Anniversary Event kicked my Old Butt

Hluill

So, I am still playing this game.  Or have come back to playing it after countless hours in BDO and ESO.

Yep, it's like getting on that rusty ride at the county fair.  It's been neglected and certainly needs a new coat of paint.  The people running it should put down their bottle of booze or crack pipe or whatever and pay attention to their rides.  There are definitely some maintenance issues.  Be nice if zoning wasn't like playing Russian Roulette with the disconnect demons, or if my outfit didn't clip so much.  But hey, my huge-breasted warrior can go topless, unlike the PG-porn of more modern MMOs.

And yeah, it's blatantly pay to win.  For cash I can buy gear that makes the game much easier to play and even be competitive in PvP.  For cracking open my wallet the game becomes playable and fun for twitchless old men like me.

For the anniversary, there's a new quest and it kicked my butt.  There were no giant red circles or special glitters.  I had to pay attention to animations and dialogue.  I actually had to pay attention to the screen.  I haven't felt that involved in the fight in a long time.  It was a decent story with some tough bosses.  I have failed to complete quests in this game.  

And though it doesn't have a huge population, there's still plenty of players to help with quests and dungeons and other group content.  In fact, some quests can be a bother as I have to wait for mobs to respawn because others are cleaning them out.  There's quite a crowd at the world-boss events and the raids run frequently.

Sure, it's still a hand-holding theme-park.  But the hand is pretty rough and the rides are pretty bumpy.  What I thought were fetch quests kept me interested and rereading the text because I hadn't paid attention to the quest giver.  Even junk mobs will swarm me and ruin my day.  

I'd love to write more, but I gotta log in and watch some gruesome fatalities.

Po_gg

Hluill said:

Yep, it's like getting on that rusty ride at the county fair.  It's been neglected and certainly needs a new coat of paint.  The people running it should put down their bottle of booze or crack pipe or whatever and pay attention to their rides.  There are definitely some maintenance issues.

A well-wrought review, and that quoted part is spot-on

AoC is rusty and offers a bumpy ride, but still a fun one, with decent population. And yep, they have the anniversary now, for about 3 more weeks.

cheyane

Haven't played this game since I played it during launch. They have gear you can buy in the cash shop. The ones you can earn in the game are not good enough? That seems a bit...

Po_gg

Since I just said the other day in Illiset's thread how less I care about being the top of endgame, and same goes for pvp so it maybe ain't my place to comment... but I feel it was an exaggeration in the OP.

The gear is more just part of the endgame jump.

It could be a whole different argument though (I'm against jump-to-levelcap offers too since their appearance around 2010), and yep, imo selling endgame character or gear should be a general no.

Sadly most games offer that "service" in one way or another, AoC ain't an exception either, you can create a level 80 character, and gear up for a quick start.

However,

cheyane said:

The ones you can earn in the game are not good enough? That seems a bit...

quality-wise it's just fine for a smoother start of the endgame. Shop has a T3 raid gear set (both as part of the level 80 quickstart and a separate purchase as well), and T2 pvp gear set.

While the "good enough" gear is around T6 for PvE and I believe T4 (?) for pvp.

(still, I agree without the gear and the level 80 jumpstart the store'd be much better)

Hluill

Endgame, there is better gear than found in the cash shop.  Factions, Relic and Shard Merchants, and  PvP Armories all sell better gear for in game currencies.  Better gear also drops from different endgame instances and quests. 

But if one is lazy like me, it's easier to just pay and play the content that almost requires it (Khitai) than to grind for it.  There's also beginner, twentieth and fiftieth level stuff for purchase that definitely makes the game easier to play.  Fights are shrunk from rotating through combos, while the health bar drops, to only one or two combos.

As a side note, I am disappointed how most (all?) have become so gear centric.  The slot-machine mechanics to get the gear is even more disappointing.  This non-immersive mechanic seems to be fundamental in modern game design.

Even with the pay-to-win gear, much of the content is still challenging.  As I wrote, the Anniversary Quest still kicked my butt.  I lost count of the numbers of times I died.  Several times I fought the boss straddling more than one of my tombstones.

It breaks my heart and challenges my imagination to dream of what this game could be with a little investment.

Po_gg

Hluill said:

It breaks my heart and challenges my imagination to dream of what this game could be with a little investment.

Yep, and they don't even do that little investment, just look at this anniversary... the half-assed reinsert of last year's.

Kinda shame, since the game itself is good and it shows even from under 5-7 years of ignorance and maintenance mode.

The tombstones I just cited in a recent thread about death penalties, the difficulty I used to cite in delete's "every game is easymode now" threads, etc.

The foundations are there, too bad Funcom won't do anything about it, they just keep it running for the IP, so they could keep milking Exiles.

An extra note to store gear (while I don't like the concept, as I said), their reasoning for it was at least semi-true. Raid structure is kinda linear, and with the lower player count, who are mostly at the end, it really could be challenging to find groups for the early raids.

So when a new character (alt, or new player) gets to 80 and finish the factions, etc., will see that players run T4 and above raids mostly, which is unreachable at that point.

The T3 set from the store at least puts those characters to the entrance of that, since the alternative is a ton of time spent with searching or gathering players willing to run the early raids several times. (though now there's a raid finder, maybe that helps a bit)

And it's only the entrance, those players still need to "work" their way up to T6...

Albatroes

Wasn't tencent in talks to either buyout or fund funcom 2-3 years back? I kind of stopped following if anything ever came of it but was hoping if they did, then they could do a proper remake of Secret World.

mgilbrtsn

Man did I enjoy this first came out.  I don't remember exactly what sort of dulled it for me, but I think the quality of Tortuga wasn't replicated in the rest of the game.  I also think that the content was kinda limited.  Like I said, was a long time ago, and my recollection could be way off base.

Po_gg

Mars_OMG said:

I tried this a few days ago and was kind of saddend by the lack of yay for the Anniversary. The server had 6 or less lvl 80's. How this game is surviving is beyond the scope of reason at this point.

I assume it was Fury? (just checked Crom, Tortage had about a dozen in the range of level 15-20, and OT had pages of level 80s)

Mars_OMG said:

Funcom simply shut the door on the community by putting the game on life support when the title still had about 1k-1.5k avid pvp players.

Just like above, they did the doorshutting on the pvp community   not really, just stopped catering them all the time, even through the cost of breaking the PvE side of the game.

They still threw some bones there in the last 5-6 years, like the B&G server, or the pvp-focused Saga server, but the numbers on those attempts were lacking.

And the game is on maintenance mode anyway, so it ain't exactly they're "favouring" one side over the other... we're all neglected.

Regardless, Crom is nicely populated. Fury, not so much.

Scorchien

Albatroes said:

Wasn't tencent in talks to either buyout or fund funcom 2-3 years back? I kind of stopped following if anything ever came of it but was hoping if they did, then they could do a proper remake of Secret World.

Tencent purchased FCMKF in Jan 2020, i had an awful lot of FCMKF that i bought for .05 and sold to Tencent for 1.75 .. ..Made quite a bit of money from that ..

Anyhow , they are working on contnet for both AoC and TSW , fyi