AOC - General Discussion II

[Gecko]

I work for a Telcom company. I have no ties to Funcom, and have actually never played a live game of theirs before. I beta tested AO and thought it was complete rubbish.

I've been honest and accurate in this thread. I like the game and give my viewpoint. Others seem to be doing the same.

The problem here is you haven't been honest or accurate. Read your own posts, man. Maybe it's just anger or something but you've been bashing this game for months, and I can't get why you keep discussing it since you loathe it.

I've played pretty much every MMO since UO, and I love the genre and all aspects of it. However, I try and limit my discussions to games that interest me and I play, or have history with. I just can't get why you keep beating on this thread and despite your reasonings why, I'm still baffled as to why you purchased this game or are participating in these threads since it's apparent to everyone you have detested it for quite some time.

One or two posts that the game sucks is cool.. page after page of trying to attack it really makes you seem like you have either professional reasons, or just have mental problems. Dunno...

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Gecko

The problem here is you haven't been honest or accurate.

Dunno...

No, the problem is you keep saying this and have nothing to back it up with. I get called every name in the book, including a liar, and I then give some supporting evidence to counter the baseless claims and all you can do is plug your ears and say 'nuh uh!'

You enjoy the game, great. Good for you. That doesn't change anything I have said.

Now like I have said before, either prove me wrong or stop saying I am wrong. I am not making baseless claims like you. I don't lie for the fun of it. Could I be wrong? Sure, but it isn't out of intent or deception. I am more than willing to consider anything that contradicts what I have said. I just haven't seen anything that does so.

You may not like what I have to say but that doesn't make it inaccurate.

[Gecko]

I think you are biased and I think the stats you roll out are crap.. There are dozens of posts in AOC threads to back up my reasonings. You can disagree, but it seems to me and others you have an axe to grind and are being deceptive.

It may just be your manner of posting, and I'll be the first to discuss AOC issues and idiotic dev decisions, but at the same time you still have yet to admit you were wrong with all your posts in early May saying the game would crater on release and be akin to Vanguard in its manner, which turned out to be pretty damn deceptive and overtly wrong.

[Rica86]

Ugh, need somewhere to vent at the moment. But the single most annoying thing at the moment for myself in game, is the building of a guild city. I understand it should be a big accomplishment and all, but in my guild of about 20ish active players, maybe half of them are actually get down on harvesting... the amount of stuff needed is ridiculous. We really would like to get larger, but were not having much luck and with the amount of time it takes to get the city going, combined with leveling is almost ridiculous. Harvesting is becoming a huge issue of contention in the guild, with people constantly bitching about someone not pulling there wieght or what not towards getting the mats. I harvest like a good hour or 2 a day, and barely hit 1 full stack of stuff towards building our tier stuff, which takes friggin retarded amounts of mats. Sigh...

[Twobit Whore]

I think you are biased and I think the stats you roll out are crap..

Of course they are...

Some people wouldn't believe the house was burning even if they were on fire. Someone says something, someone else says 'ss or it didn't happen' and then a ss is provided and it's automatically a shop. That's the definition of bias. You wouldn't believe anything I told you, no matter the source short of a funcom spreadsheet. Well, we don't have that yet.

Originally Posted by Gecko

IIt may just be your manner of posting, and I'll be the first to discuss AOC issues and idiotic dev decisions, but at the same time you still have yet to admit you were wrong with all your posts in early May saying the game would crater on release and be akin to Vanguard in its manner, which turned out to be pretty damn deceptive and overtly wrong.

I admitted at launch that they got performance to almost acceptable levels. Of course it seems to have gotten worse since then but tat the time I was more than happy to acknowledge it. Other than that, I don't see how anything I said was wrong. All the features that people like you claimed were being held back for release or being tested by super secret beta squads came out either flatout terrible or not at all. While the game has initially sold more than I thought, the spike downward is quite Vanguard-esque. Of course it's far too soon to state what direction it will ultimately take.

[Gecko]

Ask Massively: Be careful what you ask for... - Massively

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Gecko

Ask Massively: Be careful what you ask for... - Massively

Oh yay, this piece of tripe again. A quote from the article:

"In short, given the constraints under which Funcom has been operating, it made perfect sense to release Age of Conan when they did. Bugs and all. Sure, they could have taken more time to make the game more perfect for it's release, but market pressures would have resulted in increased competition for market share and shelf space, and likely would not have reduced the number of complaints from players who, in all honesty, complain about everything."

What the genius writing this article doesn't seem to get is that there are levels of dissatisfaction. MMO gamers are getting sick and tired of having half finished products foisted on us by companies who figure they'll just patch something in every couple of months while the cash rolls in. Funcom's little stunt is resulting in a hell of a lot of people complaining about the game, and then quitting and spreading bad word of mouth all across the gaming community. Trust me, when enough people feel this way about a game, it's in trouble. (see Vanguard soon after release)

[Gecko]

Actually when people bitch about a game, it means they are still interested in it and play it. All MMO gaming forums are full of bitching. It's what people do.

It's when nobody has anything to say that a game is doomed.

The article is good. It still amazes me when people compare it to Vanguard at release. They must have played a different pair of games..

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Gecko

Actually when people bitch about a game, it means they are still interested in it and play it. All MMO gaming forums are full of bitching. It's what people do.

It's when nobody has anything to say that a game is doomed.

The article is good. It still amazes me when people compare it to Vanguard at release. They must have played a different pair of games..

Well, it crashes to desktop for a lot of people, others with excellent hardware find they can't get the game over 10 fps, some of us have this black screen bug which basically results in the game being unplayable (sound's still there, but the screen's gone black), players fall through the world, get stuck in trees, etc. Sounds a whole lot like Vanguard's technical problems at launch.

Vanguard was worse, being saddled with the engine from hell, but the instability/glitches that seem to be affecting a very large percentage of players is something that early VG and AoC have in common, sadly.

(more's the pity too, because I actually like the gameplay, incomplete as it is, but I can't play due to the damn thing crashing to a black screen after about a minute of working normally...and trying to get tech support from Funcom is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone)

[Dontauro]

Best part about being dissatisfied is you can always quit.

Like me.

I haven't bitched since.

[Necrolyte]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

Trying counting the players on Bardvisatta. If you thought my data was so off you could have easily proven me wrong. But I think you were afraid I would be shown right.

And how is tracking the population of a server at nearly the same time on the same day 'laughable'? That's about the most accurate way to find a trend. You seem to know all about statistics so clearly you know what a trend is. Checking at primetime on a weekend and then again at 4am on a wednesday certainly wouldn't be a valid way to check anything other than maybe absolute min-max values. That isn't valuable for any sort of conclusion on its own though. You should know that.

So yes.. when you check one day at X pm and then the following week at the same time, as long as there are no extenuating circumstances such as a holiday, downtime, or act of God then it should be fairly accurate in showing a trend. When my server went from 2500+ during peak periods down to 1500 and below then it shows a trend. That trend is less people playing.

Is this really so shocking?

Are people now going to argue that AoC is growing just like they argued that weekends are not the peak days of the week for MMO playing? I guess some people just have problems accepting the truth.

The truth is AoC may have sold 700k copies since launch but populations are lower now than they were at launch. More people are quitting than staying + joining. This should be no surprise, it happens with most MMOs. The real question is where does it level off. My guess is the 200kish range. I think Funcom should consider themselves lucky with that. Most companies could turn a decent profit with that subbase while still investing back into the product. Can Funcom? Well, that remains to be seen.

You are quite good at taking quotes out of context.

What was laughable wasn't that you queried online players at the same time every week, sigh. What was laughable was you saying your friend, who conveniently was charged an extra month, was doing the polls for you after you quit...

...then you said that your friend only logged in once randomly, and said "Hey, only X players online." Unless your friend logged in more than once, and exactly at the same times you did (I highly doubt he logged in at the same day, on a 7 p.m, to "continue your work" as you claim), you basically debunked all your stats since you never collected them beyond once or twice and your friend definitely didn't "continue doing your polls" as you claim.

[Schatze]

Between 9:13 and 9:26 PM there were 199 people on Bardisatva.

First I verified that the search function with both arrows unticked actually showed people who weren't either LFG or LFguild by using search function on guild twinks to verify.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

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Bardisatva is in the bottom quartile of server populations. There were 4 servers with fewer people, including RP, 1 PVE and 2 PVP servers. Server populations are listed from max to least, with all rated medium.

Honestly I couldn't believe the picture I got from Bard server and how it looked on my own server. Night and day..

However, Twobit WAS being honest about how Bardisatva is doing. However, what Bardisatva looked like and what my server looked like were worlds apart, even in Tortage (i've rolled a couple of mules and tort is always packed, while Bard it was a ghost town with few instances).

So I logged onto my server which is top quartile, probably one of the highest pop servers out of em all, and verified things again with guild mates. I then began to tally people counting by counting by multiples of 3. Why? Because my search window showed 12 people without scrolling on the page. Made it easy. Then I'd count the additional people people who did not fit into a multiple of 3; a fairly accurate way of doing things. Got 858 below 30. 709 30-50. At that point I gave up, 10:30 EST.

Twobit was right, the low population servers do have extremely low populations (probably mostly the newest servers...) I wondered why there was such a huge difference especially since character creation had actually been disabled several times on the Set server.

Has anyone started a new account in the last little while? Did you actually get to pick your server, or did it redirect you to a different server? I did notice that the servers are listed from highest pop to lowest pop. I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of bias built into the UI that causes people to pick the top pop servers to start on as opposed to the low pop ones.

Set was jam packed with low level, true newbies, spamming channels with questions about how to do combos. Bard was a ghost town.

Hypothesis; if there was nothing causing server selection bias, there would be no reason why there would be so many more newbs in Tort on high pop servers than low pop servers. However, servers ARE listed from high to low pop. When I would initially log in, it would try to direct me (and scroll down) to a lower pop server. However, when I would log in again after the initial log in it would start at the top page of the list (with a server further down selected) which made it look like I had to click a specific server. Naturally, since I don't know the way the servers are listed as a newb, and since they all look the same, I'll click whatever rule set appears for me that already shows, unless it's a low pop obscure rule set (which a small minority will be trying to choose). Indeed, there isn't even any indication that you can scroll up or down further in one direction, whether you're at the top or bottom. So even if you DID want to roll on a low pop server, or a newer one, you wouldn't have any idea which servers those were.

Let me say again, Twobit is actually right about Bard. Log on it, it looks like AOC is fucking dead. Log on Set, and it looks like the game is still fucking exploding. So, again, my hypothesis is that there is something causing heavy selection bias towards high pop servers for rolling new accounts, and against low pop servers. Prediction that stems from this; the oldest (EA) servers would be at the very top since they started out with a high pop, while the newer the server, the lower the pop. Disclaimer; someone already mentioned this was the case, but I only realized that this would flow naturally from a selection bias towards high pop away from low pop after the fact.

Can someone help with this? If you're on a dead server, roll an alt and pick one of the servers on the highest on the list and compare numbers of people in tort; if you're on a high pop server, go roll a level 5 alt on a server low on the list and look how dead the servers are.

I think there's an honest, extremely divergent view point depending upon what server you rolled on, and how well the game is doing. And I think both are wrong, because of some sort of skew built into the system that causes people to roll on high pop servers and not roll on low pop servers (thus, causing an inaccurate picture if you play on either).

And yes, rolling on a ghost town will affect the way you view the game because of it being a ghost town, and the reverse. Which would cause some bias in retention towards high pop. However, I'm thinking it's where newbs roll that is the main factor in the divergence.

Possible partial explanation: when people reroll different classes they tend to pick a new server. When they're doing this, they start out at the top of the server list, with no indication which server they were on or which server their character was on; they click the list, end up on one of the top pop servers.

[spronk]

the game doesn't suggest a server when you create a new account

for the person who is having problems with harvesting resources, there is a exploit. maybe you'll get banned for it, altho prob not. top guilds and farmers use it to harvest thousands of things and sell on auction house or whatever.

the exploit is this: form a quick group and go do one of the "resource zone instances". They are the 3 zones attached to lactiesh, purple swamps, or poitan (frozen swamps, oasis, forget the 3d name). The person who first enters sets the level, so if you want a easy version have a level 40 or whatever go in. You can only go in if you have one of the zone quests, so get the quest but don't actually do it (once you finish all the zone quests you can't ever go back in).

Now clear the zone as much as you can. If you let a 40 in and most of you are 60+ it'll be cake. At even levels it is pretty difficult.

Now heres the exploit. Write a quick script (autoIT, G15 keyboard, hundred other programs) that just right clicks the mouse in the center of the screen, pauses 4 minutes, and loops.

Inside these resource zones, you do not get any of the "prospector" mobs that randomly come out, so you can farm all nite and gather stacks and stacks. Put everyone at a different node (every single resource type is in the resource instance zones) and you won't get PVP or PVE ganked. Do this for a couple of nights with enough people (split everyone up so there are 6-7 running instances) and in a couple of nights your guild will have enough resources to build a full T3 town.

Yeah its retarded and its pretty much how every T3 keep guild had their keep up within a week of it being buildable. The instances will not reset at all until servers are rebooted, so if your ballsy you can do this for like 4 days straight (lol). I wrote the script for my guild and in one night the guild had over 6000 basalt from 30 people running it overnight. AutoIT scripts can be compiled into EXEs so one person can just write it and then post it for everyone else to run all night.

for another fun sploit kylikki (sic? - the lady raid boss) can still be solo'd, you just have to wall-phase in a certain spot, drop under the world, then use ranged attacks on her. play around in her lair to figure it out, it doesn't take too long and you can then farm epics every week for yourself. been doable since aoc launched btw, and reported multiple times to funcom, still not fixed.

[Cybsled]

Glad I rolled on Deathwhisper then ;P

The main cities are crowded as all hell.

[Schatze]

Yeah, there is definitely something skewing people to start on specific servers.

So you get ghost towns and packed unstable servers.