Thanks for the positive feedback everyone. ;)

Mark Jacobs is next in my sights!

Hi Jon,

Ze link! It does not work! Ze link!

Please told me you asked him why he said "PVP was not an intended featured at launch" during your last interview?

But hey, I can't complain, you ask more hard hitting questions than most others in the industry.

Originally posted by Arington

Nice job of writing and kind of funny; however, you were way off the mark on alot of what was written. Having over 400,000 players does not make an MMORPG dead. Even if it was only 200,000 it would still be considered successful.

You might be correct if we're talking about an indy or lower budget game. AoC took over 70M USD to produce, from latest reports.

A big budget game like this needs a certain amount of subscribers in the first few months to cover production costs. The evidence against AoC having already covered this is more negative, as the company stock has dropped significantly.

It will be interesting to see a more accurate subscriber report in September/October. Christmas time reports should exclude all "3-6 month subscribers" that cancelled their accounts and went back to WoTLK or WAR.

My estimate is that by the time Noel comes around, the Age of Conan subscriber base will not be over 100K subs.

In any case, as Funcom is a somewhat stable company (I think) - the game should fall in line with Vanguard and Tabula Rasa next year.

Originally posted by Slythe

Someone posted a link to your article at the official forums - forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php

It has gotten replies from all the usual AoC suspects -Protus, Vepgenus, Lestiduz and most of the other sheep.

BTW I got a good laugh from your article, and it was very well-written. Well done!

Thanks for that link, I'll take a look.

Should be fun! :)

Thanks for the mainly positive feedback everyone, makes a hobby blogger like myself happy that he could entertain. ;)

@TalRasha: I know what you mean.

I was joking about sending it to all the devs, though I did fire an email off to the Funcom CEO. Not that he'll read it or reply, but who knows? :)

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Daedren/082008/2486_Age-of-Conan-A-Post-Mortem-Analysis-

Enjoy.

Oh, dear, what I have I done?

Condolences to the friends and family from the guys over at r1ft.

Such a shame... hopefully it will make those left behind cherish the time they have a bit more.

Thanks for the preview preview, Jon.

Regarding the spellcheck guys here, which I find a bit humorous (though they do have a point), I recommend the following solution:

Use Firefox

Get the plugin "MySpell" or "ASpell" for Firefox. This handy plugin treats anything you write in your web browser the same way it would in MS Word: red underlines for misspelled words, etc.

I couldn't survive without this. All the rambling I do on my blog, you need stuff like this.

Anyway, just a tip to make your life easier. Discard if you don't care.

Originally posted by spector75

Ok for all the people saying why  didn't Funcom just host the file themself its only 50k people, they say they are ready for 600k to patch on launch day.... Currently the patch will be 400mb. the full client is 13gigs

13 gigs divided by 400mb comes out to like 32.5.... 32.5x50000= 1625000

For all those who don't see what i am getting at here... 50k people downloading a 13 gig file is like 1.6 million people at launch day... it would be a mess on there servers with the addition of people they have in beta downloading the patches and trying to actually play the game.  They sent the file out to a server farm that could handle the load, that server farm decided to charge for its useage... that isn't really funcom doing that, its fileplanet.

 

I understand alot of folks wana play the game, but tell me how is the fileplanets beta at 5 dollars different then preordering a game and canceling it cuz you didn't like it? Costs you money either way.... Gaming companys do not HAVE to have an open beta they do it cuz its a nice look for the public... Do not try to say things like "they owe it to us" or "this is crap we shouldn't have to pay to play a beta" cuz honestly.... would you guys just prefer there was no public beta at all?

While you're math is right, it still doesn't explain why they didn't torrent out the beta client.

In fact, seeding out the torrent from the login servers / game servers is great way to stress test the bandwidth of a server.

Oh, and it takes like 10 minutes to set up. If that's too hard for FunCom, I'm worried about what would happen with a real technical problem. :P

Originally posted by PowderBurnt

Not a single question as to why tech testers were passed over when they already have the client installed. The entire "interview" was softball.

This.