All Posts by LondonMagus

Originally posted by Thenarius

Yea, Tortage was a nice marketing move.

After you level to 20 however...

Tortage was pretty but it was too reminscent of console games like 'Balders Gate - Dark Alliance'.

I was so glad to escape Tortage but the feeling of being in a console game never really went away for me, and in the end that was he biggest factor in what made me give up on the game. Even though I still have a few more weeks left on my initial 3 month subscription before it expires, I just can't be bothered to play.

I hated the 'Death never Looked so Sexy' ad from the moment it appeared as well.

It's pathetic that a game that is allegedly meant to be for adults of both genders is using a campaign that is designed for the fantasies of little boys just entering adolescence.

Are they really so desperate that they have to try to appeal to the lowest possible denominator?

Thanks for posting the picture link, the armour for the 'Magus' looks awesome!

I finally cancelled my account  yesterday as well. Although it is still live until the end of September, I am not sure I will bother playing much as there just doesn't seem to be any point.

Until WAR comes out I plan on catching up on my DVD collection. Not sure if WAR will live up to the hype either to be honest, but it should last until Xmas at least & I changed my signature to get into the spirit.

Originally posted by TeamFortress

Ok Guys. Still believe the lies of FunCom?

Have a look at www.Xfire.com

AoC is now at the same levels of active players as LOTRO and clearly under EVE.

LOTRO had last a confirmed sub base of 150 K-200K; EVE has a little more subs (240K)

Ref: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

Given the fact that Xfire has a sampled stat comparable to the techniques used in Nat Broadcast samples. (600 families = representative for 6.000.000 viewers), we can surely say that :

AOC went down from 400 K to 150-200K in the last 7 weeks.

Also : the number of servers AOC has, is about 3 times more than LOTRO.

It sure must be lonely outthere !!!!

Any guesses how hard they gonna fall when WAR will hit stores ? 

Interesting approach. Since Xfire stats aren't representative of the majority of players, as long as the proportions of players that use Xfire are constant between different games & the behaviour of the non-Xfire users is also similar, then in theory it could be possible to infer the unknown population of AoC by using the known population of another game with similar Xfire stats.

It's novel & I like the creative use of logic, but there are just too many assumptions & Xfire stats are only really representative of Xfire users. Despite these reservations though, I still think your estimate is a lot closer to the truth than the alleged 400k+ taken from the recent dubious Funcom quarterly report.

Great blog entry. Amusing, well written & very accurate.

I tried to give Funcom a chance & stay optimistic about the game for the first couple of months as they seemed to be candid about many issues & seemed sincere about addressing them.

Even as an 'Ultra Casual' player though, my patience started to run out about a month ago & now I can barely manage the enthusiasm to log in while I wait for my initial three month subscription to run out.

I think it's a shame because the game had great potential, but they just seem to have just thrown it away.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

Hope this explains a bit. In the main thread there is good discussion going on near 400 posts so far as the next update will be rather relative in this area. 

Hi Avery, so does this mean that Gems are still worth investing time/effort/money in after all?

Sorry for not being that familiar with exactly how the bonuses stack, but I had been lead to believe by previous threads that the solution to the Gem duping issues was going to be rendering them a non-issue by reducing the value of Gems to the point where they would be merely decorative.

This is of great concern to me since I have only just got to the level where I can even use Gems & had even been training on Gem Crafting, but they are probably not worth bothering with if they are just going to be rendered almost useless in the near future.

So back to the main question then, is it possible to summarise how useful will they be after the changes?

Thanks.

Hopefully Conan in the movie won't be like the one you meet in game, he sounds too much like a 'dude'!

Originally posted by octa

Erling Ellingson posted some extremely general time frames for upcoming content on the official forums here.

His post:

...

I wish I could, but at this point we can't give any specific dates. The PvP update -is- coming soon, and we are very sorry that we did not reach the date we originally set for it. But we want to get this one right, so we're taking our time with it. It is definitely a priority for us to get it out soon, and we hope that you will feel that your patience is rewarded with a truly epic update. That will be up to you to decide!

...

As for Commons and Ymir's Pass that's a little bit further down the road but not too long I expect. Again, I don't want to give any dates, but it's something that will come out in the forseeable future.

...

House of Crom is further down the road. Note that is extremely important for us to get content updates out as soon as possible as we really need to keep you guys entertained.

...

The armor is getting very much done at this point so that shouldn't be too far off.

...

I know it can be a bit frustrating not to get any dates on this, and I hope we can put some dates on it at a later stage. We know it's important that you guys have something to hold on to.

Is it just me or does he sound like one of those dodgy tradesmen that you hire to do renovation work on your house (plastering, plumbing etc) but who then takes over two months to complete something that was originally promised to be completed in two weeks. "Sorry Guv, I just can't get the Parts"!

Good grief, the game came out at the end of May & now at the end of August they sound even more vague & non-committal than they did at the start. I can remember feeling optimistic about their post-launch promises as they seemed to be fairly candid, but now three months later they still haven't got their act together and are issuing mumbling crap like this.

That last paragraph about "I know it can be a bit frustrating..." is completely outrageous. He might think he is giving the impression of sincerity, but does he have any idea how patronising it is to use phrases like 'We know it's important that you guys have something to hold on to'?

Sorry Erling, but if you want earn people's patience you are going to need to do better than that!

Originally posted by RNLee

Originally posted by Aelfinn
Actually, WOW is a copy of the Warhammer series

No, it's not. There was no "Warhammer series" when the first Warcraft game was released in '94--the first Warhammer game didn't hit until the following year, and was as big a flop as Warcraft: Orcs &Humans had been a success.

True, there were Warhammer tabletop games, starting in the early eighties, but they're not startlingly original, either--a combination of previous military sims using miniatures and dashes of D&D and Tolkien.

At any rate, there's never been a Warhammer MMORPG before, WoW's been out for three years, now, and if the upcoming Warhammer MMORPG looks and acts a lot like WoW, it's because it's imitative of Blizzard's game. Any other suggestion is absurd.

Personally, I'm reserving judgement until I get to play it, or at least hear from some people who have.

There might not have been a Warhammer MMORPG before WoW, but there definitely was a pen & paper RPG because I used to own it & wish I had kept it now rather than giving it away as a present along with all my old issues of White Dwarf about 10 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_Fantasy_Roleplay

The Warhammer universe & it's characteristic humourous style have been around for a very long time.

Originally posted by Cbdragon1

The PvE in this game is pointless and boring as hell.  Any guild bragging about their progression in AoC should be laughed off the internet.

So, it must be the roleplayers keeping this game going.  I mean the game looks great and there are...boobs.  It's like RP heaven.  RP on, RP on.

Whilst some of the PvE quests are reasonably interesting I would agree that are generally pointless.

I am not sure I agree that AoC is a Roleplayer's Heaven though unless you were purely referring to the nice scenery & the fact that seating in bars actually works!

The core of the game is a single player quest where everyone is secretly the 'Chosen One' who escaped Tortage as it burned to the ground in the middle of a Civil War. This is just ridiculous & the only way of roleplaying in such an environment is outright denial.

I can remember coming across an amusing & well written back story on an unofficial RP website, where the author's character grew up normally & had not nearly drowned ?n a ship off Tortage & then developed amnesia. Further, she regarded all talk of 'Destiny Conspiracy Theories' as madness that would be swiftly met by the business end of an Assassin's Dagger.

It fairly ridiculous when the only way of successfully role-playing is to deliberately discard such a major part of the game, especially when it re-occurs every 10 levels or so.

RPers aren't obsessed with cartoon breasts though, you must be confusing them with Cybering GMs.

Originally posted by SpiritofGame

www.warhammeralliance.com/uploads/WAR_Player_Guide.pdf

That's great thanks!
 

It gives us poor folk in Europe something to read while we wait for our chance to join in the fun.

If there were 800k subscribers at the start but only 415k by August 14th then as calculated this would give a quit rate of approximately 10k per day after the initial trial period, but as everyone knows averages can be misleading because they can give a false impression of gradual behaviour.

It is much more likely that a large proportion of players quit during the trial period, in which case the projected attrition rates would have to be far lower but that just doesn't make sense. Even if only half of the people that quit did so before the end of the trial period that would still mean that 75% of players initially went on to become active subscribers. Does that sound right to you?

The wording in the report seems intentionally vague because if the quoted subscription figures were somehow supposed to be official & legally binding at August 14th they would have been presented in a more formal table rather than as an 'off the cuff' remark in the introduction.

It isn't just people here that are querying the validity of these figures, just try googling '415k' & see how many other news stories come up. If they didn't have something to hide then why be so vague?

Just to clarify. I don't actually hate the game, just bad use of statistics!

Great post, very similar to my impressions of the game.

Originally posted by octa

Originally posted by bluberryhaze

/continue hammering

i see the human brain as a group and club mentality. prehaps if we hammer them back with love, they will just go away?

have to love the hater, he is a fragile person when we dig down deep in the personality. its the question, the question of why is he here, after 3 months-still pursuing. perhaps its because he bought the box and feels ripped off? or maybe it goes deeper than that. still deeper. hiding like a shy boy on the first day of school. he has found his outlet on the internet as a anonymous Pseudogene. lots of views on some threads. large audience. semore the seal claps for you.

sure im goading a little. but you know what? these packs of wolves are making me go to the official site for issues, questions. i just want to look for links on this site with normal questions and answers. nothing but statements here. im a little bother about it, but ill live. 

What would be more effective is listing the positives in the game and any bug-free aspects of it.  Unfortunately the list is small, if it exists at all.  Oh wait there's Tortage, I forgot.

To the OP: Rather than whine about the whiners I invite you to join the discussion and offer your opinion on the points the detractors are posting.

Actually Tortage was symptomatic of what made me want to quit because it was far to much like a section of a console game. It was pretty enough the first time round but I found it too claustrophobic & the thought of repeating it has put me off creating alts.

There might be an escape from Tortage but there is no escape from the Destiny quest. The whole game seems to have been centered on a single player storyline rather than creating a persistent MMO world.

I play a Lvl 58 Demonologist & there is practically no choice in armour/robes at all. I was lucky to pick up a 'Blue Level 50 Robe' eight levels ago, but at every new level when I check the Trader there is nothing to but in upgrades. This is possibly because the Trader is so cumbersome to use that most people just sell items to vendors apart from at endgame. I know that I end up doing that a lot.

I don't hate the game, I just feel disappointed that it turned out to be a console game with delusions of grandeur & poor itemisation rather than an MMO. Maybe Funcom will turn it around in the end, but the novelty has worn off now & I don't have the patience to wait & find out. I am still playing currently though which is why I have posted. Once I have quit I won't even bother to check the forums, let alone post.

As for BluberryHaze's comments, you are making exactly the same mistake as the people that post the senseless 'Failcom Smells' type threads. There are not only two groups 'Fanboi/Hateboi' & not all the people who criticise the game quit three months ago. The reason why the boards are such a mess is precisely because subsets of the supporters & critics seem obsessed with polarising everything into some ridiculous display of tribal behaviour, but I suppose that only reflects what people do in RL too.

Possibly one reason why people in the UK who pre-ordered through HMV are annoyed is that we payed £10 (about $20) deposit for a pre-order pack which has promises of early access printed all over it.

The money is refunded against the final purchase, but there are no cancellation refunds!

Personally I see it more as a disappointment rather than something to get that worked up about, but there is no logical reason why people in europe couldn't just have joined in the US Closed Beta. In most MMOs I have played I used the US servers because they were better populated & there were no issues at all.

Just my opinion.

Originally posted by Ghist

If hater of cigarettes just stopped using the product and didn't complain, would have ever known they caused cancer?

We haters are doing a community service trying to inform other people of the flaws of the product.

If you are enjoying AoC, congratulations!  Enjoy your cancer.

Try to keep things in perspective.

If you really do want to draw real life analogies then it is more like a passenger group trying to apply pressure to get more frequent buses with improved seating & more polite & professional drivers, but that doesn't sound quite as sensationalist.

Not everyone that has quit the game or posted about things they were unhappy with is necessarily a 'hater' either & every time someone creates a thread like this it makes it easier for Funcom to dismiss their critics as a senseless lynch mob rather than people with legitimate grievances.

By comparing AoC to cancer you are as bad as Funcom comparing it to 'Steak & Wine'.

Originally posted by thark

Constructive critique like this is never wrong at all, It's the insults and the bad manners and the childish behavior that is wrong..So I agree upon most of what you say here..

From what I know they delete and moderate the "gem duping posts" just so no one can duplicate themselves..Atleast as far as I know..What other purpose would there be !!! Hide that there is a gem duping exploit ?? WHy, every game get's plagued with issues like this, so why hide..

And furthermore I see Funcom responces all over the forum, I even saw a thread with Erlingsson himself defending that interview made by MMORPG.com.. They are trying to redeem themself, but most people are so covered in hate they have trouble seeing this..

Of course, the entire process is troublesome,as every word spoken get's analyzed by it's angry followers, twisted and turned to find a hidden agenda somewhere..PR is PR and is always as far from the real truth in any buisness both legal and other more shady buisness..

But still Erlingsson came to the forum and defended that entire video made by MMORPG.com, he answered every poster in that thread..Most of it was ofcourse spins and wordtwisting but alas I also felt many thruthfull answers there..

Thanks for your reply, at least we agree that constructive criticism is OK & it is only the insults, bad manners & childish behaviour that are the real issue. I agree that there is far too much of that & I have also posted many times in the games defense at criticism that I felt was unfair.

In response to some of your comments to other posts, I haven't really been affected by display bugs or performance issues either & hadn't commented on any grammatical issues in your replies because I checked your profile & know for a fact that your English is infinitely better than my Swedish.

Unfortunately though I find it impossible to defend a lot of Funcom's recent behaviour, especially the unprofessional behaviour of GMs & Forum Mods that persists even now. In response to your comment on 'Gem Duping', I still play the game regularly (at least for now) & all it would have taken was a comment in the official announcements or upcoming patch notes that they were aware of the issue & would be dealing with it, but as yet I haven't seen anything even though there was no patch this week at all. Unless they plan to implement a solution soon without warning, it looks like the problem will persist for a while despite it being a game-breaker for many. They have obviously been aware of the situation for quite some time & the longer it goes on the worse it gets, but they seem to have been relying on ignorance to cope with the fact that they do not know how best to fix it.

When the game first launched I was very hopeful that they would actually manage to turn things around because they seemed to be very candid about some of the issues & promised to issue patches twice a week until things were resolved. Since then things have slowed down a lot & they have given press interviews where they seem to deny any problems & claim a 'Perfect Launch' that couldn't have gone better. This is pretty insulting to the base of players like myself that continued to subscribe after the trial period, especially given that they are still charging the same money for a game that they had earlier publically admitted was incomplete.

Due to comittments in RL I am a fairly 'casual' player & although I have enjoyed the game so far, I will almost certainly quit when WAR is released. I had thought it was going to be a MMORPG but it feels more like a console game, which is OK while the novelty lasts but not enough to hold my interest for several years like EQ2.  To be honest I am not sure if WAR will do that either, but it should be fun for a while.

Originally posted by thark

 

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Originally posted by Balthaazar1
Well we have to take a stance on this horrible mess of a game. If we keep pointing out the flaws and cruel injustices by those running the game, it may help to either put an end to Age of Conan as an example to future game developers, or motivate them to give the players enough overhauling of the game and additions to make it playable. All the PR absolute BS that the game is running as intended and has nothing wrong with it but a lack of drunken bar brawls needs to be snuffed out.

---

 

Well..If you say it like this , then this also proves that my original post is the truth.

Hard as it may seem there is people who does love AoC and you are destroying the game for those people, If the above comes true. Is that right ?

/junker

Whilst I agree that there are too many negative posts that just hurl insults around, are you really claiming that we would all be better off without objective criticism as well & that "Ignorance is Bliss"?

Most people don't need others to tell them what to think & forming your own opinions about a game after reading forums is no different than in many real life situations. There is no substitute for first hand impressions, but second hand information is always useful provided you validate the sources.

What you seem to be saying is that if no-one talked about the problems then the existing player base would be happy in their ignorance. Eventually Funcom would fix all the issues, but any players that became unhappy before then would be quickly silenced before their harmful negativity infected others. 

Disregarding the senseless 'Failcom Smells' threads, the reason why the issues discussed in the more constructive ones are controversial is that many are valid. The recent 'Gem Duping Exploit' threads are a perfect example of this, since they seem to have finally forced Funcom to stop denying it's existence by deleting any official thread that mentioned it. Would it really have been better to have tried to keep it secret until Funcom finally found a solution?

On most other MMO forums, people posting flames about quitting are usually laughed at by supporters who just quote the familiar "Can I have your stuff". Unfortunately this is more like the real-life scenario where you start a new job & then realise that everyone else is leaving & the company is in serious trouble.

In such circumstances the best way for management to handle the scenario is to be honest with people & explain what they are going to do to rectify the situation, rather than reverting to 'Mushroom Management' i.e."Keep people in the dark & feed them XXXX".

Just my opinion.

Why would anyone interpret this as being 415k on Aug 14th rather than June 30th?

Ignoring the obvious comment that a Q2 report pretty much by definition normally only includes information up to June 30th, the notes at the end of the interim report also clearly state that Aug 14th was merely the date on which the report was approved not the time frame it referred to.

1 Corporate information
Funcom N.V. is a limited company registered in The Netherlands, and the shares are publicly traded on the Oslo Stock exchange under the ticker “FUNCOM”. The principle activity of the company is to develop, market and carry on business in computer games in the broadest sense. The unaudited interim condensed consolidated financial statements of the Group for the six months ended 30 June 2008 were approved for issue by the supervisory board on 14 August 2008.

It doesn't matter therefore that the Summary page contains the comment "So far the game has sold through over 800.000 copies and has currently more than 415.000 customers.", as the reason for it being dated Aug 14th was solely because that was when it was approved by the supervisory board & the term 'currently' was used in the context of the report's time-frame, i.e. Q2 ending June 30th.

Even if there were any doubt as to whether 415k was an accurate estimate for Aug 14th, basic probability implies that the game is unlikely to be gaining new players at 'exactly' the same rate as it is losing old ones. In the unlikely event that the joining/leaving rates were very similar the Aug 14th figures would still most likely differ by a few thousand either way rather than being exactly the same.

It seems likely that the real figures for Aug 14th would have been considerably lower, but we just seem to be back in the same old scenario where no-one knows the real subscription levels apart from Funcom & everything else is just speculation. 

The fact that Funcom are being so secretive implies that the real figures must be fairly depressing though. After all, the company that made the infamous "Steak & Wine" comment would hardly be likely to keep quiet if they had anything to boast about.

Just my opinion.