The article is complete BS and is written by a WoW fanboi who is afraid AOC's large subscriber numbers will force the inevitable WoW server consolidation sooner rather than later.
I love the little pie chart! In case you didn't know, 80% of all statistics are made up right on the spot.
The article is complete BS and is written by a WoW fanboi who is afraid AOC's large subscriber numbers will force the inevitable WoW server consolidation sooner rather than later.
go ahead read that and know that AOC is a great game and these haters are just scared of there beloved wow going down in flames or wow2 aka war will get no play
go ahead read that and know that AOC is a great game and these haters are just scared of there beloved wow going down in flames or wow2 aka war will get no play
HEH what a joke first the guy trashes the game and throws out a bunch of unsubstantiated numbers, then does a total turn atround and says the game is going to dominate WoW. I give this blog a rating of 1 on the credibility scale. I like how he says how he cannot even find the game on the shelf now. Come on down to my town dude, Best Buy and Walmart have plenty of copies.
"Following a supposedly successful launch, Funcom's Age of Conan has begun to crumble as the opening-month hype wears off and the criticisms increase. Today's extremely demanding MMO players are accustomed to a very high standard of gameplay and polish that seems just out of reach for Funcom's new title, and the rapidly declining user base is evidence that this experiment has failed." Full article. http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Age-of-Conan-Desperate-for-Subscribers/
LOL! This site is call WOWRIOT...WOW...do you get it? Its from some guys who are ...WOW! Fanbois! Of course they have to say badly about AoC!
I haven't seen it linked, though I admit I didn't thumb through all of the pages of this thread, but that guy that posted that, posted an updated review that was pretty much the complete opposite.
To me this makes both reviews two sides of a coin and neither reliable in the least bit. Any credibility he gained from this first he lost and received negative credibility for his flip-flop updated review.
He's like a 12 year old politician or something....
The baffling absurdity in both reviews coming from two opposite angles is almost unbelievable.
It's almost like he went to a wow fanboi and got some information, then went to an AoC fanboi and got some completely different information. Neither of which holds any water IMO.
--------------------------------------------- I live to fight, and fight to live.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post detailing the early struggles of Funcom's recently launched Age of Conan title. After reading my article, a few astute readers notified me of some discrepancies in my figures, and I decided to dig a little deeper for the benefit of the public. My original operative maintains that her numbers are correct, but I cast a wider net this time, and the results were shocking.
Age of Conan Sells Like Hotcakes Around the World
Contrary to my initial reports that as many as 40% of retail copies were going unsold, nearly all retailers are sold out and having trouble meeting the consumer demand for Age of Conan. A June 2nd press release from Funcom confirms the surprising success as Age of Conan rises to number 1 on the charts:
* #1 on PC and All-Format charts in Germany, Sweden, Norway
* #2 on All-Format charts elsewhere (bumped down only by GTA 4)
While it's difficult to get complete figures for North America (a slightly larger market) because there are no major aggregated reports available yet, retailer demand and preorders alone assure that results should be similar.
According to this blog at MMOCrunch, the WoW launch involved initial shipments of 250k units to North America and 280k to Europe. Compare that with Conan's initial shipments of 700k total to those same markets, and you will realize we have a huge boom on our hands!
Untapped Markets: Much More Room To Grow
We mentioned the initial launch figures from Age of Conan now. First reports indicated that 700k copies had shipped, and Funcom announced shortly afterward that they had passed the 500k mark for accounts activated in their billing systems. With this "conversion rate" of nearly 71%, we would expect somewhere near 700k active accounts now that Funcom has reached the One Million Units Shipped milestone.
Asian Market
According to MMOGCharts.com, World of Warcraft currently has over 50% of its subscribers in Asia, where Age of Conan has not yet launched. Given that WoW and AoC are in similar genres, but AoC has had a much bigger launch, we expect that the AoC population will at least double when Asian penetration occurs.
XBOX360 Market
Age of Conan is slated to be released soon for the XBOX360 platform, and this is a serious "trump card" when it comes to competition against World of Warcraft. Recent reports from NPD indicate that PC Games account for only 14% of Retail Game Sales, so the ability to start biting into that larger pie will be a huge payoff for Funcom when the XBOX360 launch takes place. The console market is quite fragmented with different systems, but we would expect the AoC subscriber base to grow at least 25% with exposure to Microsoft's savvy console customers (with over 9 million consoles sold to date).
Gamers Upgrading Their Computers
One point I initially used to criticize Age of Conan was its higher system requirements that limited the potential market. If I think about this differently, however, I realize it actually means Funcom's title has much more room for growth. As consumers gradually upgrade their machines over time, more and more of them will be able to play Age of Conan, while there will be no change in the market size for World of Warcraft (since they can already run it on old machines). In essence, Funcom has serious future growth "built in" to the game at launch! This initially dampened market makes the huge launch numbers even more impressive.
Age of Conan's Launch Much Smoother Than WoW's
I got input from several players who have experienced the launch phases of both WoW and Age of Conan, and the community clearly agrees that this latest launch from Funcom was much less bumpy than WoW's release nearly 3.5 years ago. One player offered this particularly telling insight:
"WoW had two hour queues, horrible lag, constant crashing & VERY limited end game content in the beginning"
As a long time WoW player myself, I realized that my perspective had been skewed somewhat by the incremental progress that has been made to the WoW servers since release. Does anyone remember login queues, loot lag, servers down for multiple days at a time? These trouble spots tend to fade from our memories after a few years but they were very real at the WoW launch.
By comparison, the Age of Conan developers have responded very quickly to problems, opened additional servers to ease the unprecedented demands, and worked quickly to address exploits and performance hiccups.
Developers Respond Faster in Age of Conan
We've all gotten used to the Blizzard patch situation by now. In World of Warcraft, we have months of buildup between patches as developers work on content that most of us never see, or balance changes and bugfixes that don't seem to impact anything for the better. Funcom's developers, on the other hand, seem very committed to addressing the needs of the playerbase as quickly as possible. We have seen several patches since launch, and continue to see multiple patches within the same week from Funcom; truly a breath of fresh air! Many have critcized Blizzard for milking their "cash cow" and ignoring customers -- it seems maybe a higher standard of service really is possible!
Age of Conan: The Better Game
I checked out a few review sites mentioned by Funcom in a press release, and I was surprised to see Age of Conan getting higher review scores than World of Warcraft, indicating that, even at this early stage of release, AoC is the better game.
Of course, I am always slightly skeptical of the bias in major media publications, so I checked out Metacritic for a fair "community" score from users who actually play the game rather than writers who are paid to give good scores.
MetaCritic User Reviews
World of Warcraft (Original): 7.4 / 10
World of Warcraft (TBC): 6.5 / 10
Age of Conan: 8.0 / 10
I know that these ratings are constantly changing, so I took pictures of the ratings today for proof. You can see them below:
This large disparity makes it obvious that gamers are enjoying AoC more than WoW, even though Blizzard has had several years (and an expansion) to polish up the WoW series!
What is perhaps even more telling is the number of reviews given on each of these titles. While Blizzard's games have been out for much longer, the Funcom title had way more users (509 votes) stop by to mention how much they enjoyed the game. This is a sign of the healthy, active, and growing community that must exist for a MMORPG to succeed.
In Conclusion
Following this research, I must apologize to my readers. I realize my last article was somewhat lacking when it comes to references, and I jumped to conclusions based on the information given to me by my inside operative. I can only thank you guys for pointing me in the right direction, as this new information has really opened my eyes.
I just called my local Gamestop and placed a pre-order for my own copy of Age of Conan today. They were out of stock (of course!) but they promised me I could get a copy before the end of the month -- I can't wait!
While his points are accurate in my mind (notably, the performance issues deterring a massive amount of players), his "facts" are misleading.
As everyone else has said, I don't think Funcom would ever release numbers like that. They wouldn't even remove the NDA on their beta, so I can't imagine them releasing detrimental statistics to a random person.
However, while it might not be 70,000, I WILL say that the world isn't as full as it used to be.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
He's writing for shock value. The large discrepency between both of his posts demonstrate that fact. One is extremely pro WoW while is other is extremely pro AoC.
Take it for what it's worth, but I think the author is just enjoying the attention and intentionally stirring up the pot.
To Melwe: Good find! That's kind of entertaining, actually... I agree with the post above mine. Seems like he wants to stir up the pot more than anything, even though neither reviews are very convincing to an educated player.
He's a troll obviously, but an effective one. Trolls on these forums, take notes
To Melwe: Good find! That's kind of entertaining, actually... I agree with the post above mine. Seems like he wants to stir up the pot more than anything, even though neither reviews are very convincing to an educated player. He's a troll obviously, but an effective one. Trolls on these forums, take notes
That statement proves itself untrue :P
If its obvious, he isn't a good troll after all. The best trolls go largely unnoticed as such. But you are definitely right, he IS a troll. Or someone so absolutely devoid of brain matter that he can not be trusted to think for himself long enough to deserve writing space on ANY site.
His second "blog" is so retarded I can't even THINK now. Using review sites as a way to observe the playerbase? Hell, most players don't vote on any of those things whether they hate it or not. Most "voting" reviews are plagued by viral marketing, and most regular reviews are plagued by plain ole' greasing the gears. You can't just "decide" AoC must not have ANY of the "issues" he swore by a single blog before it simply because a review score of the game is high...that makes no sense. He didn't play the game, he never had an insider (because, then, he CERTAINLY wouldn't be changing his tone so fast) and he has no clue what he is talking about.
One thing is for sure....I'm glad you AoC fans have him on YOUR side now. He's more damage than he's worth.
Is that articale for real? Looks like the poster is writing a bit suspicious ways, i find it hard to beleive. Must be making things up and putting up charts, quite impressive lol.
I think most of WoW's initial launch problems were directly related to the fact that no MMORPG had the initial success that WoW had. Up to WoW most MMORPGs were happy to have 250 subscribers. WoW's first day sales were 250K. Lag and crashing the servers were common place when you got 100 or so players together. New servers were rushed but that didn't unload the stress on initial servers. Slowly but surely Blizzard upgraded all servers but that took a couple of months.
Also they caught their IP off guard. There were a couple of times that forums or some servers were lost due to IP not Blizzard.
Character balance wasn't the greatest either as most people started out with shamans and Warlocks and Priests were considered underpowered.
I don't remember too many bugs though. The rogue stealth bug was the biggest. Yes there were loot problems but that again was lag. End game content wasn't that bad with Scholo, LBRS and UBRS. Not to mention MC and Onyxia.
PVP was totally lacking though.
You would have hoped that AoC would have been better prepared for its opening. Not only did it have WoW as an example, they had AO in the company history itself.
PS I think WoW's conversion rate was much superior to AoC with 80% or so re-upping their subscription. to WoW.
Communication was definitely better with the max time I ever waited for a GM 4 hours.
The sad truth that we realize, after this past month, is that speculating and reading about upcoming changes for WoW: WotLK is actually more fun and interesting than playing Age of Conan.
LOL how can you juge a WotLK when it's not even available?
Regarding the few stuff we know about WotLK I can say so far it will be boring as hell.
Same grind fest, same unfun BOP and loot system.
At least maybe, and I mark my words maybe player customisation will be nice. Which I seriously doubt be as good as LotRo's one.
On a last note, my guess is the author is one of these forums marketers hired to blend within communities and post fake stuff looking serious...
No mmo needs 500k subs to survivie, the number to successfully run it for a longer time is somewhere in the 200k line, even 100k subs works but you have to expect slower updates and less new content if sub numbers drop below a mark where they reduce team size.
You act as if all MMO's are created the same, with the same amount of money poured into them.... That is surely not the cas, expecially with AOC. Lets not forget the bought the fights to Conan prior to this game comming out. Im sure that alone did not come cheap, at all.
------------------------------ You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.-Mr.Smith
Comments
If you believe this you might as well believe anything. hehe.
yea its done on a WoW fan site called WoWriot.com. If this is real would stick my wang in a fire ant nest.
The article is complete BS and is written by a WoW fanboi who is afraid AOC's large subscriber numbers will force the inevitable WoW server consolidation sooner rather than later.
I love the little pie chart! In case you didn't know, 80% of all statistics are made up right on the spot.
That should tell you something.
lmao, that's all I say about that comment.
LOOK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE
2 days after the original blog was written the author had to update his comments:
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Age-of-Conan-Poised-to-Dominate-WoW/
whats his follow up titled you may ask? Age of Conan Poised to Dominate WoW
go ahead read that and know that AOC is a great game and these haters are just scared of there beloved wow going down in flames or wow2 aka war will get no play
HEH what a joke first the guy trashes the game and throws out a bunch of unsubstantiated numbers, then does a total turn atround and says the game is going to dominate WoW. I give this blog a rating of 1 on the credibility scale. I like how he says how he cannot even find the game on the shelf now. Come on down to my town dude, Best Buy and Walmart have plenty of copies.
I miss DAoC
LOL! This site is call WOWRIOT...WOW...do you get it? Its from some guys who are ...WOW! Fanbois! Of course they have to say badly about AoC!
I haven't seen it linked, though I admit I didn't thumb through all of the pages of this thread, but that guy that posted that, posted an updated review that was pretty much the complete opposite.
To me this makes both reviews two sides of a coin and neither reliable in the least bit. Any credibility he gained from this first he lost and received negative credibility for his flip-flop updated review.
He's like a 12 year old politician or something....
wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Age-of-Conan-Poised-to-Dominate-WoW/
The baffling absurdity in both reviews coming from two opposite angles is almost unbelievable.
It's almost like he went to a wow fanboi and got some information, then went to an AoC fanboi and got some completely different information. Neither of which holds any water IMO.
---------------------------------------------
I live to fight, and fight to live.
briyan in an idiot and should have his internet connection revoked.
Same guy apparently: http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/
Age of Conan Sells Like Hotcakes Around the World
Contrary to my initial reports that as many as 40% of retail copies were going unsold, nearly all retailers are sold out and having trouble meeting the consumer demand for Age of Conan. A June 2nd press release from Funcom confirms the surprising success as Age of Conan rises to number 1 on the charts:
* #1 on the PC charts
* #1 on PC and All-Format charts in Germany, Sweden, Norway
* #2 on All-Format charts elsewhere (bumped down only by GTA 4)
While it's difficult to get complete figures for North America (a slightly larger market) because there are no major aggregated reports available yet, retailer demand and preorders alone assure that results should be similar.
According to this blog at MMOCrunch, the WoW launch involved initial shipments of 250k units to North America and 280k to Europe. Compare that with Conan's initial shipments of 700k total to those same markets, and you will realize we have a huge boom on our hands!
Untapped Markets: Much More Room To Grow
We mentioned the initial launch figures from Age of Conan now. First reports indicated that 700k copies had shipped, and Funcom announced shortly afterward that they had passed the 500k mark for accounts activated in their billing systems. With this "conversion rate" of nearly 71%, we would expect somewhere near 700k active accounts now that Funcom has reached the One Million Units Shipped milestone.
Asian Market
According to MMOGCharts.com, World of Warcraft currently has over 50% of its subscribers in Asia, where Age of Conan has not yet launched. Given that WoW and AoC are in similar genres, but AoC has had a much bigger launch, we expect that the AoC population will at least double when Asian penetration occurs.
XBOX360 Market
Age of Conan is slated to be released soon for the XBOX360 platform, and this is a serious "trump card" when it comes to competition against World of Warcraft. Recent reports from NPD indicate that PC Games account for only 14% of Retail Game Sales, so the ability to start biting into that larger pie will be a huge payoff for Funcom when the XBOX360 launch takes place. The console market is quite fragmented with different systems, but we would expect the AoC subscriber base to grow at least 25% with exposure to Microsoft's savvy console customers (with over 9 million consoles sold to date).
Gamers Upgrading Their Computers
One point I initially used to criticize Age of Conan was its higher system requirements that limited the potential market. If I think about this differently, however, I realize it actually means Funcom's title has much more room for growth. As consumers gradually upgrade their machines over time, more and more of them will be able to play Age of Conan, while there will be no change in the market size for World of Warcraft (since they can already run it on old machines). In essence, Funcom has serious future growth "built in" to the game at launch! This initially dampened market makes the huge launch numbers even more impressive.
Age of Conan's Launch Much Smoother Than WoW's
I got input from several players who have experienced the launch phases of both WoW and Age of Conan, and the community clearly agrees that this latest launch from Funcom was much less bumpy than WoW's release nearly 3.5 years ago. One player offered this particularly telling insight:
"WoW had two hour queues, horrible lag, constant crashing & VERY limited end game content in the beginning"
As a long time WoW player myself, I realized that my perspective had been skewed somewhat by the incremental progress that has been made to the WoW servers since release. Does anyone remember login queues, loot lag, servers down for multiple days at a time? These trouble spots tend to fade from our memories after a few years but they were very real at the WoW launch.
By comparison, the Age of Conan developers have responded very quickly to problems, opened additional servers to ease the unprecedented demands, and worked quickly to address exploits and performance hiccups.
Developers Respond Faster in Age of Conan
We've all gotten used to the Blizzard patch situation by now. In World of Warcraft, we have months of buildup between patches as developers work on content that most of us never see, or balance changes and bugfixes that don't seem to impact anything for the better. Funcom's developers, on the other hand, seem very committed to addressing the needs of the playerbase as quickly as possible. We have seen several patches since launch, and continue to see multiple patches within the same week from Funcom; truly a breath of fresh air! Many have critcized Blizzard for milking their "cash cow" and ignoring customers -- it seems maybe a higher standard of service really is possible!
Age of Conan: The Better Game
I checked out a few review sites mentioned by Funcom in a press release, and I was surprised to see Age of Conan getting higher review scores than World of Warcraft, indicating that, even at this early stage of release, AoC is the better game.
GameZone (US)
World of Warcraft: 9.1 / 10 (official review)
Age of Conan: 9.4 / 10 (official review)
Of course, I am always slightly skeptical of the bias in major media publications, so I checked out Metacritic for a fair "community" score from users who actually play the game rather than writers who are paid to give good scores.
MetaCritic User Reviews
World of Warcraft (Original): 7.4 / 10
World of Warcraft (TBC): 6.5 / 10
Age of Conan: 8.0 / 10
I know that these ratings are constantly changing, so I took pictures of the ratings today for proof. You can see them below:
This large disparity makes it obvious that gamers are enjoying AoC more than WoW, even though Blizzard has had several years (and an expansion) to polish up the WoW series!
What is perhaps even more telling is the number of reviews given on each of these titles. While Blizzard's games have been out for much longer, the Funcom title had way more users (509 votes) stop by to mention how much they enjoyed the game. This is a sign of the healthy, active, and growing community that must exist for a MMORPG to succeed.
In Conclusion
Following this research, I must apologize to my readers. I realize my last article was somewhat lacking when it comes to references, and I jumped to conclusions based on the information given to me by my inside operative. I can only thank you guys for pointing me in the right direction, as this new information has really opened my eyes.
I just called my local Gamestop and placed a pre-order for my own copy of Age of Conan today. They were out of stock (of course!) but they promised me I could get a copy before the end of the month -- I can't wait!
While his points are accurate in my mind (notably, the performance issues deterring a massive amount of players), his "facts" are misleading.
As everyone else has said, I don't think Funcom would ever release numbers like that. They wouldn't even remove the NDA on their beta, so I can't imagine them releasing detrimental statistics to a random person.
However, while it might not be 70,000, I WILL say that the world isn't as full as it used to be.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
He's writing for shock value. The large discrepency between both of his posts demonstrate that fact. One is extremely pro WoW while is other is extremely pro AoC.
Take it for what it's worth, but I think the author is just enjoying the attention and intentionally stirring up the pot.
To Melwe: Good find! That's kind of entertaining, actually... I agree with the post above mine. Seems like he wants to stir up the pot more than anything, even though neither reviews are very convincing to an educated player.
He's a troll obviously, but an effective one. Trolls on these forums, take notes
That statement proves itself untrue :P
If its obvious, he isn't a good troll after all. The best trolls go largely unnoticed as such. But you are definitely right, he IS a troll. Or someone so absolutely devoid of brain matter that he can not be trusted to think for himself long enough to deserve writing space on ANY site.
His second "blog" is so retarded I can't even THINK now. Using review sites as a way to observe the playerbase? Hell, most players don't vote on any of those things whether they hate it or not. Most "voting" reviews are plagued by viral marketing, and most regular reviews are plagued by plain ole' greasing the gears. You can't just "decide" AoC must not have ANY of the "issues" he swore by a single blog before it simply because a review score of the game is high...that makes no sense. He didn't play the game, he never had an insider (because, then, he CERTAINLY wouldn't be changing his tone so fast) and he has no clue what he is talking about.
One thing is for sure....I'm glad you AoC fans have him on YOUR side now. He's more damage than he's worth.
how did i miss this article? it is hilarious.
Is that articale for real? Looks like the poster is writing a bit suspicious ways, i find it hard to beleive. Must be making things up and putting up charts, quite impressive lol.
I think most of WoW's initial launch problems were directly related to the fact that no MMORPG had the initial success that WoW had. Up to WoW most MMORPGs were happy to have 250 subscribers. WoW's first day sales were 250K. Lag and crashing the servers were common place when you got 100 or so players together. New servers were rushed but that didn't unload the stress on initial servers. Slowly but surely Blizzard upgraded all servers but that took a couple of months.
Also they caught their IP off guard. There were a couple of times that forums or some servers were lost due to IP not Blizzard.
Character balance wasn't the greatest either as most people started out with shamans and Warlocks and Priests were considered underpowered.
I don't remember too many bugs though. The rogue stealth bug was the biggest. Yes there were loot problems but that again was lag. End game content wasn't that bad with Scholo, LBRS and UBRS. Not to mention MC and Onyxia.
PVP was totally lacking though.
You would have hoped that AoC would have been better prepared for its opening. Not only did it have WoW as an example, they had AO in the company history itself.
PS I think WoW's conversion rate was much superior to AoC with 80% or so re-upping their subscription. to WoW.
Communication was definitely better with the max time I ever waited for a GM 4 hours.
Waiting for the next thing
quote:
The sad truth that we realize, after this past month, is that speculating and reading about upcoming changes for WoW: WotLK is actually more fun and interesting than playing Age of Conan.
LOL how can you juge a WotLK when it's not even available?
Regarding the few stuff we know about WotLK I can say so far it will be boring as hell.
Same grind fest, same unfun BOP and loot system.
At least maybe, and I mark my words maybe player customisation will be nice. Which I seriously doubt be as good as LotRo's one.
On a last note, my guess is the author is one of these forums marketers hired to blend within communities and post fake stuff looking serious...
So, where are the respectable sources of this article?
Considering that its biased, I think its more of a Blizzard fanboy post.
This is a link to Metacritic which Melwe mentioned with critic reviews.
Link for all the PC scores on this site.
www.metacritic.com/games/pc/scores/
Link for AOC
www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/ageofconanhyborianadventures
Here is the updated link, you n00b cake.
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Age-of-Conan-Poised-to-Dominate-WoW/
I seriously doubt there is only 70k active subs in age of conan.
You act as if all MMO's are created the same, with the same amount of money poured into them.... That is surely not the cas, expecially with AOC. Lets not forget the bought the fights to Conan prior to this game comming out. Im sure that alone did not come cheap, at all.
------------------------------
You see, every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You spread to an area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.-Mr.Smith
I'd be interested to find out what the source of this "inside information" actually is, until I do, I'll be treating these statistics as unreliable.
---
This site has no credibility... It went from hater to fanboi in two posts...
Inside information means he cant reveal his source therefore its all BS made up...
hilarious artitcles when read together tho...