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Age of Conan - Q&A With Jorgen Tharaldsen
Recently, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood had the opportunity to send eight questions over to Jorgen Tharaldsen at Funcom. In those questions, Tharaldsen addresses instances, CS and more.
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MMORPG.com:
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Some members are complaining that dealing with customer support has been frustrating, and help comes late and sometimes not at all. Can you speak to this? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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We have been known to give some of the best customer services in the MMO industry for years, and while we are striving to meet the same standards for Age of Conan as soon as possible we are not there yet. The reason for this is naturally the sheer amount of people who is playing the game right now, and while we staffed up significantly for the Conan launch it wasn't enough for what we are now facing. We are actively staffing up as fast as we can in order to reduce the waiting times, and get back to our standard of being among the best, which is always our goal. |
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MMORPG.com:
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There has been some issue recently with players not being able to log into the game's official forums. Can you comment on this? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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What has happened is that months before launch we made scenarios on what kind of hardware we needed to stand against the launch frenzy. We ordered numerous extra high performance forum servers, and I know for sure that this was along the lines of «if the game should potentially go down at launch, at least let us make sure we have all lines of communication open». In that, we thought mistakenly we would have enough forum servers to cope, by far! The truth is that even this wasn't enough. With more than 2 million unique visitors to our site in the launch days we saw a doubling of even our most hairy traffic goals. As many of those tried to go to the forums they broke down. That people pressed F5 to refresh at the same time definitively didn't help the load. So as a fallback we had to choose this option. In all of this, we thought we made plans which were watertight, with a fallback on the fallback on the fallback, but it wasn't enough. We have now opened again btw, and even more servers are coming in, but if the traffic continues to spike we will need to revert until we have all the hardware we need. Which is a lot! |
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MMORPG.com:
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Funcom recently announced that they had taken action against a number of cheaters in-game. Since that time, we have heard from players who claim that members of their guild with characters who were holding cash and items for others due to the malfunctioning bank system were banned as well. Can you speak to this? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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In general we have a zero tolerance policy towards exploiters. They cheat and break our balance, and should be banned as most are knowlingly aware of the fact that they use bugs to gain benefits. While this is always our stance, we have registered that some guilds have reported that we mistakenly banned leaders who are victims (since the tax system is not turned on yet, leaders got gold from all member to buy guild stuff, and this amount of gold automatically trigger our warning systems). It's many exploits in those streams of money, and we have reacted accordingly. If we have done mistakes we have listened, and even in a very few cases reopened accounts. In all of this there is never a wish to harm, but we need to take action. Just think if guilds who cheat gets honors like «first to build a battlekeep». That is not an achievement, that is just fake status. |
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MMORPG.com:
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Performance of the game is still quite poor for some players who exceed even the recommended specifications. What are you currently doing to resolve these issues? Do you have a timeframe? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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We had this talk during Open beta, where the issues were much larger, but we have taken tremendous strides since then. I said something like «if anything, people will be surprised about how well the game performs», and this has definitively come true. Many have mumbled about «coding magic» in regards to how our launch client performed compared to beta. Some systems still have issues, but we are actively working on it. We keep the entire team on for the times to come, and it will remain a priority to optimize. So the timeframe is «now, yesterday, next week, next year and beyond». It never stops, and we are doing our best to ensure that everyone has fun. |
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MMORPG.com:
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There seems to be some confusion regarding the way that zones are instanced in Age of Conan. Can you explain how this system works and can you please provide a concrete number limit on the number of players who can play in the same zone instance? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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Instancing is when we duplicate playfields and areas when they fill up according to set parameters. These parameters differ from zone to zone, and it's something we are continuing to experiment with. The key is performance and design choices, and this means that we are allowing larger amount of people in some places, less in others. As we in our launch window, and still uncertain on how our customer numbers will become, we are actively adding more hardware to each server to facilitate more players (much like EVE, without taking it all the way). As opposed to adding servers (which we also do!), we estimate that load will go somewhat down in the future. This means you are seeing more instancing now than you are likely to see in the future. The reason for this is to create healthy populations on each and every server. Call us paranoid or thinking too long into the future, but we think that the worst thing that can happen to a MMO is server merging as that destroys the social bonds. We hope that people will understand our choice, and see that it’s the best for everyone in the long run. We do see that we could be better at some of this, like how we display and inform, and we are improving this, but seeing we have been live for days we are still shaping the world. |
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MMORPG.com:
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Some players have been complaining that some of the server downtimes have been during peak hours. Can you speak to this? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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It is never our intention to take away the enjoyment of the players on their peak time, but during launch we have chosen the lesser of two evils (if a severe issues comes up, do we fix it, or let it pass to let people play?) Not an easy choice, but sometime you have to do what is right for most people. This will naturally change. We always aim to patch during low-peak, and this goal stays firm. |
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MMORPG.com:
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Can you give us an overview of some of the performance issues that have been resolved in the last few patches? |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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I am not sure how relevant it is to speak about the water under the bridge? We have one of the best coder teams in the MMO world, and they are working as hard as they can to optimize further. We want solid framerates and performance as much as anybody. In some cases it's things we see ourselves, in other cases due to player reports, but for those remaining issues we are improving things rapidly. |
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MMORPG.com:
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Petition lines have been extraordinarily long since launch. Are there any plans to increase the number of GMs for Age of Conan |
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Jorgen Tharaldsen
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Yes! I can say nothing else than asking you to put yourself in our shoes. If you think you get 400 people to your party, and they all invite friends without ever letting you know, how do you cope? We are adding more as fast as we can, and we hope people will be patient right now. We have not had a bad launch, we have had perhaps the best launch in MMO history. Because we are so immensely popular right now we have challenges, but we are working around the clock to improve. |
Well it's like always. This interview isn't about any of the serious issues the players face right now. I mean compare the official board to this interview.
The only interesting thing is the talk about the customer support, but we all know that of course they are going to up their staff.
All in all this interview doesn't convince me at all.
If you read between the lines it sounds more like a pr event. Nothing really new and informative, just another way to spread his word, IMO.
hmm more lies , "known to give best customer service" ? funcon is known to give the worst customer service in and out of its games for a long time. the only thing they are quick with is censoring their forum.
I noticed Funcom didn't answer the question about how many people can be in a particular instance. We wanted concrete numbers, not some artificial statement. Okay, so obviously some zones will be able to handle more than others, so why not give us an "as low as..." and an "as high as..." figure for instance loads. I personally don't care if they use instances, but it does matter how many are allowed in an instance. If it is as much as 1,500-3000 per instance, than we aren't experiencing any negatives for them using instances. However, if the figure is around 100-500 per instance, than we are suffering as a community. Companies need to be pushing the envelope with the amount of people per server in one area, without performance problems, not going backwards with the amount of population allowed in one area.
If MMORPGs aren't ready for thousands of people to play in one server without performance issues, then the developers need to use lower graphics.
The fact that they dodged the concrete numbers question and a couple other questions doesn't look well for Funcom in my book.
Oh crap fanbois inc. I agree though. Pixels over gameplay to me anyways isn t a great idea. Going with the higher graphic detail looks good, but means this sorta thing happens. I prefer seeing alot of people and i mean ALOT in an area. I also like a challenge of fighting over mobs especially in a FFA pvp situation, gives more meaning to the pvp if anything else. Must be my time in FFXI fighting over NMs and SB fighting for spawns for runes etc, I actually liked it :)
they need to fix some proformence issues.. im running a system that chews up and spits out Call of duty 4 on high and i cant get past 30 fps on high in this game... come on funcom fix it!
First, I thought mmorpg.com asked some good questions. Some of the answers, while nice to hear something from Funcom, were not what I was hoping for.
Because something is really, really borked when the game runs same or better at fully max settings, 3.0 shading, shadows everything and AA x 16 than low settings. Yeah...right now in the post Tortage areas I am getting 5 to 15 fps. But if I turn everything down from max to low settings I still get 5 to 15 fps. Wierd....just wierd....
I would rather play the game on medium settings and get 20 to 30 fps. And while I can turn down those settings and see the result graphically ingame, performance remains unchanged or worsens.
I was hoping for a miracle patch today. I guess I keep on praying as time runs out on my free thirty days because I see nothing in the patch notes today for addressing this. And if they think fixing this in any other timeline other than before my free 30 days is up, I have two words for them: subscription canceled.
I think this might be prophetic.
Funcom is unwilling to address the real problem here, which is that they released a feature and content incomplete game. This incomplete game also came filled with bugs and issues that should have never made it past any sort of real beta program. Let me be clear. I am not talking about the normal MMO launch bugs we are used to seeing at launch. I'm talking stupid, game breaking bugs that had to be looked over in the interest of meeting the launch date. No one who is pissed off about the game is unrealistic about a "normal" number of launch bugs, but what's going on with AoC is much worse.
I'm one of those people who followed this game for the last two of it's five plus years of development. I had every interest in seeing it succeed, and I thought I would be playing it for *at least* two years. Of course, I have seen enough hyped MMO's to know that most of them turn out to be garbage when they go gold, but still I was deeply disappointed when I finally bought the game and played it. I won't reiterate all of the issues the game has right now, because I know there are enough posts about this online already to sink a large ship (and probably an MMO). Needless to say, I have canceled my subscription and uninstalled the game.
The bugs, incomplete game client elements and missing content aside, the game turned out to be something other than an MMO in my opinion. No matter what Funcom's official reason is for all the instancing and small zones is, it fails. Anyone here who has played a few MMO's know that Funcom should have ever tried to use instancing as an excuse for having only one starting area in the game, and for keeping most of the questing areas so small that even sharing them with ONE other person can cause your quest to take too long and become mind numbingly boring. They should have know better than to build a game world that makes you feel like you are on rails, rather than a free roaming explorer. While I did enjoy the combat, the game feels lifeless and devoid of activity to me.
Lastly, I have to laugh at this article, because my single greatest gripe about this whole fiasco was how easily it would be for ONE person at Funcom to post some information to the official forums about what the hell is going on. I'm talking about *detailed* information explaining what issues they are aware of and what is being worked on currently. There is no excuse for this SOE style ignoring of the player base. Had they had the sack to come out and admit some faults and give us some details, I might even have kept the game installed. Instead they have been ignoring us, and giving us nonspecific fluff information just like this useless article.
Good luck to all of you who end up sticking it out with the game. Even if this game is pulled out of the current nose dive, I cannot consider it an MMO because of the design choices. I have no plans to return to the game unless some massive redesign of the game world is done. I can only hope to find a new MMO to enjoy in the near future.
Best customer service?! Best mmo launch in history?! What is this guy smoking?
This game runs fine as long as you turn off all of the settings. Then of course, it looks like crap, so whats the point of all of the graphics, if you can't turn them on while you play?
This game was pushed back how many times? I can only imagine how bad it must have been at it's orignal scheduled release date.
The reason their support can't meet demand is the sheer number of problems, not users.
Sounds like a typical mmo launch to me, especially when hundreds of thousands of people are playing the game at the moment. I think Funcom is doing the best they can at the moment. They only have 2 hands so to speak to address some issues that individuals are having. Just because someone is having an issue with the game they aren't going to drop everything and cater to you personally. I'm sure many have legitimate issues but with so many playing you just have to be patient. It's only 12 days into release and already some have unrealistic expectations on when they think issues should be handled.
No! its not the "sheer amount of people" that are cause customer service issues, (other games have high populations and deliver fine), its the sheer amount of friggin problems and bugs THAT is why their customer service is being overwhelmed.
Once again MMORPG.com has typically asked the questions in the wrong way, and conveniantly missed others out.
Heres how it should go:
1. There are claims that European players have been recieving extremely long waiting times of up to 24 hours, in the cases that petitions are answered they are done so by junior GM's and the player is forced to wait a further 24 hours to speak to an actual GM. The petition must also be updated on an hourly basis to stop it from timing out, this forces players to be online 24/7 in order to get a GM response, and in most cases, will not recieve one at all. What does Funcom have to say about this?
2. Looking at the US forums, it is clearly evident that player-dev communication is on a minimalist level. This gets worse where on the EU forums where it is devoid of forum management (stickys) and replys from Funcom on pressing issues are scarce. Does Funcom have any plans to remedy this?
3. Many players both casual and hardcore are complaining about the lack of middle game content. More specifically at levels 50+ many players are complaining at being forced to revert to 'mob grinding' due to a lack of quests. How urgent does Funcom view this issue?
4. While Guild Citys are present in the game, the lack of NPC's makes them useless. Presenting them only as an expensive disapointment to players. Does Funcom have any word when NPC's will be added to Guild Citys?
If your playing on the US forums, dont bloody try telling us your support is worse, becuase it aint. EU support is simply atrocious. Ive put in several petitions and ive NEVER had a response. It takes 3 hours to move down one place in the queue and if you dont get a response during the day it times out at night and your back to square one. This is made worse by the complete non-existance of a Funcom presence on the forum. Europeans are hollaring at the top of their voices but nobodys listening and people will only shout for so long, before they vote with their feet.
The level 50+ grind is horrendous. Anyone replying saying "im lvl 48 and theres no grind!!!" STFU! Gameplay 1-50 is FINE. But with the exception of a few, players are reaching level 50-55 and finding themselves without any quests left to do. What alternative do they have? GRIND MOBS! The power gamers are already at level 80, so this isnt a "stop power gaming!" issue, casual gamers with too much time on their hands have hit 50 and are "WTFing" on the forums, but getting no response. Its only a matter of time before casual gamers get to 50 (I predict within 2 weeks) and Funcom have a mass exodus on their hands as everyone see's the mob grind it is 50+ and buggers off back to warcraft.
Funcom NEEDS to add quests and FAST! This should be number one on their "TO BE PATCHED ASAP" list and if it isnt, then they're the next Sigil. Remember how they ignored all those performance issues in favor of new content.
As for Guild Citys, most people arent fussed, personally, I think its retarded. You spend days with your guild gathering materials at level 40. The resources, the 2g for each building. You get everyone to your guild city (which takes a fork load of traveling), you raise this magnificent structure, only to realise its little more then an ornament. Add a asura point, add a trader, add some vendors, GIVE CITYS A MEANING. In the grand scheme of things, this isnt difficult to add, and it will add a time sink for players while they wait for more quests 50+.
FFS Funcom, SORT IT OUT. I realise this game has only been out a few weeks, but my patience would be at a greater capacity if I got the feeling Funcom were evening LISTENING!
And MMORPG.com, your interviews fail, yet again.
edited for typos
Funcom Ministry of Information ( flashbacks to the Iraqi Ministry of Information):
I guess many of you remember the Comedian Saddam had to give out information during the War - if not you can check the youtube links below.
"Jorgen The Comedian of Funcom":
"We have been known to give some of the best customer services in the MMO industry for years.."
Truth:
Anarchy Online, which is the previous MMO game Funcom had, was an example of terrible and incompetent customer service with almost no GMs ever present, and the use of volunteers(ARKs) who had no real power to solve petitions. The reply time on the ARKs was around the same time or longer that other games have real paid GM who had full powers to fix the problem.
"Jorgen The Comedian of Funcom":
"The reason for this is naturally the sheer amount of people who is playing the game right now, and while we staffed up significantly for the Conan launch it wasn't enough for what we are now facing. "
Truth:
Everyone with the slighest knowledge of business know that in cases like this you outsource services and hire external customer support/GM services until you are able to solve the staffing yourself. Truth = incompetent or out of league managerial skills in Funcom related to such a big launch.
"Jorgen The Comedian of Funcom":
"...if anything, people will be surprised about how well the game performs», and this has definitively come true. Many have mumbled about «coding magic» in regards to how our launch client performed compared to beta."
Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgCS_iohyZQ&feature=related as mentor.
"Jorgen The Comedian of Funcom"
"..I am not sure how relevant it is to speak about the water under the bridge? We have one of the best coder teams in the MMO world, and they are working as hard as they can to optimize further. We want solid framerates and performance as much as anybody. In some cases it's things we see ourselves, in other cases due to player reports, but for those remaining issues we are improving things rapidly."
Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgCS_iohyZQ&feature=relatedas mentor again.
A good laugh
Sadly the game is in what I would call an alpha-test. Just graphics and gameplay up to level 19-20 is somewhat working smooth. All major aspects that make it a MMO is missing - ie no solid developments with regard to social aspects, teamplay and raiding.
Way to toss a bunch of slow balls there MMORPG.com, That is the only reason most devlopers even bother granting them interveiws..they know the tough questions will never be asked.
For example:
Why have you given the euros a RP-PVE server but have told the Americans to kiss your ass?
Same old boy network, same easy questions.
AO launch vibe? The game runs perfectly for the majority and servers are rock stable. Not sure what you mean with that.
QFT.
Oh, also runs rock solid here, good FPS (yes, on max detail @1680x1050), and is an absolute blast.
I am sure there's loads of problems as well but I think you can safely call this heavy over reaction by people part of every launch, no matter how smooth. Hire somebody to get some realism beat into you. It really helps your enjoyment and is better for your blood presure as well ;)
This launch went a lot smoother than a lot of other MMOs have, including WoW. People like to quote WoW is the best thing but it has its share of problems in the beginnning too. I really was impressed by the smooth registration system as well. Sure theres a lot of people but the servers handled the load decently. I was pretty impressed overall!
Well, I'm still having fun with my guardian, but I'm still working towards 50 while the first level 80s on our server appeared a week ago. It's actually pretty easy to level, thanks to an abundance of quests that provide satisfatory if not decent XP.
Since I didn't follow the game before launch and I didn't do beta, I'm still curious how exactly the whole Sieging aspect of the game is going to work. Our guild put our Keep up the other day and were still working diligently at getting other buildings and structures up, but how exactly is Sieging going to work?
Is it a separate map instance for siege wars?
Anyhow, the game does run pretty smoothly on maximum settings thanks to a new system. However, before that new system, the game was running horribly on lowest settings, so its definately a high system requirement game.
I personally don't see a great deal of class balance in the game, but because any one and any guild can play any combination of classes ( no restrictions on FFA servers ), its not really a problem. However, there are servers that are "faction" based so to speak and I seriously doubt those servers are enjoying their current situation of class imbalances.
Funcom is fixing stuff, important stuff finally, but atleast its getting done. I'll wait till I'm 80 to see how the end game goes and make more in-depth discussions then about the game. Until then, AoC is a pretty good game for the most part, but there are a few possible.... detrimental game flaws inherent in the system.
I love that!!!
That guy should really look into politics or at least apply for the position that writes political speeches. When I read that interview I got the image of an agility based assassin in Rag Online, just dodging everything left and right. No question could touch the guy. Once the question was appropriately dodged he'd pull out his katar of mis-direction and make an ever so lovely blow!
Honestly Could he not throw some numbers out there for amount of people in a instance or copy of a zone even if it varies between zone.... Many people wanted to know this.
What a bunch of Balhooey! Funcom support has always been horrible. If you ever played Anarchy Online it would be self evident. If you had a problem you asked someone in game because you could wait until your hair turned grey for a GM.
I deleted it off my hard drive after this weekend, certainly not the game for me. It is probably the most unchallenging MMO out there, and sorry I like challenges. When I got to 50 I found exactly what everyone else is finding, grind, grind, grind, there is virtually very little content for high levels.
And NO this is not one of the best MMO releases, they gave you a shell of game. Even DDO had more content at release than this game. Lotro had embarrassingly more content than this game.
Go crawl back into your hole Funcom, you again proved how marginal your game design abilities are.
50 people per instance.
I am losing a great deal of respect for FunCom and its continued AoC debacle. Five years of my Fanboi-ing shot to hell into under a month. They keep this kinda out-and-out lying and dis-information they'll soon by as hated as in the MMO world as SOE.
A link to this interview was posted on the Official Age of Conan forums with the quote "We have been known to give some of the best customer services in the MMO industry for years " highlighted. The forums mods INSTANTLY re-labled it "off topic" and buried it in the least read section of the forums.
Isn't that the same guy who stated "There won't be any camping in Shadowlands?
that was gaute goudager or something, cant rember the exact name. spreading lies is a company feat at FC HQ
Chyeah... More BS. Make everything sound cheery when in reality the game is a bug-riddled P.o.S. severely lacking content, crap performance on a wide array of systems, PvP doesn't even work well and their gripes about PVP are endless with people saying it's not what they hoped it would be.
Let's not even go into their customer service, game policies (blanket banning players for stupid holes in their game that they want to call "exploits"), downtime, etc... I could go on and on.
This game won't keep half of it's initial buys past the first month. They better keep locking and deleting threads left and right on the official forums so everyone that's oblivious to how shit the game is doesn't get depressed.
to save your sanity, give the BBB a whirl. and remember one unanswered incident per ticket please.
i know funcom will appreciate it.................
hmm...
i played 2 weeks beta, a few days early acess and im playing since launch now.
im more of an "after work player" then a "hardcore gamer" and i have to say im absolutely in love with the game. i have a 56lvl assasin and a 29lvl ranger so far.
yes, i deleted some quest where i tought they had bugs
yes, i stopped progressing in my crafting when cotton didnt work
yes, i would have loved dialog on everey quest like those in the 1-20...
but hey, i payed 30euros for what, 200hours of fun and content till now and i feel i have seen only half of it.
i believe the launch was a bit to early but 2 month later and they would have had a more strict competition with warhammer.
ps.: my treshhold towards grinding may be a bit low since i played 4 years of lineage2 bevore conan but i still think that the devs did a incredible job
I had so high expectations of this game. I mean like so many we waited for so long for this game to come out and all the promises from Funcom. Well after having played it since launch I must say it seems to me that the game with its huge errors in game mechanics, user interface, chat system, lack of content... well it clearly wasn't ready for launch. Bugs, yeah we all expect them to be there with a game this size, but many of these errors/flaws and lack of content had to have been apparant to Funcom.
I think the responses Tharaldsen gave is just leading us around by the nose and nothing substantial at all. Best customer service? Jesus they hardly even respond to players or their own community. They have to deliver big if I'm to continue playing this after my first month. No I predict this game will loose much of it's player mass and a MMO without player mass just doesn't cut it. I blame Funcom. They should have delayed the game so that the product was more complete in respect to game mechanics, user interface, chat system not to mention content for the players 50+. I just feel like I got ripped off.
Lol, quality catch!
so i guess most of you arent playing AoC then? I mean why would you pay for a game you dont think is very good? Thats your business, but Im having fun with AoC.
Erm Mr. Wood, how come you didnt ask funcom, why is there nearly zero content from level 40 to 80???
I was one of the very unsatisfied players in first days. Coming from WOW and despite it's »cartoon« like graphics (which I love) ... I was expecting more from a new game with my current hardware which runs very smooth WoW at max settings. Ok, with LOTRO I also had to set to medium to have acceptable gameplay.
I have dual core, 2GB RAM, 3.3 processor, .... I met recommended requirement for hardware. Except for graphics. I had Ati Radeon HD 2400 PRO with 256MB RAM which I thought should suffice and exceed minimum requirement.
In all this weeks since start of game, I have experienced only maybe 3 (minor, non important) bugs!!! Majority NPC's evading. Pretty standard thing in Wow. I really do not know about which bugs are you people talking. At least not up to lv. 22. However I do not participate in raids, I prefer solo and join forces only casually. So I do not know if there are present some other bugs. And, yes, I think instancing is simply great. And no more waiting 1 or 2 hours to get some object because there are 99 players in queue ready to jump at first sight of respawn of that object or mob.
Actually despite initial terrible impression (»thanks« to my graphics card), I now enjoy game, is well built, very stable, lag in high hours even in Old Tarantia is at acceptable level, I love destiny quests, near all others are also nice and interesting, response time from GM for the *start* was always in acceptable range of few hours (but also only 10 minutes), graphics at max are really joy for eyes, sound is decent, I simply love (unfort only to lv. 20) voice acting while accepting new quests, .... I have not noted any relevant bugs (ok, I will pretend problem with traders did not happen
), ....
All in all, with GOOD hardware, start of AoC was by my opinion fluid above all expectations. At least inEurope .
AoC have a lot of strong points and things I like a lot... but there are also many negatives (hopefully some will be fixed while others unfortunately are »by design«):
- Funcom does not guarantee alts will be preserved if player discontinue subscription and renew after some time?! Are they kidding??? However note, they do not say something “will happen” to characters in case of cancellation of subscription, they only said (in booklet that comes with DVD), that they “despite best efforts and … blah … blah … blah … can not guarantee ….”. But even this is too much! So, if will happen after few months I will lose interest and will want to wait i.e. few next months to some upgrade ... I will have to PAY all that time if I want **guarantee** my characters will be still there when I continue to play? Even if they reach multiplied number wow base of players, this should not be problem from perspective of space on server, backing up data, … so this is cheap way to suck more money from players even after they will stop to play for some time (or more likely for ever).
- Only 8 possible alts!? I like to experiment with all classes ... here I can try only part of combinations (or delete some which is not an option after some level as is even less an option to purchase another copy of game!)
- all races have same(!) starting line of quests; however different classes have a little different versions of same destiny quest chain and this is lovely (i.e. warrior will free Arias from isle, rogue will run to help him after that event, priest will bring him potion after has been helped by rogue, …)
- program do not have logoff(!); one must quit or wait 30 secs for camping ... and still has then to enter password
- When selling to NPC’s player must explicitly click sell button! No double-click! No button “sell all”, lock items, ....
- no option for automatically loot all (always must click confirmation button after clicking with mouse for loot; holding shift is not eq one-click loot)
- one have to wait until lv. 40 for crafting and gathering??
Among other things I miss »ghost walking« to corpse (like in wow). Is REALY REALY boring to fight over and over same 999 mobs that have respawned in meantime (i.e. in caves with snakes and scorpions).
And when Lich king comes I will again dedicate all my time to WoW.
But up to then after trying all possible MMORPG I was able to get trial or buy cheap in past 2 or 3 months .... AoC is by far the best (and LOTRO second).
Because, quite obviously, the Q&A wasn't about content. It's about CS and performance.
CS. It sucked from day one in AO and barely rose above rubbish
I have not found alot of bugs where I could not bare with since the game is fairly new. It's ok to give them time to fix it, you can't expect things to be perfect. However one thing that's been bugging me from day one is the class balance and even the level balance.
I have never played a game where two Assasin can't even take on a char of any kind (same level and health condition). Some class are just way over power.
And what the hell is up with a level 50 being gank by two level 30. They shouldnt' even be able to hit for you for hard enought to drop you that fast. I was a level 50 Assasin and a lvl 34 Ranger was able to kill me in 4 combos, between the stealth attack in suprise and the snare I was not able to move before dropping dead. That's 16 level different and I couldnt' even get near the guy let alone put up a fight. How can an assasin have no CC skill at all what so ever. Lol I guess it turned out to be more of a Fix my Assasin flame then anything.
Who needs content! Pfft..
It took them 2 years to patch its the biggest flaws. No coincidence he is the head Dev for Age of Conan. FunCom supposedly has one more MMO in the pipe, with supposedly 4+ years in development already. If Gaute is Lead Dev on that it'll be another giant mess as well. Gawd I am really starting to hate FC.
Should have asked him when people can expect to play via buddy keys... because no way will I buy another MMO if I can't at least have a look at it before.
I just love how he tries to day it has been one of the most solid launch, if not the most solid launch in MMO history.
I hope AoC does well, the market needs it. But if FC truly feels they had one of the best, if not THE best launch ever then there really is no hope.
IMO and experience FUNCOM has greatly improved the overall smoothness and gameplay in the game compared to the Beta event that i was in, but in the interview itself they managed to evade every single question with a vague statement, and as for good customer service....
..right.... the day that happens is the day i resub for SWG.
Lack of prompt customer service due to volume of petitions? How does that explain being number one in queue and waiting for 5 hours with no response?