Wow .. there was some real vitriol in that! Kinda makes me glad I stuck with my burger and coke

I’m starting a study to determine if MMO’s creates the Maniacal Sociopath or merely attracts them. Or is it “games” in general? Then again, I’ve been to a few tech forums…. technology? Then again, listening to political pundits on the way in… doesn’t nee to be tech… hmm

Is there something in the friggin water?

It was a nice reading on Vidkun Quisling in wiki, I thought he was somebody but just a piece of interesting history (most likely only interesting to me).

I am sure it is not only MMO or games that attract sociopaths. There are all kind of sociopaths and they are attracted to different things, but a disproportion number were attracted to politics. Just listen to some of the crazy stuff by US senators and congressmen, and to prove my pointer more, it is from BOTH parties.

When you charge people money to buy a game and then charge them some more money to actually play the game, you will find that customers have very high expectations.

“How dare people complain about the quality of play in a game they’ve just dropped $120 dollars on!” – I find that type of comment illogical at best.

If someone just paid me $60 for a code to allow them to do nothing more than down load my game and play it for a month and they went ahead and paid me another $75 so they could play my game for an additional six months, I’d probably feel real obligated to provide said customer with what they paid for.

Funny thing is what happens in the MMRPG industry… “I got your money, so F__K off!” Oh sure, the “F__K Off” is sugar coated but let’s not fool ourselves, the customer is never going to see their moneys worth, ever. Everyone knows it.

The next funny thing to happen is gaming companies and developers get all bugeyed or teary eyed and wonder aloud “why do our customers hate us?”….

Good times. Good times.

Strangely, our flirtation with AoC ended with my cousins and I re-opening our DAoC accounts after a couple years off, to do some real RvR while waiting for the release of Warhammer. DAoC has been a lot of fun the last few months. I’m sort of sorry Warhammer is coming out earlier than we expected, because we’ve just gotten rolling on the Gareth-Lamorac-Ector servers and stopping now seems like a waste.

I think quite a few people had the same response, because the number of people returning to DAoC at the time was surprisingly high.

Regarding Funcom and AO: I think it’s precisely that which made people even more mad than they would have been. The debacle of AO should have taught Funcom a few lessons, instead of “you can get away with putting out an awful product when you’re dealing with a major franchise, and spin will do the rest”.

Now, that article also misses another major point: As much as you might blame client stability, I would suggest that another reason for the game’s alleged death spiral after the first month could be that the system requirements were unrealistically high, with people even exceeding all the requirements having problems to play (and while we’re at it, what about that Funcom-NVIDIA “strategic partnership”?). The chat window during the first days of live was filled with comments by people being surprised the game wouldn’t run properly on their rig; should there be any surprise if most of them, apart for the few who upgrade just to play one game they might tire of during the week, decided to cancel? (My own reason for cancelling by the end of the second month was a blend of boredom and choppy performance.)

The second cause of death is pretty accurate, however. Just looking at the clunky trading interface, I knew that AoC’s economy would be a failure. The rest is pretty accurate, though I’d be hard pressed to name a single MMO not rooted in the endless repetition of menial tasks. (The only outstanding thing in the game? Pretty much the same thing as in the first Conan film: the music.)

Then there is that quote of Gaute’s about steak and wine, which sounds like an inverted version of the Mark Twain quip about how his books are water. I’d agree with Gaute on one thing: It is appropriate to mention wine when talking about Age of Conan, because wine can naturally be associated with CHEESE, which is all what this franchise is all about from its beginnings — the Howard pulp stories (pretty good, actually), the imitators, the comic books, the Ahnold vehicles. You look at his game, and while it’s not as cheesy as what the franchise yielded in previous decades, you get the eerie feeling of gratuitous adolescent titillation mixed with some sort of immature sense of portentous doom (difficult to explain, sorry about that). The latter seems to have been inherited from Howard; the former, from all the franchise by-products that have been published since his death.

So to hear him compare his game to haute cuisine as opposed to the McDonald’s fare of WoW is rather puzzling. Never tried WoW, but Gaute’s game (which, if you’ll recall, was being advertised by stressing decapitation as an option) is less Delmonico’s than Red Lobster — ersatz gastronomy that pretends to rise above fast food. It’s one of those classic embarrassing quotes which is going to remain with the game, I’m afraid.

Points for amusement. The worst thing is if they do truly get this in their inbox. Morale cannot be good. Server numbers are probably known well on the inside. Most devs are probably doing as best they can under the management’s eye. Nothing new or constructive here… hear, hear, internet d!$#wad theory.

Haha, WoW player meets a game that actually requires massive amounts of textures and runs smack into the Windows poor memory handling capibilities.

Granted there are lots of games out there, mostly single player, that seem to be able to overcome the dreaded Windows Memory Leak, but every MMO outside of WoW has this exact same problem. You’d think someone out there would of figured out a fix by now, if it were possible.

Also, DUDE, 400k subscribers is NOTHING to scoff at. WoW probably farts and looses 500k subscribers every hour. I think EQ2 is at 250k and they are still getting expansions and content. Don’t know what the guy is worrying about. I personally prefer the less popular MMOs anyways.

I don’t know, my old LotRO guild is loving AoC, most of them got to level 80 pretty quick, I guess I really can’t say anything bad about this article since I never played the game past beta, but damn dude, who pissed in your Cheerios?

AoC was absolutely terrible. It got good initial reviews because the first 20 levels are quite polished and were probably all most reviewers played before putting reports online and into magazines. Beyond that… almost a completely different game. Unmitigated garbage. I wouldn’t spit on it if it was on fire.

Oh wow I’m stupid, they actually labelled it that. Serves me right for reading quotes out of context.

.. It’s still Godwin’s Law.

The launch really wasn’t a failure to be totally fair. Funcom released a pretty upbeat investor report just after the launch and mostly it was true that they had a solid and promising launch. Sure there were problems but it took a few weeks for the honeymoon to end for most of the people who are now ex-players.

AO’s first 20 levels were quite nice, and there were enough quests and locations to get at least in spitting distance of max level. But the crushing bugs, performance issues, and general missing stuff (working guild and pvp stuff, dx10 client) Drove everyone I knew playing out in the first month. I hung around for 6 weeks, but it kept getting more and more of a ghost town, and bugs weren’t getting visibly fixed.

They could fix it up and make it the robot jesus at this point and I still wouldn’t go back. It’s a bit late to make a first impression now. Much like AO.

“My biggest shock was that launch wasn’t a train wreck – someone sacrificed something valuable for that magic launch-day patch AoC had.”

I guess that depends how you define “train wreck.” The servers had very little chance to crash under a heavy load because Funcom had cleverly designed the client to not allow most people to actually play the game for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

Wow someone hand that guy a napkin for that spittle!

Granted, I have my own issues with AoC like community relations but that doesn’t mean I’m going to foam at the mouth over it. I just canceled and moved on to the next game that caught my eye with some potential. Even if FC did show me they can actually improve I still doubt I’d return, but I don’t want to see the game fail.

Watching how they took AO from a disaster and turned it into an award winning game really is what gave me confidence that they’d grown and really would produce with AoC. I was wrong but I don’t believe it’s the developers fault because it’s obvious to me they CAN produce some fantastic work. Maybe it’s just piss poor management? I don’t know, but whatever it is they need to fix it before they get to deep in these next games they plan to release and end up messing them up as well.

Players that froth at the mouth and seem like they want to devote their life to trashing THAT game company that ruined their world, have issues, IMO. AoC has lost of problems, but it’s not dead.

@ dartwick. There’s a difference between getting angry and frothing at the mouth and going on and on and on with hate about a company because they didn’t meet your expectations, or even the expectations the company set for themselves. So, yes I agree there’s nothing wrong with players getting angry at MMOs that don’t deliver, but instead of throwing tantrums they should show their displeasure by closing their wallets. That gets a companies attention much more then net hate crusades.

He lost me when he started making fun of foreign names. Hard to expect anything intelligent past that point. (and I’m not saying this because I’m a fan, I quit before the end of the free month and just moved on)

“Dartwick Says:
September 1, 2008 at 7:37 am

Jackbnimble is flat out wrong.

Most players eventually tire of a game but are not resentful if they had a good experience.

On the other hand if you go through a boring grind for the promise of fun at the end and it find it doesnt deliver -cusomers tend to be upset.”

I’ve yet to find a mmorpg that doesn’t do this eventually.

>> Extra bonus points for surrounding the article with ads from
>> Age of Conan gold farmers.

Hahahahahaha no doubt. That was the best part.

-Cambios
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com

To be fair, as far as levelling went, Age of Conan wasn’t that bad, if you compared it to Shadowbane, where grinding (with no quests whatsoever) was necessary for practically everything, levelling and financial. Ditto with Pirates of the Burning Sea, where everyone was grinding the same missions over and over again just to get the money for a First Rate, and where in fact the XP was slashed by half in missions, forcing you to grind on the open sea to level up to your full potential.

Agreed on the “tortage experience”. Funcom really threw everything at that part, and it worked rather well. Then you ended up finishing that part in a week or two, only to realize that the rest of the game felt unpolished. The first thing to go was the voice acting; most of the male voices sounded like Norwegians doing their best Scottish burr, but it gave a tremendous feeling of immersion.

After that it was all downhill. More quests, and in the end I was getting the impression I was merely playing a first-person RPG with a monthly subscription fee and an out-of-whack Internet bill. Why should I bother with those, then, when I could just as quickly waste my time trying to master the incomprehensible user interface of the Gothic series?

As for the “MMO” part of the equation, it always seemed to be missing somehow. I remember joining a clan which boasted 400 members at the time (close to the end of the first month), but I rarely saw any of them “in person” although I could see them chatting. When I went to gather resources — and I never knew why exactly, since I never saw my numerous guildmates — I always went solo. I once visited our “guild village”, which was completely empty. This was on a PvE server, where apparently the plural part begins at level 80 (made it to 40 before getting utterly bored); and on the PvP servers, high-level gankers camping resurrection spots was apparently the norm. Either way, not a game I’d rather play.

Whether or not people enjoyed EQ2(I hated it) is irrelevant to the discussion.

No one felt like they were taken advantage of other than for buying the game. It was boring at the start and it never changed and never promised to change as you leveled.

There are lost of ways to drive away players. But if you want to make players really mad you have to do 1 of 2 things.

1 Have an end game that is separate but less fun than the leveling experience.

2 Promise a specific end game experience and then not deliver.

Somehow AoC managed to do both. They had an early leveling experience loaded with content – then a lame leveling experience to follow – then a broken end game. So players got to taste the good life and they were punished with a grind – both before they became angrey in the end.

AoC promised to be everything to all people. that’s just unrealistic. and that just guaranteed they would piss off a certain segment of their player base.

in early previews the devs said the “game is based around players that have less than 10 hours a week to play.” and it was expected that the “general path for advancement is gonna take people around ten days of play.” so 240 hours of gameplay, at 10 hours per week, gives six months of pre- endgame content for a casual player.

if they stuck to marketing towards this niche market segment, the devs might have had time to finish (or add) an end game. it seems that the marketing efforts worked too well. the game attracted huge numbers of players at launch, and not of the ~10 hr/wk variety. the 10 hour/day crowd capped quickly, felt cheated, became vitriolic and left in droves.

it seems like a case of too much “success” killing a game. or maybe it’s a case of players buying a casual game without doing a bit of research first.

This text is hugely interesting.