Originally posted by risenbones

It's an interesting start.

What I would like to know and something that could make or break my interest in the game is....

Do the gangs control territory?  If my gang sets up shop somewhere and defeats all commers for a period of time does the gang get some kind of benifit like increased income from drug sales or access to some kind of better manufacturing.  If so is there a way we can get NPC guards to defend our ground against other raiders and could we improve them somehow.  Otherwise I fail to see the point of paying a monthly fee for a FPS game with a prettier server selection screen.

/agree

Territory control tied to resources and the ability to modify your home turff would be exceptional. When I say modify I mean Grafitti wars and things that make it obvious who the area belongs to. Would be great if they allow creativity to take place in the game as well. upload your own logos and such.

Sounds like a great idea, looks good. The instances worry me and the name, come on...change it. No name is ever "set" until it is mastered on CD and printed on the boxes.

I find the whole notion of RMT to greatly mirror the debate of the war on drugs. You cant really win either way and the cold fact of the matter is that it is here to stay and will never go away. There is such a market for the stuff now that both sides actually make more money leaving eachother be at some level. Think about it, if drugs were completely legal, how many cops would be out of work? Without jobs how will they continue to buy their own drugs? 

In the end RMT is not evil. Does it step afoul of the "spirit of gaming"? Perhaps if you go by olympic rules that ban doping. The fact remains that the company is pushing its drug of choice, your subscription to the game. They have no issue taking that money for doing little more than keeping you entertained. You could argue that once they start to profit from it, it violates the spirit of the game. There in lies the rub.

The publisher and manager of the product do not want to get cut out of profits. The RMT businesses drive a ton of subscriptions. We hear of these sweat shops with farmers working 24x7 on hundreds of computers, running multiple clients per box. They must have active subscriptions to make the trades. Those add up to tons of bucks in the pocket of the publisher. There is very little true interest in stamping RMT out. They thrive off of eachother now like conjoined twins. Cut them apart and you risk both suffering, or dying.

Games like EVE online figured out the whole RMT issue long ago. They embraced it, just not as  in your face as SOE has done. The real goal of RMT as a game system is to integrate it into game play with security that protects the buyer and seller while making both use an active subscription.

Time is money and as long as it takes time to make money or gain items in a MMO you can be sure that someone will make a market for it. I dont think you will see RMT go away.

The last part of the whole discussion; and one that I find horribly funny, is how some gamers will allow a game company to release crap products, shoddy support  and take them for hundreds of dollars only to then maintain the idea that SOE or Blizzard has (or should have) some higher moral code when it comes to RMT and the spirit of gaming. WTF? They could give 2 shits about you.

In some way they try to make you think they are better than the "illegal gold farmers" (btw its not illegal at all) because in reality they want to be the one selling it to you they just havent figured out how to do it right yet! As long as it appears like it is BAD they have an open market and profit off the entire situation.

Get real, its all about the $$ yo

The combat engine and items were the largest let down for me. When we found out that your stats and items did nothing and that most of the skills were just for show I gave up.

Waiting on the item patch to see if I will continue my resub.

The community manager is also a very big downfall of the game. I dont understand how he got popular. None of the community programs ever seem to go anywhere.

Originally posted by Smikis

how can you take review serious from someone who supposedly bought COLLECTORS edition. and trashed it 2 weeks latter..

funcom have client setup for download.. it cost 4 bucks tho i still.. or maybe it doesnt

patcher is slow , cuz it have limited speed, so everyone have good enough download speed.. if you think 2h is long time to update game from beta to latest build.. your mentally ill

 

and sli works.. i used it my self.. there been probably atleast thousand graphic cards reviews including aoc in test.. ati allways did better in aoc. but thats not to say sli doesnt work

 

you probably probably is 8800 gts which is what 3 years old now.. and have rly crappy sli scaling .. and maybe old drivers..

I put the game away in my OLD Software box when I could no longer load the client. That was a few weeks after release. I did not trash it.

I should not have to shell out more money just to download any game client that cost me $15 a month to play. I could not find a link to download the game for free so that's a problem for Funcom. There is no main page download link or prominent placement of a download link on the pages I visited. FunCom directed their paid google link to an offer page for purchasing the game or buying a download. I dont need any of those options because I want to try it again.

Compared to other games this is an issue for me. I know they are trying to save money on distribution but they could simply make download of the client based on authentication of a valid user account. These are easy problems to solve for  acompany like FunCom. Even though I did not trash my DVDs I can bet you that some folks did. I am willing tobet they WILL NOT pay to buy another copy. When companies like CCP and Bliz offer their clients for free you must offer a compelling reason to deviate from the standard. 

At launch SLI did not work properly. End of story really. I dont care to debate it with you because I was there and deep in the mix with benchmarks and testing trying to fix it for FunCom & Nvidia. It was covered in depth on both company boards. FunCom did a board wipe during lauch so some of that traffic may be hard to find on the FunCom site.

Not to turn this into a nvidia vs ati thing, but overall im quite happy with my ATI card. The cost for performance ratio is fantastic and I havent found a game that I couldnt play yet. I also output this to a home theater projector and that is an even more pleasant experience with a 160 inch picture.

Originally posted by ObliviousX

Decent review, but how can you make a AoC review without mentioning the pvp element? It's a large chunk of the game play. Also, how can you ignore the combat system?

 

I don't completely agree with the crafting, it's not very good indeed but deserves more than a 2. The good recipes are hard to find and boss drops, but once you have them you can craft some pretty decent stuff.

 

As far as items go, yes, i agree and most of the community agrees too. And funcom heard our complaints, cause the next patch will completely change the way gear and stats work.

 

But still, pretty accurate review, i personally would rate it at 7.5.

 

 

Cheers.

I plan on doing PVP later but right now I want to get to 80 and then explore the PVP system. The combat system I assume you are talking about is the combo system , which only works for melee classes. I find it amusing but broken. This is due to how the server calculates combos. I may have a spell that makes me invulnerable but the server begins calculating combos when you start them. So even if I hit my immunity spell beforfe you finish your combo, you still land the combo. Thats bogus. I also dont like how you are locked in motion to start/ finish combos. Its a great idea , needs polish. I am sure this was added for the console crowd.

I have yet to find much worth in crafting. I think more and more games are ruining crafting. It either becomes a crutch for endgame, making you  soak up subscription time, or has no true player value. I am not a big crafter and it has to be pretty important for gameplay before I will do it. Thats just me. As a leveling toon in age of conan I see no reason to spend any extra time doing it. From looking at the auction prices it wont make me rich. I have a feeling this will change with the stats patch and then I will proably have a new look at it.

So... I was sitting there trying to decide what to do. Play another run of Crysis, Log into WoW for another boring Naxx raid, pop into EVE and see what wormholes are all about, download and play one of those F2P MMOs, talk a buddy into a CB key for one of the MMOs under development or go outside and do something? Since it has been raining for the last 3 days and none of those other options sounded fun, I decided to give AOC another shot. Everyone on the forums has been talking about how much better it has gotten so why not see what all the fuss is about. I have a gift card from Christmas I need to spend anyway.

Finding The Client

First…Dont go looking for the client to download it anywhere. I had the collectors edition but packed it up in the attic about 2 weeks after launch, when my computer could no longer load the game. I found some torrents with the old beta client. From what I read, you could download the beta and the patcher would install all the updates to the new client for you. There are not too many seeds out there so this would be painfully slow. The old FilePlanet offer was removed so no go there. I had to go dig into my box of old software and use the DVDs to install. (It still takes forever to install) You can buy a new copy from the game from Direct2Drive or Steam of some other source if you really want to pay for a new version of the game. I am a returning subscriber though.

Note to FunCom: Put your client on the web somewhere. Torrent it if you are cheap. If you want people to play, and old subscribers to return - ease of access is number 1.

Patching

After you get the game installed there will be about 3gb or so worth of patching to do. This takes a while. 2 hours for me on a great connection (18mbit DL) The patcher speed is a mixed bag. Some files will smoke down upwards of 1.5mbps, others hang in the realm of circa 1996 modem speeds. So anyway, a couple hours later and the patcher hung on stage 4 of 4. I restarted the game and it went right to "Play". Here we go!

Note to FunCom: Fix the patcher speed please!

Servers

If you are an old player coming back you will find that your server has probably been merged with another. Don’t worry it’s not too bad. At least there were some people around when I logged in. Some players have reported having numbers added to their names from this process. For example PrettyPrincess may now be PrettyPrincess26556 because there are 10 of them on the server now. As for myself, I am one seriously ugly, level 56 Priest of Mitra. Kind of a hybrid Healer / DPS class in light armor.

The Game & Graphics

My bars were still setup. So that was nice. The first thing I wanted to do was check performance. Would we have stutter problems? I wanted to see if my graphics card upgrade was going to work out as I wished. You see, I started on launch date with 2x8800gts in SLI. During that launch we found that SLI had little to no impact on performance and mostly introduced a whole new set of problems. The fix was to run a single card. I now have a Radeon 4870 1gb edition. The rest of my rig is pretty much the same as it was on launch. DualCore CPU @ 3GB, 4gb ram, sata2 hdds. After a stop in the video tab of the game menu and setting everything to max, AA to 8x and AAF to max, I saved the settings and restarted the client. Hey look mom, no lag, no stutter! FPS appears to be solid.

So yeah we know the game looks great. That was never really a complaint from anyone. Rest assured the game still looks very pretty. I don’t have the same 8800gts card so I can’t do apples to apples here, but it is playing very smooth for me now. There is still no DirectX 10 option. I am not sure it needs it but it would be nice since this was on the box at launch and all. Ok enough about graphics, first pass says that stutter problems for me are gone and hey, I can login, so that’s 100% better than it was.

Note to FunCom: The graphics are great but where is DX10?

Questing & Transport

Well why don’t we go find some action and get out of this player city? Oh yeah because I have no idea where I am anymore. It has been over 200 days since I played. I can’t remember wtf to do or where to go! Perhaps one of these nice players will help me.
I messaged a level 80 barbarian standing close by and asked if he could help me get to one of the new zones for lvl 60+ players. Not only did this guy show me around, he showed off some of his armor sets including PVP and some of the Raid armor. It does look pretty cool. It’s not over the top. In fact it looks like what you would expect. He has a nasty 2h axe and his chest armor looks more like a few straps of leather tied for decoration (Think 80s/90s Hulkster). I like the art direction! So after he does this great dress up show he asks if I have a horse.

Now you probably remember the fiasco with horses. The first ones were a joke. If you had maxed your run speed you could outpace a horse. The preorder mounts were a total waste, slow huge and annoying. So of course I told the guy no, I have a PVP preorder mount but no horse. He offered me 1 Gold and took me to a place where you can buy a horse. The horse is 75 silver and the skill to ride is 25 silver. You can buy faster horses, and armored horses if you are rich. I got a Brown horse, clicked the skill to learn it and then clicked the horse.

Mounting and dismounting still sucks, but the speed of the horse is much better than I remember. They are worth having and using. The best part is you can summon it anywhere you want. My screen does a strange phase out thing when I mount or dismount but it is not game breaking. If you need to get off the horse fast there is a quick dismount which has a cooldown. Overall Horses get a B+.
 

Note to FunCom: Mounts are better than they were but still not very gratifying for the cost. Please look into the cost balance and variety for lower level players.

So now that I have a horse, my new Barbarian friend says follow me to Ymirs Pass. (I think this is one of the new areas) It is near Eigophian Mountains, which is where I remember that I began to run into content issues. (Lack of content that is) I pulled up the map to get myself oriented and the first thing I noticed are A LOT of new places on the map that I haven’t seen before. Many dungeons and zones have been added. That is a good thing. Conan is instanced, and even though some of the zones are pretty big the game still had a very small feeling to it. Not anymore. It’s obvious I have a lot of exploring to do. I will tell you that I am not much of an explorer, but I do enjoy having craptons of content. That way when I get bored I can go find something new to cut my teeth on. Props to FunCom on making the game world larger. A ever Growing game world that can outpace my leveling would be nice, lets see how long they can keep the pace up.

So, we make it to the new area and my new friend wishes me luck. He has a raid to attend and so must go. This was certainly one of the better experiences I have run into. I have played MMOs a long time and it is rare that you run into a player who will part with money and give returning players a leg up. Now that I have a new horse I need something to do. In less than half an hour my quest log was full of quests for the area. I certainly have something to do now.

Note to FunCom: I am not sure what kind of bait you are looking at to bring old players back but consider giving them a mount, some larger bags, a stash of potions and a cape or something that makes them run faster. Travel overall still kinda sucks due to the instance thing and I REALLY wish my horse was faster.

The quests are not anything unique. It is more of the same but at a point in the game where previously one had to essentially resort to grinding out levels by AOE farming with broken skills, this was a warm welcome. The XP per hour gain was good. I went from 56-60 in a day of lazy exploring and questing. This is a pace I can deal with. I branched out and tried a few of the other areas like Atzel’s Approach and Thunder River. The areas are interesting and varied. Lots of quests but money still seems to come in very slowly.

Trade, Crafting and Banking

Remembering back to AoC launch the trader (bank and auction house) was a huge issue. Now that I had me some items worth selling I thought I would zone back to a major city and try out the trader function. Again, because of the server merges the cities are populated. On a Sunday there was what I would call a light load of people. The trader works now. There were a vast number of items on the auction. The prices varied wildly. Any single item may be listed 20 times with a price range from 1 gold to a few copper. I was able to outfit my character with several blue items and some crafted pieces.

The mail system where you pickup your goods, is…. simple. It works. One thing I don’t like is that when you sell stuff the item stays in your bank. Bleh. Slots are a rare commodity. So the bank, mail and auction system are not fantastic or anything, but hey it works! I had a bunch of gems and cloth from launch so I was able to offload those and I ended up making a few silver by the end of the day. Still a long way to the 50+ gold I would need for a kickass horse. Money might get easier at level 80 but it certainly doesn’t flow in from 55-60.

I heard that crafting is not really so hot yet. The main reason for this is because the gear is not a significant leap in looks or quality over the base gear and doesn’t even come close to the raid gear. As has been stated by FunCom the stats system in the game was not designed to give gear a major emphasis. I for one feel that this is an understatement. Gear still has almost no meaningful impact on performance. You can get gems now and I guess some of those might be nice at high levels but for a toon leveling up, I cant see any reason to craft or gather. Resources are all over the AH and there is no rhyme or reason to the prices. This is one element that probably needs a total revamp. This is mostly due to the stats system in the game. The crafted items are not sought after because they have very little impact on how the game plays.

Combat Engine & Stats

FunCom has publically stated that they are reworking the item and stats system in the game. I am going to wait to pass judgement on the system as a whole until this has been completed. I will review the state of the system today and my thoughts on how they have fixed the obviously broken parts.

I guess this would be a good time to talk about character sheets, skills and the heart of the MMO that many addicts thrive on, the combat engine. I am still unsure of what exactly FunCom wanted to do with this system. Some of the issues with the classes were addressed but many were not. The game breakers have been resolved for the most part. I am still sad that going down the skill trees does not offer a more significant impact to your progression. This is much like the problem with gear. When you are talking about skills that only offer performance gains of 1 or 2 percent, those are almost invisible. This is especially true when you start talking about damage ranges of 500-1000 per hit. What is 5 or 10 damage per 3 second cast really going to add to the fight?

Some feats are still broken. The code for some of the feats to scale properly never got fixed. What I mean by scale is that if a feat offers a plain +50 damage increase, you get that same increase at level 50 or level 80. One would expect it to jump a large amount by level 80 because +50 to a spell that does say 1500 damage is worthless. I may be wrong here and again I am only reviewing my class (PoM) in this write up. Overall though I really feel like the feats and skills are sorely lacking. In priority order I guess they focused on the game breakers first. Lack of content, bugs, crashes, exploits, and the like. Still here we are almost a year later and the feat trees are, well to be honest with you, quite less than interesting.

Note to FunCom: Thank you for making the game stable and adding content. Now that you have that out of the way please focus on skills, feats and spells.

The skills still do very little to set you apart from others in your class. Run speed, climbing and the like are very niche. Other mechanics are still, odd.

The lack of any direct healing may still trouble some of you. Let me say it again, there is no direct healing. It is, still, all area effect based on cones and proximity. I did some research in the forums and, what do you know, a guide I wrote almost a year ago is still stickied in the POM section. I thumbed through all the most recent comments about builds and such and really found no new information. It appears that most of the time has been dedicated to fixing bugs or completing content. The skill trees (at least for PoMs) were not revamped. So this is a little bad news but also some good news. It means you won’t have to learn how to play your character all over again. So, feats and skills are not completely broken but not completely worth spending time worrying about either. I found that I could still manage to play just fine no matter what build I picked. In PVP this is more of an issue because you stand the chance of getting utterly dominated without some armor, reduced cooldowns and buffing abilities.

FunCom did do some balancing. I cant AoE down 9 or 10 same level mobs anymore. On occasion when I got jumped by 5 or 6 and had all my cooldowns ready I could survive. One couldn’t really sustain this level of play solo though.

Grouping with others is the best way to mow through mobs and get good xp. The LFG interface is pretty weak. I don’t think it is working properly but it may be. Its probably an issue worth mentioning that I could not tell. The development team should go back to usability testing on this one. I didn’t give it much after I selected my zone and looked for other players and it gave me the same results no matter what zone I picked or was in.

I managed to get invited to a guild that has a full city built. They do raids on a regular basis. I am looking forward to finishing the grind to 80 and testing them out. I will play out my month of paid time now and see how it goes. I was not overwhelmed with delight at the state of the game but it is leaps and bounds better than it was. If the item system comes out quickly and FunCom gets moving VERY QUICKLY on the feat and skill issues I might stay subscribed to this for a while. 

A note on the forums.

I dont think FunCom gets it here. This is probably the worst aspect to the game. They should be MUCH MUCH more active on the forums than they are. They are very slow at getting things done on the boards that take nothing more than a little time to write about. For example the Advocate Program. This was to be part of the community shortly after lauch. I had applied for it in the early days and we never heard anything, not a peep. It just died a silent death. In Febuary, Famine brought up the subject again and took applications. There has not been a peep about it since then.

It does not, and should not take over a month to get a community program going. I know this guy is busy but seriously. There is absolutely no excuse to take over a month to launch any community activity like this. Quick action on these types of things are what will bring the community back to the game. hire a fulltime lead for AoC or get some volunteer resources to do it for you. there are simply not enough dev posts or timely mod posts in the boards, period. The forum content is dated. I work for an industry giant and we do many more community programs on a huge scale with only 2 paid resources. This team simply doesnt get it.
 

Summary:
Stable, appears to be more balanced, large content updates, most features working as they should. They did hit the critical stuff first so the game is very playable now. When they fix the issues around depth and solve some of the class specific concerns I think it will be back in serious contention for my money on a regular basis.

Here is my scorecard based on a mid level toon climbing to 80:

Overall Score 6.7 – Stable but needs depth

• Patching 5 – Long, can be slow, massive
• Graphics 9 – Fantastic even without Dx10
• PvE Gameplay 7 – The gameplay is fun, different and better in groups
• Questing 8 – Content gaps are mostly gone, there is plenty to do
• Items 3 – They look cool but have no solid purpose. Raid loot is another story.
• Sound 10 – Great soundtrack, more voiceover work would be cool
• Population 6 – So far so good, nice folks, not too crowded but can be desolate as well
• Crafting 2 – No use for this as a leveling toon, seems like a money waste
• Stability 9 – I had no crashes, random logouts or lag for that matter
• Travel 4 – Mounts are improved but still expensive
• Dungeons 8 – More have been added, others fixed, good encounters, loot looks cool and functional but doesn’t do much
   

Originally posted by Timoshenko

Originally posted by Sevenwind

Originally posted by Litigator_AB

I'll agree that a free month to old accounts would be a positive move.  But like most cash strapped companies they will be too scared to do something that drastic.  I'm sure they'll wimp out and give a free week or 10 days to old subscribers. 

 

Please god no free month! 10-15 days max is good enough. You know darn well if you plan to resub in that time frame. What do you need a month for?

 

Some people don't have more than 1 hour a day for gaming. 10 days is not enough for these people so I think a longer time would be better. Also 1 month could be an unofficial "apology" to all those players Funcom lied in order to get their beta testing money.

i agree with this. I dont just want the time to test out changes. I want the time back to level up and convince friends to come back as well if it were the case. I got ripped for my first month and couldnt play half of it. The content past the half way mark was vapor at best. I say a free month maybe more. The only reason to stay longer would be if raiding and endgame was fun. If Funcom has really addressed those issues they should have no problem wiht a free month for those players who were involved at launch and pre-order / early release.
 

Originally posted by Locklain

Originally posted by javac

Originally posted by Hazmal

------------------
Originally posted by javac

well i'm 35 and have a PhD in science, and then 10 years experience in bioinformatics... you?

 

woot, a fan.

. . . Or you are being mocked.

Lets face it, the wonders of the world wide web is due to the anonymity of its users. I have a PhD in time consumption and have 15 years of gynecology experience so what is your point?

 

I am a gynecology experience.

Originally posted by Unfinished

 

FC has a long tradition of treating some of their most active community members & fans with total disregard and abuse.

The original creator of AO's Guild Chat-Bot was banned for life after helping FC identify and solve severe exploits in the game. There are many incidents equal to this over the years.

Quite sad really. Either way, I like the IP and want the game to be good, not the company. Im bored with all the other crap out there.  BTW other companies are not any better so I dont want to sound like I am bashing Funcom. A co-worker played EVE for a long time and CCP banned him for life when he reported a large scale exploit that several alliances were using.  When you go up against these people you are nobody and money is the only thing they understand.

With all the new titles and IP on the table Funcom would really have to pull out the stops to get me back. I dont expect much because its more about the money than anything else for them. The relaunch is less about wanting people to enjoy the game and more about another cash grab.

It would be very difficult to justify giving them my money again after what they did. I think they will find this to be the case with the majority of people who left early in the launch period.

Originally posted by anahka2309

Give me a new free month to replace the wasted month just after the first launch and I'll consider it. I pre-ordered the Collector's Edition back in the day, was looking forward to AoC, gave a LOT of feedback in the closed beta and ended up quitting in frustration after barely 2 weeks when the game was "released". That is, when open paid & please-buy-a-boxed-copy beta started. 

Out of principle I'm very tempted to refuse to play anything from FC ever again though. If they're willing to launch a highly anticipted MMO in that sorry state there's no limit to what they'll do to make a few bucks. 

But hey, free weekend a year later, now that the game is actually done and somewhat playable. There's some money well spent on a CE. 

I had the same experience with AoC. I wrote a few class guides early on, got involved in the community only to have one of the patches result in an unplayable game for me. After a couple weeks of trying to get support and never getting it I quit. I was also treated like crap by the wonderful forum mods in their efforts to cleanse the forums and supress bad PR during the launch.

I might come back for a free month or two and see how things have changed. The graphics were great but there was no core game, sense of progress or character development that you expect with a mmo. Id play for free but unless it was AMAZING they wouldnt get a cent.

Relaunch with free gametime for the brutalized sounds like a good idea.

So does an apology for launching crap, but we will never get it.

Toiletpaper stuffing to fix a massive hole in the ship.

Famine and his freebie cronies are late to the party on this one. I tried to get involved in the community early on , writing several player and class guides, reporting bugs and problems to devs etc. I STILL have open issues from the prepay early access days. When I tried to escalate my support issues I was met with bans, infractions etc. A group of us tried to make it known to these guys that there are some very real issues with the classes and the game code but they didnt want to hear it and they REALLY didnt want us talking about it openly on the forums. All they care about is keping these issues OUT of the public eye and protecting the marketing image they created.

The latest drivel from Leipzig made me want to puke. Not a single good answer to any of the questions from the MMORPG staffer.

They cant keep subscribersand now with over 500K people canceling  not renewing the ship is almost sunk.

With so many MMO options out there I think this is too little too late.

maybe next time funcom.

My advice, staff up properly for a launch next time and get a real community strategy before you just open forums and try to fight fires.