Broken Toys

What are the “strengths the others won’t match”? I don’t dislike AoC, but what does it have that other MMOs don’t and / or can’t implement? Apart from boobs (which didn’t hold player interest past the first few weeks, I note) I can’t really see AoC owning much in the way of “can’t be copied” territory.

Do any other fantasy games have player controlled/built towns that can be raided and defended? I know it may be one of the things that was/is broken, but perhaps if they focused a little more on that they could carve out a nice niche for themselves…

I understand where the producer is coming from. I still don’t understand why the consumer isn’t waiting 90 days to buy.

Re AoC’s “unique” assets: the combat system still stands out in my mind as being more enjoyable than what you’ll see in any other similar game. I really do find myself missing AoC’s directional attack and combo system (as well as its deliciously brutal fatalities).

I also liked the Tortage gameplay a lot, but it was woefully brief (and WoW looks to already be doing similar with Death Knights).

If Funcom had managed to deliver Tortage-style gameplay all the way to the level cap, I might have kept paying for a few months. Heck, if they ever flesh that out, maybe I’ll go back and give it another try. Of course, even in this hypothetical universe where the game is “finished,” I don’t have any sense that AoC will have a compelling “endgame” that’s going to rope in long-term subscribers.

Netcraft confirms it – subscription fantasy MMOs are dying!

Well EVE would hardly be considered a part of the fantasy genre. FFXI still has an extremely dedicated following but I doubt the numbers put them in the top 5.

I don’t understand how building and sieging other player/guild town could work. The town has to be uncrackable when all players log off, but what if part of the players in the guild is on? Does the system assign NPCs to help defend?

Else it would be a great idea.

Conan did give us outstanding graphics, some new concepts, like Tortage, and their combat system, but they failed in too many other important areas, and yes gamers are notorious for having long memories.

WAR’s combat is boring and leveling is boring, BUT they excelled in key areas that will keep my support for awhile.

WAR’s Customer Support has been fantastic and they listened to what RPers (PvP and Non) wanted and gave it to us. They didn’t basically tell half (or maybe more) of the RP community to go screw itself while offering subpar at best community support. That alone is enough to get my, and a lot of others money and is something I really hope future game developers notice.

Talk to your community and know what it wants. Listen to your community and keep talking to them even if you can’t give them all they want.

Communication. If they’d done that 500% better from the start I don’t think they would have lost the number of players they did, and frankly that interview with Jorgen sounds like he’s still a little bit delusional about the state of that game.

And it’s the early starts and offers for goodies that keep a whole lot of players from waiting 90 days or even 30 before trying a game.

I wonder why he lauds the features implemented after launch. Most people I talked to, and from my own point of view, it was the subpar postrelease lack of direction that killed the game. A lot of people thought it was fun and had potential and with a community director (they hardly communicated at all) and a clear sense of purpose that was somewhat in sync with atleast a portion of the playerbase (spending a lot of time on features nobody cared about or outright didn’t want and neglecting glaring problems that affected day to day play) they might have retained a lot of people. Mostly it felt like it lingered unfinished and that it would take ages to get the more annoying flaws fixed. In many ways, they revisited their AO launch. Hopefully someone else will copy the innovative ideas they had for combat atleast.

Just because what Tesh said really should be said twice : “True “maturity” != boobs and blood. AoC has nothing truly “mature” about it.”

Yeah, I’m another ex-AOC player. The concepts were good. It was pretty, once I bought a new computer. Boobs and blood might not be the definition of “mature” but at least it beats games that seem to be pitched to the kindergarten crowd, and modzirated accordingly. The quests were fun, when they weren’t broken.

I left for several reasons. One, of course, is that the economy (what there was of it) was borked, tradeskills were borked (especially how training them depended on random drops from resource nodes, some of which turned out to have been, um, left out … cottonwhisp, anyone?), the cost of buying enough bag space to carry your loot was prohibitive, the lack of bank space was ridiculous, etc. Another was that the devs seemed to be flailing around randomly trying to do something, but weren’t quite sure what. My main’s class got randomly nerfed and buffed every patch, to the point that it should have been renamed “Yo-Yo”. Instancing everything was a stupid idea. When I to to Old Tarantia, I expect to find a crowded, bustling city — not a ghost town with 10x as many NPCs as players. Grouping was rarely worthwhile; you spent more time trying to get your group assembled in the right instance than actually doing anything. If you disconnected (which happened at random) you’d log back into a different instance, usually one with a fresh batch of mobs all over you. Every patch seemed to introduce two new bugs for each one it fixed, like randomly breaking bits of the UI.

The constant gold spam, apparently condoned by Funcom since they could have prevented most of it very easily, drove me mad. When I logged in, I’d have dozens of offline messages from gold spammers flooding my screen, and I couldn’t find my tradepost sales under the mass of spam in my mail. The lack of any easy way to travel between areas was bad. When players are spending more time traveling to places to have fun than they are having fun, that’s a game breaker. (especially when quests make you run across multiple zones over and over)

The last straw was trivial, but it broke this camel’s back: They cut the price of mounts, which had been obscene, but didn’t refund anything to those of us who had scrimped and saved every bent tin piece to get them. If you didn’t play AoC this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was; it was a very big deal. Way to go, reward the slackers and punish the hard workers.

It wasn’t the worst launch I’ve ever endured; that was Shadowbane. If they ever fix the game, and offer me a free month or something, I might go back.

It would seem the system has eaten up my first attempt at posting. Here we go again:

Regarding the “maturity” of tits and blood. Yes, not only was AoC *not* mature, it was in fact more immature than a game which would have left them out.

And in response to Wanderer: The problem, I think, is that the kindergarten crowd is sexually precocious these days (don’t pigeonhole me into the “moral conservative” camp, though; I despise them), and a game like AoC caters to them even more than a game without tits and guts would.

I will tackle the larger question of AoC in another post; I have to reread some of the comments posted above first.

AOC was the WORST mmo i ever played during my 11 years of mmo history, i played games with incredibly bad launches , other with lots of system bugs and some with internal(game) bugs and also other with plain simple boring game play.

AOC has succeeded to combine all those negative qualitys! in one game ,which i think is a sucess in his own right, but joke aside ,after leveling to 80 and almost completing my T1 set for my necro ,getting my fast horsey and doing some not so fun sieges, someday i just uninstalled this abomination and cancelled my account.

During this time War was out but i didint jumped right away just waited to hear other peoples opinions and after 3 weeks i decided to give a try.

Now that i am working and dont have time for heavy raiding War is the ultimate online game i have ever seen ,its fun, almost everything working only after 3 weeks, you can join the game anytime for raiding and find a battle.Pve is not as strong as in others game but let me tell you this you cannot do all quests in all realms becasue your level will be too high eventually ,meaning; you will find quests twice than you need to reach next level, and whenever you start a new race all scenery wıll change and you have two factions ,this will give you 6 completly different start..tortage must be renamed torture..

And about great! graphics of AOC, thats total bullshit, everything looks grey and brown , yeah i saw some nice scenery on distant horison now and then ,but who gives a shit if your chracter look like wearing patato sack at lvl 80 wearing epics, WAR graphics are MUCH BETTER! i cannot stress this enough ,good graphic doesnt mean realistic graphic,good graphics sooth your eyes ,look bright and fun and give eye candys where you look most and in graphic depertement WAR is way ahead of AOC ,just give it a try if you dont beleive it.

And what about all credit card mistakes! funcom did, hundreds if not thousand people complaing about their credit cards getting charged after they cancelled their accounts and still not one word of explanation from funcom, such a great company, oh btw i playing WAR for 10 days or so and i still didint gave my credit card information ,becasue they DONT ask for any credit card information until your free one month is over..

I just cannot beleive there are some people still playing AOC…

Vetarnias try join all button for rvr and you will find where are thousands of people in your server ,rvr games give incredible xp along with renown points(im getting 10k+ xp per game)so doing pve quests is a bit pointless atm ,but then again this game is all about pvp so i think its understanble and if you like some solo time and do pve quests all world is yours