Many of the elements that most MMO's offer(aside from combat) are either weak, or nonexistent in AoC..
Despite how quickly levelling goes, there are still holes in the content for even 1 toon!
Many of the game mechanics are used poorly, or in a frustrating manner. Ex: the Stygian crafting vendors are mostly accessible by ladders. These ladders require 200 climbing skill to climb. THEY'RE LADDERS!!! How on earth can my toon wipe out baddies by the dozen and yet be such an idiot as to not be skilled enough to climb a ladder?
Inventory is still inadequate. Particularly if you ever want to craft anything, which fortunately, you rarely do.
Funcom needs some perspective. They need to see what other popular MMO's are offering and come to the realization that their game is grossly weak in every other department other than combat. They obviously don't need to copy what these other games are doing, but they have to ask the question, "What does a player do when they're not fighting?". Right now, there's only one answer: quitting.
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
As someone that beta'ed the game in both closed and open, was in Early Access, and quit within two months of launch, I think there are several unmentioned points here. I loved the game, and how it played, and how it looked. However, they botched things, plain and simple. The memory leaks were pretty bad, and I think anyone around in beta and launch remembers the dreaded grey map. Especially for someone that had a low-mid range rig, it was VERY annoying, because loading back in could take 4-5 mins back then, and if you crashed while fighting... Yeah. No fun. It is excusable in the beginning, but after 10-20 times, it becomes a major annoyance. I, however, was WELL used to it from beta, and shrugged it off. But a lot of people were pissed about it. Next, we have the bank problems. To make matters worse, the NPCs controlled not just the bank, but the AH and mail system too! They worked fine all through beta. Never a problem. And then Early Access hits, and they don't work? Pretty crappy. So, you get loaded down with stuff, or, god forbit, you were actually out gathering materials, and you now have a full inventory. Nothing you can do about it. You cant even mail off the stuff to an alt... You either need a friend you trust, or a second account. But that was just the start. Once you hit 38ish, and the gems started dropping.. Forget about it. They dropped like crazy, and they didnt stack for some reason. Even worse, they were not going into your resource bag, they went into your regular loot bag! And, even worse again, you had no idea what they would sell for, so you wanted to keep them all, but at the same time, you wanted make room! So annoying. THEN, FINALLY, they fixed the bank NPCs. People floked to the AH, flooded it with gems so that they could clear out their inventory, and they were worth nothing! ALL that time taking up space, and they were worth crap because so many people were selling them. Not to mention half the feats didn't work, or didnt work as advertized, and several skills were crap. Then the nerf bat started swinging, and the readjustments came... Within the first few weeks of launch... No better way to piss off a large group of people. And the PvP? Not too much of it, and it usually didn't work out too well. And that was the battlegrounds. Seiging was completely impossible due to poor performance. Oh, and the little fact that you could not actually make a tier 2 town until several patches in because one of the plans required things you could not get... But, once they finally DID fix it, even people with VERY nice computers had to put the settings to low, and STILL have terrible FPS stuttering, memory crashes and all sorts of other problems just to attempt to seige... Now, dont get me wrong. I loved AoC. But really, if I had not betaed it, and already gotten a feeling for the game, and liked it from that, I would have dropped it even faster than I did.
Good read, it was mature and thoughtful. Thanks I am curious have you played AoC since the time you quit? IF not, maybe you should give it another whirl. Alot of what you talked about has been fixed, or is not a problem anymore really.
Good read, it was mature and thoughtful. Thanks I am curious have you played AoC since the time you quit? IF not, maybe you should give it another whirl. Alot of what you talked about has been fixed, or is not a problem anymore really.
Yes, I went back with the vet re-invites, and I tried out the trial. The game is still good, and sound, and I think it would be totally awesome for a new player with an open mind. However, I had gone through the first 40 levels so many times in beta and launch, I just can't bring myself to do it again. I could pick up my old chars, but I don't know. I just don't have the "burn" for it, you know what I mean? I just burnt myself out so much in the 5-6 months that I did play, that I just cant manage to get back into the swing of things. Same goes for a lot of MMO's I have tried to go back to. I am psyched for a few days, and then the novelty of being back wears off, and I just kind of fizzle out.
They have fixed and added a lot, and I think AoC is a solid title right now. I am just done with it.
I think some of the problem here is that certain people are Funcom haters. Doesn't matter what FC does, they will not like it and will make sure to let everyone else know that, as loudly as possible.
Did AoC have a lot of patches in the beginning? Yes. Was that unusual? NO. Most MMO's have a lot of patches when they first start out. You can beta with a few thousand people, only to find more things you missed when 700k people start playing.
They merged servers, so what? Previous posters failed to mention that they added more servers at launch to handle the load. So when numbers dropped off the new servers were merged back. Can you imagine how bad it would of been if they hadn't added the new servers at launch? Some people enjoy login queues?
The free level 50 character was a nice idea. This saves someone from having to grind one alt all the way up, they can just start at 50 with a full set of green gear and a basic mount.
They added a lot of content since launch, the most recent being the Iron Tower single group dungeon. Since you can apprentice people 20 levels below you, someone as low as 60 could go there if they had friends who were 80. Same thing applies to raiding, my assassin been raiding since lvl 60.
So the launch was actually pretty smooth all things considered.
I disagree with the OP's argument ,the past and launch are HUGE factors.The points the OP are pointing to,imo are not valid either,there is not much different in AOC than any other game from dungeon design,to killing,to hotbars,there really is little difference.The graphics are better,that is a difference. The fact is to keep gamers interested,they seem to be attracted to VERY superficial trinkets like mounts/pets/gear.Constantly give them something to want. The difference between a large following and a game trying to make it big,is the large following has massive website information,tons of apps,it seems players want everything automated/easy mode.so they love their apps.If there is a way to cheat/exploit or a way to RMT buy overpowering items/gear,again they latch onto this. None of it makes sense,but this is the true face of gamers,teenagers with simplistic minds and full of ego and drama.Design and content has come across as a very weak carrot for these teenie boppers to follow.What i am saying is that no matter how hard AOC tries to make a great game,it is the ridiculous things that attracts gamers.Look how many people are all woosey over flying in AIOn or screwing around with that character customization screen for hours then covering it all up with gear...lol duh. To create success you have to start thinking like a young teenager,you have to watch them game to fully understand the immaturity in their wants/needs,always selfish never common sense attitude.They will always cry nerf,but give them the over powering class,everything is cool.Everyone has a few different wants/needs/expectations from gaming,but i painted the over all big picture,one i believe is quite accurate.
Those are some truly excellent points Wizardry.
I might chime in that the MMO market is rather small and saturated. People switching games are usually more "hard-core" (i.e. play more often and for longer) than the average MMO gamer. I doubt the average MMO player actually plays more than an hour a day on average. Decisions on a new MMO will always lay to ground the average player, but the actual players joining a new MMO will not be the average player. When a new game is launched it is mostly people who play 4-6 hours daily that switch, as they have become bored with the content of their current MMO, and they make a mad dash to the end-game. There seems to be a commoneality between all recent MMO launches that focus is on starter content before launch, and they think "let's add mid-level after launch, and then focus on end-game later".
This pisses the "elite" players off to no end, and the swarm to forums such as these to vent their anger and frustration, which ends up destroying the community and has a domino effect on the population size and mood.
I want to add to both what Wizardry and Aercus spoke of:
Never underestimate the power of fluff.
people have constantly place fluff in a bad light, saying it is something that does nothing more than quantity but no depth; absolute paradox. they say this, and do not want it, but turn around and scream for content, or ignore content that is placed into the game and denounce it as something else because i does not fit "their" definition of content.
but i say this out side of AOC's realm
Inside its realm, the game has its content, which they place effort in doing. however whether funcom realizes this or not, a dungeon or two maybe content, but will dry up in a matter of a couple of days before everyone goes back to brood about why there is nothing to do in AOC; evidence of what i say is towards the recent admission of Iron Tower, it does not take long to run that place to the ground if your a hard core raider/gamer either being a few hours or a few days, once its complete AOC is back to square one as far as lack of content, this type of issue, overall is void when it comes to newer players that are yet to explore everything in hyboria -- veteran players however is another story.
As for my stance on Fluff in general, you'd be surprise what a small mini game of fishing would do for people, Esspecially if it ties in into the economy, or Dancing benefits at a tavern if they ever were able to tie it in with drunken brawler (they never will). AOC, with its linear behavior, has next to none. Crafting is perhaps the most straight forward and shortest i have ever seen in a game, tacked on with a number of materials that are next to useless in value on the economy, it continues to feel shallow or unfinished when it comes to reaching the top of your crafting level, the incentive to keep on going would be the tomb raiding hunts you do when you want to find recipes for cultural weapons/armor.
As for the OP's topic of not blaming everything on launch, well thats too bad because unfortunately thats what people will continue to do; fans and haters alike. why?
because the old saying goes "make your first impression your best one" and AOC overall failed to deliver on that.
the customers, aside from bugs, were not impressed with the idea of mmo with console/arcade elements, with a game design of oversaturation of loading screens being the biggest negative towards the game, add the portion of having nothing to do once you hit 80 and all its limited or yet to be fixed end game, you are stuck doing the following.
Pee country Keshatta, the 12 Bosses of raiding olypmics (T1 , T2), russian roulette sieging (finding a siege that doesnt crash),
and last but not least, Crafting, or what i call (if you got more than 20 gold you can master your craft under 2 days or less).
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
If a company wants to do a theme park so be it... just do it right. That's my opinion. I can have fun in theme park and sandbox games, but they have to get most of the stuff right.
AoC's themepark consists of 4-5 rollercoasters and a hot dog vendor. It's fun for a while, but it isn't long til' you're ready to leave. Hopefully they learn their lesson as they develop Secret World.
FE has its problems, but since they didn't blow a ridiculous amount of dough, and it would seem they hit their planned number of subs, they are things that can be overcome. The sooner they put together an accessible, low cost commitment pricing plan, the sooner they'll start trickling more subs to their niche. It'll probably be a slow buildup like Eve was, but it can happen.
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
If a company wants to do a theme park so be it... just do it right. That's my opinion. I can have fun in theme park and sandbox games, but they have to get most of the stuff right.
AoC's themepark consists of 4-5 rollercoasters and a hot dog vendor. It's fun for a while, but it isn't long til' you're ready to leave. Hopefully they learn their lesson as they develop Secret World.
FE has its problems, but since they didn't blow a ridiculous amount of dough, and it would seem they hit their planned number of subs, they are things that can be overcome. The sooner they put together an accessible, low cost commitment pricing plan, the sooner they'll start trickling more subs to their niche. It'll probably be a slow buildup like Eve was, but it can happen.
I think that EVE has such a buildup due to its pretty much limitless advancement. FE does not have this. It does have a cap, in which once you reach it, you cannot continue to improve your character. In EVE, there are so many skills, and so many more being added as time goes by, that I would highly doubt that anyone will/can ever cap out their skills. It is a big reason people in EQ1 stuck around for a good amount of time. People could hit cap, and then burn TONS more time getting AAs. It seems that most games have replaced this sort of advancement with gear grinds, which is unfortunate.
I think that EVE has such a buildup due to its pretty much limitless advancement. FE does not have this. It does have a cap, in which once you reach it, you cannot continue to improve your character. In EVE, there are so many skills, and so many more being added as time goes by, that I would highly doubt that anyone will/can ever cap out their skills. It is a big reason people in EQ1 stuck around for a good amount of time. People could hit cap, and then burn TONS more time getting AAs. It seems that most games have replaced this sort of advancement with gear grinds, which is unfortunate.
So you think they replace the "box price commitment", so to speak, with "skill development commitment"? Hmmm... never really thought of it that way.
Wonder if FE will expand skill into more specialized categories, kinda like Eve...
Is this thread another joke thread, or is this your actual opinion LB? Quite hard to know if you are being serious anymore If you are for real this time: All of your ramblings above is your opinion, which you conveniently pass off as fact. In YOUR opinion the game is unbalanced, broken, boring etc, but that is not the opinion of all, least of all the current playerbase. The "problem" launch is mostly hyperbole, it was no worse than most other launches. The real problem of the launch was the players expecting (built up by hype, from Funcom and gamers) something completely new, fantastic in all ways, game-changing, level-raising, an exceptional and orgasmafabulous jewel which would shine as the WoW killer for years. Short story, their hopes and dreams were crushed as Funcom produced nothing more than a game, and today they here moaning.
Oh, and when the next big thing comes and dashes their hope anew, they'll move their moaning there. Unless their hope for humanity is crushed so deeply they start playing with razor blades. See you in a year's time on the SW:TOR forums!
Horseshit Aercus, this launch was outstanding, the biggest in MMO history right? Then what happened, people played, were lied to, found out they were lied to, the game was being patched so fast and they were breaking just as fast as they fixed shit, and after less than 4 months it was beginning to be necessary to merge servers, the game imploded because of bugs, lag, implementations that failed, mechanics that suck donkey balls, and because Funcom is the company that Funcom is. That is opinion.
The facts are pretty clear and well documented. One million copies sold in the first 2-3 months, then 400k subscribers 3 months later, less than half that 6 months later, today less than 75k. We'll find out in 6 days just how much of a loss the game is incurring.
Aercus who was responsible for the hype? Funcom. Who was responsible for not delivering the content? Funcom. Who was responsible for lying about all of that? Funcom. Who was responsible for the shill campaign and bullshit campaign? Funcom. Players hopes and dreams, wtf r u talking about Walter? People who paid $50 for the game, and then paid another $50 in subscription fees only to find out the developers were fucking liars and full of horseshit from the get go were pissed. That is what happens, right or wrong when you wrong customers.
You won't be seeing me in another MMO anytime soon Aercus. Not until this industry cleans up their act.
I never said the launch was perfect, I said it was no worse than most other launches. If it was unplayable, how come people were getting to 80 in the first few weeks, and starting to down raid bosses after 6-7 weeks? Yes, Funcom hyped the game, but gamers also hyped the game and imbelished on the information given by Funcom. Yes, Funcom is guilty of building expectations among the players, and not fulfilling them completely. It's called advertisement, and all companies are then guilty of "lying" to some extent. As previously said, Axe bodyspray won't get you laid and Gilette Razors won't make you a good golfer even though they portray this in their ads. If you are unable to look through ad gimmics you are not a very educated or experienced consumer.
But it's just a game, and if that is something that get you so psyched that you whine about the launch after 1.5 years, you have larger problems than AoC...
Advertising is saying "I have oranges for sale, I have the best oranges and they are the most orange, oranges you have ever seen" when they really are green on the inside, but only colored orange with paint on the outside and it fools the reviewers enmass.
Shilling is when you pay other people "to tell folks you are selling oranges, and that they have tasted and tried them and indeed, they are the most orange, oranges, contrary to their known or unknown ability to attain undisclosed and unbiased, uncompensated judgement of their product.
Funcom employed in advertising but they also employed shilling to lie their way into sales. Doing so has permanently damaged their reputation, but the facts of the game are such that it isn't up to par with what people would pay for.
Advertising is saying "I have oranges for sale, I have the best oranges and they are the most orange, oranges you have ever seen" when they really are green on the inside, but only colored orange with paint on the outside and it fools the reviewers enmass. Shilling is when you pay other people "to tell folks you are selling oranges, and that they have tasted and tried them and indeed, they are the most orange, oranges, contrary to their known or unknown ability to attain undisclosed and unbiased, uncompensated judgement of their product. Funcom employed in advertising but they also employed shilling to lie their way into sales. Doing so has permanently damaged their reputation, but the facts of the game are such that it isn't up to par with what people would pay for.
Funcom advertised and hyped their product like all MMO developers do, and how are the "lies" by Funcom worse than those of e.g. Blizzard? If you believe *everything* a company says about its product you better not watch infomercials...
Some features just don't make it into launch, and some planned features just aren't implemented. This goes for all games, and AoC is not an exception to this rule.
most of the features wow promised were there at launch. Over 50% of the age of conan content was either not part of the launch or never existed in the first place.
Advertising is saying "I have oranges for sale, I have the best oranges and they are the most orange, oranges you have ever seen" when they really are green on the inside, but only colored orange with paint on the outside and it fools the reviewers enmass. Shilling is when you pay other people "to tell folks you are selling oranges, and that they have tasted and tried them and indeed, they are the most orange, oranges, contrary to their known or unknown ability to attain undisclosed and unbiased, uncompensated judgement of their product. Funcom employed in advertising but they also employed shilling to lie their way into sales. Doing so has permanently damaged their reputation, but the facts of the game are such that it isn't up to par with what people would pay for.
Funcom advertised and hyped their product like all MMO developers do, and how are the "lies" by Funcom worse than those of e.g. Blizzard? If you believe *everything* a company says about its product you better not watch infomercials...
Some features just don't make it into launch, and some planned features just aren't implemented. This goes for all games, and AoC is not an exception to this rule.
I don't watch informercials. I didn't believe everything Funcom was saying about AOC, but we were told week after week and month after month that fixes and features were coming.
Come to try this game out again like 100,000 others, only instead of for free I subbed for a month (a few days before free trials came along) stupid me, the only things that had substantially changed were performance and the servers had been merged, and DX10 was in beta rather than non-existent.
This thread is not about what funcom did at launch it is about what they haven't done to get the game where it needed to be to be a huge success after launch. Today there is nobody measuring or calling it successful and how can they. The game clearly isn't what they expected to get back on their investment and they thought it was when they did the free trials and they figured out pretty fast that it still is not.
This game hasn't got features advertised on the box, or in the manual even 20 months after launch with no sign of them coming in this game. They are talking expansion product, without even bothering to deliver at least some form of all the features of what they promised with the original. They don't have fully functioning and playable sieges. Sorry you lose.
I don't watch informercials. I didn't believe everything Funcom was saying about AOC, but we were told week after week and month after month that fixes and features were coming. Come to try this game out again like 100,000 others, only instead of for free I subbed for a month (a few days before free trials came along) stupid me, the only things that had substantially changed were performance and the servers had been merged, and DX10 was in beta rather than non-existent. This thread is not about what funcom did at launch it is about what they haven't done to get the game where it needed to be to be a huge success after launch. Today there is nobody measuring or calling it successful and how can they. The game clearly isn't what they expected to get back on their investment and they thought it was when they did the free trials and they figured out pretty fast that it still is not. This game hasn't got features advertised on the box, or in the manual even 20 months after launch with no sign of them coming in this game. They are talking expansion product, without even bothering to deliver at least some form of all the features of what they promised with the original. They don't have fully functioning and playable sieges. Sorry you lose.
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment. For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up. Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
I don't watch informercials. I didn't believe everything Funcom was saying about AOC, but we were told week after week and month after month that fixes and features were coming. Come to try this game out again like 100,000 others, only instead of for free I subbed for a month (a few days before free trials came along) stupid me, the only things that had substantially changed were performance and the servers had been merged, and DX10 was in beta rather than non-existent. This thread is not about what funcom did at launch it is about what they haven't done to get the game where it needed to be to be a huge success after launch. Today there is nobody measuring or calling it successful and how can they. The game clearly isn't what they expected to get back on their investment and they thought it was when they did the free trials and they figured out pretty fast that it still is not. This game hasn't got features advertised on the box, or in the manual even 20 months after launch with no sign of them coming in this game. They are talking expansion product, without even bothering to deliver at least some form of all the features of what they promised with the original. They don't have fully functioning and playable sieges. Sorry you lose.
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment.
Horseshit. MMOs are growing fastest in PC gaming, and PC gaming is either holding steady or slowly declining. With Windows 7and an improving economy it will begin to grow again.
For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up.
Wrong again. Consumers need the features and content advertised. If you buy an adventure book, you expect the pages to contain a story with chapters pertaining to that story. AOC was an adventure fantasy set in an MMO without a lot of players, with borked mechanics and features missing. Deliver what you are advertising and you'll do well, don't and you won't. This isn't about the need for an expansion. Who are they making the expansion for? Most players who played and quit the game because it is missing features, buggy, and doesn't contain enough content or mechanics favorable to fair and fun play to justify the price being charged are not going to pick up the expansion. Rather than fix the product they have, trying to sell an expansion on a game already not fleshed out and functioning isn't going to win them a whole bunch of new customers.
Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
I would agree with you if the number was 50/50 but its 96% quit, 4% still subscribe to a game which can casual players a year to play through entirely the first time. It's been about 20 months since launch, so explain to me why the ratio is 96/4 when this market is growing, diverse, and supposedly contains so many casual players.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
WOW is an example of how to do it right or at least well. AOC is not by any measure. I can't believe you are writing that the reason AOC was unsuccessful at holding onto hundreds of thousands of subs or trying to attain millions of subs, while their game remains broken, while it still does not contain features hyped months before the launch, all while they have abandoned efforts to fix borked implements and add these missing features, I can't believe you are blaming that on the market. The market indeed does decide on the value of a product.
96% of players who have ever tried AOC have left to do other things. If they had managed to keep even another 100,000 of the million who have bought the game, still subscribed the current server makeup would be populated and healthy, and the game would not be in danger of server implosions. However that is not the case, and that is why AOC is failing.
Doing nothing or maintaining the current pace and focus of improvements, patches, and tweaking is not helping. Notice the downward trend in every metric to measure population and buzz for the game, they all agree, effective measurements or not, reliable or not, they all agree on the direction of the game's population.
I don't watch informercials. I didn't believe everything Funcom was saying about AOC, but we were told week after week and month after month that fixes and features were coming. Come to try this game out again like 100,000 others, only instead of for free I subbed for a month (a few days before free trials came along) stupid me, the only things that had substantially changed were performance and the servers had been merged, and DX10 was in beta rather than non-existent. This thread is not about what funcom did at launch it is about what they haven't done to get the game where it needed to be to be a huge success after launch. Today there is nobody measuring or calling it successful and how can they. The game clearly isn't what they expected to get back on their investment and they thought it was when they did the free trials and they figured out pretty fast that it still is not. This game hasn't got features advertised on the box, or in the manual even 20 months after launch with no sign of them coming in this game. They are talking expansion product, without even bothering to deliver at least some form of all the features of what they promised with the original. They don't have fully functioning and playable sieges. Sorry you lose.
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment.
Horseshit. MMOs are growing fastest in PC gaming, and PC gaming is either holding steady or slowly declining. With Windows 7and an improving economy it will begin to grow again.
For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up.
Wrong again. Consumers need the features and content advertised. If you buy an adventure book, you expect the pages to contain a story with chapters pertaining to that story. AOC was an adventure fantasy set in an MMO without a lot of players, with borked mechanics and features missing. Deliver what you are advertising and you'll do well, don't and you won't. This isn't about the need for an expansion. Who are they making the expansion for? Most players who played and quit the game because it is missing features, buggy, and doesn't contain enough content or mechanics favorable to fair and fun play to justify the price being charged are not going to pick up the expansion. Rather than fix the product they have, trying to sell an expansion on a game already not fleshed out and functioning isn't going to win them a whole bunch of new customers.
Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
I would agree with you if the number was 50/50 but its 96% quit, 4% still subscribe to a game which can casual players a year to play through entirely the first time. It's been about 20 months since launch, so explain to me why the ratio is 96/4 when this market is growing, diverse, and supposedly contains so many casual players.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
WOW is an example of how to do it right or at least well. AOC is not by any measure. I can't believe you are writing that the reason AOC was unsuccessful at holding onto hundreds of thousands of subs or trying to attain millions of subs, while their game remains broken, while it still does not contain features hyped months before the launch, all while they have abandoned efforts to fix borked implements and add these missing features, I can't believe you are blaming that on the market. The market indeed does decide on the value of a product.
96% of players who have ever tried AOC have left to do other things. If they had managed to keep even another 100,000 of the million who have bought the game, still subscribed the current server makeup would be populated and healthy, and the game would not be in danger of server implosions. However that is not the case, and that is why AOC is failing.
Doing nothing or maintaining the current pace and focus of improvements, patches, and tweaking is not helping. Notice the downward trend in every metric to measure population and buzz for the game, they all agree, effective measurements or not, reliable or not, they all agree on the direction of the game's population.
Steady
Slow
Decline
Defending AoC must be more fun than
hey why is Dragon Age ads all over *MMO*RPG.com ???
more fun than playing AoC
Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions.
The total Western MMOG market is estimated to have a revenue of about ~1.3b in 2009 and will most likely hit the 1.5b mark in 2011. That's about a 50% growth over 2007, which is around 7-8% annualy. Certainly quick, but not exactly explosive, right?
If you were just starting to play a MMORPG, which game is it the most likely you would pick up, the one everybody has heard of, or an unknown title? Do you think most newcomers to the genre start out in WoW or another game? Do you think the average gamer switches games frequently or infrequently?
It is my contention that this leads to few newcomers joining new releases, and the gamers you do get are not the ones you desire. Developers don't want the people who blast through the content they spent 5 years making in a few weeks, they want the guy that plays an hour or two every other day, not reaching end game for a year at least.
Consumers wants a game they find entertaining, which can be delivered in a myriad in ways. It's not the lack of promised player housing in WoW or drunken brawling in AoC which drive people to or from the games, it's their inherent entertainment value. Your proposed factors may or may not had an impact on the entertainment value of AoC, but to draw conclusions like you do, you would have to know the psychology of everyone that left, and not just assume all left for the same reasons you did.
No mmo has a 50% retention rate. I'd say 30% might be the best for the ones that have aimed mass market. It's a boom or bust market, and only WoW has boomed (and possibly Aion, remains to be seen). 5% or lower retention rate sounds bad, but it's something that happened to pretty much all releases the last few years; AoC, WAR, TR, HG:L, DDO, VG,etc. WoW certainly appears to be well polished today (based on the opinions of the players), but remember that when launched it was no better than the games that has succeeded it.
With almost all games post-WoW failing, don't you really see a trend that sticks deeper than the game itself?
I've been playing AoC since launch, I stuck at it through the memory leaks and saw an improvement when the Ymir's Pass content was added, the memory leaks were fixed and all was well.
lvl 80 came soon enough and my raiding began in earnest, then it began to sink in...Nothing else to do...Raid T1 and T2 every week, rinse 'n' repeat until you and the guy next to you are identikit doubles.
I've been doing those same raids (every week) for maybe 8 months, plenty of time for AoC's new helmsman Craig Morrison to analyse AoC's problem and fix them, and in the process keep existing players and attract new ones.
None of it!
Morrison's master plan has seen the introduction of more bliddy dungeons for people to run through each week!
Add pets
Give players 'loyalty points'
Mess with gear stats
It's a shame that the very description of AoC's genre hasn't yet sunk in to Morrison's brain.........RPG!
[Disclaimer : I play AoC mainly because I am a fan of RE Howard's Conan stories, and the excellent community that exists on the server Crom]
The total Western MMOG market is estimated to have a revenue of about ~1.3b in 2009 and will most likely hit the 1.5b mark in 2011. That's about a 50% growth over 2007, which is around 7-8% annualy. Certainly quick, but not exactly explosive, right? If you were just starting to play a MMORPG, which game is it the most likely you would pick up, the one everybody has heard of, or an unknown title? Do you think most newcomers to the genre start out in WoW or another game? Do you think the average gamer switches games frequently or infrequently? It is my contention that this leads to few newcomers joining new releases, and the gamers you do get are not the ones you desire. Developers don't want the people who blast through the content they spent 5 years making in a few weeks, they want the guy that plays an hour or two every other day, not reaching end game for a year at least. Consumers wants a game they find entertaining, which can be delivered in a myriad in ways. It's not the lack of promised player housing in WoW or drunken brawling in AoC which drive people to or from the games, it's their inherent entertainment value. Your proposed factors may or may not had an impact on the entertainment value of AoC, but to draw conclusions like you do, you would have to know the psychology of everyone that left, and not just assume all left for the same reasons you did. No mmo has a 50% retention rate. I'd say 30% might be the best for the ones that have aimed mass market. It's a boom or bust market, and only WoW has boomed (and possibly Aion, remains to be seen). 5% or lower retention rate sounds bad, but it's something that happened to pretty much all releases the last few years; AoC, WAR, TR, HG:L, DDO, VG,etc. WoW certainly appears to be well polished today (based on the opinions of the players), but remember that when launched it was no better than the games that has succeeded it. With almost all games post-WoW failing, don't you really see a trend that sticks deeper than the game itself?
The market is growing we agree, Funcom didn't lose 7-8% marketshare with AOC, they lost 96% of their playerbase to purchase ratio, whatever that translates to I don't know and don't care. The market is growing, so should AOC were they average or better. However they are far below average and for reasons I've stated before.
I have no idea which game is most likely to be picked up. Most referred would probably have to be WOW, but there is just as much negative buzz as positive buzz about WOW at times, so word of mouth is their best marketing method. Most new MMOs need the positive impression followed by better and stable impressions and a concurrency with the rest of the players playing, to stick around. Another major need for MMOs is stable populations, see AOC or WAR as examples of where when this doesn't exist for any reason nor do the MMOs.
WOWs retention is much higher than AOCs and over a much longer period. About the only worse performing game than AOC would be SWG that I can think of, in terms of it having 1 million subs sold, and less than 100k playing today. AOC didn't fail because of WOW or any other reason except the merits of AOC and their product implementation.
My point is that we ought to stop placing the blame on present day subscriptions, performance, and characteristics of the game on the launch which was almost 2 years ago. We need to look at the game today.
Broken sieges, unfair imbalance between classes, both techincal and mechanical. Do you recall when there was an imbalance between female and male character damage levels? Was that acceptable? Why should the caster/melee imbalance which heavily favors casters be permitted?
How about imploding servers now? This is a real problem now and until they tweak mechanics and fix broken shit this isn't going to go away. Its only going to get worse.
If the game was vastly improved over what it was at release then more people would be playing.
It isn't as if people have not retried the game or there is a free trial.
If the game isn't growing then it is pretty clear the changes have not been great enough to keep people entertained or resolve the issues they had with the game.
In other words a game with exceptional gameplay will grow on its own. The game will sell itself with the exceptional gameplay it offers.
I don't hate the game or love it, but it is time to stop blaming the release of the game for the current situation. If enough was changed then some sort of rebound could have happened. It isn't like the majority of the market who tried conan isn't still looking for a new game.
If the game was vastly improved over what it was at release then more people would be playing. It isn't as if people have not retried the game or there is a free trial.
If the game isn't growing then it is pretty clear the changes have not been great enough to keep people entertained or resolve the issues they had with the game.
In other words a game with exceptional gameplay will grow on its own. The game will sell itself with the exceptional gameplay it offers.
I don't hate the game or love it, but it is time to stop blaming the release of the game for the current situation. If enough was changed then some sort of rebound could have happened. It isn't like the majority of the market who tried conan isn't still looking for a new game.
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
most of the features wow promised were there at launch. Over 50% of the age of conan content was either not part of the launch or never existed in the first place.
Actually that isn't true Frostbite.
Blizzard initially said that the easy leveling curve was so players could get to 60 quickly to begin working on pvp and their hero class. Well the pvp was pointless until several months later when the (now old) honor system was put it with battlegrounds. Until then it was just grief here, gank there, with no gain or consequece.
Hero Classes were promised at release. They had originally said that you would get to 60, then become a <whatever>. For whatever reason, they never followed up on that and refused to even talk about hero classes until Wrath. At that time it was a hero class (read: singular) that required no effort to get.
Honestly thought, can't really compare AoC and WoW fairly. AoC it geared towards higher end PC's and mature gamers. WoW is going for mass market appeal with lower-res "cartoony" graphics and younger players.
If the game was vastly improved over what it was at release then more people would be playing. It isn't as if people have not retried the game or there is a free trial.
If the game isn't growing then it is pretty clear the changes have not been great enough to keep people entertained or resolve the issues they had with the game.
In other words a game with exceptional gameplay will grow on its own. The game will sell itself with the exceptional gameplay it offers.
I don't hate the game or love it, but it is time to stop blaming the release of the game for the current situation. If enough was changed then some sort of rebound could have happened. It isn't like the majority of the market who tried conan isn't still looking for a new game.
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
So Funcom... a corporation publicly traded on a stock exchange, with hundreds of employees, scores of investors, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shareholders "should be disbanded" because you don't like their products?
That's pretty narcissistic. if you were a Coke drinker, should Pepsi Corp should be disbanded? I mean they are unethical and not good at making soft drinks that taste up to your standards.
most of the features wow promised were there at launch. Over 50% of the age of conan content was either not part of the launch or never existed in the first place.
Actually that isn't true Frostbite.
Blizzard initially said that the easy leveling curve was so players could get to 60 quickly to begin working on pvp and their hero class. Well the pvp was pointless until several months later when the (now old) honor system was put it with battlegrounds. Until then it was just grief here, gank there, with no gain or consequece.
Hero Classes were promised at release. They had originally said that you would get to 60, then become a <whatever>. For whatever reason, they never followed up on that and refused to even talk about hero classes until Wrath. At that time it was a hero class (read: singular) that required no effort to get.
Honestly thought, can't really compare AoC and WoW fairly. AoC it geared towards higher end PC's and mature gamers. WoW is going for mass market appeal with lower-res "cartoony" graphics and younger players.
Lol since when have boobies attracted mature gamers?
It's a myth that AoC has older players. Every guild I have ever been to has had tons of kiddies who lied that they were adults and who always refuse to come to vent because then they would be exposed. All you need is one look at public chat and you'll see how "mature" AoC community is.
First off, where did you get in my post that "mature gamers" equates to "boobies"? I would think the immature gamers would be going for the digital boobies as it were.
As for looking at public chat, there is technically no "public" chat, I will assume you mean Global? Many people actually disable that as there is a LFG channel if they need to find peopel for a pug. As for the "quality" of chat in Global it is no where NEAR as bad as the infamous Barrens Chat that WoW has. If you ask a legitimate question in Global you will rarely get a snarky reply (unlike in WoW).
When speaking of a mature game, it's more than the "boobies" as you put it. There is adult language and themes as well in many of the quests. Not to mention, AoC has fatalities....
If the game was vastly improved over what it was at release then more people would be playing. It isn't as if people have not retried the game or there is a free trial.
If the game isn't growing then it is pretty clear the changes have not been great enough to keep people entertained or resolve the issues they had with the game.
In other words a game with exceptional gameplay will grow on its own. The game will sell itself with the exceptional gameplay it offers.
I don't hate the game or love it, but it is time to stop blaming the release of the game for the current situation. If enough was changed then some sort of rebound could have happened. It isn't like the majority of the market who tried conan isn't still looking for a new game.
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
So Funcom... a corporation publicly traded on a stock exchange, with hundreds of employees, scores of investors, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shareholders "should be disbanded" because you don't like their products?
That's pretty narcissistic. if you were a Coke drinker, should Pepsi Corp should be disbanded? I mean they are unethical and not good at making soft drinks that taste up to your standards.
Coke and Pepsi both deliver good products and services, and they don't screw their customers by delivering half cans of soda with holes on the top but letting us all know it will be fixed in 2-3 months or maybe 4. To be fair I'm not the typical MMO player, never played WOW don't play AOC or any competion anymore because honestly nothing else currently appeals to me. I have given Aion some thought but I'm holding out for Mortal Online, I'm thinking that is going to be a pretty good game if they can get it off the ground. AOC is simply dying fast and I have no faith given the history of Funcom that there development team is going to build an expansion worth paying for.
Coke and Pepsi both deliver good products and services, and they don't screw their customers by delivering half cans of soda with holes on the top but letting us all know it will be fixed in 2-3 months or maybe 4. To be fair I'm not the typical MMO player, never played WOW don't play AOC or any competion anymore because honestly nothing else currently appeals to me. I have given Aion some thought but I'm holding out for Mortal Online, I'm thinking that is going to be a pretty good game if they can get it off the ground. AOC is simply dying fast and I have no faith given the history of Funcom that there development team is going to build an expansion worth paying for.
Minus the launch of AO, did you ever play AO? And then thier follow up expansions? If anything, I turst thier expansions more than the originals. Shadowlands was a great addition, and Alien Invasion added elements to the game that were pretty revolutionary at the time, and I thought it was great. I was not around for the Lost Eden expansion, or whatever the name of it was, but I heard from many of my friends that it was well done as well.
I think you just have a pretty large bias against them for some reason, and would just rather assume that everything they have ever done, and will ever do is crap. Two bad launches. That sucks, but that is pretty much all. AO developed into quite the game, relished by many even to this day, and it added elements to the MMO genre never seen before, or really even after. AoC has not gotten there yet, but they are still on the right path. The game is doing much better as far as the fun factor, and if they keep building onto the base, they will get a great game. It is just a shame that it took so long.
I hope they take a que from AO, and once the expansion comes out, they make froob accounts for the normal AoC, and then you need to subscribe for the expansion content.
Comments
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
Good read, it was mature and thoughtful. Thanks
I am curious have you played AoC since the time you quit? IF not, maybe you should give it another whirl. Alot of what you talked about has been fixed, or is not a problem anymore really.
Yes, I went back with the vet re-invites, and I tried out the trial. The game is still good, and sound, and I think it would be totally awesome for a new player with an open mind. However, I had gone through the first 40 levels so many times in beta and launch, I just can't bring myself to do it again. I could pick up my old chars, but I don't know. I just don't have the "burn" for it, you know what I mean? I just burnt myself out so much in the 5-6 months that I did play, that I just cant manage to get back into the swing of things. Same goes for a lot of MMO's I have tried to go back to. I am psyched for a few days, and then the novelty of being back wears off, and I just kind of fizzle out.
They have fixed and added a lot, and I think AoC is a solid title right now. I am just done with it.
I think some of the problem here is that certain people are Funcom haters. Doesn't matter what FC does, they will not like it and will make sure to let everyone else know that, as loudly as possible.
Did AoC have a lot of patches in the beginning? Yes. Was that unusual? NO. Most MMO's have a lot of patches when they first start out. You can beta with a few thousand people, only to find more things you missed when 700k people start playing.
They merged servers, so what? Previous posters failed to mention that they added more servers at launch to handle the load. So when numbers dropped off the new servers were merged back. Can you imagine how bad it would of been if they hadn't added the new servers at launch? Some people enjoy login queues?
The free level 50 character was a nice idea. This saves someone from having to grind one alt all the way up, they can just start at 50 with a full set of green gear and a basic mount.
They added a lot of content since launch, the most recent being the Iron Tower single group dungeon. Since you can apprentice people 20 levels below you, someone as low as 60 could go there if they had friends who were 80. Same thing applies to raiding, my assassin been raiding since lvl 60.
So the launch was actually pretty smooth all things considered.
Those are some truly excellent points Wizardry.
I might chime in that the MMO market is rather small and saturated. People switching games are usually more "hard-core" (i.e. play more often and for longer) than the average MMO gamer. I doubt the average MMO player actually plays more than an hour a day on average. Decisions on a new MMO will always lay to ground the average player, but the actual players joining a new MMO will not be the average player. When a new game is launched it is mostly people who play 4-6 hours daily that switch, as they have become bored with the content of their current MMO, and they make a mad dash to the end-game. There seems to be a commoneality between all recent MMO launches that focus is on starter content before launch, and they think "let's add mid-level after launch, and then focus on end-game later".
This pisses the "elite" players off to no end, and the swarm to forums such as these to vent their anger and frustration, which ends up destroying the community and has a domino effect on the population size and mood.
I want to add to both what Wizardry and Aercus spoke of:
Never underestimate the power of fluff.
people have constantly place fluff in a bad light, saying it is something that does nothing more than quantity but no depth; absolute paradox. they say this, and do not want it, but turn around and scream for content, or ignore content that is placed into the game and denounce it as something else because i does not fit "their" definition of content.
but i say this out side of AOC's realm
Inside its realm, the game has its content, which they place effort in doing. however whether funcom realizes this or not, a dungeon or two maybe content, but will dry up in a matter of a couple of days before everyone goes back to brood about why there is nothing to do in AOC; evidence of what i say is towards the recent admission of Iron Tower, it does not take long to run that place to the ground if your a hard core raider/gamer either being a few hours or a few days, once its complete AOC is back to square one as far as lack of content, this type of issue, overall is void when it comes to newer players that are yet to explore everything in hyboria -- veteran players however is another story.
As for my stance on Fluff in general, you'd be surprise what a small mini game of fishing would do for people, Esspecially if it ties in into the economy, or Dancing benefits at a tavern if they ever were able to tie it in with drunken brawler (they never will). AOC, with its linear behavior, has next to none. Crafting is perhaps the most straight forward and shortest i have ever seen in a game, tacked on with a number of materials that are next to useless in value on the economy, it continues to feel shallow or unfinished when it comes to reaching the top of your crafting level, the incentive to keep on going would be the tomb raiding hunts you do when you want to find recipes for cultural weapons/armor.
As for the OP's topic of not blaming everything on launch, well thats too bad because unfortunately thats what people will continue to do; fans and haters alike. why?
because the old saying goes "make your first impression your best one" and AOC overall failed to deliver on that.
the customers, aside from bugs, were not impressed with the idea of mmo with console/arcade elements, with a game design of oversaturation of loading screens being the biggest negative towards the game, add the portion of having nothing to do once you hit 80 and all its limited or yet to be fixed end game, you are stuck doing the following.
Pee country Keshatta, the 12 Bosses of raiding olypmics (T1 , T2), russian roulette sieging (finding a siege that doesnt crash),
and last but not least, Crafting, or what i call (if you got more than 20 gold you can master your craft under 2 days or less).
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
If a company wants to do a theme park so be it... just do it right. That's my opinion. I can have fun in theme park and sandbox games, but they have to get most of the stuff right.
AoC's themepark consists of 4-5 rollercoasters and a hot dog vendor. It's fun for a while, but it isn't long til' you're ready to leave. Hopefully they learn their lesson as they develop Secret World.
FE has its problems, but since they didn't blow a ridiculous amount of dough, and it would seem they hit their planned number of subs, they are things that can be overcome. The sooner they put together an accessible, low cost commitment pricing plan, the sooner they'll start trickling more subs to their niche. It'll probably be a slow buildup like Eve was, but it can happen.
Can't really say I disagree with you too much on many of these points. In my heart of hearts, I hope AoC, WAR, and Aion marks the end of this specific area of the genre and the new games that come will offer something different. I think AoC did the theme-park, closed space, dungeon-crawler, gear grind best, but I know opinions vary widely on this. I also play FE, which I find much more to be the future of my interest rather than the aforemention type of games.
If a company wants to do a theme park so be it... just do it right. That's my opinion. I can have fun in theme park and sandbox games, but they have to get most of the stuff right.
AoC's themepark consists of 4-5 rollercoasters and a hot dog vendor. It's fun for a while, but it isn't long til' you're ready to leave. Hopefully they learn their lesson as they develop Secret World.
FE has its problems, but since they didn't blow a ridiculous amount of dough, and it would seem they hit their planned number of subs, they are things that can be overcome. The sooner they put together an accessible, low cost commitment pricing plan, the sooner they'll start trickling more subs to their niche. It'll probably be a slow buildup like Eve was, but it can happen.
I think that EVE has such a buildup due to its pretty much limitless advancement. FE does not have this. It does have a cap, in which once you reach it, you cannot continue to improve your character. In EVE, there are so many skills, and so many more being added as time goes by, that I would highly doubt that anyone will/can ever cap out their skills. It is a big reason people in EQ1 stuck around for a good amount of time. People could hit cap, and then burn TONS more time getting AAs. It seems that most games have replaced this sort of advancement with gear grinds, which is unfortunate.
I think that EVE has such a buildup due to its pretty much limitless advancement. FE does not have this. It does have a cap, in which once you reach it, you cannot continue to improve your character. In EVE, there are so many skills, and so many more being added as time goes by, that I would highly doubt that anyone will/can ever cap out their skills. It is a big reason people in EQ1 stuck around for a good amount of time. People could hit cap, and then burn TONS more time getting AAs. It seems that most games have replaced this sort of advancement with gear grinds, which is unfortunate.
So you think they replace the "box price commitment", so to speak, with "skill development commitment"? Hmmm... never really thought of it that way.
Wonder if FE will expand skill into more specialized categories, kinda like Eve...
Horseshit Aercus, this launch was outstanding, the biggest in MMO history right? Then what happened, people played, were lied to, found out they were lied to, the game was being patched so fast and they were breaking just as fast as they fixed shit, and after less than 4 months it was beginning to be necessary to merge servers, the game imploded because of bugs, lag, implementations that failed, mechanics that suck donkey balls, and because Funcom is the company that Funcom is. That is opinion.
The facts are pretty clear and well documented. One million copies sold in the first 2-3 months, then 400k subscribers 3 months later, less than half that 6 months later, today less than 75k. We'll find out in 6 days just how much of a loss the game is incurring.
Aercus who was responsible for the hype? Funcom. Who was responsible for not delivering the content? Funcom. Who was responsible for lying about all of that? Funcom. Who was responsible for the shill campaign and bullshit campaign? Funcom. Players hopes and dreams, wtf r u talking about Walter? People who paid $50 for the game, and then paid another $50 in subscription fees only to find out the developers were fucking liars and full of horseshit from the get go were pissed. That is what happens, right or wrong when you wrong customers.
You won't be seeing me in another MMO anytime soon Aercus. Not until this industry cleans up their act.
I never said the launch was perfect, I said it was no worse than most other launches. If it was unplayable, how come people were getting to 80 in the first few weeks, and starting to down raid bosses after 6-7 weeks? Yes, Funcom hyped the game, but gamers also hyped the game and imbelished on the information given by Funcom. Yes, Funcom is guilty of building expectations among the players, and not fulfilling them completely. It's called advertisement, and all companies are then guilty of "lying" to some extent. As previously said, Axe bodyspray won't get you laid and Gilette Razors won't make you a good golfer even though they portray this in their ads. If you are unable to look through ad gimmics you are not a very educated or experienced consumer.
But it's just a game, and if that is something that get you so psyched that you whine about the launch after 1.5 years, you have larger problems than AoC...
Advertising is saying "I have oranges for sale, I have the best oranges and they are the most orange, oranges you have ever seen" when they really are green on the inside, but only colored orange with paint on the outside and it fools the reviewers enmass.
Shilling is when you pay other people "to tell folks you are selling oranges, and that they have tasted and tried them and indeed, they are the most orange, oranges, contrary to their known or unknown ability to attain undisclosed and unbiased, uncompensated judgement of their product.
Funcom employed in advertising but they also employed shilling to lie their way into sales. Doing so has permanently damaged their reputation, but the facts of the game are such that it isn't up to par with what people would pay for.
Funcom advertised and hyped their product like all MMO developers do, and how are the "lies" by Funcom worse than those of e.g. Blizzard? If you believe *everything* a company says about its product you better not watch infomercials...
Some features just don't make it into launch, and some planned features just aren't implemented. This goes for all games, and AoC is not an exception to this rule.
most of the features wow promised were there at launch. Over 50% of the age of conan content was either not part of the launch or never existed in the first place.
Funcom advertised and hyped their product like all MMO developers do, and how are the "lies" by Funcom worse than those of e.g. Blizzard? If you believe *everything* a company says about its product you better not watch infomercials...
Some features just don't make it into launch, and some planned features just aren't implemented. This goes for all games, and AoC is not an exception to this rule.
I don't watch informercials. I didn't believe everything Funcom was saying about AOC, but we were told week after week and month after month that fixes and features were coming.
Come to try this game out again like 100,000 others, only instead of for free I subbed for a month (a few days before free trials came along) stupid me, the only things that had substantially changed were performance and the servers had been merged, and DX10 was in beta rather than non-existent.
This thread is not about what funcom did at launch it is about what they haven't done to get the game where it needed to be to be a huge success after launch. Today there is nobody measuring or calling it successful and how can they. The game clearly isn't what they expected to get back on their investment and they thought it was when they did the free trials and they figured out pretty fast that it still is not.
This game hasn't got features advertised on the box, or in the manual even 20 months after launch with no sign of them coming in this game. They are talking expansion product, without even bothering to deliver at least some form of all the features of what they promised with the original. They don't have fully functioning and playable sieges. Sorry you lose.
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment. For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up. Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment.
Horseshit. MMOs are growing fastest in PC gaming, and PC gaming is either holding steady or slowly declining. With Windows 7and an improving economy it will begin to grow again.
For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up.
Wrong again. Consumers need the features and content advertised. If you buy an adventure book, you expect the pages to contain a story with chapters pertaining to that story. AOC was an adventure fantasy set in an MMO without a lot of players, with borked mechanics and features missing. Deliver what you are advertising and you'll do well, don't and you won't. This isn't about the need for an expansion. Who are they making the expansion for? Most players who played and quit the game because it is missing features, buggy, and doesn't contain enough content or mechanics favorable to fair and fun play to justify the price being charged are not going to pick up the expansion. Rather than fix the product they have, trying to sell an expansion on a game already not fleshed out and functioning isn't going to win them a whole bunch of new customers.
Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
I would agree with you if the number was 50/50 but its 96% quit, 4% still subscribe to a game which can casual players a year to play through entirely the first time. It's been about 20 months since launch, so explain to me why the ratio is 96/4 when this market is growing, diverse, and supposedly contains so many casual players.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
WOW is an example of how to do it right or at least well. AOC is not by any measure. I can't believe you are writing that the reason AOC was unsuccessful at holding onto hundreds of thousands of subs or trying to attain millions of subs, while their game remains broken, while it still does not contain features hyped months before the launch, all while they have abandoned efforts to fix borked implements and add these missing features, I can't believe you are blaming that on the market. The market indeed does decide on the value of a product.
96% of players who have ever tried AOC have left to do other things. If they had managed to keep even another 100,000 of the million who have bought the game, still subscribed the current server makeup would be populated and healthy, and the game would not be in danger of server implosions. However that is not the case, and that is why AOC is failing.
Doing nothing or maintaining the current pace and focus of improvements, patches, and tweaking is not helping. Notice the downward trend in every metric to measure population and buzz for the game, they all agree, effective measurements or not, reliable or not, they all agree on the direction of the game's population.
Steady
Slow
Decline
Almost no games after WoW have been successful, and that's because WoW ate pretty much the whole casual segment.
Horseshit. MMOs are growing fastest in PC gaming, and PC gaming is either holding steady or slowly declining. With Windows 7and an improving economy it will begin to grow again.
For a MMO to be successful they need to pump out expansions (if themeparks, see WoW and Lotro for reference) or be sandbox games (like EVE). I've tried/played WoW, EVE, Lotro, EQ2, L2, VG, AO and a number of others, and have left them all behind with no intention of picking them back up.
Wrong again. Consumers need the features and content advertised. If you buy an adventure book, you expect the pages to contain a story with chapters pertaining to that story. AOC was an adventure fantasy set in an MMO without a lot of players, with borked mechanics and features missing. Deliver what you are advertising and you'll do well, don't and you won't. This isn't about the need for an expansion. Who are they making the expansion for? Most players who played and quit the game because it is missing features, buggy, and doesn't contain enough content or mechanics favorable to fair and fun play to justify the price being charged are not going to pick up the expansion. Rather than fix the product they have, trying to sell an expansion on a game already not fleshed out and functioning isn't going to win them a whole bunch of new customers.
Just because they don't appeal to me, and the majority of people who have tried them, does not make them failed or bad. Pulling up the population of a game as an evidence to its quality is a moot point as almost no games have a particularly good retention rate, and the largest game is bigger than all other games combined.
I would agree with you if the number was 50/50 but its 96% quit, 4% still subscribe to a game which can casual players a year to play through entirely the first time. It's been about 20 months since launch, so explain to me why the ratio is 96/4 when this market is growing, diverse, and supposedly contains so many casual players.
The MMO market is small, new players gravitate towards one game, and the vast majority of existing players does not readily switch games due to sunken-costs. Until WoW disappears there will be no WoW killer due to these factors, and no matter what Funcom does or does not do, or did or didn't do, has any impact in making AoC a success. And this statement will go for all MMO launches which try to get millions of subs - they are doomed before they are launched. That is not the games or the companies mistake, it's how the market is.
WOW is an example of how to do it right or at least well. AOC is not by any measure. I can't believe you are writing that the reason AOC was unsuccessful at holding onto hundreds of thousands of subs or trying to attain millions of subs, while their game remains broken, while it still does not contain features hyped months before the launch, all while they have abandoned efforts to fix borked implements and add these missing features, I can't believe you are blaming that on the market. The market indeed does decide on the value of a product.
96% of players who have ever tried AOC have left to do other things. If they had managed to keep even another 100,000 of the million who have bought the game, still subscribed the current server makeup would be populated and healthy, and the game would not be in danger of server implosions. However that is not the case, and that is why AOC is failing.
Doing nothing or maintaining the current pace and focus of improvements, patches, and tweaking is not helping. Notice the downward trend in every metric to measure population and buzz for the game, they all agree, effective measurements or not, reliable or not, they all agree on the direction of the game's population.
Steady
Slow
Decline
Defending AoC must be more fun than
hey why is Dragon Age ads all over *MMO*RPG.com ???
more fun than playing AoC
Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions.
The total Western MMOG market is estimated to have a revenue of about ~1.3b in 2009 and will most likely hit the 1.5b mark in 2011. That's about a 50% growth over 2007, which is around 7-8% annualy. Certainly quick, but not exactly explosive, right?
If you were just starting to play a MMORPG, which game is it the most likely you would pick up, the one everybody has heard of, or an unknown title? Do you think most newcomers to the genre start out in WoW or another game? Do you think the average gamer switches games frequently or infrequently?
It is my contention that this leads to few newcomers joining new releases, and the gamers you do get are not the ones you desire. Developers don't want the people who blast through the content they spent 5 years making in a few weeks, they want the guy that plays an hour or two every other day, not reaching end game for a year at least.
Consumers wants a game they find entertaining, which can be delivered in a myriad in ways. It's not the lack of promised player housing in WoW or drunken brawling in AoC which drive people to or from the games, it's their inherent entertainment value. Your proposed factors may or may not had an impact on the entertainment value of AoC, but to draw conclusions like you do, you would have to know the psychology of everyone that left, and not just assume all left for the same reasons you did.
No mmo has a 50% retention rate. I'd say 30% might be the best for the ones that have aimed mass market. It's a boom or bust market, and only WoW has boomed (and possibly Aion, remains to be seen). 5% or lower retention rate sounds bad, but it's something that happened to pretty much all releases the last few years; AoC, WAR, TR, HG:L, DDO, VG,etc. WoW certainly appears to be well polished today (based on the opinions of the players), but remember that when launched it was no better than the games that has succeeded it.
With almost all games post-WoW failing, don't you really see a trend that sticks deeper than the game itself?
I've been playing AoC since launch, I stuck at it through the memory leaks and saw an improvement when the Ymir's Pass content was added, the memory leaks were fixed and all was well.
lvl 80 came soon enough and my raiding began in earnest, then it began to sink in...Nothing else to do...Raid T1 and T2 every week, rinse 'n' repeat until you and the guy next to you are identikit doubles.
I've been doing those same raids (every week) for maybe 8 months, plenty of time for AoC's new helmsman Craig Morrison to analyse AoC's problem and fix them, and in the process keep existing players and attract new ones.
None of it!
Morrison's master plan has seen the introduction of more bliddy dungeons for people to run through each week!
Add pets
Give players 'loyalty points'
Mess with gear stats
It's a shame that the very description of AoC's genre hasn't yet sunk in to Morrison's brain.........RPG!
[Disclaimer : I play AoC mainly because I am a fan of RE Howard's Conan stories, and the excellent community that exists on the server Crom]
The market is growing we agree, Funcom didn't lose 7-8% marketshare with AOC, they lost 96% of their playerbase to purchase ratio, whatever that translates to I don't know and don't care. The market is growing, so should AOC were they average or better. However they are far below average and for reasons I've stated before.
I have no idea which game is most likely to be picked up. Most referred would probably have to be WOW, but there is just as much negative buzz as positive buzz about WOW at times, so word of mouth is their best marketing method. Most new MMOs need the positive impression followed by better and stable impressions and a concurrency with the rest of the players playing, to stick around. Another major need for MMOs is stable populations, see AOC or WAR as examples of where when this doesn't exist for any reason nor do the MMOs.
WOWs retention is much higher than AOCs and over a much longer period. About the only worse performing game than AOC would be SWG that I can think of, in terms of it having 1 million subs sold, and less than 100k playing today. AOC didn't fail because of WOW or any other reason except the merits of AOC and their product implementation.
My point is that we ought to stop placing the blame on present day subscriptions, performance, and characteristics of the game on the launch which was almost 2 years ago. We need to look at the game today.
Broken sieges, unfair imbalance between classes, both techincal and mechanical. Do you recall when there was an imbalance between female and male character damage levels? Was that acceptable? Why should the caster/melee imbalance which heavily favors casters be permitted?
How about imploding servers now? This is a real problem now and until they tweak mechanics and fix broken shit this isn't going to go away. Its only going to get worse.
If the game was vastly improved over what it was at release then more people would be playing.
It isn't as if people have not retried the game or there is a free trial.
If the game isn't growing then it is pretty clear the changes have not been great enough to keep people entertained or resolve the issues they had with the game.
In other words a game with exceptional gameplay will grow on its own. The game will sell itself with the exceptional gameplay it offers.
I don't hate the game or love it, but it is time to stop blaming the release of the game for the current situation. If enough was changed then some sort of rebound could have happened. It isn't like the majority of the market who tried conan isn't still looking for a new game.
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
Actually that isn't true Frostbite.
Blizzard initially said that the easy leveling curve was so players could get to 60 quickly to begin working on pvp and their hero class. Well the pvp was pointless until several months later when the (now old) honor system was put it with battlegrounds. Until then it was just grief here, gank there, with no gain or consequece.
Hero Classes were promised at release. They had originally said that you would get to 60, then become a <whatever>. For whatever reason, they never followed up on that and refused to even talk about hero classes until Wrath. At that time it was a hero class (read: singular) that required no effort to get.
Honestly thought, can't really compare AoC and WoW fairly. AoC it geared towards higher end PC's and mature gamers. WoW is going for mass market appeal with lower-res "cartoony" graphics and younger players.
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
So Funcom... a corporation publicly traded on a stock exchange, with hundreds of employees, scores of investors, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shareholders "should be disbanded" because you don't like their products?
That's pretty narcissistic. if you were a Coke drinker, should Pepsi Corp should be disbanded? I mean they are unethical and not good at making soft drinks that taste up to your standards.
Actually that isn't true Frostbite.
Blizzard initially said that the easy leveling curve was so players could get to 60 quickly to begin working on pvp and their hero class. Well the pvp was pointless until several months later when the (now old) honor system was put it with battlegrounds. Until then it was just grief here, gank there, with no gain or consequece.
Hero Classes were promised at release. They had originally said that you would get to 60, then become a <whatever>. For whatever reason, they never followed up on that and refused to even talk about hero classes until Wrath. At that time it was a hero class (read: singular) that required no effort to get.
Honestly thought, can't really compare AoC and WoW fairly. AoC it geared towards higher end PC's and mature gamers. WoW is going for mass market appeal with lower-res "cartoony" graphics and younger players.
Lol since when have boobies attracted mature gamers?
It's a myth that AoC has older players. Every guild I have ever been to has had tons of kiddies who lied that they were adults and who always refuse to come to vent because then they would be exposed. All you need is one look at public chat and you'll see how "mature" AoC community is.
First off, where did you get in my post that "mature gamers" equates to "boobies"? I would think the immature gamers would be going for the digital boobies as it were.
As for looking at public chat, there is technically no "public" chat, I will assume you mean Global? Many people actually disable that as there is a LFG channel if they need to find peopel for a pug. As for the "quality" of chat in Global it is no where NEAR as bad as the infamous Barrens Chat that WoW has. If you ask a legitimate question in Global you will rarely get a snarky reply (unlike in WoW).
When speaking of a mature game, it's more than the "boobies" as you put it. There is adult language and themes as well in many of the quests. Not to mention, AoC has fatalities....
I completely agree. I don't have AOC either I think it was a pretty good exprience, just lacking and it fell apart towards the end for me. I think Funcom is a company that should be disbanded though cause they are unethical and not good at making MMOs that are addictive and functional.
So Funcom... a corporation publicly traded on a stock exchange, with hundreds of employees, scores of investors, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shareholders "should be disbanded" because you don't like their products?
That's pretty narcissistic. if you were a Coke drinker, should Pepsi Corp should be disbanded? I mean they are unethical and not good at making soft drinks that taste up to your standards.
Coke and Pepsi both deliver good products and services, and they don't screw their customers by delivering half cans of soda with holes on the top but letting us all know it will be fixed in 2-3 months or maybe 4. To be fair I'm not the typical MMO player, never played WOW don't play AOC or any competion anymore because honestly nothing else currently appeals to me. I have given Aion some thought but I'm holding out for Mortal Online, I'm thinking that is going to be a pretty good game if they can get it off the ground. AOC is simply dying fast and I have no faith given the history of Funcom that there development team is going to build an expansion worth paying for.
Minus the launch of AO, did you ever play AO? And then thier follow up expansions? If anything, I turst thier expansions more than the originals. Shadowlands was a great addition, and Alien Invasion added elements to the game that were pretty revolutionary at the time, and I thought it was great. I was not around for the Lost Eden expansion, or whatever the name of it was, but I heard from many of my friends that it was well done as well.
I think you just have a pretty large bias against them for some reason, and would just rather assume that everything they have ever done, and will ever do is crap. Two bad launches. That sucks, but that is pretty much all. AO developed into quite the game, relished by many even to this day, and it added elements to the MMO genre never seen before, or really even after. AoC has not gotten there yet, but they are still on the right path. The game is doing much better as far as the fun factor, and if they keep building onto the base, they will get a great game. It is just a shame that it took so long.
I hope they take a que from AO, and once the expansion comes out, they make froob accounts for the normal AoC, and then you need to subscribe for the expansion content.