There is nothing wrong with a game that has server merges early in life if they happen to open too many servers. The problem is the population left the game en mass. Not merging the servers earlier than this has just compounded the problems. Keeping every server relatively full is incredibly important.
There is nothing wrong with a game that has server merges early in life if they happen to open too many servers. The problem is the population left the game en mass. Not merging the servers earlier than this has just compounded the problems. Keeping every server relatively full is incredibly important.
I completely agree, should have been done much sooner.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Some MMO's start out with waiting list of up to an hour or more you have to wait in order to get into the game. In other words they only make about 2/3's the servers need for their intial population. Then they wait a few months for the massive population serge to settle down and they add more servers then.
For some reason AoC made enough servers for everyone who pre-ordered and then some, guess they thought that everyone who tried their game was going to stay or something. Anyways, many people do not stay with a newly released MMO, in AoC's case that number was even higher than average. So now you have a game made for over 1 million that has 40% to 30% of that number actually playing.
They should eigther make xserver instances and wait for the X-Box release or close down half a dozen or so servers and merge them with the other low pop ones. Then reopen the closed one with the x-box release if need be.
If you were a PVEer sure shadowbane was a bad mmo but most hardcore pvpers look back at shadowbane as one of the top 3 pvp mmo's of all time and many think it's number 1. shadowbanes pvp, city, seiging and things like mines and runes to encourage conflict make it 10 times the pvp game that aoc is. Graphics were shit, clicking to move is sucky, it was buggy, it was exploitable, there was little pve content at all but damn the game rocked for pvp, no mmo has come close to getting the blood pumping like shadowbane could, nore got close to provideing such a great conflict system that made enemies and very close life time friends. shadowbane 2 please but with a decent budget.
This is totally the wrong place to debate the pros and cons of Shadobane but...
Let me just say that you explained yourself why the game was terrible. Did it have some good ideas about how to make an interesting PvP game? Yes, it did. That was why myself and many of my friends were excited to play it even years before it was released. But in the end it was crap. Most of the features they claimed they would have never made it into the game. And the few that did were too deeply buried under a sea of bugs and exploits to be enjoyed.
My experiences with Shadowbane summed up in one paragraph: Myself and my friends were told the game would be out in six months. We started a guild. We recruited many people. The game was delayed. It was delayed again. We got bored and played other games. It was still delayed. Two years later it finally comes out. It was buggy as hell. Half our guild quits because they can't even get past the bugs in the install CD, much less the bugs in the actual gameplay. The other half of the guild pushes on and builds a city. Our tree of life is bugged and the city is deleted. We build another. Same thing happens again. We build another. Same thing happens again. Half the guild quits again. The last few remining people decide to change leaders. The new leader cheats to high hell and back to build city #4. City #4 doesn't get deleted by a bug but he gets banned for cheating along with most of the rest of the guild.
And you call THAT a good game? I called it a waste of two years of my life and moved on.
Funny thing, now that we are talking about this I wonder if people who were dedicated to AoC before its release are as pissed about AoC as I was about Shadowbane. But then again, atleast AoC runs for more than two minutes at a time without crashing....
Originally posted by FischerBlack Having been through merges in the past, they tend to have 2 effects. 1. They improve gameplay for subscribers 2. They provide a signal to the wider community that sub numbers are shrinking. I think its a tough call for a studio to make. They need to balance the welfare of current players with the image hit that comes from the announcement. But of course if it does happen the haters will all do victory dances for a few days.
It might seem like a tough call to make, but in my opinion there's only one approach to take that will serve them well in the long run: do what's best for your players.
Customer numbers are a factor of acquisition and retention. Retention is secured by providing for the players you have, and the only acquisition you will have after 3-6 months is through expansions (kind'a a re-launch) and word-of-mouth. The latter is "acquisition through retention", so a factor of retention.
So do what benefits your current player base. They're your key audience now, whether these were the people you aimed for at the start or not, and they're the ones who will bring you new customers, if any. And throw in an expansion somewhere down the road so your faithful players have a good selling point when they recruit their friends. Just don't let them feel that the expansion takes away from what you're doing for them now.
My two cents anyway. But then I don't work with MMOG development. :-)
FC-FamineFuncom Community ManagerMemberUncommonPosts: 278
A quote from Famine, a Funcom moderator: "There is nothing official yet on such a system but I think it's safe to say we are considering it. We do see the concerns in the community for needing it and that is something I have personally taken up with the dev-team in relation. If we receive any additional information on something like this then we will of course post it in the announcement section of the forums."
Last time that quote was brought up here on these forums to show how Famine pretty much confirmed server merges, Famine came out screaming how it was taken out of context because he realized what a big goof he made letting that slip.
Let's see if he does it again.
You know it! This is only because everyone is overlooking the original post in which the comment was made. The question on that specific topic was on character transfers and if we were adding the system. That's why the use of system is mentioned in the reply.
This is also why I should have quoted the original post. I will do that now for clarity haha.
Glen ''Famine'' Swan Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Wow. Even EQ2, which had one of the roughest launches ever and had the extreme misfortune of being launched at the same time as WOW made it over a year before server merges.
Wow. Even EQ2, which had one of the roughest launches ever and had the extreme misfortune of being launched at the same time as WOW made it over a year before server merges.
Low populations aren't really as noticable or dire in pve-centric games.
If every game branded as "fail" by those forum experts got shut down, there'd be no mmo's around anymore - only highly expected games being developed. Vanguard was a spectacular "failure", it had it's server merges and yet it's still doing fine, people play it and enjoy it.
There is space on the market for WAR, WoW and AoC - deal with it.
You're confused. This is actually about the time most MMOs have server merges.
Uh... most of the (good) MMOs I've played either went several years before merging servers or they never merged at all.
I was going to post the same thing. I can't remember any MMORPG I have played merging servers, let alone even considering doing it in the first 6 months. I'm not saying AoC is doomed if they do merge or anything, but this statement is just not true.
Even SWG and the steaming pile of cr*p that it has become hasn't merged servers.
Some of it's remaining players have asked for it, but SOE hasn't done any mergers yet.
The company did start allowing individual character transfers for a price, but that's not quite the same thing.
And the game's been out since 2003, and has yet to merge servers.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Launched in May and server merges coming in Sepyember or October. Does not look good for the steaming pile of crap that AOC is.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Launched in May and server merges coming in Sepyember or October. Does not look good for the steaming pile of crap that AOC is.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
Agreed, I want them to go down in flames for making me pay for that pile of broken promises/garbage.
Launched in May and server merges coming in Sepyember or October. Does not look good for the steaming pile of crap that AOC is.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Having been through merges in the past, they tend to have 2 effects.
1. They improve gameplay for subscribers
2. They provide a signal to the wider community that sub numbers are shrinking.
I think its a tough call for a studio to make. They need to balance the welfare of current players with the image hit that comes from the announcement. But of course if it does happen the haters will all do victory dances for a few days.
This is really the test of the new post-GG funcom
Will it..
1. Make the gameplay better for it's subscribers by merging servers or
2. Keep it's own ego inflated by pretending there are not major issues with the # of subscribers they have.
I don't think it's so much to keep the ego inflated as it is to try and stem further bleeding. Nothing says "dying game" to players - especially so early on - more than "we're merging servers".
When NCSoft announced they were merging 6 of the US servers down to 3 in Lineage II, they actually stated that it had nothing to do with the game losing players or doing poorly.
The pin on my BS meter spiked into the red on that bit.
1) If your game has healthy server populations, you don't have to merge them.
2) The players can tell by themselves how well the populations are doing.
To their credit, though, L2 has had a good run - about 4 years - before they had to merge servers.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I've seen maybe four sharded MMOs that reached 200k that didn't merge or simply shut down servers in the first few months.
I guess Vanguard is in that list, what are the other 3?
Well, since he has a Pirate avatar I would be willing to bet hes a huge fan of full loot PvP games. So we can add Shadowbane to that list as well. Then again, this is why I said "(GOOD) MMOs" in my post. Shadowbane was not a good MMO by any stretch of the imagination. Most other MMOs that have to merge or shut down servers this quickly are not going to be very good either, or enough people would want to play to make the servers full enough to keep them online.
If you were a PVEer sure shadowbane was a bad mmo but most hardcore pvpers look back at shadowbane as one of the top 3 pvp mmo's of all time and many think it's number 1. shadowbanes pvp, city, seiging and things like mines and runes to encourage conflict make it 10 times the pvp game that aoc is.
Graphics were shit, clicking to move is sucky, it was buggy, it was exploitable, there was little pve content at all but damn the game rocked for pvp, no mmo has come close to getting the blood pumping like shadowbane could, nore got close to provideing such a great conflict system that made enemies and very close life time friends.
shadowbane 2 please but with a decent budget.
Stray Bullet Games (new company formed from the remnants of the original SB team) has a New MMO In Development. It won't be SB2, but it looks like they're going for a similar play style.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
AoC wont last. Severver merges might make a few people stick around a while longer but lets face it...there is really nothing to do in Conan. Lets say server merges are the answer. Going by Funcoms standards, it will take them 1 year to figure out how to do it. And if the game hasnt gone under by then, there will be tons of bugs by merging the servers. its just the way they work.
Conan could have been a good game but its flawed in so so many ways I dont think it can ever be fixed. Funcom would have been better off investing $50 million in real estate. At least then they would have a place to go when Funcom gets shut down.
Its funny. This thread started with a quote from "Famine" about how AoC was going to merge servers. Shortly into the thread it derailed into a flame fest about what an awful game AoC is and how they really NEED to merge the servers to survive. Almost supporting their decision to merge the servers in a back-handed sort of way. Then Famine himself shows up to deny everything... and everyone just kind of ignores him to keep talking about how much they hate AoC.
I'm not saying stop. By all means, please carry on with trashing AoC. I hope Famine is still reading this so maybe he will get the message that he is working on one of the worst MMOs released in recent memory.
Launched in May and server merges coming in Sepyember or October. Does not look good for the steaming pile of crap that AOC is.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Having been through merges in the past, they tend to have 2 effects.
1. They improve gameplay for subscribers
2. They provide a signal to the wider community that sub numbers are shrinking.
I think its a tough call for a studio to make. They need to balance the welfare of current players with the image hit that comes from the announcement. But of course if it does happen the haters will all do victory dances for a few days.
This is really the test of the new post-GG funcom
Will it..
1. Make the gameplay better for it's subscribers by merging servers or
2. Keep it's own ego inflated by pretending there are not major issues with the # of subscribers they have.
I don't think it's so much to keep the ego inflated as it is to try and stem further bleeding. Nothing says "dying game" to players - especially so early on - more than "we're merging servers".
When NCSoft announced they were merging 6 of the US servers down to 3 in Lineage II, they actually stated that it had nothing to do with the game losing players or doing poorly.
The pin on my BS meter spiked into the red on that bit.
1) If your game has healthy server populations, you don't have to merge them.
2) The players can tell by themselves how well the populations are doing.
To their credit, though, L2 has had a good run - about 4 years - before they had to merge servers.
But the big difference is that this is a PVPcentric game. I purposefully chose the lowest population server I could find in WOW (horde side) and rolled on it because for pve, I hate 'competing' for quest mobs, and I love crafting. I love low populatons servers in WOW because I see all the rare mobs, I have a ton of crafting materials and I rarely have to wait to kill quest mobs. I'm also not a cutting edge raider, I don't mind being a teir behind other servers.
For games like Warhammer, DAoC and AOC, that is completely different. You want zones to be full, you want to have balanced factions.... you want seiging to be constantly happening. If you look at AOC now and that new video that AA posted of the test server. How difficult is it going to be on a normal server to have a 48v48 fight. They can fix the mechanisms, fix the framerate, fix objectives.. but in the end, it is going to be nearly impossible to get together two teams of 48 to do that stuff.
PVE games can go much longer before doing server merges because it doesnt' effect gameplay as much. PVP games need to do servers early, or else the pvp falls apart.
Server mergers will definitely be good for Aoc. Not good for the Funcoms image but generally good for the players since they will have more to group with
Server mergers will definitely be good for Aoc. Not good for the Funcoms image but generally good for the players since they will have more to group with
I think their image has been tarnished a LOT just from the lies and everything else accompanied with AoC. I would literally pay hundreds of dollars to someone if they snapped a picture of Gaute Godager sweeping crap up in the local McDonalds. I hated that douche.
Launched in May and server merges coming in Sepyember or October. Does not look good for the steaming pile of crap that AOC is.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
Agreed, I want them to go down in flames for making me pay for that pile of broken promises/garbage.
lol I wouldnt want them to go that far. Theres still a few people out there who enjoy playing AoC. Age of conan release has brought some good to the mmo industry and us the gamers. Never again will a Dev release a game still in Alpha stage hidden with a cloak of lies.
Am confused though....some people keep coming on here saying servers are filling up and ofc theres 440k active accounts. Surely theres no need for server merges 4 months after release.
Never again will a Dev release a game still in Alpha stage hidden with a cloak of lies.
LOL
MMO Devs never learn. Ever heard of Shadowbane, Dark and Light or Anarchy Online? Crappy games that were buggy, unstable and nearly unplayable at launch. Yet even after those games were made... Age of Conan still got released the same way.
It WILL happen again. (If for no other reason than because some genius decided it would be a good idea to let the Shadowbane devs make another game.)
I knew from day 1 there would be server merges. Interest in the game was far higher than expected at launch, of course, due to worn-out WoW players looking for another game. As a result FC opened new servers to accomodate the flood.
Once it became apparent that AoC was not that game, and once the initial flood died down, it was only a matter of time before the comparitively small percentage of remaining players were too thinly spread across the enormous server farm.
Even in Funcom had somehow managed to polish the game into what it could have been, once the launch dust settled, there would still have been fewer players left than at release, leading to less populated servers, and eventually a merge.
Instead, of course, the game got worse instead of better, and even people who had high hopes for the game, and (admittedly blind) faith in Funcom to make it better left in frustration.
Funcom needs to cut some servers, and invest the money back into the game. Maybe read some of those 200+ page protest threads, and realise that ignoring the complaints of your players is not how you keep them paying/playing.
Maybe if they do this, they won't need another server merge next year.
Comments
There is nothing wrong with a game that has server merges early in life if they happen to open too many servers. The problem is the population left the game en mass. Not merging the servers earlier than this has just compounded the problems. Keeping every server relatively full is incredibly important.
I completely agree, should have been done much sooner.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Some MMO's start out with waiting list of up to an hour or more you have to wait in order to get into the game. In other words they only make about 2/3's the servers need for their intial population. Then they wait a few months for the massive population serge to settle down and they add more servers then.
For some reason AoC made enough servers for everyone who pre-ordered and then some, guess they thought that everyone who tried their game was going to stay or something. Anyways, many people do not stay with a newly released MMO, in AoC's case that number was even higher than average. So now you have a game made for over 1 million that has 40% to 30% of that number actually playing.
They should eigther make xserver instances and wait for the X-Box release or close down half a dozen or so servers and merge them with the other low pop ones. Then reopen the closed one with the x-box release if need be.
Merge will make this game a bit more fun...
Still blows imho.
This is totally the wrong place to debate the pros and cons of Shadobane but...
Let me just say that you explained yourself why the game was terrible. Did it have some good ideas about how to make an interesting PvP game? Yes, it did. That was why myself and many of my friends were excited to play it even years before it was released. But in the end it was crap. Most of the features they claimed they would have never made it into the game. And the few that did were too deeply buried under a sea of bugs and exploits to be enjoyed.
My experiences with Shadowbane summed up in one paragraph: Myself and my friends were told the game would be out in six months. We started a guild. We recruited many people. The game was delayed. It was delayed again. We got bored and played other games. It was still delayed. Two years later it finally comes out. It was buggy as hell. Half our guild quits because they can't even get past the bugs in the install CD, much less the bugs in the actual gameplay. The other half of the guild pushes on and builds a city. Our tree of life is bugged and the city is deleted. We build another. Same thing happens again. We build another. Same thing happens again. Half the guild quits again. The last few remining people decide to change leaders. The new leader cheats to high hell and back to build city #4. City #4 doesn't get deleted by a bug but he gets banned for cheating along with most of the rest of the guild.
And you call THAT a good game? I called it a waste of two years of my life and moved on.
Funny thing, now that we are talking about this I wonder if people who were dedicated to AoC before its release are as pissed about AoC as I was about Shadowbane. But then again, atleast AoC runs for more than two minutes at a time without crashing....
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
It might seem like a tough call to make, but in my opinion there's only one approach to take that will serve them well in the long run: do what's best for your players.
Customer numbers are a factor of acquisition and retention. Retention is secured by providing for the players you have, and the only acquisition you will have after 3-6 months is through expansions (kind'a a re-launch) and word-of-mouth. The latter is "acquisition through retention", so a factor of retention.
So do what benefits your current player base. They're your key audience now, whether these were the people you aimed for at the start or not, and they're the ones who will bring you new customers, if any. And throw in an expansion somewhere down the road so your faithful players have a good selling point when they recruit their friends. Just don't let them feel that the expansion takes away from what you're doing for them now.
My two cents anyway. But then I don't work with MMOG development. :-)
Last time that quote was brought up here on these forums to show how Famine pretty much confirmed server merges, Famine came out screaming how it was taken out of context because he realized what a big goof he made letting that slip.
Let's see if he does it again.
You know it! This is only because everyone is overlooking the original post in which the comment was made. The question on that specific topic was on character transfers and if we were adding the system. That's why the use of system is mentioned in the reply.
This is also why I should have quoted the original post. I will do that now for clarity haha.
Glen ''Famine'' Swan
Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
Wow. Even EQ2, which had one of the roughest launches ever and had the extreme misfortune of being launched at the same time as WOW made it over a year before server merges.
Low populations aren't really as noticable or dire in pve-centric games.
If every game branded as "fail" by those forum experts got shut down, there'd be no mmo's around anymore
- only highly expected games being developed. Vanguard was a spectacular "failure", it had it's server merges and yet it's still doing fine, people play it and enjoy it.
There is space on the market for WAR, WoW and AoC - deal with it.
Uh... most of the (good) MMOs I've played either went several years before merging servers or they never merged at all.
I was going to post the same thing. I can't remember any MMORPG I have played merging servers, let alone even considering doing it in the first 6 months. I'm not saying AoC is doomed if they do merge or anything, but this statement is just not true.
Even SWG and the steaming pile of cr*p that it has become hasn't merged servers.
Some of it's remaining players have asked for it, but SOE hasn't done any mergers yet.
The company did start allowing individual character transfers for a price, but that's not quite the same thing.
And the game's been out since 2003, and has yet to merge servers.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
Agreed, I want them to go down in flames for making me pay for that pile of broken promises/garbage.
-Computer specs no one cares about: check.
-MMOs played no one cares about: check.
-Xfire stats no one cares about: check.
-Signature no one cares about: check.
------------------------------------------------------------
-Narcissism: check.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Having been through merges in the past, they tend to have 2 effects.
1. They improve gameplay for subscribers
2. They provide a signal to the wider community that sub numbers are shrinking.
I think its a tough call for a studio to make. They need to balance the welfare of current players with the image hit that comes from the announcement. But of course if it does happen the haters will all do victory dances for a few days.
This is really the test of the new post-GG funcom
Will it..
1. Make the gameplay better for it's subscribers by merging servers or
2. Keep it's own ego inflated by pretending there are not major issues with the # of subscribers they have.
I don't think it's so much to keep the ego inflated as it is to try and stem further bleeding. Nothing says "dying game" to players - especially so early on - more than "we're merging servers".
When NCSoft announced they were merging 6 of the US servers down to 3 in Lineage II, they actually stated that it had nothing to do with the game losing players or doing poorly.
The pin on my BS meter spiked into the red on that bit.
1) If your game has healthy server populations, you don't have to merge them.
2) The players can tell by themselves how well the populations are doing.
To their credit, though, L2 has had a good run - about 4 years - before they had to merge servers.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I guess Vanguard is in that list, what are the other 3?
Well, since he has a Pirate avatar I would be willing to bet hes a huge fan of full loot PvP games. So we can add Shadowbane to that list as well. Then again, this is why I said "(GOOD) MMOs" in my post. Shadowbane was not a good MMO by any stretch of the imagination. Most other MMOs that have to merge or shut down servers this quickly are not going to be very good either, or enough people would want to play to make the servers full enough to keep them online.
If you were a PVEer sure shadowbane was a bad mmo but most hardcore pvpers look back at shadowbane as one of the top 3 pvp mmo's of all time and many think it's number 1. shadowbanes pvp, city, seiging and things like mines and runes to encourage conflict make it 10 times the pvp game that aoc is.
Graphics were shit, clicking to move is sucky, it was buggy, it was exploitable, there was little pve content at all but damn the game rocked for pvp, no mmo has come close to getting the blood pumping like shadowbane could, nore got close to provideing such a great conflict system that made enemies and very close life time friends.
shadowbane 2 please but with a decent budget.
Stray Bullet Games (new company formed from the remnants of the original SB team) has a New MMO In Development. It won't be SB2, but it looks like they're going for a similar play style.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
AoC wont last. Severver merges might make a few people stick around a while longer but lets face it...there is really nothing to do in Conan. Lets say server merges are the answer. Going by Funcoms standards, it will take them 1 year to figure out how to do it. And if the game hasnt gone under by then, there will be tons of bugs by merging the servers. its just the way they work.
Conan could have been a good game but its flawed in so so many ways I dont think it can ever be fixed. Funcom would have been better off investing $50 million in real estate. At least then they would have a place to go when Funcom gets shut down.
Its funny. This thread started with a quote from "Famine" about how AoC was going to merge servers. Shortly into the thread it derailed into a flame fest about what an awful game AoC is and how they really NEED to merge the servers to survive. Almost supporting their decision to merge the servers in a back-handed sort of way. Then Famine himself shows up to deny everything... and everyone just kind of ignores him to keep talking about how much they hate AoC.
I'm not saying stop. By all means, please carry on with trashing AoC. I hope Famine is still reading this so maybe he will get the message that he is working on one of the worst MMOs released in recent memory.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Having been through merges in the past, they tend to have 2 effects.
1. They improve gameplay for subscribers
2. They provide a signal to the wider community that sub numbers are shrinking.
I think its a tough call for a studio to make. They need to balance the welfare of current players with the image hit that comes from the announcement. But of course if it does happen the haters will all do victory dances for a few days.
This is really the test of the new post-GG funcom
Will it..
1. Make the gameplay better for it's subscribers by merging servers or
2. Keep it's own ego inflated by pretending there are not major issues with the # of subscribers they have.
I don't think it's so much to keep the ego inflated as it is to try and stem further bleeding. Nothing says "dying game" to players - especially so early on - more than "we're merging servers".
When NCSoft announced they were merging 6 of the US servers down to 3 in Lineage II, they actually stated that it had nothing to do with the game losing players or doing poorly.
The pin on my BS meter spiked into the red on that bit.
1) If your game has healthy server populations, you don't have to merge them.
2) The players can tell by themselves how well the populations are doing.
To their credit, though, L2 has had a good run - about 4 years - before they had to merge servers.
But the big difference is that this is a PVPcentric game. I purposefully chose the lowest population server I could find in WOW (horde side) and rolled on it because for pve, I hate 'competing' for quest mobs, and I love crafting. I love low populatons servers in WOW because I see all the rare mobs, I have a ton of crafting materials and I rarely have to wait to kill quest mobs. I'm also not a cutting edge raider, I don't mind being a teir behind other servers.
For games like Warhammer, DAoC and AOC, that is completely different. You want zones to be full, you want to have balanced factions.... you want seiging to be constantly happening. If you look at AOC now and that new video that AA posted of the test server. How difficult is it going to be on a normal server to have a 48v48 fight. They can fix the mechanisms, fix the framerate, fix objectives.. but in the end, it is going to be nearly impossible to get together two teams of 48 to do that stuff.
PVE games can go much longer before doing server merges because it doesnt' effect gameplay as much. PVP games need to do servers early, or else the pvp falls apart.
Server mergers will definitely be good for Aoc. Not good for the Funcoms image but generally good for the players since they will have more to group with
I think their image has been tarnished a LOT just from the lies and everything else accompanied with AoC. I would literally pay hundreds of dollars to someone if they snapped a picture of Gaute Godager sweeping crap up in the local McDonalds. I hated that douche.
-Computer specs no one cares about: check.
-MMOs played no one cares about: check.
-Xfire stats no one cares about: check.
-Signature no one cares about: check.
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-Narcissism: check.
Uh... most of the (good) MMOs I've played either went several years before merging servers or they never merged at all.
Vanguard merged servers when SoE took over about 6 months time? I really cant remember.
Don't merge the servers and your screwed -
Merge the servers and you get comments like yours.
Either way doesn't really effect non constructive comments like yours.
How about you let the people who pay to play the game inform FC what they think. Don't like it either way, best to move on, prancing around screaming fail isn't healthy you know.
Merging them can be good for those who have poor levels in numbers on them and I think its the right way to go forward - screaming fail and POS the game is without saying why is OOO.
It's a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
And TBH, I'm quite happy that Failcom is damned either way.
And we're free to rail Failcom for the drama that is AoC, especially since we had paid them money for that "game" they put out.
Agreed, I want them to go down in flames for making me pay for that pile of broken promises/garbage.
lol I wouldnt want them to go that far. Theres still a few people out there who enjoy playing AoC. Age of conan release has brought some good to the mmo industry and us the gamers. Never again will a Dev release a game still in Alpha stage hidden with a cloak of lies.
Am confused though....some people keep coming on here saying servers are filling up and ofc theres 440k active accounts. Surely theres no need for server merges 4 months after release.
Vanguard merged servers when SoE took over about 6 months time? I really cant remember.
Like I said: GOOD MMOs, which Vanguard is not.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
LOL
MMO Devs never learn. Ever heard of Shadowbane, Dark and Light or Anarchy Online? Crappy games that were buggy, unstable and nearly unplayable at launch. Yet even after those games were made... Age of Conan still got released the same way.
It WILL happen again. (If for no other reason than because some genius decided it would be a good idea to let the Shadowbane devs make another game.)
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
I knew from day 1 there would be server merges. Interest in the game was far higher than expected at launch, of course, due to worn-out WoW players looking for another game. As a result FC opened new servers to accomodate the flood.
Once it became apparent that AoC was not that game, and once the initial flood died down, it was only a matter of time before the comparitively small percentage of remaining players were too thinly spread across the enormous server farm.
Even in Funcom had somehow managed to polish the game into what it could have been, once the launch dust settled, there would still have been fewer players left than at release, leading to less populated servers, and eventually a merge.
Instead, of course, the game got worse instead of better, and even people who had high hopes for the game, and (admittedly blind) faith in Funcom to make it better left in frustration.
Funcom needs to cut some servers, and invest the money back into the game. Maybe read some of those 200+ page protest threads, and realise that ignoring the complaints of your players is not how you keep them paying/playing.
Maybe if they do this, they won't need another server merge next year.