AOC - General Information

[Hatorade]

On release Vanguard was fun because it was new after 3 weeks of 6-10 hours a day playing, the new/fun went away and all the bugs and shittyness was all I saw. I hope AoC is fun because its fun and not cause it is new/different.

[Gecko]

2bit,

My point is solely that I have played the game and I find it fun. It has good and bad points. I've given my personal feedback.

Your posts are often consistent links to others who slam the game, or to try and reaffirm how bad the game is. You aren't presenting an opposing viewpoint, you seem an anti AOC propagandist, which would be ok, except it ain't formed from your own experiences.

Also, comparing an MMO release to Vanguard is pretty much saying the game is horrid.

[Venjenz]

Without looking liek I am taking sides, I will ask qeustions that I haven't really seen answered yet, and from the perspective of someone who played AO from launch and still maintains an account about 4 months of every year since 2001.

1) Has there been any large scale PVP? They use massive PVP battles as a selling and talking point, but I know FunCom server technology from attending more lagtacular tower battles on Rubi Ka than I can count. So, have these massive battles occurred yet, and if so, what has been the reported framerates from those participating, and balanced up against those framrate numbers, what rigs are people running to get good performance and what are their settings?

2) Where are they at with itemization? Do they have AoC's keeper class, who get three weapons for 160 levels? Do they have the AoC enforcer, who get nanos to buff weapon skills that have no useful weapons in the game? Do they have class specific weapon or item that has a 0.0000000000000000001% drop rate, but has been made a key leveling mechanic, like the trader shotguns in AO that sell for more than a whole player built city costs?

3) On the leveling path, do they have the Shadowlands-esque bottlenecking quests that ended up being removed from the game?

4) On the leveling path, is there anything remotely resembling the "hecklering" phenomenon of AO, where exp on one kind of mob in one or two zones was like triple what it was anywhere else, forcing most people into hecklering if they want to group?

5) Can every class effectively solo?

I am asking because I get the AoC emails every month, and I follow the forums, and core stuff like the lagfest of tower battle PVP never gets addressed, and when it comes up, you hear "it's beta, relax" but Notum Wars for AO was released in early 2002, and they still haven't fixed the lag at mass PVP in AO, and the 7th anniversary of NW is rolling around soon. If they had 7 years to fix it and haven't in that game, how far offbase is Twobit when he raises legitimate concerns for the last few months of beta before release?

Large scale PVP with good framerates on an average box, smooth combat with good framerates on an average box, class balance along the lines of 3 rocks, 3 scissors and 3 papers, a smooth leveling curve with good itemization, and high end content that works are all must haves when that game launches. For those in the beta, what is the percentage chance of seeing each of those listed things at release?

I am a fan of FunCom for what they do right, but I have too many hours sunk into AO, too many launches I have suffered painfully through, and too much experience with FunCom developer excuses to not be critical and pretty nitpicky with giving them my $50 up front and $15 per month. More important, I am investing time, and that time needs to be fun, not spent reading forum posts by devs telling me that had I done the proper RegEdit in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE according to the tech notes on the Norwegian forums, then I wouldn't have these problems.

I am not playing WoW fanboi, and I'd love a game to come out that is more fun than WoW. I think anyone here would. End of the day, we're all gamers and like playing fun games. Don't see the harm in raising an eyebrow about whether we'll be paying to do the "gold beta" for the umpteenth time after being promised the moon and the stars by the game publisher.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Gecko

Also, comparing an MMO release to Vanguard is pretty much saying the game is horrid.

And Vanguard's release compared to the launch of AO, the SL expansion, the AI expansion, and the Lost Eden expansion was like ranibows, bunnies and kittens awesome.

Actually, if AoC launches as well as Vanguard, that would be a huge success on the FunCom game launch meter. Hell, if I can log in to AoC and play for longer than 10 minutes without being disconnected or my machine crashing, within the first month, it will have the AO and SL expansion launches beat by a good margin. And if any of the promised content actually works before the third major patch, it has the AI expansion beat.

FunCom is the MMO industry leader in making you pay to do the final six months of beta. So stop attacking Twobit and start being honest about the game. Tell us what works well, what works sorta good, what is close to working and what flatout sucks donkey balls, and be specific. The AoC forums gloss too much, and FoH is a forum long known to abandon notions of sugarcoating.

[Draegan]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

On release Vanguard was fun because it was new after 3 weeks of 6-10 hours a day playing, the new/fun went away and all the bugs and shittyness was all I saw. I hope AoC is fun because its fun and not cause it is new/different.

Wow it took you that long to realize the shittyness?

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Venjenz

And Vanguard's release compared to the launch of AO, the SL expansion, the AI expansion, and the Lost Eden expansion was like ranibows, bunnies and kittens awesome.

Bullshit. Yeah, AO inarguably had a bad launch, but it was more technical shit that literally kept you from playing more than anything else. VG had MANY more issues at launch. Broken abilities, shit performance, bugged quests..... the fuckin' list is enormous.

I always said AO had the shittiest lauch of any mmo in history. Until Vanguard. A month after AO released, I was in game enjoying myself. A month after VG released, the box was in the fuckin' trash.

[Gaereth]

AO had so much innovation and great ideas that got lost in its bad launch. The game was there you just couldn't get to it. In VG you could get to it yet the game wasn't there.

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by Draegan

Wow it took you that long to realize the shittyness?

Your posts suck but yeah, was playing with a tight group of friends so that made it suck less. When they quit so did I. Not to mention I was using like a 6 year old comp to play it, got 10 fps standing still 0-2 fps grouping haha.

[Draegan]

My posts suck? Where did that one come from? You're the idiot playing a game at 2fps.

[jayrebb]

The shaw potential is strong with this one, should I throw my hat into the arena?

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by Draegan

My posts suck? Where did that one come from? You're the idiot playing a game at 2fps.

Fuck my bad I should of said your posts lately suck, then posted some explaining the whole opinion thing etc etc, and how playing a game with friends can make any game fun.

Hell last week was drunk and we played some E.T. on the Atari, thats right one of the worst games ever made. It was hilarious, followed by some Q-bert...thats some fucked up controls if you haven't played in like 15 years haha.

Bird told me more invites from fileplanet will be out 3pmish central time.

[Grumpy Old Fart]

I think it's only been said about 5 million times since AO's release, but the vast majority of the performance/"lag" problem were due to the unbelievably stupid internet protocol that they used (I forget my TCP/UDP stuff). Fixing the "lag", etc. would have required them completely re-writing the entire damn game.

Even though I'm certainly hesitant about AoC's readiness for release, and more than leery of FunCom's blatant lying about many things, I'm pretty sure they couldn't possibly be stupid enough to program their second online game with that same basic problem.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Rayne

Bullshit. Yeah, AO inarguably had a bad launch, but it was more technical shit that literally kept you from playing more than anything else. VG had MANY more issues at launch. Broken abilities, shit performance, bugged quests..... the fuckin' list is enormous.

I always said AO had the shittiest lauch of any mmo in history. Until Vanguard. A month after AO released, I was in game enjoying myself. A month after VG released, the box was in the fuckin' trash.

rose colored memory of AO, that's for sure. The list of shit that didn't work in AO a month after release is easily as long as the borked shit in Vanguard. And the thing is, they still haven't dealt with server lag among large groups. To this fucking day the lag sucks at large scale battles.

I played AO as recently as October of last year, and my engineer pets still joust with mobs and hump doorframes due to pathfinding algorithms that sucked in 2001 and still do, you still rubberband when running in several areas of Scheol, Adonis and Penumbra, and the last tower battle I attended I literally had about 5 FPS performance with every setting knocked down to try and limit the lag. Come to think of it, you still freeze when entering busy places like Rome Blue Basic and some of the busier whompahs. And I helped some folks out trying to get weapons from the Inner Sanctum, and you still need an engineer to Beacon Warp teammates into the same instance, because the game still cannot resolve putting teamed players into an instance together, at least not reliably.

Like most AO players, I make jokes about that stuff and press on, but as a fan of the game, I try to make the best of things, not unlike a Vanguard player who can now try to laugh off the crap that is still busted, since they are trying to get their moneys worth.

So I wonder stuff about AoC from an AO player's perspective, knowing how FunCom does things.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Grumpy Old Fart

I think it's only been said about 5 million times since AO's release, but the vast majority of the performance/"lag" problem were due to the unbelievably stupid internet protocol that they used (I forget my TCP/UDP stuff). Fixing the "lag", etc. would have required them completely re-writing the entire damn game.

Even though I'm certainly hesitant about AoC's readiness for release, and more than leery of FunCom's blatant lying about many things, I'm pretty sure they couldn't possibly be stupid enough to program their second online game with that same basic problem.

I know about the rewriting thing. But that doesn't explain some of the other stuff that was broken at release and still is. And I see the same kind of Funcom thinking permeating their forums and the dev repsonses you see.

The game will sell, people will play it, and I bet they do like I do with AO and make excuses for stuff that really has no excuse, just to feel good about spending the time and money to play.

Tell you waht, when the first series of large scale PVP battles happens, and I hear how great the performance is from a lot of people, then sign me up. Until then, I am waiting for the other Notum Wars shoe to drop.

[Guiness]

They are disbursing beta keys right now as of 2:57pm cst.