Age of Conan's Future

[Meir-SiN]

With the power gamers hitting 80 within 9-10 days of release and the others coming up on that mark now, funcom has to lite the afterburners. With 400,000 active subscriptions and 700,000 boxes sold on day 1 there is a massive influx of money coming in. By the way - that I think - is better than the WoW release. True, they are still probably in debt from the development but thats no reason to be stingy. This game has one massive flaw, it's nowhere close to being half-finished at the endgame. Funcom HAS to hire a massive amount of customer support and game developers to keep the player base that flocked to the game, abandoning WoW. With that being said here is a small list of things that have to be done within the next 2-4 weeks or they risk losing a huge amount of subscribers (a-la Daoc who had 250,000 and dwindled to 50,000).

1.) Dungeons. At release WoW didn't have a lot to do, we spent most of our time in Hillsbrad (having the best time in WoW period), but at least they had fairly finished level 60 content for groups. AoC however seems to have had either no testers, or testers in tier 12332131 raid loot in these level 80 dungeons. The three resource zone daily dungeons are fairly complete with some minor issues. The spiders in one, one hit everyone. One instance has a type of mob that doesnt fight back, and the last seemed finished till we got to the last boss and he was un-attackable at 20%. Aztels fortress is just a joke, the boss hit our tank for 6.6k one shotting him. Anyhow, it won't take a lot of time/effort to tweak those places and that should be done within a week or two at most if funcom has their shit together.

2.) Crafting. At the moment I am unable to do the craft I want because they "forgot" to make a way to un-learn professions (and a GM can't do it either). Another of our guild members is unable to craft because we have been unable to harvest cotton for nearly a week now due to a bad patch. Trying to convince ourselves that Stygians refused to pick cotton only worked for a few days. A few various other issues that have plagued our members should and could be fixed in the next patch if they had the coders on it....

3.) Zones. Granted, this one will take awhile to sort out, but some major bugs really take the fun out of this game at times. Zones crashing for no apparent reason (my nighttime tortage even crashed today). Getting loading errors where it just gets stuck forcing you to relog and waste 5-10 minutes getting back ingame. As for zones themselves, there are areas where you run into invisible objects and have to treck 50m out of your way to get around an open field. Last and by far the most annoying is the "clipping" effect. In later zones (especially the level 70-80 zone) there are areas where mobs and players simply disappear 5m away from you if they cross an invisible zone load line. Trying to PvP in these areas is simply frustrating. As a side note, I imagine auto-running suddenly stopping has to do with these load lines as well.

4.) PvP. Let me say that again, PvP. We were promised a PvP system where you earned points for killing people. A reward system is a must and there is no reason why it is not in. We gained points in beta, why not in release. Even if they did not patch the reward system in yet, at least let us accumulate points. I mean, you could even do something retarded like giving us 5 points for killing an equal level player and losing 5 if we died, then making the items, feats, whatever the rewards are cost 10 billion and rework the point system at that point. We would at least think we were accomplishing something in the meantime (and would give people an incentive to not res-zerg). As it stands now there is no penalty for death besides a few minutes of your time. This is unacceptable.

5.) Class balance. This is not a huge issue. Yes it is annoying to get 1 shot sometimes at level 80 but it doesn't happen often enough to ruin my gametime (it often gets a good laugh from everyone else in your group). This needs to be gradually tweaked over the next month and by the end of June should be fairly even. I know class balance is something that goes on the entire time a game is live, by even i mean no 1-shots, no completely broken skills etc.

6.) Sieging. Nobody has been able to siege, duh. But just look at player keeps and think about how much time they put into testing/developing sieging. As it stands now, players can just run through our massive gate as if it isn't even up. How did they miss something like this if they even had one test-siege? There are even walls you can jump through because they are built near a rock! Sieging has to be fully functioning within 4 weeks period. No give or take. Givin the developers time table for battlekeeps, we should start seeing some around three weeks from now. The major guilds will not stand for bugs that burn our battlekeeps to the ground. A side note on this, they stated that guilds with the highest PvP points would be first in line for raiding battlekeeps... A slight issue when we arn't accumulating points at all.

Takng into account everything, this game is still really - really fun at times. The PvP is simply above and beyond and other game out now. It takes skill (gasp) to do it. Nobody with half a brain expects any MMO to be finished at release, hell they are always evolving. The problem with AoC is that funcom only got to polish the game up until level 50 before release. Post 50 it seems to me all they did was fix broken quests since I quit playing beta 4-5 weeks ago. AoC has the potential to be beyond huge, perhaps a powerhouse. They also have the potential to be another Daoc. Anyone else care to differ, or have other issues you feel needs to be worked out within the next month for the game to be a success?

[Drax]

The huge amount of improvements they made to the game in the last week of beta gives me some hope that they can get a decent amount of work done quickly. I'd like to see some major UI improvements as well.

[Nox]

I was in beta for about the last 10 weeks of it, and what I observed in beta was that they invited individuals rather than inviting guilds, and so the players played like individuals.

I tried, but was not able to form recurring groups to do difficult content, and the playskill of the people I did find was nothing I got excited about.

I managed to get to 50 in about 6 weeks of play soloing with an assassin, and that was like chewing rocks. I've gotten to about 50 in 2 weeks in final, and I have learned more about the game in the last week than I did in 10 weeks of beta due to the challenge and exposure.

There were raid-focus groups, but remember that mobs were not itemized in beta and the devs were silent about that, so we didn't know if boss mobs should be dropping loot, or would etc. Also many zones (including the 80 daily dungeons) weren't open in beta so we had no chance to test them even if we had managed a raid group.

For as long as the beta ran, I think their mistake was in not having a good process of selection to bring in people who would test the game as it would be played.

[simbala-SiN]

I agree with all the above, except for the end-game part obviously (only lvl 56).


PvE / Character / Environment
1. Need more quests for higher levels.

2. Some Trader npcs are still not working, such as the one in Bradoc.

3. Feat descriptions are inconsistent or broken. Example - I have a feat that causes Cobra Stare to have a 1% chance to not break on damage (yes, it says one percent). That has actually proven to be 100%. I have another talent that supposedly reduces spell damage by "1%" and one that gives the opponent a "1%" chance to fizzle. Are those supposed to be 100% also?

4. LFG. I don't know who else in the game uses the LFG tool, but it's really hard finding a group...even just a group to grind with or to quest with for a couple hours.

5. Oh, and what's with some item stats not showing up in the Stats page? Wisdom, for example is supposed to increase a Priest's magic damage...that is not reflected in the Stats page.

6. That brings me to itemization. I'm still using gear from Tortage : ( I'm trying to stack +health gear to survive better in PvP, but there doesn't seem to be much of that for light armor and cloth. At level 56, I have less than 2000 hp which is very very sad.


PvP

1. There is a big problem with class "balance" when a few other classes can single hit me for more than my hp.

2. Some classes seem to be able to heal themselves for more than I'm able to heal myself, and I'm a healer. The same classes also do a LOT more dmg than I'm able to do.

3. Knockbacks are out of hand. I don't see why there isn't an immunity debuff to knockbacks (or maybe there is and it's broken).



Who knows why, but it seems like there are 10 people working for that company, and 9 of them are on vacation.

[Drek-SiN]

I was going to pick up the game to casually play with you guys because I miss you so much but I think I will be waiting until another review from you Meir, very good read.

Thanks for the info.

[Motig]

Personally I dont think these 5 man dungeons are that bad.

They are DOABLE, you actually have to have players think and move and stay alive.

Casting mobs could use about a 25% damage nerf and melee mobs probably a 15% damage nerf, generally speaking, but the dungeons are still doable with creative thinking and not just "stand there, tank mob, beat mob, heal tank"

[Nox]

Remember we have shit gear yet.

Don't presume that this stuff was intended to be doable by newbie 80's w/ white/green crap gear.

[misery-SiN]

To simbala mostly~

As far as I'm concerned the leveling curve is way too easy anyhow needing to have quests to guide your ass through every single level from 1 to 80 when it goes at fast as it does is some fucking sad shit =( I wish it had taken longer to get to 80 as the best fighting has been over leveling spots tbh.

Admittedly some of the %'s they forgot to multiply or divide by 100 (mana / stamina tap magical) but those are minor issues that aren't too terrible to figure out. Some of the talent translations are not so great but oh well I can deal with that too. Eventually they should be fixed but if it's really that hard I'd rather they fix the crafting and pvp system & shit first.

Seriously LFG on a FFA pvp server has not ever and will not ever be easy. This is probably further aggravated by your guild tag...


Wisdom Str Dex and whatnot outside of adding minor amounts of stamina / hps or mana do not seem to do a gd thing and this needs to be fixxed.

Defense rating is so easily capped that in order to get more mitigation really all you have is raising your immunities.... not the generic immunities to all because the % is so absurdly low on these items that one piece of 1% physical immunity armor and 1 piece of 1% to all magic immunities gear will far outdo an entire set of generic immunity % gear. Unless of course this stat is also off by a factor of 10 as many other percents are. I have not had much opportunity to test this yet, but I'm sure I will get around to it later if it takes too long for some other clown to do it for me!

There is a 30 or 40 second immunity buff to knock backs if it was a player who did it to you and not a npc. But that certainly does seem to be the best form of cc besides killing them!

I do kind of like how the SIX (not 5) man dungeons are cc fests, some of them are just absurd though with bosses hitting the tank for 6k and being resistant to like stun/fear/kb. Those are probably just meant to be impossible right now. At least I'm not spamming like one button all the time in there, I do not like how my heals don't stack with anyone else's ever unless that was bug though.

Also nox I'm in almost all lvl 80 blues just btw... and a purple ring tee hee. What I really want is for my tunic to not show off my pecks.

[Nox]

I said this elsewhere, so shoot me if I am repeating myself but in beta it seemed like funcom was obsessing on tortage and 1-40 content, which is understandable.

They invited individuals, not guilds - so people played the beta solo. There was very little cohesive end-game testing and much of the content was blocked off.

So, really I think that everything past about 60 is just unfinished, and some outright broken.

This will get better in time. I originally was going to hold off on getting AOC after seeing how rough it was in beta, but when I saw SiN was coming, as were a lot of people I wanted to kill I figured I might as well experience the launch.

[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.