There is no denying it anymore. AoC is an EPIC fail.

While Funcom has raked in a lot of dollar on early sales due to their [useless] mount preorder program and extreme hype and blanket lies, there is no way they can retain people.

These and the official forums are filled with people stating the game is getting empty, people leaving in droves, guilds quitting, friends lists are empty.

The only question is if they will do server merges soon or just let the servers remain empty for a long time.

There is no way people return after such a bad experience, sure some people will take a second look, but too many have been burned.

I hope this will teach the mmo industry (incl. makers of WAR, Aion, TCoS, Champions Online, the new bioware mmo etc.) that there is no more free lunches. You can't just release hyped garbage and let people pay for beta. Sure close to 1 million sales is good for getting ROI. But there is no real money coming down the road and I wonder how much longer they can continue with so many developers connected to the game.

There is a financial drop off point (just like with Tabula Rasa) where they will figure they will have to run this game with a skeleton crew. Expect it this summer. They won't have enough retentions to keep expanding on the game, so expect small fixes in the future and nothing big that changes the buggy experiences. To repeat myself, just look at how TR is unable to make big additions to the game now. Still no vehicles or anything.

My prediction is that we shall see no more clear numbers from Funcom about subscriptions. The only hint we will see is not in the next quarterly report where the large sales are still hiding the problems of retention, but the quarterly report after that. The end of the year quaterly should show the big financial problems clearly.

Funcom as a company is defamed like SOE. Sure there are still rabid fanboys (and viral marketeers!) but the world is filled with people who got screwed. Some got screwed over bugs, unable to play or just unstable to play, others get screwed over deleted petitions, lack of communication from Funcom, and yet others about marketing lies. Like lies about DX10, or paying for buddy keys without getting them. And sieges is an exploitable bug fest.

I think it is high time to send a message to the industry: Don't treat us like 15$ pr. month sheep any more.

The whole "no mmo is ever released finished or perfect" is NOT a valid argument. Sure there were others that screwed their customers too, but people CAN expect a company to actually put things into the game they write on the frigging box. People CAN demand to have main content likes sieges playtested.

Stop letting us players pay for beta. Stop abusing your power as multinational gaming companies. Stop lying to our faces. N O    M O R E    F U N C O N

/discuss

did not read your rant 

(I assume its a rant if the title is epic fail)

you should know that Funcom usually doesnt report its subs

- at least it didnt for Anarchy Online

/agree entirely with those facts...everyone will agree..because facts are facts...its not an opinion...

Quick question OP: do you even play the game or are you just getting your material from these ridiculously troll-infested forums? Sorry if I'm wrong, but it just seems like you're an outsider regurgitating the same crap that everyone else has for weeks now... same old wild ranting that'll plague the communities of every MMORPG coming out.

Your predictions and claims are ridiculous. AOC is still very big in europe and despite everything, still very big in NA, and it'll most probably continue to be until the Xbox version is released, even after all the upcoming MMO's have come out. I myself am taking a break from the game and MMO's in general, and I do know what you're talking about with the "I'm quitting" trend of threads, but the servers are still well populated--at least the PVP and RPPVP ones, when I was playing.  I haven't played on the PVE ones but the communities seem very active, and alot of my friends still playing say their servers are very well populated.

I enjoyed the game alot during my free month, but I decided to take a break from it for awhile. I was dissapointed by the missing content, but there was enough there to keep me happy. And I was in a guild with over 100 daily-active members in an alliance of guilds each with the same amount of players who are still having fun.

AOC is not an "epic fail", sorry. They've made enough and they will maintain enough subs to keep the dev teams working on overdrive to make due on all the promised content for the PC players, and then make the expansion into the console market. AOC will not drop down to 50k subs, they won't be working with a skeleton crew and turn into another TR.

Move along.

I don't think AoC is that bad off, however, it would have benefitted greatly from a 6 month delay.

If you are not going to release with the polish and at least a good fraction of the content WoW has you are wasting your time and money. People are not going to pay to be bored or be bug ridden when they can pay the same price and play something polished with loads of content. It may have been ok to release unfinished games 7-10 years ago, but that is a thing of the past now.

I gave Conan a second month of subscription but it seems they are updating less which with their errors that isn't a good sign to me. I log on now and the guild I am a part of that had quite a few active members is now barren. So that means quite a few quit from there alone and these are veteran gamers. I am not sure where they get their numbers but the second month I have seen almost no one in the leveling zones where as the first month it never happend. I enjoyed the game the first 50 levels but it is getting very boring and unenjoyable. This being said I would tend to agree with OP. I will just wait to see if they get their act together and decide if I rejoin then. I honestly hope they succeed I just don't have the patience to pay someone to learn how to fix their product.

I agree 100% with the OP.

The absolutely ONLY reason I am still occassionaly playing AoC is because my guild is still playing it as their game of choice and I love my guild.  Otherwise I would uninstall this POS from my pc immediately.

Even though my guild is still playing, I have noticed many of my guild mates not playing for various reasons.  I imagine the main reason many are not playing is because the game is an unfulfilling mess.

Originally posted by illspawn

I gave Conan a second month of subscription but it seems they are updating less which with their errors that isn't a good sign to me.

Funcom is patching less often to test their patches more

www.massively.com/2008/06/30/new-patching-schedule-for-age-of-conan/

"

Originally posted by MaGicBush

"

Funcom boasts 700,000 Accounts

Jun 30, 2008

Funcom, the company behind the new MMORPG, Age of Conan, has issued a press release stating that more than 700,000 players have created accounts for the game."

 

On the front page for AoC... Almost a million, you are completely wrong.

Created accounts, not active subscriptions. Try again.

This is exactly what I anticipated when I played the AOC beta. They would have strong sales at release, but be unable to keep players in the long run.

My impressions from playing AOC at beta was that it isn't anything new or special at all. The combat system is in fact pretty much the same as in other mmo's (made just so they could market the game for consoles). I don't see any reason to play AOC over wow, for instance. It might have good looking graphics, but in my book that doesn't make a great game.

Never saw a company talk about shipped copies before.  It's meaningless.   What peoples want to know is how much subs the game have.   Funcom is playing with numbers in hope of luring more peoples in.