correct, the PvP testing was done sporatically and wasnt a continual process)

Gotta luv Carp even if you pull it from yer arse.