All Posts by afoaa

Good review and quite accurate.

That being said the biggest killer for me is that unless you are in a HUGE guild then there is nothing to do once you hit max lvl.

You cant craft since you need a tier 2 or 3 town to do that and small guilds cant build those.

You cant PvP since you need a battlekeep for battles and you need a tier 3 town before you can build a battle keep.

You cant PvE since it takes 24 people.

So you can just sit and look at a pretty world and have nothing to do. And THAT will in the end kill the game.

This issue show how FunCom prioritize elements in the game.

Looks is more important than substance. They recorded the animations and then instead of changing them to fix game elements, they changed the game elements to fit the animations.

And you see it again in the general game system. For example most stats didnt work at game release. And armors dont protect you in PvP and often not either in PvE.

The core game system is not established as a strong unified system, instead its a mesh of elements that serves to simulate an effect from all the graphics.

Really weird way to make a game if you ask me.

I changed my sub from a 3 month paid to 1 months.

I am willing to give them another month to begin to communicate honestly with their customers about what is really going on.

Its understandable that a complex game has bugs and problems. Its unforgiveable that they are stonewalling their customers about it.

I find it harder and harder every day to log in.

I soo much want this game to succeed, gameplay is wonderful, I love the original lore and the idea behind the crafting system appeals to be.

But you are fighting a constant uphill battle against not only bugs and crashes but also what appears to be completely borked core game systems.

And what really ticks me off is the lack of meaningful communication from funcoms side:

What is the status on armors? Do they or do they not protect and if they do how do they do it?

What is the status on changing the UI so it actually display game data players need to know?

What is the status on female animations being 17% slower than male animations?

What is the status on getting gemcrafting to work?

FunCom has has failed to communicate with their customers in a meaningful modern way and keep on using the last milenium methods we have seen earlier with tailored press statements that in no way answers the questions the players is struggling with and paint a picture of the game there has little relation to the reality we experience while playing.

I still have a hope but its quickly being snuffed out by funcoms attitude towards their customers. :(

I have waited for this game for years and years keeping track every single day and I have been a big supporter of the game but now I am becoming fairly negative.

Not because of the lack of content or the never ending bugs. I sort of expected that.

No its the completely unprofessional way funcom acts in regard to their customers. They keep stonewalling never ever engaging in meaningful communication. They never ever inform about what really happens and they keep the most basic game mechanics hidden which cause people to make choices that goes against what they really wanted.

Why does a company in 2008 think you can avoid talking to their customers? It makes them look like amateurs when they only come out with a controlled press release once in a while which is so far from the reality their players experience in the game that it just look like damage control, outright lies and untruthful hype.

If FunCom were honest about the state of the game and actually talked to their players about what works and what dont work and how things were intended to work in the game then they would probably have avoided loosing a very large percentage of those who quit these days.

People can easily forgive errors and problems. People will never forgive dishonesty.

Where have you seen that they will fix it monday?

So far the only thing we have been told is that they admit the bug and have had a talk with the lead designer of the game. Nothing about a fix.

Same with the 30% dps penalty female toons suffer from. They are looking into it and have admitted its there but nothing about a fix.

I must say I am shocked. I am a great fan of the game, it works and is fun but this . .

So it only works because people have different health.

Atm increasing attributes appears to do nothing in regard to to-hit, damage, crit chance, fatality chance, increased resist. Actually the only thing you _can_ se they do is to increase health, stamina, mana which makes str and dex relatively useless.

FunCom has already admitted that they dont work as intended. . .

Now armors seems to have no game effect either.

Is the entire background system broken and is that why funcom has stated they will never ever reveal how it works?

I think the only way funcom can save face here is to come out and be honest and show how the system works and explain themselves. For example if armors works like in D&D then they dont mitigate damage but make your more difficult to hit giving mobs a greater miss chance. Is that the case here?

The sad thing a system that works like what we suspect here would actually be ok for a mmo, but then the developing company should be honest about it and not try and make it look like it has traditional rpg stats.

They actually gave a good reason why they keep the populations on each server so high. Its to expand server lifetime. They very well know people will drift off the game with time and that will lead ot empty landscapes in most games. Here instead it will lead to fewer instances.

I am beginning to seriously like the instance system. Its a great way to avoid irritating people and to avoid competing for camps and spawns. Most zones are big enough not to feel walled in, its similar to CoX.

Well sieges are technically in but you have to make a tier 3 city before you can build a battle keep. And so far you cant build tier 3 cities because of a bug.

Blood money is out but they will introduce pvp lvls and later ranks and if you are a griefer who like to kill lowbies or repeating kill someone who rezzes then you open yourself to getting lootet when killed.

Overall the game is quickly shaping up. 2 patches a week with scores of fixes (and about half as many new bugs he he), helps a lot.

Now crafting is beginning to make sense.

You can get special drops anywhere now with highest drop chance from boss mobs and already a day after the last patch you can see people beginning to deviate a lot in appearance.

The developers is quickly changing game elements based on feedback from the players about what is good or bad. And that has restored my faith in FunCom.

To the OP. Yes the NPC attacks on player cities was scrapped.

Originally each player city should have a region for itself. And the NPCs would build an enemy city on one of the other spots. But they scrapped it around new year.

There are many things promised that never made it to the live game. This is only one of them. Personally I am more annoyed that the promised separate cloth layer under armors was scrapped too. Others dont like the missing DX10 or the missing baroom brawls.

Game runs far better for me after the june 9 patch than it did before. Framerates are up, no studdering at all. Others with the same graphicc card (GF 8800 gts 320) report the same.

My main is lvl 57 by now. I do have a lot of quest in my log but I have become afraid to do them because there are only about 2 quests per level by now and they will gain me maybe 20% of a lvl. Rest is grinding repeatable kill quest.

So I have done crafting, gained me lvl 54 and 55 to complete tier 2. Done the repeatable villa quests and come to realize that the game in its current form is not really that fun anymore at those lvls.

I had thought that at lvl 60+ things would get better again as there are more zone to lvl in again but my guildies have already run out of lvl 60+ content including red quests and they are still lvl 60 . . .

People will know me as a stout defender of the game but right now there is a serious content problem past lvl 50 which is as bad as the lvl 30s in lotro before book 9. This has made me roll an alt hoping for better content once that char reach lvl 50.

If that havent happened by then then I dunno . . .

Originally posted by impulsebooks

I thought 50 per zone was fact (confused here) Can you link your proof please. I am very interested in this.

http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/181978

Originally posted by markoraos 

This is all nice and cool... but...

The way it's been implemented so far reeks of extremely bad and off-hand core game design.

Instanced keep sieges? With timed widows for attacking? That you have to earn the right for by doing PvP mini-games? Oh my god.... These are all last-second solutions that show that they didn't have any clue how to actually pull off those guild-warfare sieges they've been so proudly boasting off.

All the things you listed are all fine and dandy and would make any full-blooded mmorpg-er's mouth water, but... They simply didn't do their homework. Plain and simple.

I suggest they do a proper game design document  for their next game BEFORE they actually start coding it. Some simulations and crap beforehand would do wonders as well. Maybe just sitting around a big table and talking about stuff would help - like "Hmm we have no death penalties and no corpse runs... Wait a minute, won't the players start suiciding as a way of fast travel? OMG, you're right! Maybe we should do something about it BEFORE the release!" Meh... they probably talked about teh new awsomez gfx and that really fantastic new fatality animation...

I detest AoC and all it stands for because they've placed graphics and titties before that which makes games games - game design. I hope they sink as a warning to other developers.

Sieges arent instanced. The borderland pvp zones cant be instanced at all. What happens is that there is a limit on how many can take part in the battle (which is done for the sake of balance but I personally find it stupid).

The pvp games dont give points for guild pvp rank any more than open land pvp or pvp battles. Its the kills you guild produce that give them no matter where you get the kills.

I think my friend you are a victim of the lies and rumors that bashers spread to harm the game. That being said I agree the lack of a real pve death penalty is silly and the severe pvp death penalty is silly too.

But the game is better than what people say on this site. People here wil bash anything there is different from UO or AC because no one makes those kind of games anymore which makes them bitter old men.

Originally posted by Khrymson

To bad all of the endgame is broken and unfinished as so many here are reporting!  ...and to those that will respond they have a tier 1 city....big deal...does it do anything for you yet...nope didn't think so!
 

How do you know its broken? No one has made a tier 3 city yet.

There are so many untrue rumors spread about this game that is worries me. For example the 50 per zone rumor which is a blatant lie people keep spreading even after it was proved wrong.

People havent even seen what AoC is about yet. Sure there is action, quests, zones and pretty graphics. But where funcon has really put their effort is in the endgame.

What is AoCs endgame? Well its society building and fighting for it!

The point of AoC is to join a guild so you can build a city and later a battle keep so your guild can control an area where it can control the resources. And then you have to fight other players for control of your guild's lands in hopefully big battles.

Sure there will be those silly arena pvp fights and raids but the huge community effort in building up your city so you gain access to the advanced features in the endgame is the real goal.

And its something you cant do on your own, it has to be a combined effort of many players that work towards a common goal for you to succeed. Gathering resources, learning the skills, getting the money, finding the rare drops (its huge what you need).

But people only see the fairly shallow lvl'ing game atm which can be entertaining but in reality is little different from WoW (apart from the combat system).

Originally posted by xDarc

I didnt bother to read the post linked by the OP but I'll just go off the the gist of your summation.  That is, disagreeing with the notion that certain kinds of self-ascribed MMORPGs destroy the genre.

I 100% agree with such a notion and the reason why is simple.  You cannot spit in the face of any genre with an established set of principles and ideals and simultaneously declare yourself a part of it.  What you are doing is riding on the wave of somebody else's success.

The people complaining about today's neo-MMORPG's were here first.  We built this genre and it's success with our dollars and our patronage...

If you're not going to continue the spirit or the fundamentals of something somebody else bought and paid for- if you don't reflect it's pioneers- then stake out your own territory, get your own god damn acronym, and your own community.

That's how I feel about that. 

The world moves on, things change. That is the nature of everything and any attempt ever to recreate the past or try to prevent development and change is doomed to fail and end in misery and self deceit.

If everyone thought like you then there wouldnt even be MMO's. "Playing with other people? Pfff we have played good games for years with ourselves, and whats good enough for us must be good enough for everyone else. And if they dare to do it they cant call it computer games because we have the right to decide what computer games are!"

Originally posted by musicmann

This type of stuff always happens when you develope a game that is class/lvl based that offers nothing but quests to advance your toon.

Kinda of funny that mmorpg's that are open sandboxed worlds never have these type of problems. The community can actually become part of the online world, not become a hampster on a wheel, chasing a stupid lvl bar.

AOC is no differant than WOW, LOTR, EQ2, and a whole lot more. Instead of making a world that you can actually feel like you are part of, FC made a instanced zoned unfinshed mess of a mmo.

Shame on FC for their laziness and their unability to bring the lore and huge world of Conan to actual life.

Sandbox games were sandbox because they were totaly passive, it was like going to a supermarked and selecting wares on the shelf where you didnt really know what they were until you opened them and tried it.

They werent interactive. You created the world inside your own head. Well most people in the world dont find that entertaining which is why MMOs used to have such a small audience.

That rig is better than mine and I run the game on high settings with typically 30 to 45 fps in the open and 60 to 120 inside dungeons.

There is a funny bug in the game so medium to high quality rigs lose performance the lower you put the graphic settings. Its REALLY weird but everyone can confirm it.

Originally posted by SignusM

I'm pretty sure when Mythic launched DAoC it was one of the smoothest launches to date, and remains so today, maybe only being topped by Lord of the Rings Online. LotRO's ALPHA was smoother than most games 6 games after launch.

Age of Conan belongs in the bin with games like SWG and Vanguard for crappy launches.

How short memory is he he. When daoc launched it was so full of bugs that it would never ever have been a success these days.

Groups disbanded when they zoned. There were no items in the game over lvl 30 except for spindelhalla (giving mids a huge advantage early on). There were a build in memory leak in the game that made it crash after loading too many player skins. Half the spell lines didnt do as described. Moving from area to area was a smooth zone like in wow but often you experienced you came out of sync and then you had to contact a GM for your char to be able to enter the game again.

DaoC became VERY stable and bug free with time like most ofther mmos. People just tend to forget the bad things about the good old days.'

The only reason why AoC has more bugs atm than daoc had at launch is because AoC has about 20 times as much content from launch.