General Discussion

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.

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?

Jorgen Tharaldsen

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.

Check out the whole Q&A here.

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.

Originally posted by Stradden

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.

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?

Jorgen Tharaldsen

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.

Check out the whole Q&A here.

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.

Originally posted by JK-Kanosi

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.

....we estimate that load will go down in the future...

 

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.