Exploits aside yes there was about a weeks worth of dmg done between patches. A year out of pocket for a week is a big on the extreme exaggeration side, something that most PVP'rs or fisherman like to do. - AmazingAvery
You are 100% wrong. There are people on Fury server who MAXED out their mastery AA's. Yes MAXED them out. Such was the lunacy of the available exploits. I realise that to an npc basher on a pve server AA's don't mean squat in the grand scheme of things. But for pvp they make a HUGE difference.
That was the final straw for me, when it became clear that Funcom were more interested in retaining subs than punishing those who cheated. They had the data, they had the capability to do so as they done it before with pvp exploiters. Even a trained chimp could write a query that would pull that data. This time they refused to do it, and people walked away.
Like I said I understand being an Advocate and "tester" I understand the functionality, time vs reward and length in obtaining AA in Godslayer, working with the developers themselves. Assuming I just like PvE is a cop out. But then again if Godslayer was just a PvE expansion why care about AA... Obviously it was not. What you are essentially saying is even though Godslayer was promoted as a PvE majority expansion the portions than encompass PVP make a "HUGE difference".
What got up your nose is that for a week portions of your server community exploited and went unpunished and furthermore official comments were a whimper to nothing, right?
In addition you would of liked to have seen a heavier presence in PVP in the expansion regardles.
Both points left you frustrated.
If my assumptions are correct then I can totally agree with you, ok.
But backing up a bit, it is of my opinion, through experience, that maxing out all AA takes time but not a lifetime. Same goes for faction levels. The reviewer for Gamespot hints on taming pets which we know takes some time to do. Therefore it was quite a hands on review in terms of experience had. At the same time it lacks in my opinion due to the lack of PvP talk/testing/experience.
You play on a pve server right ? - Therefore have no clue about open world PvP in the brutal world that is Fury or Tyranny. Minigames and the odd siege now and again are what you call PvP ?
Yes it was a pve expansion. It had ONE thing that could help in pvp. That was AA's, yes even on the pve side of the page.
Since you are a tester and worked with the developers themselves. You must realise the inordinate amount of time it would take to max out your mastery AA's. People did that in less than a week. So the one thing that was "good" for pvp'ers became yet another hurdle. Since honest players who did not exploit were left at the starting blocks.
This situation then being exacerbated by Funcom refusing to rollback these cheaters.
If you like to bash npc's, and grind your arse off to get pretty gear so you can mince around in OT like some flamer then yes the expansion would be a success for you. If however you like the challenge of being attacked at virtually any time in the open world. Being FORCED to pve to grind AA's simply to catch up with the exploiters constitutes a monumental fail in my opinion.
Wow, great news. When will Funcom be opening the new servers to accomodate the tons of returning players? Where are the posts about people complaing about queues to get into the game? Where is a link to where it is blowing away the sales records? Of wait... that is a different game.
Gaming site reviews are unimportant, since they rarely do anything drastic. All games get between an 8 and 9.5 and the reviews talk about features that haven't been fully explored. For instance, this review is out already, which means it was written a few weeks ago.. probably within a month of the expansion going live. it's really very similar to that game that only let players beta test and reviewers review the first 20 levels which were polished, but the review never covered the weeks after players got past level 20.. what was the name of that game that was drastically unfinished after lvl 20, but allowed reviewers to only play the part that was finished?
The lack of servers, sales or returning players speaks for the success of this expansion, not someone's 3 week game experience.
# 3 Factually spent 40hrs in the first month, assuming the same for the second or say another 30hrs, totally 70hrs of written opinion is quite a long time.
# 4 Correct me if I am wrong but that is 4 times the amount of in game experience you have not had
# 5 Score is irrelevent, read the actual pro's and con's and comment on that.
# 6 review is based on post launch and not some beta limited time as you guess
# 7 New servers has no bearance on the fun factor a person would have in game, there are plenty of people in game having no issues grouping or with population. 10 trial to try free at the moment..
# 8 Sales of the game have yet to be detirmined but it was up high on Amazon during launch week and there were posts floating around about it. Same about people enjoying it - check mmorpg.com review comments.
# 9 Seems you are out of touch in in-game experience and totally missed the reviewer had spent 2 whole months give a few days in the post launch retail game gathering opinons. You just focused on the score and not the content written.
# 10 Popularity does not equal awesome game - see WoW for example
You see, here is the funny thing. You talk about working with the devs on this expansion. Obviously you are a little too close to the issue.
Fact - There is not one measureable piece of evidence that the expansion had any impact on subscriber numbers. No new servers, no noticeable increase in player populations, xfire and just about everything is ALREADY back to where it was before the expansion with the exception that AOC has now totally alienated their pvpers.
Make jokes about WOW all you want, but for months after an expansion, there are queues to get on the servers. They are constantly adding new servers and they are setting sales records all over the place with their expansions.
The other big thing that is beind the fall in AOC subscribers is just the future. There is nothing coming anymore that gives hope for the game getting better. You can't point to the pvp patch, or the next expansion, becuase everyone knows Funcom doesn't have any eggs in the AOC basket anymore.. just a lead developer making monthly speeches. Players are already done with the content, the only thing they have now is a dozen repeatable quests to grind every day. The exploits in this expansion aren't even the big problem, the problem is 'what next'? nothing. Grind your 12 quests for the next year.
Having worked in the industry and watched the sales/marketing people in action, I have a pretty good insight into how magazines etc. score their reviews. Basically, the computer game company will sweeten them up with free stuff, promises of buying advertising space, show controlled demos and basically whatever it takes to milk a respectable score. Therefore I always laugh when companies try and toot the horn over review scores.
In the case of this review, they pretty much painted themselves into a corner with the score for the original game. By giving it a very generous 8.5 back in 2008, it was kind of impossible to give the expansion a lower score, since it does add stuff to the game!
However, when you read the actual latest review and see the words 'tedious', 'monotony' and 'grind' being used to describe the content, then you can see that the more truthful score should have been 6-7 out of 10. With probably a 5-6/10 for the original. Lineage 2 got a 6.0 for being grindy after all.
AOC is one of only a handful of games worth subbing on and off, esspecially with the free level every 4 days you stay subbed. Like it or not the expansion was good and the game is pretty solid for what's available in the MMO market right now.
I do agree so much. I have still not got through expansion content even though i play a lot. the expansion is HUGE. And good review by the way. AoC got 8.5 well deserved...
AOC is one of only a handful of games worth subbing on and off, esspecially with the free level every 4 days you stay subbed. Like it or not the expansion was good and the game is pretty solid for what's available in the MMO market right now.
I do agree so much. I have still not got through expansion content even though i play a lot. the expansion is HUGE. And good review by the way. AoC got 8.5 well deserved...
Your still in the honeymoon phase, wait till you see what ROTGS really looks like without makeup in the morning
Wow, great news. When will Funcom be opening the new servers to accomodate the tons of returning players? Where are the posts about people complaing about queues to get into the game? Where is a link to where it is blowing away the sales records? Of wait... that is a different game.
Gaming site reviews are unimportant, since they rarely do anything drastic. All games get between an 8 and 9.5 and the reviews talk about features that haven't been fully explored. For instance, this review is out already, which means it was written a few weeks ago.. probably within a month of the expansion going live. it's really very similar to that game that only let players beta test and reviewers review the first 20 levels which were polished, but the review never covered the weeks after players got past level 20.. what was the name of that game that was drastically unfinished after lvl 20, but allowed reviewers to only play the part that was finished?
The lack of servers, sales or returning players speaks for the success of this expansion, not someone's 3 week game experience.
# 3 Factually spent 40hrs in the first month, assuming the same for the second or say another 30hrs, totally 70hrs of written opinion is quite a long time.
# 4 Correct me if I am wrong but that is 4 times the amount of in game experience you have not had
# 5 Score is irrelevent, read the actual pro's and con's and comment on that.
# 6 review is based on post launch and not some beta limited time as you guess
# 7 New servers has no bearance on the fun factor a person would have in game, there are plenty of people in game having no issues grouping or with population. 10 trial to try free at the moment..
# 8 Sales of the game have yet to be detirmined but it was up high on Amazon during launch week and there were posts floating around about it. Same about people enjoying it - check mmorpg.com review comments.
# 9 Seems you are out of touch in in-game experience and totally missed the reviewer had spent 2 whole months give a few days in the post launch retail game gathering opinons. You just focused on the score and not the content written.
# 10 Popularity does not equal awesome game - see WoW for example
I'd bet my mortgage on players from Fury and Tyranny with several hundreds of hours gaming time behind them disagreeing with the sugar coated drivel of this review. That expansion was a nice addition to the pve game. It did NOTHING for the pvp game.
Except open up many new avenues in which people could exploit the black hell out of instances. Leaving honest players a year or more normal playtime behind. Avenues which were left open so long that the damage was done (again) before Funcom reacted with some cursory 7 day bans with no rollbacks.
RoTGS - come cheat like a bastard. We don't care. We like your subs. This is the message Funcom delivered. So for pve. Maybe it was a nice expansion. For pvp, it was yet another punch in the tits. Utter fail in my opinion.
Tranca your Phd must have come from some 5th class russian community college or else you would not write nonsense like this.
You are surprised FC is after the money? SHIT! I always thought they are some sort of red cross investing 25 millions to help people grow in virtual world.
And as I heard some people that openly exploited were banned. But using XP pots for AA is not an exploit, it is FC being careless enough to forget to write an exception in code. You cannot ban people who simply at 80 used what they bought ... F C fucked that sure, but they would probably get fucked even more if the rolled back.
Another thing. You claim it is booohoo that FC with expansion caters to PVE players and yet majority of players are preferring to play PVE than PVP. It was publically announced that this expansion is PVE only and as such aimed at PVE-ers. FC simply awarded the player base that stayed (funny is that in general pvpers are that stupid to plan their come backs for PVE expansion) while PVP one move on to Aion and WoW. You cannot develop an expansion for minorities. (if that would be so - next expansion should be RP one). PVP community left, PVE one stayed. I can understand that to be honest. With all them expanded FPS games with portions of RPG, I think PVP in MMO is simply not worth the time and the effort anymore.
AOC is one of only a handful of games worth subbing on and off, esspecially with the free level every 4 days you stay subbed. Like it or not the expansion was good and the game is pretty solid for what's available in the MMO market right now.
I do agree so much. I have still not got through expansion content even though i play a lot. the expansion is HUGE. And good review by the way. AoC got 8.5 well deserved...
Your still in the honeymoon phase, wait till you see what ROTGS really looks like without makeup in the morning
I agrre the glamour does come off but I think it does for all expansions. I think the score was a little high, probably about 8 I would give it, it definately gives AoC a kick up the ar se.
Wow, great news. When will Funcom be opening the new servers to accomodate the tons of returning players? Where are the posts about people complaing about queues to get into the game? Where is a link to where it is blowing away the sales records? Of wait... that is a different game.
Gaming site reviews are unimportant, since they rarely do anything drastic. All games get between an 8 and 9.5 and the reviews talk about features that haven't been fully explored. For instance, this review is out already, which means it was written a few weeks ago.. probably within a month of the expansion going live. it's really very similar to that game that only let players beta test and reviewers review the first 20 levels which were polished, but the review never covered the weeks after players got past level 20.. what was the name of that game that was drastically unfinished after lvl 20, but allowed reviewers to only play the part that was finished?
The lack of servers, sales or returning players speaks for the success of this expansion, not someone's 3 week game experience.
# 3 Factually spent 40hrs in the first month, assuming the same for the second or say another 30hrs, totally 70hrs of written opinion is quite a long time.
# 4 Correct me if I am wrong but that is 4 times the amount of in game experience you have not had
# 5 Score is irrelevent, read the actual pro's and con's and comment on that.
# 6 review is based on post launch and not some beta limited time as you guess
# 7 New servers has no bearance on the fun factor a person would have in game, there are plenty of people in game having no issues grouping or with population. 10 trial to try free at the moment..
# 8 Sales of the game have yet to be detirmined but it was up high on Amazon during launch week and there were posts floating around about it. Same about people enjoying it - check mmorpg.com review comments.
# 9 Seems you are out of touch in in-game experience and totally missed the reviewer had spent 2 whole months give a few days in the post launch retail game gathering opinons. You just focused on the score and not the content written.
# 10 Popularity does not equal awesome game - see WoW for example
I'd bet my mortgage on players from Fury and Tyranny with several hundreds of hours gaming time behind them disagreeing with the sugar coated drivel of this review. That expansion was a nice addition to the pve game. It did NOTHING for the pvp game.
Except open up many new avenues in which people could exploit the black hell out of instances. Leaving honest players a year or more normal playtime behind. Avenues which were left open so long that the damage was done (again) before Funcom reacted with some cursory 7 day bans with no rollbacks.
RoTGS - come cheat like a bastard. We don't care. We like your subs. This is the message Funcom delivered. So for pve. Maybe it was a nice expansion. For pvp, it was yet another punch in the tits. Utter fail in my opinion.
Tranca your Phd must have come from some 5th class russian community college or else you would not write nonsense like this.
You are surprised FC is after the money? SHIT! I always thought they are some sort of red cross investing 25 millions to help people grow in virtual world.
And as I heard some people that openly exploited were banned. But using XP pots for AA is not an exploit, it is FC being careless enough to forget to write an exception in code. You cannot ban people who simply at 80 used what they bought ... F C fucked that sure, but they would probably get fucked even more if the rolled back.
Another thing. You claim it is booohoo that FC with expansion caters to PVE players and yet majority of players are preferring to play PVE than PVP. It was publically announced that this expansion is PVE only and as such aimed at PVE-ers. FC simply awarded the player base that stayed (funny is that in general pvpers are that stupid to plan their come backs for PVE expansion) while PVP one move on to Aion and WoW. You cannot develop an expansion for minorities. (if that would be so - next expansion should be RP one). PVP community left, PVE one stayed. I can understand that to be honest. With all them expanded FPS games with portions of RPG, I think PVP in MMO is simply not worth the time and the effort anymore.
Well if that's the case too bad Funcom still advertises this game as having a major pvp element huh?
2 Months in game is not enough time to be worn down, when one gets to 80 and tries to mini game, runs into premade mini teams filled with players full of pvp 8-10 gear yeah that starts to wear you down.
It's enough to make a review, actually it's more time than often will be given with any review, even game reviews.
When crashes rule the day when you zone into the Northern Grasslands
Ehm, I and others don't have that problem.
When balancing classes means creating a FTM class (see ranger revamp and sin revamp)
There will always be problems with class balancing and FoTM classes in any MMO with any change, same as calls for nerfs and outrages, etc. You just have to look at the forums of any MMO. Next to that, there are enough rangers who cry outrage and want the old ranger setup back because they felt nerfed.
When bugs that have been in since launch are still here
And the majority of bugs that was present at launch have been solved, I can't recall any of the major issues I had after launch of having been there after the first months up to half a year had passed.
I'd say that basically it comes down to you having become determined to keep hammering on anything bad you might find with AoC, and refuse to acknowledge any good aspects that AoC has.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Wow, great news. When will Funcom be opening the new servers to accomodate the tons of returning players? Where are the posts about people complaing about queues to get into the game? Where is a link to where it is blowing away the sales records? Of wait... that is a different game.
Gaming site reviews are unimportant, since they rarely do anything drastic. All games get between an 8 and 9.5 and the reviews talk about features that haven't been fully explored. For instance, this review is out already, which means it was written a few weeks ago.. probably within a month of the expansion going live. it's really very similar to that game that only let players beta test and reviewers review the first 20 levels which were polished, but the review never covered the weeks after players got past level 20.. what was the name of that game that was drastically unfinished after lvl 20, but allowed reviewers to only play the part that was finished?
The lack of servers, sales or returning players speaks for the success of this expansion, not someone's 3 week game experience.
# 3 Factually spent 40hrs in the first month, assuming the same for the second or say another 30hrs, totally 70hrs of written opinion is quite a long time.
# 4 Correct me if I am wrong but that is 4 times the amount of in game experience you have not had
# 5 Score is irrelevent, read the actual pro's and con's and comment on that.
# 6 review is based on post launch and not some beta limited time as you guess
# 7 New servers has no bearance on the fun factor a person would have in game, there are plenty of people in game having no issues grouping or with population. 10 trial to try free at the moment..
# 8 Sales of the game have yet to be detirmined but it was up high on Amazon during launch week and there were posts floating around about it. Same about people enjoying it - check mmorpg.com review comments.
# 9 Seems you are out of touch in in-game experience and totally missed the reviewer had spent 2 whole months give a few days in the post launch retail game gathering opinons. You just focused on the score and not the content written.
# 10 Popularity does not equal awesome game - see WoW for example
I'd bet my mortgage on players from Fury and Tyranny with several hundreds of hours gaming time behind them disagreeing with the sugar coated drivel of this review. That expansion was a nice addition to the pve game. It did NOTHING for the pvp game.
Except open up many new avenues in which people could exploit the black hell out of instances. Leaving honest players a year or more normal playtime behind. Avenues which were left open so long that the damage was done (again) before Funcom reacted with some cursory 7 day bans with no rollbacks.
RoTGS - come cheat like a bastard. We don't care. We like your subs. This is the message Funcom delivered. So for pve. Maybe it was a nice expansion. For pvp, it was yet another punch in the tits. Utter fail in my opinion.
Tranca your Phd must have come from some 5th class russian community college or else you would not write nonsense like this.
You are surprised FC is after the money? SHIT! I always thought they are some sort of red cross investing 25 millions to help people grow in virtual world.
And as I heard some people that openly exploited were banned. But using XP pots for AA is not an exploit, it is FC being careless enough to forget to write an exception in code. You cannot ban people who simply at 80 used what they bought ... F C fucked that sure, but they would probably get fucked even more if the rolled back.
Another thing. You claim it is booohoo that FC with expansion caters to PVE players and yet majority of players are preferring to play PVE than PVP. It was publically announced that this expansion is PVE only and as such aimed at PVE-ers. FC simply awarded the player base that stayed (funny is that in general pvpers are that stupid to plan their come backs for PVE expansion) while PVP one move on to Aion and WoW. You cannot develop an expansion for minorities. (if that would be so - next expansion should be RP one). PVP community left, PVE one stayed. I can understand that to be honest. With all them expanded FPS games with portions of RPG, I think PVP in MMO is simply not worth the time and the effort anymore.
SOME people that openly exploited got banned, not all. The "freemasonry" guilds that know all the secrets of the world exploit on a weekly basis and FC is none the wiser. And were there any rollbacks as to the whole Bori fiasco? Any AA xp rollback for those "poor" people who got a one-year advantage over noobs and cannot play for 72 hours? To tell you the truth, banning and doing rollbacks would further alienate the remaining players, I think they cannot afford to take such drastic actions.
You sort of imply that AoC is a full-blown pve game with rich pve content and basically an alternate paradise for those who do not wish to play WoW, LotrO or Aion, for example. I find that extremely laughable. There are basically tier 1 and tier 2 encounters (available to most of the pugs, basically) which are all jokes, even EQ had better encounters, and then there is tier 3 which is buggy as hell and those "freemasonry" guilds of course keep everything to themselves (meaning no proper feedback how to fix the encounters and make them available to either casual players or basically the majority of guilds). The last 2 bosses cannot be defeated because they are simply bugged. Is it not laughable that the main villain of the original game is Thoth Amon and he cannot be killed, the story cannot be concluded at all before RotGS?! Even from a lore point of view this is just horrible. And tier 4 bosses (all TWO of them!) cannot even be reached, noone knows about them (Not even ONE picture of them is availeble; do they even exist?!). For a pve game I find this expansion an embarrassment, to say the least. If 6-man dungeons (yes, these are done extremely well and are challenging, the major problem for a player like me, however, is that I cannot experience them because I am not in one of those "freemasonry" guilds - hardmodes are kept secret) are FC's selling point in pve development and complexity, then they have literally stepped backwards. Even the fact that they released 2 entirely bugged tier 4 bosses without fixing tier 3 first screams of total incompetence one can expect from ... well, none other than FC.
Do not remind me of the factions, please. I would rather not talk about them. Last time this retarded "rinse and repeat 3 quests for 2 months in a row" mechanic was introduced, it was the year 2004. As people have figured it out already - you only introduce such an extreme and tedious grind when you have little content. Works in the year 2010 too, I guess.
If this expansion is a testimony to the powers of pve development in AoC, then this game is in a worse position than I thought.
2 Months in game is not enough time to be worn down, when one gets to 80 and tries to mini game, runs into premade mini teams filled with players full of pvp 8-10 gear yeah that starts to wear you down.
It's enough to make a review, actually it's more time than often will be given with any review, even game reviews.
When crashes rule the day when you zone into the Northern Grasslands
Ehm, I and others don't have that problem.
When balancing classes means creating a FTM class (see ranger revamp and sin revamp)
There will always be problems with class balancing and FoTM classes in any MMO with any change, same as calls for nerfs and outrages, etc. You just have to look at the forums of any MMO. Next to that, there are enough rangers who cry outrage and want the old ranger setup back because they felt nerfed.
When bugs that have been in since launch are still here
And the majority of bugs that was present at launch have been solved, I can't recall any of the major issues I had after launch of having been there after the first months up to half a year had passed.
I'd say that basically it comes down to you having become determined to keep hammering on anything bad you might find with AoC, and refuse to acknowledge any good aspects that AoC has.
I have previously acknowledged that Age of Conan has become a decent PvE game, you need to take you fanboi goggles off for a moment and actually take a good hard look at AoC and all it's issues. Heck a person even posted on the TL forums for Didek to resign yesterday.
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
Yes, AOC has improved their PVE game. Now you can actually level all the way up by questing. When the game launched, there were levels where you literally could do nothing but grind mobs for 2-3 levels at a time. When WOW launched, you could easily level 6 characters from 1-60 without ever doing the same quest twice. AOC now has 1 quest path to level, which means your second character will do exactly the same quests as your first.... but that is actually an improvement on how it shipped.
Now lets talk to how they improved endgame pve with the expansion. Before the expansion, there was no content. you simply grinded mobs for gold, which bought very little. With the expansion, yes things have improved, now there are factions that you can grind by doing the same 3 quests every day. Yet, again, that is an improvement on the way the game was before the expansion. PVE right now is comparable to WOW back with Sithilis and Eastern Plaquelands faction grinds. Of course, that was WOW 5 years ago, and endgame PVE has been drastically improved. And with this expansion came two more tiers of raiding.. of course they are both broken and can't be completed. Even the previous tiers remain mostly broken since launch.
So since lauch, AOC has improved thier pve game. You can now level all the way to endgame (1 time) using quests, and now you have 3 quests you can do every day once you reach it. You can also try every once and while to raid to see if it was fixed.. but don't count on it.. since the previous raids still aren't working correctly.
The numbers speak for themselves. PVPers aren't playing because they got nothing in the expansion, and pvers are seeing that there is nothing more to endgame then 3 repeatable quests and a bunch of broken raids that are half finished.
Anyone who thinks the expansion is worth more than a 4 is obviously Korean.
If the expansion got an 8.5 than the Base game should have received atleast a 10!
The two are not even comparable and 90% of the player base is STILL PLAYING IN THE ORIGINAL AOC!
I aint going to pull the wow argument here but just to use as an example, You were hard pressed to find ANYONE in the "Old World" when Burning Crusade hit.
AOC's expansion is the exact opposite. Most players are not even going to it and choosing to stay in teh "Old World" over the new one!
However, there have been a few things that were done, in my opinion only of course, pure ass wrong.
First and foremost was the handling of the Den of Crowmen exploits. Not only did Funcom refuse to say ANY damn thing about it one way or the other, but instead of shutting it down ( like they did Yag for a much less serious problem ) until they could fix it, they let it continue AND had overzealous GM's banning eveyone they saw near a group of exploiters without even checking if the person was in fact exploiting.
Now, I can certainly understand the "We don't discuss exploits" stance Funcom takes very well. I don't expect them to have detailed workings of the exploit all over the forums for people to use. However, simply putting up a dev message saying "Den of Crowmen off limits due to exploits" is not "discussing" exploits, it's warning your paying customers to stay the hell away, and causes a lot less problems than a paying customer being banned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as I said, it should have been immediately disabled until fixed. Period.
Next on the list is the faction grind. If they had fewer factions to grind for, I could see the current rate of advancement working with minimal adjustments. But when you're trying to juggle up to 6 damn factions, and then you add in the grind for EACH ONE, it's just too much. I tried to defend the faction grind on the official forums in the beginning, even counting on the "We've got 50 new quests on the way" as a means to finally alleviate some of the grind of having to do the same few quests over and over and over; only to find that those 50 new quests did shit for the real grind. Who cares about 50 non-faction quests when the faction is what everyone needs? Time wasted on hitting a bulletin board is time that could have been spent grabbing more faction. Perfectly understandable to me why people were pissed at that.
Also, when you've got a test server, don't dick around with cutting requirements or increasing drops at 2-3%, start at damned 50% and TEST it. If it's cutting too much, then raise it a bit and retest it. If it works, then leave it alone and THEN put it to live. All FC is doing by adding one or two miniscule changes at a time is further frustrating people who are counting on FC to make things workable.
Anyway, I'm still loving the game and I ain't going anywhere soon, but there are definitely some issues Craig and the others need to work on; not just in the game, but in their development process as well.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
However, there have been a few things that were done, in my opinion only of course, pure ass wrong.
First and foremost was the handling of the Den of Crowmen exploits. Not only did Funcom refuse to say ANY damn thing anout it one way or the other, but instead of shutting it down ( like they did Yag for a much less serious problem ) until they could fix it, they let it continue AND had overzealous GM's banning eveyone they saw near a group of exploiters without even checking if the person was in fact exploiting.
Now, I can certainly understand the "We don't discuss exploits" stance Funcom takes very well. I don't expect them to have detailed workings of the exploit all over the forums for people to use. However, simply putting up a dev message saying "Den of Crowmen off limits due to exploits" is not "discussing" exploits, it's warning your paying customers to stay the hell away, and causes a lot less problems than a paying customer being banned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as I said, it should have been immediately disabled until fixed. Period.
This is no surprise from Funcom. We demolished the little bit of T1 and T2 that was working at launch and exploited the crap out of the rest with no repercussions. Every one around was doing it once they found out how. I hardly considered it an exploit considering the bosses were so bugged out there was no other way to defeat them. They should have disabled the non working content like you have said. Not saying it was the right thing to do when we did it, just saying it's no surprise Funcom is still releasing the same bugged out stuff and still not caring about exploiters or the consequences of them.
Interestingly enough, metacritic.com rates Rise of the Godslayer a 82 and this site rates RotGS a 85.
So, my question is, should we just consider all game reviews and reviewers from all games to be crap, or just the ones we disagree with?
And yes, I'm aware that reviews of games across the board are often rated higher than they deserve, whether it's in game magazines or gaming sites. APB on the other hand only got a 59 rating on metacritic (unjustly in my eyes btw).
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Interestingly enough, metacritic.com rates Rise of the Godslayer a 82 and this site rates RotGS a 85.
So, my question is, should we just consider all game reviews and reviewers from all games to be crap, or just the ones we disagree with?
And yes, I'm aware that reviews of games across the board are often rated higher than they deserve, whether it's in game magazines or gaming sites. APB on the other hand only got a 59 rating on metacritic (unjustly in my eyes btw).
No just the reviews for MMO's should not be taken seriously, since MMO's are probably the most subjective experience you'll have based on communities within the game.
MMO's aren't as straightforward as your FPS or RTS games.
Sounds silly and hilarious to me, all reviews are more or less subjective. Sorry, it does sound foolish and measuring with 2 standards, trusting game reviews but not MMO reviews. You could as well say 'trust PC game reviews but not console reviews because they're more commercially influenced'.
I could agree with the viewpoint of MMO's needing more time for a proper review, but for the rest your argumentation is just too weak. But, it's your subjective opinion of course, not as if you're stating a fact of life.
I think reviewers of large sites and magazines are on average more objective than regular gamers and better in seeing and weighing the good and bad aspects of a game against eachother, where many an ordinary (MMO) gamer often tends to see either only the bad or good stuff. You've only to see how excessively polarized the discussions on the mmorpg.com forums are going as a simple sign of that.
An average of 82 on metacritic sounds reasonably fair, although 59 for APB I find somewhat low (I'd give it 65-70). RotGS I rate around 75-80 myself.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
Yes, AOC has improved their PVE game. Now you can actually level all the way up by questing. When the game launched, there were levels where you literally could do nothing but grind mobs for 2-3 levels at a time. When WOW launched, you could easily level 6 characters from 1-60 without ever doing the same quest twice. AOC now has 1 quest path to level, which means your second character will do exactly the same quests as your first.... but that is actually an improvement on how it shipped.
Now lets talk to how they improved endgame pve with the expansion. Before the expansion, there was no content. you simply grinded mobs for gold, which bought very little. With the expansion, yes things have improved, now there are factions that you can grind by doing the same 3 quests every day. Yet, again, that is an improvement on the way the game was before the expansion. PVE right now is comparable to WOW back with Sithilis and Eastern Plaquelands faction grinds. Of course, that was WOW 5 years ago, and endgame PVE has been drastically improved. And with this expansion came two more tiers of raiding.. of course they are both broken and can't be completed. Even the previous tiers remain mostly broken since launch.
So since lauch, AOC has improved thier pve game. You can now level all the way to endgame (1 time) using quests, and now you have 3 quests you can do every day once you reach it. You can also try every once and while to raid to see if it was fixed.. but don't count on it.. since the previous raids still aren't working correctly.
The numbers speak for themselves. PVPers aren't playing because they got nothing in the expansion, and pvers are seeing that there is nothing more to endgame then 3 repeatable quests and a bunch of broken raids that are half finished.
This is exactly why I can never get into AoC, not at launch and certainly not now - it feels way too much like it's doing the exact same mistakes and follows the same path as WoW does. Currently it's at the level of vanilla WoW and it'll probably take years to come to the level of WotLK. It can also be argued that this expansion is in some ways TBC-like with ridiculously exclusive and hard 6 man dungeons. I played many different MMOs, but seriously, AoC feels to me like a constantly failed WoW clone that's trying to reach its "daddy".
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
Yes, AOC has improved their PVE game. Now you can actually level all the way up by questing. When the game launched, there were levels where you literally could do nothing but grind mobs for 2-3 levels at a time. When WOW launched, you could easily level 6 characters from 1-60 without ever doing the same quest twice. AOC now has 1 quest path to level, which means your second character will do exactly the same quests as your first.... but that is actually an improvement on how it shipped.
Now lets talk to how they improved endgame pve with the expansion. Before the expansion, there was no content. you simply grinded mobs for gold, which bought very little. With the expansion, yes things have improved, now there are factions that you can grind by doing the same 3 quests every day. Yet, again, that is an improvement on the way the game was before the expansion. PVE right now is comparable to WOW back with Sithilis and Eastern Plaquelands faction grinds. Of course, that was WOW 5 years ago, and endgame PVE has been drastically improved. And with this expansion came two more tiers of raiding.. of course they are both broken and can't be completed. Even the previous tiers remain mostly broken since launch.
So since lauch, AOC has improved thier pve game. You can now level all the way to endgame (1 time) using quests, and now you have 3 quests you can do every day once you reach it. You can also try every once and while to raid to see if it was fixed.. but don't count on it.. since the previous raids still aren't working correctly.
The numbers speak for themselves. PVPers aren't playing because they got nothing in the expansion, and pvers are seeing that there is nothing more to endgame then 3 repeatable quests and a bunch of broken raids that are half finished.
This is exactly why I can never get into AoC, not at launch and certainly not now - it feels way too much like it's doing the exact same mistakes and follows the same path as WoW does. Currently it's at the level of vanilla WoW and it'll probably take years to come to the level of WotLK. It can also be argued that this expansion is in some ways TBC-like with ridiculously exclusive and hard 6 man dungeons. I played many different MMOs, but seriously, AoC feels to me like a constantly failed WoW clone that's trying to reach its "daddy".
seems like you are a total bloody noob johnie ...
the only thing that failed is the tokken and faction grind , what is more then 50 % of the content.
what is a total fail of the complete expac , but the only thing they did very well are the dungeons , they are very nice tuned and there are some very inovative encounters that are much fun ...
and jeah a bit of skill is required ... and btw age of conan is one of the games that doesn t copies wow from start to end , thats why noobs like u fail at the first lvl 30 dungeons
Retired : Daoc , Warhammer , WoW , Lotro , Tabula Rasa , Everquest 2 , Aion, Eve , AoC , SW:Tor ( failwars ), Planetside 2 Waiting : Star Citizen Playing : Star Citizen FPS : Overwatch
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
Yes, AOC has improved their PVE game. Now you can actually level all the way up by questing. When the game launched, there were levels where you literally could do nothing but grind mobs for 2-3 levels at a time. When WOW launched, you could easily level 6 characters from 1-60 without ever doing the same quest twice. AOC now has 1 quest path to level, which means your second character will do exactly the same quests as your first.... but that is actually an improvement on how it shipped.
Now lets talk to how they improved endgame pve with the expansion. Before the expansion, there was no content. you simply grinded mobs for gold, which bought very little. With the expansion, yes things have improved, now there are factions that you can grind by doing the same 3 quests every day. Yet, again, that is an improvement on the way the game was before the expansion. PVE right now is comparable to WOW back with Sithilis and Eastern Plaquelands faction grinds. Of course, that was WOW 5 years ago, and endgame PVE has been drastically improved. And with this expansion came two more tiers of raiding.. of course they are both broken and can't be completed. Even the previous tiers remain mostly broken since launch.
So since lauch, AOC has improved thier pve game. You can now level all the way to endgame (1 time) using quests, and now you have 3 quests you can do every day once you reach it. You can also try every once and while to raid to see if it was fixed.. but don't count on it.. since the previous raids still aren't working correctly.
The numbers speak for themselves. PVPers aren't playing because they got nothing in the expansion, and pvers are seeing that there is nothing more to endgame then 3 repeatable quests and a bunch of broken raids that are half finished.
This is exactly why I can never get into AoC, not at launch and certainly not now - it feels way too much like it's doing the exact same mistakes and follows the same path as WoW does. Currently it's at the level of vanilla WoW and it'll probably take years to come to the level of WotLK. It can also be argued that this expansion is in some ways TBC-like with ridiculously exclusive and hard 6 man dungeons. I played many different MMOs, but seriously, AoC feels to me like a constantly failed WoW clone that's trying to reach its "daddy".
seems like you are a total bloody noob johnie ...
the only thing that failed is the tokken and faction grind , what is more then 50 % of the content.
what is a total fail of the complete expac , but the only thing they did very well are the dungeons , they are very nice tuned and there are some very inovative encounters that are much fun ...
and jeah a bit of skill is required ... and btw age of conan is one of the games that doesn t copies wow from start to end , thats why noobs like u fail at the first lvl 30 dungeons
AoC is turning into a WoW clone; if you haven't played from launch you won't see it of course. Also he who draws out the Newb word first is in fact a Nub.
Comments
You play on a pve server right ? - Therefore have no clue about open world PvP in the brutal world that is Fury or Tyranny. Minigames and the odd siege now and again are what you call PvP ?
Yes it was a pve expansion. It had ONE thing that could help in pvp. That was AA's, yes even on the pve side of the page.
Since you are a tester and worked with the developers themselves. You must realise the inordinate amount of time it would take to max out your mastery AA's. People did that in less than a week. So the one thing that was "good" for pvp'ers became yet another hurdle. Since honest players who did not exploit were left at the starting blocks.
This situation then being exacerbated by Funcom refusing to rollback these cheaters.
If you like to bash npc's, and grind your arse off to get pretty gear so you can mince around in OT like some flamer then yes the expansion would be a success for you. If however you like the challenge of being attacked at virtually any time in the open world. Being FORCED to pve to grind AA's simply to catch up with the exploiters constitutes a monumental fail in my opinion.
Tranca [RUS corp]
You see, here is the funny thing. You talk about working with the devs on this expansion. Obviously you are a little too close to the issue.
Fact - There is not one measureable piece of evidence that the expansion had any impact on subscriber numbers. No new servers, no noticeable increase in player populations, xfire and just about everything is ALREADY back to where it was before the expansion with the exception that AOC has now totally alienated their pvpers.
Make jokes about WOW all you want, but for months after an expansion, there are queues to get on the servers. They are constantly adding new servers and they are setting sales records all over the place with their expansions.
The other big thing that is beind the fall in AOC subscribers is just the future. There is nothing coming anymore that gives hope for the game getting better. You can't point to the pvp patch, or the next expansion, becuase everyone knows Funcom doesn't have any eggs in the AOC basket anymore.. just a lead developer making monthly speeches. Players are already done with the content, the only thing they have now is a dozen repeatable quests to grind every day. The exploits in this expansion aren't even the big problem, the problem is 'what next'? nothing. Grind your 12 quests for the next year.
Having worked in the industry and watched the sales/marketing people in action, I have a pretty good insight into how magazines etc. score their reviews. Basically, the computer game company will sweeten them up with free stuff, promises of buying advertising space, show controlled demos and basically whatever it takes to milk a respectable score. Therefore I always laugh when companies try and toot the horn over review scores.
In the case of this review, they pretty much painted themselves into a corner with the score for the original game. By giving it a very generous 8.5 back in 2008, it was kind of impossible to give the expansion a lower score, since it does add stuff to the game!
However, when you read the actual latest review and see the words 'tedious', 'monotony' and 'grind' being used to describe the content, then you can see that the more truthful score should have been 6-7 out of 10. With probably a 5-6/10 for the original. Lineage 2 got a 6.0 for being grindy after all.
So, really nothing to be amazed about.
I do agree so much. I have still not got through expansion content even though i play a lot. the expansion is HUGE. And good review by the way. AoC got 8.5 well deserved...
The Ultimate Breakdown
Your still in the honeymoon phase, wait till you see what ROTGS really looks like without makeup in the morning
Tranca your Phd must have come from some 5th class russian community college or else you would not write nonsense like this.
You are surprised FC is after the money? SHIT! I always thought they are some sort of red cross investing 25 millions to help people grow in virtual world.
And as I heard some people that openly exploited were banned. But using XP pots for AA is not an exploit, it is FC being careless enough to forget to write an exception in code. You cannot ban people who simply at 80 used what they bought ... F C fucked that sure, but they would probably get fucked even more if the rolled back.
Another thing. You claim it is booohoo that FC with expansion caters to PVE players and yet majority of players are preferring to play PVE than PVP. It was publically announced that this expansion is PVE only and as such aimed at PVE-ers. FC simply awarded the player base that stayed (funny is that in general pvpers are that stupid to plan their come backs for PVE expansion) while PVP one move on to Aion and WoW. You cannot develop an expansion for minorities. (if that would be so - next expansion should be RP one). PVP community left, PVE one stayed. I can understand that to be honest. With all them expanded FPS games with portions of RPG, I think PVP in MMO is simply not worth the time and the effort anymore.
how much do they pay for this rating?
I agrre the glamour does come off but I think it does for all expansions. I think the score was a little high, probably about 8 I would give it, it definately gives AoC a kick up the ar se.
Well if that's the case too bad Funcom still advertises this game as having a major pvp element
huh?
I'd say that basically it comes down to you having become determined to keep hammering on anything bad you might find with AoC, and refuse to acknowledge any good aspects that AoC has.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
SOME people that openly exploited got banned, not all. The "freemasonry" guilds that know all the secrets of the world exploit on a weekly basis and FC is none the wiser. And were there any rollbacks as to the whole Bori fiasco? Any AA xp rollback for those "poor" people who got a one-year advantage over noobs and cannot play for 72 hours? To tell you the truth, banning and doing rollbacks would further alienate the remaining players, I think they cannot afford to take such drastic actions.
You sort of imply that AoC is a full-blown pve game with rich pve content and basically an alternate paradise for those who do not wish to play WoW, LotrO or Aion, for example. I find that extremely laughable. There are basically tier 1 and tier 2 encounters (available to most of the pugs, basically) which are all jokes, even EQ had better encounters, and then there is tier 3 which is buggy as hell and those "freemasonry" guilds of course keep everything to themselves (meaning no proper feedback how to fix the encounters and make them available to either casual players or basically the majority of guilds). The last 2 bosses cannot be defeated because they are simply bugged. Is it not laughable that the main villain of the original game is Thoth Amon and he cannot be killed, the story cannot be concluded at all before RotGS?! Even from a lore point of view this is just horrible. And tier 4 bosses (all TWO of them!) cannot even be reached, noone knows about them (Not even ONE picture of them is availeble; do they even exist?!). For a pve game I find this expansion an embarrassment, to say the least. If 6-man dungeons (yes, these are done extremely well and are challenging, the major problem for a player like me, however, is that I cannot experience them because I am not in one of those "freemasonry" guilds - hardmodes are kept secret) are FC's selling point in pve development and complexity, then they have literally stepped backwards. Even the fact that they released 2 entirely bugged tier 4 bosses without fixing tier 3 first screams of total incompetence one can expect from ... well, none other than FC.
Do not remind me of the factions, please. I would rather not talk about them. Last time this retarded "rinse and repeat 3 quests for 2 months in a row" mechanic was introduced, it was the year 2004. As people have figured it out already - you only introduce such an extreme and tedious grind when you have little content. Works in the year 2010 too, I guess.
If this expansion is a testimony to the powers of pve development in AoC, then this game is in a worse position than I thought.
I have previously acknowledged that Age of Conan has become a decent PvE game, you need to take you fanboi goggles off for a moment and actually take a good hard look at AoC and all it's issues. Heck a person even posted on the TL forums for Didek to resign yesterday.
Yes, it always works very well to make you and your arguments sound sensible by stating that other people wear fanboi goggles. Not really.
True, you mentioned that PvE has improved, an acknowledgement that's at least more than some others will make; alas, then you continue here and in other current threads with a host of negative arguments of which most of the times only a part is relevant to the debate being held.
I mentioned in other posts some of the things I think is wrong with AoC or have been handled wrong by Funcom: it doesn't mean that I don't see and acknowledge the good aspects of the game. Not being blind for good and bad aspects but seeing both, a policy I use for everything and any MMO game, current and upcoming, even a WoW, TSW, SW:TOR, Aion or CO.
Of course I tend to see the fun and positive aspects of a game I'm still playing enthusiastically from time to time more than people who haven't played that game for a long time or who've made it their mission to discredit it or its company in all of their posts: this doesn't mean it makes me blind for the flaws in a MMO game, it just makes me give less weight to those whose post histories (almost) entirely exist of negative arguments or sophisms regarding that game, like for example AoC.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Yes, AOC has improved their PVE game. Now you can actually level all the way up by questing. When the game launched, there were levels where you literally could do nothing but grind mobs for 2-3 levels at a time. When WOW launched, you could easily level 6 characters from 1-60 without ever doing the same quest twice. AOC now has 1 quest path to level, which means your second character will do exactly the same quests as your first.... but that is actually an improvement on how it shipped.
Now lets talk to how they improved endgame pve with the expansion. Before the expansion, there was no content. you simply grinded mobs for gold, which bought very little. With the expansion, yes things have improved, now there are factions that you can grind by doing the same 3 quests every day. Yet, again, that is an improvement on the way the game was before the expansion. PVE right now is comparable to WOW back with Sithilis and Eastern Plaquelands faction grinds. Of course, that was WOW 5 years ago, and endgame PVE has been drastically improved. And with this expansion came two more tiers of raiding.. of course they are both broken and can't be completed. Even the previous tiers remain mostly broken since launch.
So since lauch, AOC has improved thier pve game. You can now level all the way to endgame (1 time) using quests, and now you have 3 quests you can do every day once you reach it. You can also try every once and while to raid to see if it was fixed.. but don't count on it.. since the previous raids still aren't working correctly.
The numbers speak for themselves. PVPers aren't playing because they got nothing in the expansion, and pvers are seeing that there is nothing more to endgame then 3 repeatable quests and a bunch of broken raids that are half finished.
Anyone who thinks the expansion is worth more than a 4 is obviously Korean.
If the expansion got an 8.5 than the Base game should have received atleast a 10!
The two are not even comparable and 90% of the player base is STILL PLAYING IN THE ORIGINAL AOC!
I aint going to pull the wow argument here but just to use as an example, You were hard pressed to find ANYONE in the "Old World" when Burning Crusade hit.
AOC's expansion is the exact opposite. Most players are not even going to it and choosing to stay in teh "Old World" over the new one!
All things considered, I Iike the expansion.
However, there have been a few things that were done, in my opinion only of course, pure ass wrong.
First and foremost was the handling of the Den of Crowmen exploits. Not only did Funcom refuse to say ANY damn thing about it one way or the other, but instead of shutting it down ( like they did Yag for a much less serious problem ) until they could fix it, they let it continue AND had overzealous GM's banning eveyone they saw near a group of exploiters without even checking if the person was in fact exploiting.
Now, I can certainly understand the "We don't discuss exploits" stance Funcom takes very well. I don't expect them to have detailed workings of the exploit all over the forums for people to use. However, simply putting up a dev message saying "Den of Crowmen off limits due to exploits" is not "discussing" exploits, it's warning your paying customers to stay the hell away, and causes a lot less problems than a paying customer being banned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as I said, it should have been immediately disabled until fixed. Period.
Next on the list is the faction grind. If they had fewer factions to grind for, I could see the current rate of advancement working with minimal adjustments. But when you're trying to juggle up to 6 damn factions, and then you add in the grind for EACH ONE, it's just too much. I tried to defend the faction grind on the official forums in the beginning, even counting on the "We've got 50 new quests on the way" as a means to finally alleviate some of the grind of having to do the same few quests over and over and over; only to find that those 50 new quests did shit for the real grind. Who cares about 50 non-faction quests when the faction is what everyone needs? Time wasted on hitting a bulletin board is time that could have been spent grabbing more faction. Perfectly understandable to me why people were pissed at that.
Also, when you've got a test server, don't dick around with cutting requirements or increasing drops at 2-3%, start at damned 50% and TEST it. If it's cutting too much, then raise it a bit and retest it. If it works, then leave it alone and THEN put it to live. All FC is doing by adding one or two miniscule changes at a time is further frustrating people who are counting on FC to make things workable.
Anyway, I'm still loving the game and I ain't going anywhere soon, but there are definitely some issues Craig and the others need to work on; not just in the game, but in their development process as well.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
This is no surprise from Funcom. We demolished the little bit of T1 and T2 that was working at launch and exploited the crap out of the rest with no repercussions. Every one around was doing it once they found out how. I hardly considered it an exploit considering the bosses were so bugged out there was no other way to defeat them. They should have disabled the non working content like you have said. Not saying it was the right thing to do when we did it, just saying it's no surprise Funcom is still releasing the same bugged out stuff and still not caring about exploiters or the consequences of them.
Steam: Neph
I never trust gamespot for any reviews. Most of the time they are paid off to do good reviews.
Interestingly enough, metacritic.com rates Rise of the Godslayer a 82 and this site rates RotGS a 85.
So, my question is, should we just consider all game reviews and reviewers from all games to be crap, or just the ones we disagree with?
And yes, I'm aware that reviews of games across the board are often rated higher than they deserve, whether it's in game magazines or gaming sites. APB on the other hand only got a 59 rating on metacritic (unjustly in my eyes btw).
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
No just the reviews for MMO's should not be taken seriously, since MMO's are probably the most subjective experience you'll have based on communities within the game.
MMO's aren't as straightforward as your FPS or RTS games.
Overall i'd give ROTGS a 5/10
Sounds silly and hilarious to me, all reviews are more or less subjective. Sorry, it does sound foolish and measuring with 2 standards, trusting game reviews but not MMO reviews. You could as well say 'trust PC game reviews but not console reviews because they're more commercially influenced'.
I could agree with the viewpoint of MMO's needing more time for a proper review, but for the rest your argumentation is just too weak. But, it's your subjective opinion of course, not as if you're stating a fact of life.
I think reviewers of large sites and magazines are on average more objective than regular gamers and better in seeing and weighing the good and bad aspects of a game against eachother, where many an ordinary (MMO) gamer often tends to see either only the bad or good stuff. You've only to see how excessively polarized the discussions on the mmorpg.com forums are going as a simple sign of that.
An average of 82 on metacritic sounds reasonably fair, although 59 for APB I find somewhat low (I'd give it 65-70). RotGS I rate around 75-80 myself.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
This is exactly why I can never get into AoC, not at launch and certainly not now - it feels way too much like it's doing the exact same mistakes and follows the same path as WoW does. Currently it's at the level of vanilla WoW and it'll probably take years to come to the level of WotLK. It can also be argued that this expansion is in some ways TBC-like with ridiculously exclusive and hard 6 man dungeons. I played many different MMOs, but seriously, AoC feels to me like a constantly failed WoW clone that's trying to reach its "daddy".
johnie ... WHAT THE HELL!? I already explained to you that dungeons are not elite ... unless you start godslayer trial
seems like you are a total bloody noob johnie ...
the only thing that failed is the tokken and faction grind , what is more then 50 % of the content.
what is a total fail of the complete expac , but the only thing they did very well are the dungeons , they are very nice tuned and there are some very inovative encounters that are much fun ...
and jeah a bit of skill is required ... and btw age of conan is one of the games that doesn t copies wow from start to end , thats why noobs like u fail at the first lvl 30 dungeons
Retired : Daoc , Warhammer , WoW , Lotro , Tabula Rasa
, Everquest 2 , Aion, Eve , AoC , SW:Tor ( failwars ), Planetside 2
Waiting : Star Citizen
Playing : Star Citizen
FPS : Overwatch
Yt chan : https://www.youtube.com/user/raine187
AoC is turning into a WoW clone; if you haven't played from launch you won't see it of course. Also he who draws out the Newb word first is in fact a Nub.