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Why does everybody attach hatred to Funcom?
motig34
Member Posts: 10
I personally love Age of Conan. I still play it. Hell I have the game down on my taskbar at this very moment. But I've noticed that everybody in chat, and a handful of people in my guild refer to the company as Failcom repeatedly. They say how TSW is going to be a failure just as Age of Conan is, blah blah blah. And then they seem to just. Turn around. Bend over. And start praising Bioware for SWTOR, saying it's going to be the best MMO ever. Even though it's Bioware's first hop into the MMO market.
Also, for people who are looking forward to Funcom's next game, TSW, what's your favorite aspect that has been advertised about it. I really love the setting the game is going to be taking place in.
Comments
simple answer is this AOC was a trainwreck upon release yes its a great game now, but gamers are not forgiving and frankly i am not really sure we should be imagine going to a movie that was half done at release well that is often what we as gamers are stuck with. Also Anarchy Online was a buggy rubber banding laggy mess for years, however to be fair so was most of the MMO world back then we have a very different set of expectations of what we expect in terms of performance now. So at a quick glance thats two bad MMO's.
However if you take a closer look eventually AO became a very innovative creative sci-fi MMO when there were almost none in the market at all. AOC's PvP system is better than the majority of PvP systems in MMO's so i trust them creativilly however am i totally confident in their ability to launch a good product no why should i be i have seen them do a bad job twice. But with that being said at least they take chances and have good ideas i like them a lot more than SOE and Cryptic
It's hard to live down something like a paid employee cybering with a customer.
Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned
(I'm really excited for TSW but I know what to expect from this company.)
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
There's a sticky thread over in the TSW forums to discuss Funcom and its past shortcomings.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/314860/AllPurpose-Funcom-Discussion-Thread.html
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Just going to answer you thread title question. Funcom made a lot of promises they couldn't deliver at launch (some were even advertised on the game box like DirectX 10) while hyping up AOC. This combined with a massive amount of bugs and broken content, and lack of any real end game, set a poor tone with customers.
It also didn't help that AOC made it to release with a couple of massive quest exploits that allowed players who took advantage of them to reach level cap in a matter of hours, and also made them quite wealthy. Funcom responded to this by the mass banning of accounts and the removal of gold from many guild banks. Quite a few players cried foul and claimed that they were punished when they were innocent of any wrong doing. Whether they truly honest or not is anybodys guess, but while I dislike exploiters I have to wonder how such a glaring proplem was not found before release.
So anyway those are the main reasons. While I admit Funcom has managed quite a bit of improvement from those days, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Lot of hype, little delivery. Clearly the best department at FC is their marketing department. But really its a whole lot of big things and a whole lot of little things. A lot of that probably could have been forgiven and forgotten if the game was good but while you like the game the large majority of people who tried it didn't.
Because of FC I will never pre-order or buy an MMO without a free trial first.
Excellent Question motig
Having now a couple years of funcom products under my belt perhaps i can answer your question in a balanced manner.
Yes some people down right despise funcom, hence the failcom,fukcom badges and avatar shirts you see hovering around our reality. of course you have those that find funcom as a disappointment, but have the patience and vitality to understand the constant stumbling giant that we know and some "love".
focusing on these two groups mainly, it boils down to two things:
time wasted and squandered opportunity.
time wasted for the customers, esspecially those that placed stock (not stock market) on funcom games, the time, knowledge, anticipation of competition and cooperation from fellow customers; all of that going down the drain due to funcom either changing the formula too much and leaving it to stew for too long when said formula becomes sour. or funcom being ill-prepared to work out ever nagging problems with their products. for example:
putting too much PR hype in their products while failing the balancing act of proper development and realistic goals.
laymens terms being underdelivering...
Squandered opportunity, in a much less explaination, being failure to actually correct their past mistakes, letting their errors stack up one after another.
ill give a another example using Age of Conan this time.
being a launch player of AOC, Funcom always had a terrible problem of fixing sieges. at one point of time they actually made it possible to have sieges playable, aside from lag issue and trebuchet's bugging out at worse times possible. then some where inbetween introducing 1.05, sieges became completely borked, in as long as i can remember, or perhaps 2 years later , the said sieges remained broken due to random zone crashes. Funcom mentioned talks, at first, of introducing super battle kingdoms for guilds to make alliances.
ya.....
due to their track record on actual stable sieges, it was scraped and swept under the rug (along with drunken brawling) and a altnerative of making sieges playable was actually mentioned, having them being 24 instead of 48.
The thing is, AOC's engine from the get go was flaky when it came to performance due to high poly count and memory..period. it couldnt handle it, and it made things worse when people looked at past footage of Erling Ellison milking it up with videos of massive battles playing behind him of how great sieges were.
Of course on Funcom's side, for whatever reason, it took them nearly 2 to 3 years to attempt to make sieges playable, whether they work flawlessly is up in the air. but the running joke currently is having freemium players not to be able to attend sieges unless they become premium players.
look into that by the way, i hope its not true.
I do not hate funcom, but i have to say i am at the category of disappointed with them. they are a company that I KNOW they can do better and have the ability to do better. my personal qualm with Funcom when it comes to AOC was direction. I understood that the changing of Directors took place, but the extreme direction change from a brutal risk taking project to a rank and file mmo to appease the masses for survivals sake is a sour pill to swallow, but none the less a bitter sweet victory knowing that Funcom will not be at risk of going out of business, unless The Secret World nosedives AOC style.
to Funcom's credit, at least they some respect towards IP's to capture the feel of what that world might be, compared to another company that poop's out giant IP's under a two year span per project.
Eh, they're no worse than SOE or Cryptic. At least Funcom has made an MMORPG that I find highly enjoyable. (Anarchy Online)
A lot of the Funcom hate came mostly with Age of Conan's release, and has since stuck onto them. I haven't seen much hate for them outside of this forum, though.
Granted, Funcom deserved a lot of the backlash, but when I really look back at other releases, a lot of people treated those games similarly.
The core MMO crowd is pretty unforgiving, and will highlight any mistakes of the past to condemn a studio, Be it worth mentioning or not.
As for my own opinion of Funcom - I've since learned that I have to treat funcom like any other MMO developer: with skepticism.
That's the only real thing you can do now that there's so many companies making these MMO's and the games are average at best.
But since AO gave me so much joy in the past, I will at least give TSW a shot. Plus, it has that whole cthulhu horror vibe going, and I love HP Lovecraft.
Groovy.
With AO, Funcom proved that they can botch a launch. At the time, this was no big deal because most MMO´s and even many expansions have very rough launches. For many years, AO was considered the worst launch ever, but not by much.
With AOC, the opinion was the Funcom would learn something from AO. But again, it was a terrible launch. But the real difference this time was the extent to which Funcom went to decieve the public. The 1-20 experience (tortage) was the only portion of the game that was in the open beta, The Press was only ever allowed to play the 1-20 experience. The problem at launch was, as soon as you finished the 1-20 portion of the game, there was a HUGE drop off in content and polish and a huge increase in bugs. While 1-20 was full of story and quests were abundant, at launch, there were frequently areas in leveling where the ONLY option was to grind mobs.
Meanwhile, the alpha players who were allowed to play past level 20 were never allowed to talk about it. They whole time they were told by Funcom that a big patch was coming at launch that would fix all the problems. There was the whole issue of PvP.. wherre Funcom repeatedly bragged about it´s incredible PvP system and how much fun it was. At launch, there was no real PvP... it took months for them to really include anything at all.. and when it did come, it was a very very simplistic system similar to UO.. it definitely wasn´t anything groundbreaking or fun, and it was obvious that back when they were bragging about their incredible pvp system, they really had nothing at all fully drawn up.
Then there was just the arrogance and denial the first few months after launch. Despite rapidly plummeting subscriber levels that summer, Funcom was constantly putting out press releases about ´sales figures´... meanwhile never addressing the problem of ghost-town servers. In July, instead of announcing server mergers to address player concerns, they instead set every server to ´medium´ populaton and pretended the problem didn´t exist.
There was no real endgame. The game launched with a few bosses, which were mostly all bugged. All available strats for bosses involved the series of steps you had to take to ´glitch´the boss so it could be killed. Nobody was killing bosses in any type of ´normal´way.. it was all about glitching them to make them killable. Sieges, which were supposed to be a big part of endgame, never worked for the first 6 months after launch.
The bugs and just terrible gameplay will make you want to never play a Funcom game again. But the arrogance and deciet is what makes players ´hate´ the company.
AOC is a very good game, now. At launch it sucked, for all the reasons others have mentioned. Funcom, SOE and Cryptic are in my do not trust group. Bioware, CCP and Blizzard are in my trust list, for now! It comes down to promises made and promises kept.
The reason Funcom "has a bad rap" is not because of how their games turn out, but because of how they are released.
AoC fell WAY short at release of the features listed on the box, let alone mentioned in their trailers. They sure put a lot of post release effort into that game though. I would say that Khitai may be the best single expansion I have ever seen for a MMO. Overall, they slvaged AoC and turned it into a good game but many never saw because they felt the unfinished release product left such a bad taste in their mouth they dint want to come back.
Funcom's other major release was Anarchy Online back in 2001. This also turned out to be a very good game. However, not surprisingly, it had the worst release of any game I have ever seen. People today complain about imbalance at release or queues or whatever in games. AQ was litterally not functional for a vast majority of subscribers for the 1st month. I could go into detail about how bad this release was, and how badly funcom handled it and tried to shift blame, but I wont. Lets just say they had the name "failcom" LONG b4 poppa Conan was eyeing Momma Conan looking to make a baby Conan game.
The other beef I have with Funcom is that they take SOOOO long to expand content for fix bugs/imbalance. They usually do a good job when they get around to it, but people get old and die waiting for them to take action.
If they can manage to actually release TSW as a proper functioning game, with features in the game they said would be in there, people might actually like Funcom. Instead they have a reputation for releasing half finished products which sell great because of the promises, but die quickly because of the lack of fulfillment of those promises.
A lot of MMO's launch with less endgame than they end up to be, even WoW had a lot less endgame content and options than it ended up to have. The bugs, I give you that, but regarding the terrible gameplay, that's just that 'hate' you were mentioning talking. AoC had great fun gameplay on the level of other top AAA MMO's.
I think a number of people 'hate' AoC or Funcom because of their crushed expectations and the (psychological) hurt and pain it brought them, never mind that it's just about a game and 50-60 dollars and that years ago. The way how the game was in its bugged, rushed out state at launch and how the FC reps talked under Gaute's presence, that all already changed after the first half year. Yet you'll have people that will never let go of their experiences in those first months after launch, no matter how much has changed since then.
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."
It's not that I hate Funcom.
No sirree. It's just that after the debacle of AoC (Collector's Edition. I was such a dumb*ss), I just think Funcom are a bunch of underdelivering, incompetent fools.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Where you apparently experienced a debacle, I had a great time in AoC with friends. Then again, I've been playing MMO's since the first ones appeared so I'm not deterred by bugs or an unfinished feel to a game, neither was I prey or victim of any overhyped, failed expectations I had of the game. So I could enjoy AoC for what it offered, and it was great fun, it was better and I had more fun in it than in a lot of other AAA MMO's that I played.
The launch, true, they released the game half a year too soon, rushed launches are never good, Rift shows that a game should at least release polished and finished in this day and age.
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."
I am one of those that pounds on failcom even though i dont hate or even dislike them as much as i dont believe them or trust them to do half of what they claim, i am extremely leary of this companies releases and even more leary of their on the fly flavor of the month game breaking/changing changes...
Failcom is a very creative dev in many aspects but their propaganda machine is way over the top and all the half truths and lies leaves a bitter taste and a proven track record of not living up to the products hype..
TSW is one of the most promising games i have seen in many years but because it is funcom and it wont have a new or reasonable business model it most likely will not be a day one buy for me but rather a wait and see if its worth subbing to thing...
Im one of those that believes that greedy game companies that deliver mediocre quality and depend on monthly subs to exist will soon to be a thing of the past..
Playing GW2..
i wish things had been differnt launch, xpansion,
but i really have fond memorys of the game
instances, world feel, music, fun melee
all the points others have made i agree with
but in all honesty ive been more angry with bizzard than funcom
Funcom has proven that they're great at making pie-in-the-sky promises, they're absolute crap at actually delivering on them. Every game they have ever put out has been garbage at launch and even thereafter, they make big promises but it takes forever, if ever, to actually come through. How long have they been promising a new graphics engine for AO? Years? Where is it again? Oh yeah, lots of excuses, zero follow-through. Same with AOC. Crap launch, lots of hype, not much worthwhile in the game. I don't expect the new one to be any different.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Because they smuggle weapons into our country, tried to topple our government and capture the necular warheads to start world war 3;...wait nope....they just made couple of video games which some people didn't like.
Yeah pretty much this for me as well, hell I played SWG from summer 03 until nov 05. I like that Funcom actually tries new things rather than wait for someone else to.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
A half-assed launch is a half-assed launch. Not to mention Funcom totally denying major, widely reported technical issues. Remember the memory leak thing? It was ALWAYS the player's rig. It was only later that Funcom finally admitted it was the game, but everyone was gone by then. There was also that nice little thing with AoC that a bunch of special abilities simply did not work. I mean, I'm not even talking about clicking on the move with the proper parameters set, the thing cools down but doesn't work right. I'm talking about hitting moves and not a d*mn thing occurs. Then there's the Sieges thing.
Anyways, AoC had a tremendous amount of people at launch. That was undeniable and it was fun being there with all those people. But in a scant few months, they were gone.
It was getting bad enough that PvP in their official forums was more fun. How did it come to that? Easy.
They handled it like I said in my earlier post: Like underdelivering, incompetent fools.
How else do you take an MMORPG that started out spectacularly well with those initial sales to where it would fall within the first 3 months?
Again, with incompetence.
I've played MMORPGs for a long time also, but that doesn't mean I will stay with an MMORPG if it looks bad and the devs don't seem to have a handle on guiding the game to where it should be. I've also been in one in particular where the devs kept on promising fixes, hell even starting threads on what's going to get fixed down the road. "Just hang on for a few more months!" or some BS along those lines. Well, the fixes that were spoken of never came. I'm not sticking with any MMORPG that looks bad because of that prospect alone. Because of my personal experiences with several MMORPGs over the years and how players / customers are handled, I don't tolerate much of that BS.
Maybe those fools at Funcom finally did fix the game to where it should be. But I'll never know since I will never go back to them after that terrible gaming experience and spending alot of my hard earned money and valuable free time.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
For me aoc was perfectly playable at launch, and I enjoyed it for several months, but there could definitely be more content at launch. But I've seen so many bad mmorpg launches and aoc wasn't even close. It was a decent launch, or I could accept an average launch.
I think most people are angry because the game wasn't what they thought it would be, they heard it would be different, it would do this and that, without really knowing what it was. So they created their own idea in their head(very unfair towards funcom) and when the game (obviously) wouldn't be like that they got furious.
Of the game launches I have actually experienced, DAOC, WOW, WAR, CO, STO, D&DO, LOTR(not in that order) and AOC, AoC was a solid launch, especially considering the fairly high end graphics demand the game put on most systems.
The problem came later when the power levelers discovered that the content beyond level 20 was either not there or did not work.
It was forced to launch too soon, we can only hope that eventually game develpers will learn that if you screw the launch your are going to severly impact the success of your game.
People don't like false promises. That is all.
First i want to say i dont hate Funcom. It would help if they would not release their game a full year before they are ready. Yes all games have bugs, but when you cannot even do the most basic things without crashing every 2 minutes..... so far Funcom as failed to release any game in "playable" status.
In two short words, AO and AoC launches had one thing in common : Gaute Godager.
They've remedied that now.
I was fortunate enough to miss AoC's bad faze, but funcom's rep does worry me as I am really looking forward to TSW for 5 reasons.
1. The modern setting, is such a needed change, and could have some interesting possibilities for social interaction, and gameplay mechanics.
2. The horror element, if done well, and combined with real world mundane details, ala Gaiman's Sandman could create a fantastic sense of atmosphere and realism.
3. The skill system, I am losing interest in classes now, being an alterholic can ruin a game if the content doesn't stand up to repeated play through. I have seen how much better it can be in sandboxes such as EVE to focus on 1 character most of the time.
4. The locations, I love the idea of walked the streets of London (my home town) in an mmo, and look forward to other parts of the world.
5. The NPCs, it seems they have put a lot of effort into giving them personalities, and good voice work, and could work out better than SWTOR's NPCs.
But I worry about the launch, if it’s not as smooth as the last mmo I played, (Rift) this game might never recover, and the combat still looks very dull (compared to GW2 especially), also I get the slight feeling a lack of content might be a problem.