Age of Conan's Future

[Nox]

Originally Posted by Drax

Just to compare it to early WoW, I remember doing Strat and Scholo with 15 man groups and still wiping at times. There were those undead in the Scholo basement with the gas cloud that would always kill people on every pull. There was also no Maraudon or Dire Maul dungeons at release. I also recall having to do Blightcaller with a raid group of 40 and barely killing him.

QFT

I think everyone got to 80 so fast in this game they have no respect for it. This is the first 'hard' shit we've encountered. Sure some of it is undoubtedly balance, but some of it is l2p, too.

[misery-SiN]

PvE can suck a dick anyhow they can never finish that portion of the game for all I care, ON WITH THE SIEGING~ Griefing is really fun though lol

YouTube - AoC good times with a horse

I partially take that back, private instanced pve can suck a dick but public ones are a-ok with me! esp raid zones.

[Meir-SiN]

A post was made today about the future of the game in the coming weeks which amazingly enough address a lot of issues:

Letter from the Game Director
Posted: - 03.06.2008

The following information from Game Director Gaute Godager is about the plans for the near future.


Fellow Hyborians!

As you may have noticed we have had frequent patches the last two weeks. We hope this will soon start to quiet down, but as long as there are major issues – and there have been – we will dedicate the Conan team to fixing them and giving you these fixes as soon as possible! We have a plan on how to move this game forward because as you know, what you have today is but the platform – the dawn of this world. I hope you enjoy the game as is, but I can ensure you, this is but the beginning!

Our focus from now on can be summarized by these points:

We will add content, specifically in mid-late thirties and mid-late fifties and make the leveling speed smoother in those areas, reducing the need to grind.
We will have an overhaul of the PvP system – adding consequence and a host of small things.
We are fixing bugs you reported through all channels we can get information from.
We will add a new large outdoor region in the 55-60 range this summer!
This is only a small taster! More information about the exciting summer and fall Roadmap will come the end of the next week!
We are staffing up Customer Service, Quality Assurance and Community departments!
I will spend some words on a bit more details now.


1. Filling “thin areas” in our content

We have seen that there are certain level ranges of these Hyborian Adventures that do not have the amount of quality we wish them to have. Most specifically these are the end of the Thirties and the end of the Fifties level ranges. We are addressing this in several ways.

Several mid-late thirties dungeons are getting a complete overhaul (Black Castle, Pyramid of the Ancients and Treasury of the Ancients)
Several quests are being made fuller and more entertaining. If people wish to revisit these quests, we will add a system to let them try them out again.
we are adding first a batch of quests in Eiglophian Mountains (lvls 55+)
We are also adding in a bunch of quests that didn’t quite make it for launch in the 30+ areas.
Around 60 quests through the game have been flagged as “Lore Quests”. They will now be patched out with full Voice-Over. (Roughly 1 quest per level after level 20)
All this will come in June! In July the first level 80 additional Dungeon will be patched out. More on that later…


2. Overhauling the PvP System

People like our open PvP system. There are many plans on how to give this open free PvP even more meaning and Purpose. In the meantime we will be doing some smaller tweaks, and we plan to get these out sometimes in June. I will not go into 100% detail here, but that will come next week! What I can promise is:

An update on how sneaking and perception works in PvP (nothing major, but an adjustment).
A change in the amount of information you get when you hover over an other player.
An added system of consequence to “ganking”. (Killing much-much lower level players).
A system of adding consequence to losing a PvP match, and winning a PvP match + turning on PvP Leveling.
A change in how Crowd Control (Root, Knockback etc) works in PvP.
PvP gear.


3. New Massive Region

We will unveil this location later, but it will feature a host of quests, new monsters and places of dreams or horror. It will be styled towards the players in the late 50s and bridge the experience on the way to Atzels Approach. We have plans for releasing several of the areas that didn’t quite make it for the release.


4. Fixing bugs and increasing Customer Service

Funcom has always prided ourselves with having great customer satisfaction. The success so far for this title has left us with the need to increase the size of CS. This will go in parallel with the constant fixing of bugs and other issues that lead people to petition. Included in this is even better testing of the game by increasing the size of Quality Assurance and informing you better about changes by staffing up the Community Department. I know a blurb like this will haunt me always, but I will still venture one: We aren’t satisfied until all our customers are! You know we had a very, very difficult launch of Anarchy-Online! That was a very painful process for all of us working on it – 4 years. You might not understand how driven we are to make sure you enjoy this game, and all the support around it!

The future is very bright for Hyboria. There will be many bright mornings following this, the very first. Together we shall surge ahead and build the world even bigger, better and more detailed!

Yours truly,

Gaute Godager

Game Director
Age of Conan, Funcom

[Dirty Old Man]

I have to say for the first time in the last few weeks, today I was truly annoyed and pissed at the game.

The recent bugs they introduced in the game are atrocious.

1. Buffs don't clear. This may not be an issue for some classes, but for a class like mine (Conquerer) it's huge as I have tons of temporary small duration buffs that I can never tell if they're on or not. It's really shitty to go running into a PvP fight only to find I don't have the core buffs I need to compete in PvP. Now I'm forced to randomly cast the shit constantly because I can never tell if it's off or on. This becomes an even greater issue for me because they haven't fixed where if you're CC'd and use a skill, the timer is used but no skill goes off (and now there's no way to tell).

2. CC effects are lasting forever. Everyone has experienced the 5 minute stuns or the perma fears and snares that make you relog. This simply needs to be fixed immediately. It's shit like this that makes me question if they really got either a QA team to test it, or even if they do have it if they even bother to test the shit for PvP (which implies dangerous things). So many fights tonight could have gone differently and all I heard all night long was "bugged, relogging..."

3. Now I like the new switching instances thing and doing it from a graveyard. I've had a lot less people get out of combat and just wisk themselves away to another instances. Thumbs up. BUT MAKE IT FUCKING WORK FIRST BEFORE YOU IMPLEMENT IT. Having to log out, log back in just to be able to switch instances where everyone else is...just incredibly fucking annoying.


A lot of people are quick to jump onto the "This is a new game..." bandwagon, but this isn't Funcom's first rodeo and these aren't problems that were here at release. These problems are things that they're putting into the game after the fact. These are things that should be left out if they're untested or they don't know if things are going to work.

I honestly hope that this isn't a glimpse into the future. What use is all the things they promised recently if all they do is wreck them by horrid application of their patches and break more things then they fix?

[Angus-SiN]

I think they are being honest in what they said on the post, just not completely transparent. I thik while every company wants the success that AoC has seen, the company footing the bill never staffs to the appropriate levels. I'd bet their Q&A department is sorely lacking enough people to properly test these patches before they are published, and until it is, we will be the test rats.

I think they are making a big push to staff up not only CS, but the dev team as well so that they can address these issues. Time is the issue, becuase we will suffer for it.

[Meir-SiN]

Originally Posted by Dirty Old Man

I have to say for the first time in the last few weeks, today I was truly annoyed and pissed at the game.

The recent bugs they introduced in the game are atrocious.

1. Buffs don't clear. This may not be an issue for some classes, but for a class like mine (Conquerer) it's huge as I have tons of temporary small duration buffs that I can never tell if they're on or not. It's really shitty to go running into a PvP fight only to find I don't have the core buffs I need to compete in PvP. Now I'm forced to randomly cast the shit constantly because I can never tell if it's off or on. This becomes an even greater issue for me because they haven't fixed where if you're CC'd and use a skill, the timer is used but no skill goes off (and now there's no way to tell).

2. CC effects are lasting forever. Everyone has experienced the 5 minute stuns or the perma fears and snares that make you relog. This simply needs to be fixed immediately. It's shit like this that makes me question if they really got either a QA team to test it, or even if they do have it if they even bother to test the shit for PvP (which implies dangerous things). So many fights tonight could have gone differently and all I heard all night long was "bugged, relogging..."

3. Now I like the new switching instances thing and doing it from a graveyard. I've had a lot less people get out of combat and just wisk themselves away to another instances. Thumbs up. BUT MAKE IT FUCKING WORK FIRST BEFORE YOU IMPLEMENT IT. Having to log out, log back in just to be able to switch instances where everyone else is...just incredibly fucking annoying.


A lot of people are quick to jump onto the "This is a new game..." bandwagon, but this isn't Funcom's first rodeo and these aren't problems that were here at release. These problems are things that they're putting into the game after the fact. These are things that should be left out if they're untested or they don't know if things are going to work.

I honestly hope that this isn't a glimpse into the future. What use is all the things they promised recently if all they do is wreck them by horrid application of their patches and break more things then they fix?

My only complaint is that funcom is making the mistakes MMO's made years ago, and they even have a MMO under there belts (AO). Doesn't make a lot of sense but they are changing pretty quick which is a +. There response to all the complains about bugs was to push shit out really quick (which is theory is good but in practice bad). Bad testing period, and Im sure in the next week or two we won't see these major bugs with new patches.

Just like they went from 36 hour petition queues to getting to them in a day, but fucked up b/c they added an update thing where you had to update it to stay in the queue causing thousands of petitions to not get looked at. They changed that the other day =p

Anyhow the game is not complete blah blah blah but i do see that they are making a major effort to improve everything and they are communicating to the player base about these issues which is fucking amazing. You never saw Blizzard say "whoops we fucked up, changes inc", or any other developer for that matter that I can think of.

[EyE-SiN]

its been 2+ weeks and we've gotten .... 75ish megs of updates? if they dont drop a major patch on us soon, i am seeing a dim future approaching.

edit: and all those updates do is break more shit that they dont fix.

[Dirty Old Man]

Originally Posted by EyE-SiN

edit: and all those updates do is break more shit that they dont fix.

And that is my major complaint so far.

They recognize bugs. Great. Awesome. Thumbs up. However fixing one bug while adding in 3 others isn't really counteracted by "Ooops...sorry...our bad!" time after time again. You wouldn't even hear a peep out of me about this shit if it wasn't for them consistently so far breaking more shit as they fix other shit.

I really couldn't care if they bring the servers down for 4 hours each day if they can eliminate a bug and not create others. Even still, if they fix these game breaking bugs I listed and don't patch for a month that's fine too, so long as they don't break 5 other things.

For me, the game has just gotten worse and worse. Barring the glaring exploits, I honestly felt it was a better game when I first got to play weeks ago than it is today.