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MMORPG.com doesn't like AC (too much)
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Member UncommonPosts: 2,329
They only post the patch info every other month even though I submit it every month. It's sad I have to submit it and sending out the news is not someones (Frelorn's) job at Turbine.
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"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
/begin flamewar
The game is dead and yes its good not to have little teenagers running around peein on your loot.
D3D
_________________________________
Loved AC, played it for 3 years. But yeah it's dead now, don't expect mmorg to post news on a game played by 2-3k persons.
Aguitha, try at least three times that.
I would expect a MMORPG website to cover MMORPG news no matter the popularity of the MMO. I know why they don't. It's because there home page is such a cluttered mess that's more about advertising than content leaving only room to display 10 news items at a time.
yeah, AC is slowly dying but is the best MMORPG game of all time...anyone who played this game knows that...There will never be another AC...
Well, I play on Darktide , the full PvP server, and server populations have been going up since LoTROnline came out and with the new push of games that focus on PvP (i.e. Warhammer Online, Vanguard, and Age of Conan). If Turbine did any promotion of the PVP combat engine and loot system, they may grab a significant amount of new players while they are waiting for Conan and Warhammer to come out. If you haven't played AC PvP, its a slick mix of FPS style & RPG... I love being able to use rocks, trees, walls, etc to block arrows & magic war bolts... it adds some combat realism that games like WoW, SWG, and DAoC don't have since in those games the range & magic attacks go through obstructions.
http://www.DarktideRegulators.com
http://www.EvinsWardlaw.com
http://www.EZPaintball.com
http://www.EZAirCompressors.com
Seeing how AC is rated at 8.2 and WoW is rated at 8.1....you would think even a dead game would get more recognition.
~Mongoose
wow that sounds really awesome. I got the client d/l jsut need to make time for it one day inbetween EVE
Population has been steadily rising since Free Trial. Morningthaw has maybe 30% more population than it did before I quit 2 years ago. I came back a few months ago.
AC:ToD
yeah, i may give it another go in a few days. Well, i've quit at least 50 times, always to come back a few months later.
Actually I noticed it took a little drop when LotRO came out. The free trial helped a little with the population, old players like myself are returning. I started playing 7 months ago because of the free trial.
Also back to the topic. I submitted this months patch info to MMORPG.com. It didn't get posted. I wonder if they would post it if Turbine themselves submitted it.
Turbine's marketing irritates me, they do nothing. To my knowledege they don't send out the patch news to any game sites. There are no screenshots on the official site, and the ones on the trial page are really bad. I wish they would make an official MySpace page for AC. The last ad was really crappy and looked like bad box art from the 80's. There's nothing epic about the sh!tty drawing. It was obviously a side project of someone's at Turbine. Whoever gave the OK to waste money and run it needs to be kicked in the head.
The game isn't dead! Just don't have many players. Although lately some ppl that used to play some years back have come back to the game.
I just started playing again myself, and I like the game. It doesn't have the graphics like WoW (another great game), but Asherons Call is one of it's kind!
If Turbine had advertised about the game some(!) more, maybe other ppl might have started to play.
Indeed such a great game owned by such a crap company.
Its really sad, AC is a brilliant MMO probably the best of all time, its such a shame that Turbine's retards screwed up the sequel. If they had any brains they would maybe try a remake, but they obviously dont. And no, the game isnt dead.
yep right now the only plausible reason to join AC is for darktide PVP,
and if you are completely new to AC then you should know somebody from the forums here or anybody that already has a character on darktide that will help you.
Help on Darktide? Right...
They will help you find another server.
AC was a great game, but the graphics, UI and just about everything about it are so outdated that it is painful to play it again. I tried and logged out within 15 minutes.
To those of you saying that it was a great game, but the company sucks..........WTF are you smoking, it was the company that made the game as good as it is. No other company had the nerve to put out a game such as AC, but Turbine did and made it a critical success if not a mainstream success. They made a game with no real public history for it and got a huge following at the time. They came out with the standard of constant free updates that many companies still won't follow even though everyone pretty much wants them. They have made some mistakes but so has every single other MMO company out there, yet they have had some of the best game launches in history and you people still feel the need to put them down for no other reason than to try to inflate your self-promoted egoes.
Get off the hate of all these companies that have done great jobs and get a clue.
Back to AC though, it has and will probably be one of my top 2 games of all time and if they ever redid it (not the AC2 fiasco) I would run back just as many others would.
Turbine hasn't always owned the game. They made some changes when they bought the game from Microsoft. Not everything was for the better of the game.
After Turbine bought it completely from Microsoft, things started to go downhill.. which is stupid, because everyone thought Microsoft was the reason the game was starting to fail - until Turbine actually took over and started to prove that they didn't really know what they were doing.
Microsoft trayd to get players over to AC 2 so they could close AC 1... It dident happed.... Turbine has trayd to get a old game to work.... did they sucsed... well in some parts... but they faild in other parts too....
There are no mmo games that can compere with AC... It whas one but never got from beta... sadly...
AC is probely the best OLD style rolplaying game online today...
Seen games tray to match AC but never quit did it.... Sadly AC is old and not the best grafics.... and missing bit stuffs.... but the rollplaying there rules big time...
Sheista,
The deal between Microsoft and Turbine is not the reason why there are less players on AC. The only influence Microsoft might have had, is money and employment.
The main reason is the competition of other games. AC was one of the first MMORPG's. Later the better looking games lured AC players away from the game. I am convinced when you ask former AC players what they think of AC, the majority will say, it is one of the best games ever.
This is the reason why you see many returning players in AC today, because other, better looking games can't deliver the same content. Good example is WoW. A very nice game till you reach the cap. Then you will be forced into mass battles. Not everyone like that element. Another example is DDO (also from Turbine). Players are forced in group playing.
As soon players are forced into a kind of play, the charm is gone. This happened to AC2 in a certain way too and is the main reason why it failed.
The freedom of play on high and low level in AC is what players like. Players who are grown up in the modern games can have a hard time playing AC, because not everything is delivered on a plattern. They have to use their brains and must explore. Another big advantage is you can play AC for 90% solo, but the game comes to glory when you join a monarchy.
Ok, enough advertisement (again). So please if you have info about the (not anymore) declining numbers in AC, have your facts in order.
I have my facts perfectly in order. I never stated that Microsoft was the reason. In case you didn't read my post completely, I said that people -thought- Microsoft was running it into the ground. But as soon as they stopped running the show (they -did- have creative control over the game. They told Turbine what they were and weren't allowed to do with the game), Turbine took over. After Turbine took over and the Ken Karl fiasco surfaced, it was obvious that Turbine was worse at running the game than Microsoft. Yet, on top of Ken Karl's crappy decisions, it got even WORSE after he left. Even with all of his bad decision making, he managed to make enough good decisions to keep the game headed in the right direction. People just weren't aware of it because they only looked at the negatives. Granted, he was an idiot for making -so many- bad decisions, but it went on to prove that Turbine really couldn't run a game. They got greedy and don't listen to their players.
I was in AC for the whole thing, and I remember very clearly what was happening behind the scenes. In case you forgot, it was Turbine that killed red PKing, which was hands down their biggest mistake over the games life. Go back before PKL was introduced and look at the support the game had. You could portan into Ayan on almost any server and the place would be full of people both PKs and non-PKs. As soon as PKL was introduced... well there went wars between guilds, and there went the hundreds of people across the servers who played the game for hours every day JUST for PKing. Everyone tried to make PKL work.. people tried to revive red PK. Never worked, and it was a fast decline after that.
I still remember watching the numbers of friends who just slowly stopped coming online as often. And then finally they would say they were quitting. Finally, I followed suit. About 8 or so months after that, I resubscribed only to see that the numbers were WAY less. The people that tried hanging on when I had left, had all finally given up and gone. None of the old-school PKs were left.
MUCH later, I went back and resubbed only to find that a 'new breed' of PKs had spawned. Barely any of the old-school PKs were left, if any at all on some servers. Most of the big monarchies had crumbled except for a select few, and they only had maybe 20-30 active people left. But the legends of the server were just that.. legends. These new PKs thought they were top dogs now, because they never experienced the game in its prime. They never dealt with looting or wars. It became nothing more than an e-peen contest, because there were no penalties associated with it anymore. People wore their best gear, people had 500 health, maxed stats, etc..
All of that was Turbine's fault. You can argue it all you want, but I was one of the players who was doing it all, from PKing, to being in that first group every patch to do the new story arc quests. I was in the guild of the first actual XP chain in AC, created by Gekkonidae (another of Turbine's huge blunders.. not fixing things the second they were exploited and letting them continue for way too long) Had they fixed XP chains within the first month that they surfaced, the game wouldn't have gotten so out of control. Had they addressed the issue of UCMing when it first surfaced, and actually assigned GMs to -actively- police it, things would have gone a lot better.
Turbine killed their own game for not listening to their players, and for not addressing REAL ISSUES with the game much sooner than they did. I don't even know how long XP Chains went on until they changed the mechanics of how you got XP from it. FAR too long, though.
Here's a quick fact: At Asheron's Call's conception, it was planned for every server in the game to be like Darktide. Interesting how that turned out after they started destroying PKing.
Ok Sheista, now we are talking.
Good facts and not a simple "one liner". On most points I agree. Of course not only the well looking games drove players away. Some decisions of Turbine did no good either.
True, many players liked in the old days the PK element on the white servers. PKlite destroyed more of less this kind of fun. However I think the majority of players did not like PK at all. This is the group I am talking about. These days on the white servers you don't see many people doing PK or even PKlite, just because they don't like it or don't have the skills. The real PK-ers go to Darktide.
Leaves the question why the not PK people walked away. As I said mainly because other, newer games were brought out on the market. The hardcore AC players survived because they tend to be social and like a friendly surrounding. Players who only want to grind or don't share the community feeling, don't stay long.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Sheista.
I think you're underestimating the number of PKers there were on white servers though. On Leafcull alone, the 4 largest guilds on the server were the ones that were involved in the PK wars. You could warp into Ayan and instantly see no less than 20 red dots on the radar. If you went on a quest, there was at least 1 person in addition to you that was PK (for those of us who were perma-red). While you were out hunting, you would always run into other PKs. There were mansion raids, where even people who didn't usually PK would go red just for the opportunity to swing at people in a rival guild.
On good days, there were fights going on in Ayan, Subway, Sanctuary, and random accounts of people chasing each other across the landscape. Those same people who PKed were some of the most noteable players on the server. Even the leaders of these guilds PKed, and these people were some of the same who were involved in the main events of the server - IE; the story arc quests.
When people like that lose interest in the game, it has a huge impact on the world because a lot of those people had a direct impact on what happened in the rest of the game. Just because we PKed didn't mean we didn't partake in the PvE aspect of the game. The most dedicated PKers just did it -while- they were red.
I still remember exploring Asheron's Island when it first opened up. There were dozens of PKs there, and I remember fighting in huge battles while Olthoi swarmed around us. Then there was the race to become the first to get to the ends of the new dungeons there. It was made even harder by the fact that people on both sides were PKs and were competing to get there.
Let's not forget the best story arc of all.. Asheron vs. BZ. To even destroy the crystal you had to be PK, and other PKs were there defending it for weeks on end. Then there were the wars back and forth between Asheron and BZ's followers.
My main point is that for -many- of the old-school players, Turbine ruined what we held dearest. We may have been a minority, but there were still a LOT of us. We got the best out of both worlds.. the lore, and the competition.
Edit: And my feelings as to why the non-PKs started to lose interest. XP chains first of all, followed by UCM. If you didn't macro and (at one point) weren't in an XP chain.. you were left behind. In Gekk's XP chain I could easily make 200 mil a day without lifting a finger. That was up to some 350mil a day. I was gaining a level a day no problem. (in the high levels) Turbine allowed XP Chains for sooooo long, that people were miles ahead, which made Turbine add some things to balance it out. Well now, XP chains are dead, and there are other things in place to allow people to level faster (I started a new account after ToD was released, and got to 129 in about 3 weeks just hunting in the new places)
Then, Turbine started to add stupid things.. take for instance the ToD expansion. Pre-orders got a ridiculously unbalancing HP boost item. They made it to where people without these high end items could no longer compete. In a level based game, that might be fine. But AC was not a level based game. It was a skill/attribute based game. Even the purest of templates couldn't compete with people that had all this uber gear and could do all the quests. Which is another problem. They started to make AC a gear based game. Where people used to be unique based on their templates and what combinations of gear they used.. it became a game based on having -specific- gear. You had to have these things in order to have the best character. It was no longer preference, so much as what was best.
The loot system in AC was one of its best aspects. Getting a random item from a mob that was awesome was great. Same with getting a random one and then tinkering it up to be something great. Quest gear shouldn't have been the end all, like it is in other larger games.