Keep in mind that all the optimists you're looking for probably aren't reading or posting on the forums; they're actually playing the game!
Absolutely spot-on. In epidemiological science, we would call forum posters a "skewed sample." Same goes for political polling. This is why I rely on these forums only to discern what key game-play elements there are (like instancing and special directional attacks), and the degree to which core game mechanics need improvement. Thus the forum commentary of "trolls" has utility to me-- but only to some extent.
In contrast, I know better than to make predictions on the commercial fate of a game based on the postings of < 1% of a game's players on release. Both auto-assault (ha- remember that one? See my avatar) and AoC forums had passionate defenders and haters weighing in here at release. However, the number of toons I saw around me in-game in AA plummeted within a couple weeks of release, whereas AoC is apparently adding servers left and right. That is a better guide, and the true commercial fate will only be evident once time actually passes.
I'll be purchasing and playing this game... in a month or two when the worst of the kinks have been patched out. Even so, I would probably have a blast installing it tomorrow since I'm a casual player who would not need a crap bucket under his chair (that was hilarious by the way), such that content patches would likely be rolled out by the time I'd need them. Took me a year to get a toon to 50 in LOTRO.
In sum, be realistic on what can be meaningfully inferred from these forums considering the high likelihood of a skewed sample of participants.
It is said that , even God took 6 days to create the universe...and this is God i'm talking about...a supreme being...and I think its safe to say that the universe still undergoes regular patches and updates ...even up to this day...to this minute....and bugs...Platypus anyone? Not a very successful launch,,,seeing as popular belief is that earth is 10,000 years old..give or take.So lets give some credit to the AoC Developers...nothing is perfect...Ask God...if he'll listen.
In LOTRO beta we were balancing classes far before release. We were polishing up the completed crafting sytem. Even finalizing the initial higher level areas months before it went live. AoC seems to have just hit beta from alpha... That's the feel anyway. And I played beta (err alpha)...
THIS is what happens when you run out of time / money and have to release the game, despite the state it's in....
Then your first few months are spent using the boat load of money you just made to bring the game up to "Launch Ready" status.
I'm really not trying to burn AoC of Funcom, it's just a tragic reality of this market. MMOs are unique in that they can release an unfished product to make money to finish the product. Name any other gaming genre that can do that!
The real question then becomes is:
Is what they currently have available enough to warrant your purchase and financial support (subscription fees) until they patch the game up to the point they WISH they had it in at launch?
It's a personal question, everyone will likely have a different opinion and viewpoint.
Me? I'd rather they push launch back and get things right. But, as I said, sometimes (especially with self-published titles) that's just simply not an option.
There will always be people who like to level to the highest level in shortest possible time, people claim they can get to 220 in anarchy online in a few weeks and here i haven't even made it to 180 playing on and off since 2001 then again i'm not in any rush and by leveling slow i take time to see the world around me not just the zones that let me level the fastest.
I remember when sony released the planes of power expansion for everquest and the hardcore raiders could not get to the end zone(plane of time) cause it was not ready, that to me is even worse since it was an expansion.
Disturbs me a bit that tradeskills seems bad in AoC i have started to like doing tradeskills in other games, but hopefully they will fix it up to VG level (and yes i think Vanguard have super crafting reminds me of Horizons)
Haven't played AoC much yet but it looks fantastic and i bet it will get better when more dx10 stuff is added.
It is a nice stable beta at the very best. I have played a solid two weeks. I have seen many technical issues as well as creative short cuts. Look at the models. Most look similar or near alike. As far as a ton of people having a good time so far I see most people in chat complaining about getting ganked repeatedly. I love PVP but this is P-PVP, "P" is for pointless. Being camped my a player 10 levels above my own on the resurection pad is just pointless in my book.
Would I pay, I am still deciding. Probably not at the end of my 30 days. The real question is should I get my money back. Knowing what I know now I would never have bought the game and waited until 6 months to see what others were saying of if, or if the servers were still up. Do I think this game is here for the long run, nope, the attention to detail is that poor (even withe the first 20 levels that I totally enjoyed).
It is a nice stable beta at the very best. I have played a solid two weeks. I have seen many technical issues as well as creative short cuts. Look at the models. Most look similar or near alike. As far as a ton of people having a good time so far I see most people in chat complaining about getting ganked repeatedly. I love PVP but this is P-PVP, "P" is for pointless. Being camped my a player 10 levels above my own on the resurection pad is just pointless in my book.
One my pet peeves in wow pvp to, being corpse camped by a lvl 70 when you are 30 are so much fun, what sucks is they risk nothing doing it, bit sad that AoC is taking the same approach at least in a game like eve going ganking the newbies in secure space had a risk, you where likely to loose your ship and take a sec rating hit, do it enough and the police force will attack on sight.
Ah yes, THIS is what happens when you run out of time / money and have to release the game, despite the state it's in.... Then your first few months are spent using the boat load of money you just made to bring the game up to "Launch Ready" status. I'm really not trying to burn AoC of Funcom, it's just a tragic reality of this market. MMOs are unique in that they can release an unfished product to make money to finish the product. Name any other gaming genre that can do that!
Considering that well yeah, the game needs to be tailored for MILLIONS of PC configurations and not to mention the whiney biatches out there who stomp their feet and DEMAND the game be made specifically for them.
It really makes me shit my pants in stupidity how people go off on a tangent and compare a fecking OFFLINE game which is made for one up to three console configs with something this massive.
If people are too blind to see when the basis of a game, which has a fricking long lifespan, is good and that future "fixes" or patches will only add to this making it a GREAT game then I don't know what to say.
I take my hats off to all the developers out there.
P.S. no insult intended to the poster of the quote, simply used it as leverage.
I like how people are saying WoW had bugs and was missing content at release...
I played at release, and I don't even remember any major bug, except 2 evenings where lag made the game unplayable.
Also, I never had to grind to reach level 60. There was no "missing" content. The content at release was sufficient. It was still quest grind of course ^^ but nothing like AoC.
I'm starting to love more and more AoC every day, despite I was pretty disapointed at the beginning (90% of this solved purchasing new graphics card). Still my no.1 is WoW, more complete in any sense (but is also out much more time), but when I return now back to wow I'm realising more and more at least 2 very big minuses with WoW: in wow I guess I have spent 30% of gameplay only due to constant need to EAT and DRINK nearly after every single fight. In AoC there is virtually no downtime due to this. In WoW walking and even using mounts is PAINFULLY SLOW! Only now I realise this. In AoC is very fast. And one have bonus of using shift key for short runs which increases a loooot travelling. One can actually play game.
Unfortunately still a lot of things looks like in pre-pre-beta (like crafting and alike) and hope they will fix this soon. Using AH is not even remotely comparable to wow's. And number of alts is too limited. They should allow players to create as many alts as number of classes. And few other things.
I find it amusing how the pro-WoW people seem to be in denial that their game wasn't perfect at release. Servers were crashing so they had to add queues. Login servers were crashing so they limited the data by having all your toons "nekked" at login screen. Stuck while looting bugs. Certain Radeon cards had issues with Searing Gorge which weren't fixed til several months later.
WoW wasn't missing content? Huh? Mara, DM, were added in later even though the area was in game at release. To this day there is still an instance in Stormwind and Winterspring that hasn't been made useable. Near Kara there is a locked off area where "something" was supposed to be added at some point.
So please, spare me the WoW Is Perfect rants cuz we all know that is Bull***t. It had (and has) issues like every other MMO out there.
Far as AoC is concerned my only complaint, a minor one at that, is the lack of voice overs once you leave Tortage. Doing voice overs in mulitple languages is probably taking a while. Rather than delay the game months to just add voice overs, they released it. Overall game had a good launch, none of the bugs are game-breaking. Worst bug I found was a bug with Awakening II quest, but being only ONE quest I just worked on others while my petition was in queue.
I think part of the problem is the powergamers blitzed their way to (or near) 80 and are now screaming how bored they are and how the content isn't "completed" for them.
Originally posted by DrowNoble I find it amusing how the pro-WoW people seem to be in denial that their game wasn't perfect at release. [...] So please, spare me the WoW Is Perfect rants cuz we all know that is Bull***t. It had (and has) issues like every other MMO out there.
WoW was not perfect. But the point is you've never had to grind mobs to gain levels in WoW. There has been enough quests from the beginning.
You can't say WoW was missing content because it didn't include everything at once. The thing is there was enough content at release.
DM weren't in? Big deal! It's just an instance. How is that an "issue"? You didn't need it to level up. Of course, no MMO will have all its content delivered at release (you want a game without any updates? lol). But when the content is so poor that you have a very hard time leveling up, there is a problem.
I was a beta tester for AoC, I had very high hopes for this game but even as a beta tester I felt we were being slightly ignored. If that was on purpose or if the dev team honestly couldn't figure out the issue I won't ever know. But I am really glad I got to beta test the game because personally for me, AoC doesn't meet my standards for a MMO.
Granted people do enjoy this game and that is great. If you want to support Funcom and play AoC then don't let people regret your decision. But for those of us that expected AoC to be what Funcom said it was supposed to be, those optimists need to understand our point of view also as some of us are angry.
Every game will have people who are disheartened and people who are optimistic about the game/it's future. Fair enough. In the end it's up to the individual to decide, forums can debate and tell others what do to with their time / their opinion but it really doesn't matter.
Yes Funcom should of listened to a lot of us in beta but in their eyes/situation the push for release was necessary. That is fine. The lovely thing is we all have the freedom of choice. I for one do not like this game so I don't subscribe.
For those of you enjoying the game, I am happy for you. For those of us that didn't fair it well, there are tons of new MMO's on the horizon.
I am a guild leader with over 40 poeple on TestLive (aka Beta Server-1). We are constantly posting on the beta forum and hitting ctrl-b to send in bugs along with many others on TestLive. What we dont see is much feedback from the Devs about our findings. We honestly dont know if the Devs even see what we post or submit because we still hear about the bug reported when they are released to live. Then we sit back and scratch our heads saying "We have been telling you guys about this bug/problem/issue for a week now."
Thankfully I am not paying bug test it.
We have all Tier 1 buildings complete. Too bad they dont do anything for us to test as the feats for these buildings are turned off.
When they patch the TestLive they have VERY abreviated patch notes. We never see the full version of what is being changed/fixed/tested. I usually have to hit the AoCNews site to find out what is being posted to live servers.
Trust me when I say that I and many others are trying to find the bugs before they hit live but in the end it is up to the Devs to listen to us and fix them before they get to you.
I think part of the problem is expectations and WoW's success have left people jaded as to what to expect. This game was heavily hyped for quite some time, you are bound to find disappointed people when the game doesn't fit into their highly hyped expectations. They also unfairly compare the game to WoW, which will probably be commonplace with any MMO coming out in the future due to WoW's vast success.
To an above poster, my comment about DM was actually very relavent. Many people are complaining that AoC is lacking mid-high end content. They blitzed through levels and then are screaming "we're bored WTF?!". This is the same problem that happend in WoW early days, people were hitting the cap quickly and Blizzard reacted by adding Mara and DM early on to give people more options at 50+ on what to do. AoC got hit with the same "growing pains" by a percentage of the playerbase that leveled quickly. Funcom has been doing patches twice a week to get bugs squashed and these concerns addressed. Today (thursday 6/12), they tweaked quests and spawn rates in the 30-50 range to help with this.
Game not even been out a month, give it more time. Heck WoW's first couple weeks were a queue filled, stuck while looting, why is my char at login nekked mess. Then Blizz got it together and the rest is, as they say, history.
I think part of the problem is expectations and WoW's success have left people jaded as to what to expect. This game was heavily hyped for quite some time, you are bound to find disappointed people when the game doesn't fit into their highly hyped expectations. They also unfairly compare the game to WoW, which will probably be commonplace with any MMO coming out in the future due to WoW's vast success. Game not even been out a month, give it more time. Heck WoW's first couple weeks were a queue filled, stuck while looting, why is my char at login nekked mess. Then Blizz got it together and the rest is, as they say, history.
First I am not flaming you but just using this as a point. For $60 I would expect a complete game. A comparison to WOW is just a comparison to other products in the market which is valid. What I see being said is that it is ok to buy a game and start a monthly subscription and only receive a partial product. That is like saying I will start paying for a car and every week I will take it back to finish the assembly.
Personally I disagree with this and think that publishers/Devs need to get better at delivering more complete games on the day they say they intend to release the game.
My big issue is all the content that they add that I should be getting now when I level my current character is not yet in the game. I do not have the time to level a second character to get the experience that they I should be getting now, this is my choice but it diminishes the value of the game.
Blizzard raised the bar, but look at all the other games that have failed to date. Every other MMO since WOW has failed or only had marginal success (Eve, COH, etc). The reason, is that the bar is that high and OAC devs understood that and yet they still went forward and prematurally released the game.
So what you are saying is your $60 is an investment in a future game. When the game does not hit critical mass the client will be given away for free, so what does your $60 get you now. The opportunity to be in an open beta tester. Bottom line is that we are working for Funcom as testers and feature focus testers.
I have seen many people leave already, I have seen many people not buy the game based on the forums and posts here, and I see this game going away or diminishing to some point and expect to see it in the collection of Games at SOE station as all defunct games end there.
Call it game heaven or hell but here is a fine list of games that never quite lived up to expectations...
Well in the last month, content and issues have been fixed and more are slated to be done soon.
Very early on ganking was rampant on pvp servers. Higher levels would camp the rez spot of the newbies and endlessly, mercilessly kill them over and over til their death penalities stacked them into uselessness. They then patched a buff that grants a short term invulnerability every time you load into a zone. This is one example of something they did in reaction to how the players were playing.
Many people took one character and ran with it, blitzing through levels and then started screaming "we're bored! no content!". Actually the content was there, but some required groups... which were hard to find since these people had passed up many others. So, they added more content and faster spawns in the mid-range. Today's mini-patch (6/23) added more quests to the Khoseph(sp?) stygian zone to further help out people in their early 30's.
Now if you played a cimmerian, and only played in cimmerian zones... yes you probably ran into areas where the quests were slim. However, you have two other areas, aquilonia and stygia that you could go to as well.
No game comes perfect, 100% complete and bug-free at its launch. WoW had to add Maraudon in its first patch because players were complaining they had no instances to go to in the 50ish level range. Now, one could complain that WoW wasn't "complete" when I think it is fairer to say that Blizzard reacted to how the players were playing and made an adjustment.
Finally I don't think you flamed me at all. However, I do say that your belief that many people are leaving may be unfounded. You don't add 9 more servers if people are leaving. You can't fairly judge a game only 1 month into its release. Heck if everyone did that, WoW would of been dead before January 05.
Comments
Absolutely spot-on. In epidemiological science, we would call forum posters a "skewed sample." Same goes for political polling. This is why I rely on these forums only to discern what key game-play elements there are (like instancing and special directional attacks), and the degree to which core game mechanics need improvement. Thus the forum commentary of "trolls" has utility to me-- but only to some extent.
In contrast, I know better than to make predictions on the commercial fate of a game based on the postings of < 1% of a game's players on release. Both auto-assault (ha- remember that one? See my avatar) and AoC forums had passionate defenders and haters weighing in here at release. However, the number of toons I saw around me in-game in AA plummeted within a couple weeks of release, whereas AoC is apparently adding servers left and right. That is a better guide, and the true commercial fate will only be evident once time actually passes.
I'll be purchasing and playing this game... in a month or two when the worst of the kinks have been patched out. Even so, I would probably have a blast installing it tomorrow since I'm a casual player who would not need a crap bucket under his chair (that was hilarious by the way), such that content patches would likely be rolled out by the time I'd need them. Took me a year to get a toon to 50 in LOTRO.
In sum, be realistic on what can be meaningfully inferred from these forums considering the high likelihood of a skewed sample of participants.
It is said that , even God took 6 days to create the universe...and this is God i'm talking about...a supreme being...and I think its safe to say that the universe still undergoes regular patches and updates ...even up to this day...to this minute....and bugs...Platypus anyone? Not a very successful launch,,,seeing as popular belief is that earth is 10,000 years old..give or take.So lets give some credit to the AoC Developers...nothing is perfect...Ask God...if he'll listen.
....and unlike the AoC Director...good luck on God writing in to advise of upcoming changes/improvements in the universe.
We? You're a developer for LOTRO?
Ah yes,
THIS is what happens when you run out of time / money and have to release the game, despite the state it's in....
Then your first few months are spent using the boat load of money you just made to bring the game up to "Launch Ready" status.
I'm really not trying to burn AoC of Funcom, it's just a tragic reality of this market. MMOs are unique in that they can release an unfished product to make money to finish the product. Name any other gaming genre that can do that!
The real question then becomes is:
Is what they currently have available enough to warrant your purchase and financial support (subscription fees) until they patch the game up to the point they WISH they had it in at launch?
It's a personal question, everyone will likely have a different opinion and viewpoint.
Me? I'd rather they push launch back and get things right. But, as I said, sometimes (especially with self-published titles) that's just simply not an option.
There will always be people who like to level to the highest level in shortest possible time, people claim they can get to 220 in anarchy online in a few weeks and here i haven't even made it to 180 playing on and off since 2001
then again i'm not in any rush and by leveling slow i take time to see the world around me not just the zones that let me level the fastest.
I remember when sony released the planes of power expansion for everquest and the hardcore raiders could not get to the end zone(plane of time) cause it was not ready, that to me is even worse since it was an expansion.
Disturbs me a bit that tradeskills seems bad in AoC i have started to like doing tradeskills in other games, but hopefully they will fix it up to VG level (and yes i think Vanguard have super crafting reminds me of Horizons)
Haven't played AoC much yet but it looks fantastic and i bet it will get better when more dx10 stuff is added.
It is a nice stable beta at the very best. I have played a solid two weeks. I have seen many technical issues as well as creative short cuts. Look at the models. Most look similar or near alike. As far as a ton of people having a good time so far I see most people in chat complaining about getting ganked repeatedly. I love PVP but this is P-PVP, "P" is for pointless. Being camped my a player 10 levels above my own on the resurection pad is just pointless in my book.
Would I pay, I am still deciding. Probably not at the end of my 30 days. The real question is should I get my money back. Knowing what I know now I would never have bought the game and waited until 6 months to see what others were saying of if, or if the servers were still up. Do I think this game is here for the long run, nope, the attention to detail is that poor (even withe the first 20 levels that I totally enjoyed).
One my pet peeves in wow pvp to, being corpse camped by a lvl 70 when you are 30 are so much fun, what sucks is they risk nothing doing it, bit sad that AoC is taking the same approach at least in a game like eve going ganking the newbies in secure space had a risk, you where likely to loose your ship and take a sec rating hit, do it enough and the police force will attack on sight.
Considering that well yeah, the game needs to be tailored for MILLIONS of PC configurations and not to mention the whiney biatches out there who stomp their feet and DEMAND the game be made specifically for them.
It really makes me shit my pants in stupidity how people go off on a tangent and compare a fecking OFFLINE game which is made for one up to three console configs with something this massive.
If people are too blind to see when the basis of a game, which has a fricking long lifespan, is good and that future "fixes" or patches will only add to this making it a GREAT game then I don't know what to say.
I take my hats off to all the developers out there.
P.S. no insult intended to the poster of the quote, simply used it as leverage.
I like how people are saying WoW had bugs and was missing content at release...
I played at release, and I don't even remember any major bug, except 2 evenings where lag made the game unplayable.
Also, I never had to grind to reach level 60. There was no "missing" content. The content at release was sufficient. It was still quest grind of course ^^ but nothing like AoC.
Anyhow the best part of this update was
I loled.Seriously, it's ridiculous.
---
Waiting for: GW2
*thumbs up*: GW, Eve(, WoW)
*thumbs down*: MO, GA, FE
Mainly I agree with original post.
I'm starting to love more and more AoC every day, despite I was pretty disapointed at the beginning (90% of this solved purchasing new graphics card
). Still my no.1 is WoW, more complete in any sense (but is also out much more time), but when I return now back to wow I'm realising more and more at least 2 very big minuses with WoW: in wow I guess I have spent 30% of gameplay only due to constant need to EAT and DRINK nearly after every single fight. In AoC there is virtually no downtime due to this. In WoW walking and even using mounts is PAINFULLY SLOW! Only now I realise this. In AoC is very fast. And one have bonus of using shift key for short runs which increases a loooot travelling. One can actually play game.
Unfortunately still a lot of things looks like in pre-pre-beta
(like crafting and alike) and hope they will fix this soon. Using AH is not even remotely comparable to wow's. And number of alts is too limited. They should allow players to create as many alts as number of classes. And few other things.
I find it amusing how the pro-WoW people seem to be in denial that their game wasn't perfect at release. Servers were crashing so they had to add queues. Login servers were crashing so they limited the data by having all your toons "nekked" at login screen. Stuck while looting bugs. Certain Radeon cards had issues with Searing Gorge which weren't fixed til several months later.
WoW wasn't missing content? Huh? Mara, DM, were added in later even though the area was in game at release. To this day there is still an instance in Stormwind and Winterspring that hasn't been made useable. Near Kara there is a locked off area where "something" was supposed to be added at some point.
So please, spare me the WoW Is Perfect rants cuz we all know that is Bull***t. It had (and has) issues like every other MMO out there.
Far as AoC is concerned my only complaint, a minor one at that, is the lack of voice overs once you leave Tortage. Doing voice overs in mulitple languages is probably taking a while. Rather than delay the game months to just add voice overs, they released it. Overall game had a good launch, none of the bugs are game-breaking. Worst bug I found was a bug with Awakening II quest, but being only ONE quest I just worked on others while my petition was in queue.
I think part of the problem is the powergamers blitzed their way to (or near) 80 and are now screaming how bored they are and how the content isn't "completed" for them.
You can't say WoW was missing content because it didn't include everything at once. The thing is there was enough content at release.
DM weren't in? Big deal! It's just an instance. How is that an "issue"? You didn't need it to level up.
Of course, no MMO will have all its content delivered at release (you want a game without any updates? lol). But when the content is so poor that you have a very hard time leveling up, there is a problem.
---
Waiting for: GW2
*thumbs up*: GW, Eve(, WoW)
*thumbs down*: MO, GA, FE
I was a beta tester for AoC, I had very high hopes for this game but even as a beta tester I felt we were being slightly ignored. If that was on purpose or if the dev team honestly couldn't figure out the issue I won't ever know. But I am really glad I got to beta test the game because personally for me, AoC doesn't meet my standards for a MMO.
Granted people do enjoy this game and that is great. If you want to support Funcom and play AoC then don't let people regret your decision. But for those of us that expected AoC to be what Funcom said it was supposed to be, those optimists need to understand our point of view also as some of us are angry.
Every game will have people who are disheartened and people who are optimistic about the game/it's future. Fair enough. In the end it's up to the individual to decide, forums can debate and tell others what do to with their time / their opinion but it really doesn't matter.
Yes Funcom should of listened to a lot of us in beta but in their eyes/situation the push for release was necessary. That is fine. The lovely thing is we all have the freedom of choice. I for one do not like this game so I don't subscribe.
For those of you enjoying the game, I am happy for you. For those of us that didn't fair it well, there are tons of new MMO's on the horizon.
I am a guild leader with over 40 poeple on TestLive (aka Beta Server-1). We are constantly posting on the beta forum and hitting ctrl-b to send in bugs along with many others on TestLive. What we dont see is much feedback from the Devs about our findings. We honestly dont know if the Devs even see what we post or submit because we still hear about the bug reported when they are released to live. Then we sit back and scratch our heads saying "We have been telling you guys about this bug/problem/issue for a week now."
Thankfully I am not paying bug test it.
We have all Tier 1 buildings complete. Too bad they dont do anything for us to test as the feats for these buildings are turned off.
When they patch the TestLive they have VERY abreviated patch notes. We never see the full version of what is being changed/fixed/tested. I usually have to hit the AoCNews site to find out what is being posted to live servers.
Trust me when I say that I and many others are trying to find the bugs before they hit live but in the end it is up to the Devs to listen to us and fix them before they get to you.
Ramino, 61st Conquorer
Bug Exterminator Guild
I think part of the problem is expectations and WoW's success have left people jaded as to what to expect. This game was heavily hyped for quite some time, you are bound to find disappointed people when the game doesn't fit into their highly hyped expectations. They also unfairly compare the game to WoW, which will probably be commonplace with any MMO coming out in the future due to WoW's vast success.
To an above poster, my comment about DM was actually very relavent. Many people are complaining that AoC is lacking mid-high end content. They blitzed through levels and then are screaming "we're bored WTF?!". This is the same problem that happend in WoW early days, people were hitting the cap quickly and Blizzard reacted by adding Mara and DM early on to give people more options at 50+ on what to do. AoC got hit with the same "growing pains" by a percentage of the playerbase that leveled quickly. Funcom has been doing patches twice a week to get bugs squashed and these concerns addressed. Today (thursday 6/12), they tweaked quests and spawn rates in the 30-50 range to help with this.
Game not even been out a month, give it more time. Heck WoW's first couple weeks were a queue filled, stuck while looting, why is my char at login nekked mess. Then Blizz got it together and the rest is, as they say, history.
First I am not flaming you but just using this as a point. For $60 I would expect a complete game. A comparison to WOW is just a comparison to other products in the market which is valid. What I see being said is that it is ok to buy a game and start a monthly subscription and only receive a partial product. That is like saying I will start paying for a car and every week I will take it back to finish the assembly.
Personally I disagree with this and think that publishers/Devs need to get better at delivering more complete games on the day they say they intend to release the game.
My big issue is all the content that they add that I should be getting now when I level my current character is not yet in the game. I do not have the time to level a second character to get the experience that they I should be getting now, this is my choice but it diminishes the value of the game.
Blizzard raised the bar, but look at all the other games that have failed to date. Every other MMO since WOW has failed or only had marginal success (Eve, COH, etc). The reason, is that the bar is that high and OAC devs understood that and yet they still went forward and prematurally released the game.
So what you are saying is your $60 is an investment in a future game. When the game does not hit critical mass the client will be given away for free, so what does your $60 get you now. The opportunity to be in an open beta tester. Bottom line is that we are working for Funcom as testers and feature focus testers.
I have seen many people leave already, I have seen many people not buy the game based on the forums and posts here, and I see this game going away or diminishing to some point and expect to see it in the collection of Games at SOE station as all defunct games end there.
Call it game heaven or hell but here is a fine list of games that never quite lived up to expectations...
http://www.station.sony.com/en/freeTrials.vm
Well in the last month, content and issues have been fixed and more are slated to be done soon.
Very early on ganking was rampant on pvp servers. Higher levels would camp the rez spot of the newbies and endlessly, mercilessly kill them over and over til their death penalities stacked them into uselessness. They then patched a buff that grants a short term invulnerability every time you load into a zone. This is one example of something they did in reaction to how the players were playing.
Many people took one character and ran with it, blitzing through levels and then started screaming "we're bored! no content!". Actually the content was there, but some required groups... which were hard to find since these people had passed up many others. So, they added more content and faster spawns in the mid-range. Today's mini-patch (6/23) added more quests to the Khoseph(sp?) stygian zone to further help out people in their early 30's.
Now if you played a cimmerian, and only played in cimmerian zones... yes you probably ran into areas where the quests were slim. However, you have two other areas, aquilonia and stygia that you could go to as well.
No game comes perfect, 100% complete and bug-free at its launch. WoW had to add Maraudon in its first patch because players were complaining they had no instances to go to in the 50ish level range. Now, one could complain that WoW wasn't "complete" when I think it is fairer to say that Blizzard reacted to how the players were playing and made an adjustment.
Finally I don't think you flamed me at all. However, I do say that your belief that many people are leaving may be unfounded. You don't add 9 more servers if people are leaving. You can't fairly judge a game only 1 month into its release. Heck if everyone did that, WoW would of been dead before January 05.