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Why would anyone buy another game from FUNCOM?
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You make massive assumptions, if anybody wants to name any other game company I am this vocal about then please step forward. Fact is I am negative about one game company and that is Funcom for the myriad of reasons I have posted here and other places. While people constantly defend these muppets I feel obliged to balance out that view. Bitter, yes I am bitter I think a company like Funcom that treats it's customers in such a way doesn't deserve to be in business.
The people that are supporting Funcom are trying to make out it's logical to buy another game from these muppets. Based on the fact they had some single player success in the past with a few games and seem to neglect what has happened over the last few years. Funcoms failing over the last few years are about customer interaction, keeping the customer happy, listening to the customer etc. I can put up with bugged games if the ethos of the company is right, it isn't right at Funcom they don't care about their customers.
Now they could turn that around but I see no indications of it happening, and with big PVP guilds leaving AOC the writing is on the wall. People/customers are not happy, things need to change and just because they plan to release a new game doesn't mean they immediately wipe the slate clean. I have never known a game company in my experience ignore users to the extent that Funcom do time and time again. They make out like they listen, then ignore what they are being told. Next to nothing is done with the current users in mind, they just go their own way with their own plans. Yet it's the current users that keep them afloat, this company does not deserve to be in business in my opinion. If you have money to spend support a independant developer, buy games you might not even consider. But don't give Funcom money until they start to take into account the thing that keeps a business moving forward and in profit - the customer.
Personally AoC is the game i´ve stuck with the longest. 12 months and that is alot for me. Cox is second in my mind, even though I´ve played it longer in total it wasn´t in succession. Wow for me lasted 6 months.
Now I was also mad about the bugs in AoC at launch but after 3 months it was just a good game. Now every ones opinion will always differ but for me I see no problem jumping in on a Funcom game again. Maybe it´ll be buggy as hell at first but I also know they have the know how to get things fixed. And hopefully since the budget is bigger on this one it´ll be smoother at launch.
He who lives shall see I guess.
All statements I make is from my point of view unless stated otherwise.
If you have multiple dealings with a company and they are negative it is very hard to view that company with anything but scorn. While there may be good people working in Funcom a company is led and how it acts is based on direction. There is company policy involved which communicates to users whether they are valued customers or merely viewed as a source of income. The ethos at Funcom is wrong to my mind, you are treated as a source of income and not as a customer.
The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. Thats two games from Funcom that delivered what they promised. Funcoms issue was their former Game Director Gaute Godager (and one of the co founders). He is now out and Funcom is a different company without him.
Also, AO was hailed as a great game 6 months after releases. AoC is now widely considered a great game. Both had extremly poorly handled launches, but in the end both games became state of the art in their time.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Fallenlords, if you don't want to give a game a try because of the company that made it and warn others to do the same, that's your call mate.
There are people that will never give a MMO game of SOE a try again, or Cryptic, or NC Soft, or Turbine, or Activision, or EA, because they think those companies have failed badly.
I myself care less about a company than about a game.
The past has shown that even companies and lead developers with successes on their track record can fail with their next MMO, so since nothing is certain, I'll just wait for myself and see how a MMO develops. I play a MMO because it's fun or brings something fresh and interestingly different to the field, something entertaining enough to keep me playing, not because I think its game company 'deserves' my sub or not or out of loyalty towards some game company.
MMO's are about fun, you know.
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."
Funcom are an isolated case as far as I am concerned. Not only do they release poor performing games with bugs up to the eyeballs, their customer service attitude sucks beyond belief. I have never come across a company like this during my entire gaming experience. Funcom pretend to engage their customers which in a way is worse than ignoring them. They adopt underhanded tactics to keep people quiet and basically project an image that to my mind is false.
While other game companies have their issues, there is at least a sense that they are trying to resolve the problems. You get no sense of that at Funcom, all you get is a sense they are banking on the next big thing and that everybody forgets past history. But they act as though they are massive company that don't need the loyalty of their customers, when in effect without that loyalty they wouldn't exist.
What Funcom fail to realise is the with an MMO you as a customer make a commitment - that is the model that they put into place. That ranges from perhaps 1 month to a year to perhaps even a lifetime subscription. But it is something that is a two way street especially in these types of games more so than others. If you don't listen to your users then the commitment is only one way. The commitment with regards to Funcom has been one way now for a very long time. If they want to disregard their users and just go their own way, then don't release MMO's release standalone games. Then you don't have to honor any sort of real commitment and you can do what you like.
Hm. that sounds pretty familiar....
People/customers are not happy, things need to change and just because they plan to release a new game doesn't mean they immediately wipe the slate clean. I have never known a game company in my experience ignore users to the extent that Cryptic does time and time again. They make out like they listen, then ignore what they are being told. Next to nothing is done with the current users in mind, they just go their own way with their own plans. Yet it's the current users that keep them afloat, this company does not deserve to be in business in my opinion. If you have money to spend support a independant developer, buy games you might not even consider. But don't give Cryptic money until they start to take into account the thing that keeps a business moving forward and in profit - the customer.
Sounds about right.
People/customers are not happy, things need to change and just because they plan to release a new game doesn't mean they immediately wipe the slate clean. I have never known a game company in my experience ignore users to the extent that Blizzard-Activision does time and time again. They make out like they listen, then ignore what they are being told. Next to nothing is done with the current users in mind, they just go their own way with their own plans. Yet it's the current users that keep them afloat, this company does not deserve to be in business in my opinion. If you have money to spend support a independant developer, buy games you might not even consider. But don't give Blizzard-Activision money until they start to take into account the thing that keeps a business moving forward and in profit - the customer.
That fits too!
People/customers are not happy, things need to change and just because they plan to release a new game doesn't mean they immediately wipe the slate clean. I have never known a game company in my experience ignore users to the extent that Turbine does time and time again. They make out like they listen, then ignore what they are being told. Next to nothing is done with the current users in mind, they just go their own way with their own plans. Yet it's the current users that keep them afloat, this company does not deserve to be in business in my opinion. If you have money to spend support a independant developer, buy games you might not even consider. But don't give Turbine money until they start to take into account the thing that keeps a business moving forward and in profit - the customer.
Man this is fun, it's like mad libs!
Point is, all game developers care about profit to an extent you've probably never dreamed of. Its the corporate mindset. If you have never experienced a company that ignores its player base and chases the almighty dollar to the extent funcom does, you've clearly never played an MMO aside from AoC. ever heard of Champions Online? The game Cryptic made to sell beta keys to Star Trek Onine? Im not even exagerating. They made the game right before they were going to be bought out by Atari, Hyped it to all hell, and then said if you buy their "lifetime subscription" which cost as much as 2 years monthly subscription, you would get to play the Star Trek Online beta. They rushed CO out the door and it was bad, they rushed STO out the door and it was worse. STO also had a lifetime subscription. Why would a game that expects to be around for more than 2 years do something like that? wont it eat away at their bottom line? Oh right, they then sold the useless company to Atari and made enough money to retire off it. If you think Funcom is bad, you haven't been around the block.
I think AoC was a big let down and still is, their killed awesome melee combat system and can't still make those epic siege battles their advertised working. Sieges still keep crashing all the time, PvP class balance was never addresed as it should. From my experience population is slowly decreasing and new bugs introduced every patch. Anyway I had my share of fun playing this Funcom game and I hope they gonna learn from mistakes they did in AoC and TSW will be better and more polished game. I think TSW it their last chance to change minds of many customers and they should realise that. If they fail with TSW, it will be the end for Funcom. So here is hope they won't...
You feel you can compare Funcom to people like Blizzard? Blizzard don't have to care about their customers they are big enough not to care. But then for the most part they must be doing something right to have around 11+ million subscribers to WoW. I tried WoW I though it was a good game - better than AOC in terms of stability and overall performance. Fair enough graphics in WoW are lame, but then I prefer my games to perform rather than look pretty.
Cryptic I don't know about, none of their games appeal to me to be honest so never tried them. So can't judge the quality of their work. Turbine, again games seemed like reasonable quality to me I had no issue with performance or stability. People like NCSoft I think release decent games and again stability/performance has never been an issue. Fallen Earth which I play at the moment, performance is sound considering I am playing from Europe on North American servers. Fallen Earth is worlds apart from say AOC, just check the patch notes and you can see where each company has their focus.
Sure game developers are interested in profit, you don't go into business with the idea of not making money. But at the same time I think you can tell where their focus is based. Do Funcom care about AOC? I don't think so and in effect they just lead customers on with a load of empty promises and make the right noises every once in a while. Other companies I sense care about the quality of the work they produce, fine they want to make money, but they can make money and deliver a decent product at the same time. In fact sometimes the better the product the more money you can make. I know that sort of thing might sound strange to people like Funcom but less bugs, better performance, stability and reliability can actually make you money.
So wait, Blizzard is ALLOWED to shit on their customers because they are successful? you're fun to talk to :P
in fact, WoW had an even WORSE launch than AoC. Allow me to introduce you to our friend, Queuedance: http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html
Granted, they did give us something like a free extra two months because the first two months were unplayable for everyone. WoW got a pass for their unplayability because at the time, they had no competition. Dozens of bugs, unplayable classes(i dont remember if it was warlock or hunter that was totally broken, but warriors were impossible to play because of a broken rage system), random server freezes, queues in excess of 5 thousand on peak hours, Entire zones and continents being booted from the server, instances being frozen, getting bugged out when looting, the server and the cliant being out of sync and then speeding up like a Zach Snyder film, all sorts of hilarious issues like falling through the world and not being able to get your body back. The same thing happened AGAIN with the first expansion. The thing is that when people got sick of WoW's bugs, they had nowhere to go. When people got sick of AoC's bugs, they went back to WoW. And so people came back to WoW a few months later when the servers stablized and played until they forgot all about launch. people who quit AoC because of the bugs still carry that chip on their shoulder, because the last thing they saw of it was a broken game. I never liked AoC in the first place, so i never purchased it. Wasn't my style of game. But while waiting for more news on the games I want to play to come out, I downloaded the trial and played through a few classes. The game was boring (like i said, not my style) but completely stable in every way. Interesting from an MMO perspective, and incredibly pretty. A decent time waster, about on par with WoW.
Do some research, the only really huge issue with AoC was a lack of end game content which, granted, is pretty bad. But at least it was possible to get to the end (WoW also launched without zones above level 50, relying on the fact that people took a long time to get to that point)
No Blizzard isn't allowed to be bad to their customers, but at the same time how they treat their customers is a mute point. They don't need to go over the top in their customer relations because they have so many customers. Whatever they are doing it's working and its been working for some time now. If you innovate customers can be a lot more forgiving than if you are just following, hence MMO's get compared to WoW all the time.
Funcom on the other hand has around 100,000 users for AOC - they can't afford to not listen to their customers or ignore their customers, because they have such a limited number. What they are doing is working to a marginal success, but not pushing the boundaries or showing any innovation. It also appears large guilds are leaving AOC and generally that 100,000 is going down not up. Rise of the Godslayer wasn't a big hit in general terms and while it might have brought a few players back the whole launch was a little blip on the gaming radar. There was no marketing push, Funcom act as though they are Blizzard and the users are going to come to them. Wrong, they need to draw the attention of the users and pull people in but then they don't seem to care.
People left AOC because of the bugs, bugs which are still there two years down the road. If you play AOC, and have played it before, you see the same visual bugs as you did at launch. What does that say about the state of the game? It's only if you give it time and get out of places like Tortage that you might see it's improved. But most people are probably going to think not a lot has changed. Well it has but the priorities have been all wrong to my mind, neglecting bug fixing, neglecting performance and neglecting stability while focusing on new content that puts a strain on the aforementioned areas I think is stupid. With the launch of the expansion performance took an even further nose dive. Memory leaks and bugs is what AOC is all about, now if they changed tact and started addressing those areas fair enough. But here we are dealing with a game company that seems to have an aversion for fixing bugs and doesn't know how to code for optimum performance. Whether the problems are inherent in their proprietary game engine or what I don't know - but there are some serious issues that just don't get addressed. Instead they prefer to silence the people that complain about them, that is the attitude Funcom take.
Their inability to fix bugs within their own game engine I think is a serious issue. Now they state new updates are coming, so perhaps that might improve things. But this engine is developed according to Funcom alongside the development of the games. So it has it's own separate development cycle which kind of seems a bit odd to me that it isn't being developed alongside the live game it's supporting. My opinion the game engine is fubar, yes it can give you pretty graphics but performance wise it sucks big style. They will still be using the same game engine for TSW so in that respect I think the game is probably doomed from the start. They can't fix bugs as it stands, apart from trivial stuff that you don't mind being bugged anyway.
Funcoms point releases on AOC most of the time, didn't even deserve to be point releases. It took us nearly two years to get to 1.6/1.7 (1.7.x being more to setup for the expansion) - now I know you can't always read a lot into level numbers but we crawled along. Fallen Earth is on 1.6 at the moment and to me it's a justified 1.6 with some serious changes and improvements. Done in the space of less than a year, that to me is a reasonable sort of pace and they have had their own problems with staff layoffs etc.
You would think overall Funcom would be grateful to the customers for showing them some support, but they do nothing in-game. They charge for things they should be giving away and generally as far as interest in their own game goes they have zero. Everything is player led and nothing is done that involves expense to Funcom. Events, just mention Conan's birthday - advertised about an hour before. Most people missed it - done as an afterthought and their whole sense of a game community is next to non existant.
Sigh. This nonsense again.
As people said to you on the official AoC forums again and again, not everyone has the same problems as you experienced, don't make it as if you speak for every AoC player and that every AoC player has the same technical issues with the game that you have.
I was there, at the months after launch. I've seen how a lot of the issues and bugs and crash causes and out of memory problems gradually disappeared, at least for me and a lot of other players. Looking at the responses of people actually playing the game I'd say that in the months after AoC launch, 9 out 10 people had a lot of those problems, and they improved it in the course of time to 1 of 10 still having problems of that kind, and 9 out of 10 playing stable and problem free.
A very rough estimate, but you get the gist.
Does that mean FC solved all the bugs - like the visual ones - for everyone and every PC system?
No, they didn't. But it's evident to most that they solved a lot of the causes and bugs in the system that caused a lot of these issues. But maybe there's a thing to be said for not aiming for the highest possible graphics and polygon counts for a MMO, but instead go the WoW way, and keep it down and 'stylized' in graphics. It certainly worked for WoW and LotrO, and it's not for nothing that Bioware opted for a more 'stylized' look for SW:TOR instead of a graphical look like Mass Effect 2.
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."
Fallenlords from remebering your posts on the AoC forums from the beginning and up to know you have become such a hater that it's almost funny.
Most games follow a logic, you tweak settings and things change for the better or worse. You start off low or high and adjust accordingly until you get smooth performance. Now even people that have been running well with 60fps+ have noticed serious performance issues since the expansion. The AOC client is not optimised in any way shape or form, yet there is 30gb of crap sitting on your hard drive. The client for the most part defies logic and what you think will boost or change performance (based on experience with other games) has no impact.
That's another reason I am pissed at Funcom, I bought a new rig with AOC in mind. Part of the reason I re-subbed, because I knew I was going to buy a new PC. So with AOC in mind I made sure I had what I thought was enough memory, a reasonable graphics card and a decent cpu. Every other game I own, from Crysis to Fallen Earth to Aion to AVP worked like a dream. Great performance on maxed out settings, even running AVP on Directx 11. Could not be happier, appear to have made a reasonable choice in my selection. Oh but hold on - AOC now runs like a dead dog. From about 1.6 the performance just kept getting worse. I can't run it in a resolution above 1024x768 - if I switch on antialiasing the game is unplayable. But then if I have world particles, shadows and grass on it runs better than if I don't wtf. It crashes in DX10 and is basically a big pile of puss that has been deleted from my machine.
Now certain people have not had issues, but for those that have what have Funcom done? When I logged a call about the 'out of memory' crash I was told to follow a user submitted hack to make more memory available because they had no idea. Oh yes another suggestion go to a 64 bit OS, well that isn't an option at the moment due to other software I run. I got bug all help and Funcom did shag all about it. CPU affinity, still an issue I would imagine. Which ironically kind of makes it better to have an old rig to get the better performance which is just insane.
Basically experiences do vary, but most games you find you can run them well at varying levels of settings. Play around, tweak this and that is has an impact. AOC you might as well close your eyes and twiddle with settings because there is no logic to them at all. Then it's never anything to do with Funcom, it's your graphics card (works fine on every other game) or it's a bug in DX9 that only Funcom seem clever enough to uncover. I don't know how people can defend these idiots, things in AOC are just broken. Check your resource database lately have you? Downloaded another 10gb of complete crap. People have requested rollbacks to 1.4 because of performance issues. Just because some people are not having issues doesn't mean you can gloss over the problems as if they are happening to a minority because that isn't the case. Last thing I knew the users where trying to track down the issues - next to nothing was happening from Funcom. How many people posted the best way to resolve performance issues in AOC was to delete AOC - I followed that advice and it worked well.
Ridiculous is probably a better word - I was happy with the game when I first started but things got worse and worse. I left because I was unhappy with performance and was lured back by a promotion and the fact I was getting a new PC. Yet performance got worse and worse. Oh, safe to say I hate Funcom with a passion these days. When my ban is lifted in October on the forum I will make sure I am banned permanently, see they can't even do that right the muppets.
Simple. Because most people don't have the problems that you have.
I tracked it with guildies, friends and their guilds. A lot of people were complaining after RotGS launch, but those complaints grew less and less until after a month as good as all didn't have any issues anymore, besides the occasional lag spike (and with occasional I mean once, twice an hour). I myself experienced OOM crashes after RotGS launch, but with the 2nd patch they were gone, and didn't come back. Sign for me that the cause for my issue was fixed.
A guide that helped with my graphical tweaking of AoC settings was this: video optimization guide
I can upscale my fps with 20-30 with it without even having to lose my DX10 settings.
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."
So does this make you feel better? Using all this time to trashtalk one company because you allowed yourself to be fooled back to the game? I'm amazed how people like you think, first of all Funcom never lured you back, they gave you an offer and you took it. That can only be blamed on yourself, you knew about the state of the game you knew that during the time you played the game didn't improve much and yet you choosed to return with a new PC and a offer from Funcom. It's funny that you hate the company with a passion when they never forced you back, you willingly went back yourself. Of course I'm sure it helps you a lot to be hateful towards them as you have someone to blame for your own stupidity.
Yes your to blame for going back, not funcom. Hating them with a passion makes you only look like a idiot.
I left AOC due to performance issues and I was led to believe by people on the AOC forum that the issues were all down to the spec of my PC. Not planning at that time on upgrading I canceled my sub, went and played things that would run fine on my PC. I came back to AOC due to an offer of a free expansion, beta access to TSW and a reduced yearly sub. So knowing that I was buying a new PC I took advantage of that offer - at that time my main issue with AOC was just performance.
I would like to know how it's foolish to think that game performance is going to improve if you double the amount of ram you have, double the amount of processors you have quad core, buy a video card with twice the amount of memory, faster disks and go for an OS that is supposedly faster. Oh yeah and at the same time switch to cable for internet, going from a 4mb connection to 20mb. All with a view to running AOC and taking into account recommendations from the forum. Wouldn't it be a natural assumption that AOC will work better if you plan on doing all of that - err yes I think it would. Did my games work better after doing that - err yes everything did apart from AOC. Is the problem with my machine - no. Is the over bloated AOC client a pile of crap - yes.
So my journey with AOC started with a reasonable game and the understanding my rig wasn't quite up to running it (well that's what I kept being told). Fair enough half the problems you put down to your PC, oh it crashed - probably my PC. Oh, my hair has turned blond again - perhaps my PC. Oh it's lagging, perhaps my PC. Go on the forums - 'hey it's your PC' you need a better xyz. So having been led to believe the issues were all related to my PC (a common trend on the technical issues and 'no solutions' part of the forum) - and to an extent some issues were related. I upgrade with all this in mind and have AOC run worse than it did on my previous machine- yes I found that slightly annoying. Check my posts on the forum - what do they bang on about - performance and bug fixing mostly. What has Funcom done in however many point releases with regards to performance - sod all.
If anything I was foolish to sign up for a year - it was a good offer but MMO's you never know what is going to happen from one month to the next. So if anything I would only ever sign up for a month at a time regardless of how good the offer is overall. So yes I learnt something, don't sign up for longer than a month and Funcom can't code for toffee. So yeah AOC defies known logic to my mind and while spending hours upon hours trying to eek out that extra bit of fps might be a nice hobby for some. I actually want to play and enjoy the game not reverse engineer the thing.
Complaints grew less and less because people just left - most people don't complain. They might complain once or twice, but if nothing is done they tend on the whole to vote with their feet.
I was talking about the same groups of people. Of those a considerable group complained right after RotGS. Any problems they had vanished however within a few weeks, with 1 or 2 exceptions. I know because I also asked around actively of friends, acquaintances and guildies of whom I knew they had problems right after RotGS release, because I was curious. I think a number of 40ish people is a reasonable amount to get an impression.
Of those groups there were a few that quit or started to play less, but that wasn't because of technical reasons.
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."
Q. Why would anyone buy another game from funcom?
A. Because they took advice from players and worked hard to fix the issues. Thus making a game the core playerbase (not me) loves.
The simple fact that they turned AoC around and kept to their word about it. Even if secret world launches badly you can count on funcom to fix it, even if it means firing someone.
Played AO for many years and played aoc on and off since launch. I personally can't find anything to complain about with funcom so i would definetly buy another mmo from them. Drunken brawling,seiges,etc would all upset me if i was a pvper but i never really get into pvp in games just not my taste. I also never had any technical issues running any of their games either.
How exactly do you finish an mmo?
This is question SW:TOR aims to answer for all of us! Can't wait for the giant "CONGRATULATIONS: YOU WIN!" screen.
Sorry, very bad of me to go off topic to another game.. anyhow. Go Funcom and stuff!
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
So if I am to believe this then, you actively canvassed for opinion on the expansion just after launch and then a few weeks later. I suppose just in case you got into a conversation like this, where you opinion needed some sort of validation.
Of course everybody had problems at the start with the expansion, the game was crashing for everybody when changing zones. Funcom had to hotfix that little gem and to be honest fair enough, I have no issue with that problem. But the out of memory didn't effect everybody, it was narrowed down (by the users I hasten to add) that it was either something to do with Directx 9 or a 32 bit OS. But Funcom did shag all about that one because it didn't impact on everybody. As far as I know, though I am banned from the forums, they are still investigating. They can move when they need to move - but most people found workaround to the problems. In fact AOC should be renamed to Age of Workarounds - a workaround is not a solution. It's a temporary fix until a solution is found - trouble is with AOC next to nothing is ever fixed. So if I was to download AOC now I would also need ByCrom, AOCQS, Download Cache, Game Booster prior to even attempting to go through a 16 page tut on tweaking graphics settings.
Third party applications don't pop up for a game to fix performance issues if there are no issues. AOC has a number of third party apps that directly address the known performance problems, cpu affinity, thread priority, shaders, caching etc etc. In fact for a lot of people AOC would run a lot worse without those apps. So to say it's only a few people having issues is glossing over the fundamental problems. Which is something Funcom are quite adept at doing.