AOC - General Discussion II

[Vehn]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

And I dunno if this has been fixed (if not that's pathetic but it doesn't really surprise me), but the "1 person in group 1 of a raid" shit was by far the fastest method

Selling crafted armor is the fastest method imo

[TwiNCannoN]

Good call :P

Broken craft quests ftw here.

[Radek-SiN]

Well being bored in AOC is the norm atm. We're trying to be patient but the bugs keep rolling in. This one in particular is great. Rhinos FTW

Video:
Rhino Rampage! - Sinister

[spronk]

think the pvp stuff will be in weds patch?

[ajiatus]

This thread became very interesting in the last few pages. Basically, the same people who are dissatisfied with the game are also perfectly familiar with the game's exploits. I guess it shows a different vision of what attracts you to MMOs and how and why you play them. Personally, I am just a casual player who enjoys the little things, who basically enjoys an immersive world, and who gets bored once that level of immersion and/or the grind kicks in. However, this gives a good insight into the other kind of player, the one who sees this as a competition to "beat the game" or "beat the others" and will use every trick to be on the same level as everyone else. Am I misreading this or is this indeed how it is -- i.e., once an exploit is public knowledge you feel as though it's fair game for everyone and it does not matter if it breaks the game's experience?

[Shots]

Originally Posted by ajiatus

This thread became very interesting in the last few pages. Basically, the same people who are dissatisfied with the game are also perfectly familiar with the game's exploits. I guess it shows a different vision of what attracts you to MMOs and how and why you play them. Personally, I am just a casual player who enjoys the little things, who basically enjoys an immersive world, and who gets bored once that level of immersion and/or the grind kicks in. However, this gives a good insight into the other kind of player, the one who sees this as a competition to "beat the game" or "beat the others" and will use every trick to be on the same level as everyone else. Am I misreading this or is this indeed how it is -- i.e., once an exploit is public knowledge you feel as though it's fair game for everyone and it does not matter if it breaks the game's experience?

I'm dissatisfied with the game and I knew of none of the exploits mentioned (except the gem-cutter one that lets you cut level 80 gems before a Tier 3 Guild City). I doubt most of the people that are unhappy are exploiters. I would guess that many are unhappy about Funcoms inability to patch one thing without breaking two other things. It was frustrating watching them mess up so much (even things that weren't broken to begin with are broken now). I don't hate the game though.

[TwiNCannoN]

Originally Posted by ajiatus

This thread became very interesting in the last few pages. Basically, the same people who are dissatisfied with the game are also perfectly familiar with the game's exploits. I guess it shows a different vision of what attracts you to MMOs and how and why you play them. Personally, I am just a casual player who enjoys the little things, who basically enjoys an immersive world, and who gets bored once that level of immersion and/or the grind kicks in. However, this gives a good insight into the other kind of player, the one who sees this as a competition to "beat the game" or "beat the others" and will use every trick to be on the same level as everyone else. Am I misreading this or is this indeed how it is -- i.e., once an exploit is public knowledge you feel as though it's fair game for everyone and it does not matter if it breaks the game's experience?

Well if an exploit is going to be public knowledge and the company isn't going to do anything about it then sure, fair game. It can definitely affect how much I enjoy the game but that isn't going to change the fact I need to use it to keep up with other people. I tend to be very competitive and will use every advantage (within reason) that I can find (although if I'm positive I'm the only one who knows about it I may treat it differently depending on the situation). In beta I may be a bit more on the "good beta tester" side (depends heavily on how serious the beta is taken though - LOTRO had a great bug/QA system and I reported about 240 bugs there, AoC's process was really shitty and I reported maybe 30), but once live hits it's generally fair game, if you didn't grind out enough testing/QA to find it in beta then I'm damn well going to use it in live, and if it's a serious issue and you're not going to rollback/bring the servers down, then, well... apparently you work at Funcom.

Example, in AoC beta, I found a few exploits, the most fun of which allowed me to level a necro to 80 in about 4 hours. Reported it, bug was fixed, end of story. In retail and after I was a bit unhappy with funcom I found a few more, including one that lets me cast spells while moving. Haven't said anything about it and it's still not fixed but whatever. Actually I found it out pretty early on but never shared it or used it, now I just use it openly in pvp if I ever play heh. I guess this is an example of how my perception will change depending on how much I care about the game.

Hacks are another thing entirely though, I don't use them and would never consider them unless it's to the point of "lol I hate this game so much let's see what I can do" (and even then I usually have a deep enough care about my characters to not risk losing them). However when I get to that level of boredom I no longer have any motivation to log in, even if (in AoC's case) it means solo'ing raid bosses for free epics. Sad part is that's probably worse for them than if I actually did care enough to go and use a hack.

[spronk]

Yeah I don't think its necessarily those who "want to be on top" are exploiters, I stopped playing at level 65 even though I wrote a afk bot script when I hit 55 which would easily let me level to 80 over a few nites - I just don't see the point in going any further, I'd rather just wait 6 months and resub if I'm bored and finish leveling the right way.

I love reading the quests and doing the story and being in the conan universe, it just completely fell apart for me in the early 60s. I also reported all the major exploits, you can email exploits@ageofconan.com but they don't even respond (not that I expect them to). At some point you figure you may as well just shout out the exploits to everyone, at least then maybe Funcom will fix it.

Many people have reported all of the exploits since week 1, and except for the ToS AoE leveling exploits not a single one has been fixed so far (and the AoE exploit fixes were clumsy at best). That plus the breakdown of the ingame economy makes me feel Funcom isn't that interested in making a great game, just in making a quick buck. By contrast I remember in early WoW people got banned within 72 hours of finding the Z-axis hack, and they had fixed the client within a week. Pretty much every big exploit gets fixed in other MMOs within a few days, especially any that let anyone get money, resources, or XP at a much faster rate than normal.

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by ajiatus

This thread became very interesting in the last few pages. Basically, the same people who are dissatisfied with the game are also perfectly familiar with the game's exploits. I guess it shows a different vision of what attracts you to MMOs and how and why you play them. Personally, I am just a casual player who enjoys the little things, who basically enjoys an immersive world, and who gets bored once that level of immersion and/or the grind kicks in. However, this gives a good insight into the other kind of player, the one who sees this as a competition to "beat the game" or "beat the others" and will use every trick to be on the same level as everyone else. Am I misreading this or is this indeed how it is -- i.e., once an exploit is public knowledge you feel as though it's fair game for everyone and it does not matter if it breaks the game's experience?

I am not sure if you actually understand how long it takes you to farm 42 immu and 42 invio gems. But I can tell you that as casual player, you are busy grinding for more than a month without anything else. (prolly many months)
I want to pvp. I do not want to grind. So the fastest way to get pvp equipment is to run into an instance alone and kill bosses instantly with explosive urns standing around, I gladly do it until they fixed it to save myself many many many hours of more grinding.
I would never cheat in a game, I wouldnt want unique armor that noone else has and I will not use any kind of bots etc. But I will not waste my precious free time on endless grind because Funcom is too stupid to design content.

[Falmer]

I hope they tone down the gems and/or their stackability and make it possible to actually chose what stats you get on the created gem in near future, but not really getting my hopes up, seeing how there are shitloads of other issues they'll probably want to fix first.

[Morannon]

Originally Posted by ajiatus

This thread became very interesting in the last few pages. Basically, the same people who are dissatisfied with the game are also perfectly familiar with the game's exploits. I guess it shows a different vision of what attracts you to MMOs and how and why you play them. Personally, I am just a casual player who enjoys the little things, who basically enjoys an immersive world, and who gets bored once that level of immersion and/or the grind kicks in. However, this gives a good insight into the other kind of player, the one who sees this as a competition to "beat the game" or "beat the others" and will use every trick to be on the same level as everyone else. Am I misreading this or is this indeed how it is -- i.e., once an exploit is public knowledge you feel as though it's fair game for everyone and it does not matter if it breaks the game's experience?

Very subtle there, outright saying pretty much that anyone who is dissatisifed with the game is a dirty, dirty cheater, and is wrong because they're cheating cheaters. As lame as it is, it's a perfect example of a ad hominem fallacy. Thanks for the effort!

[ajiatus]

Originally Posted by Morannon

Very subtle there, outright saying pretty much that anyone who is dissatisifed with the game is a dirty, dirty cheater, and is wrong because they're cheating cheaters. As lame as it is, it's a perfect example of a ad hominem fallacy. Thanks for the effort!

Actually, you couldn't be further from the truth. Instead, I thought I got some very interesting answers to my posting, that shed some more light on the whole matter. I am not here to judge, but to observe, ask questions, and learn. I have been playing MMOs now for a loong time, and I still have a lot to learn about what drives other people to play them, how, and why. So thanks to everyone that gave a sincere answer (everyone so far).

[Grumpy Old Fart]

I'm an ex-AoC player (80 ToS, played beta, blah blah), so take this with a grain of salt, but don't you think these last few pages are indicative of a "This won't turn it around for Vanguard" moment for this game? Besides the 50,000 other bugs and stupid things wrong with Vanguard, when people saw other players making vast sums of money from hacks, bugs, exploits, etc., they pretty much universally bailed from that game.

Now, we read and see AoC players with hundreds and thousands of gold, gained by methods that FunCom will most likely fix - to some degree - within the next month or two. After that, anybody that can't use these methods (or refuses to use them now) is pretty much screwed and hopelessly behind.

Nobody wants to play a game of chess with you (and AoC is a competitive PvP game at the "end game" core) if they don't get any bishops or rooks and you do. That's what AoC is now and will be forever, unless they wipe the money (won't happen), ban the cheaters (won't happen) or fix the bugs and open new servers (won't happen).

A few days after hitting level 80 (a few weeks ago), I don't think any game I'd installed in the past few years struck me as being more completely boring. I love to explore in these games, and once the whole "world" (pretty much) was seen a few times, there's really nothing else to do. Besides a huge number of extremely poorly thought-out game mechanics, this was the main reason I bailed.

This leaves aside the fact that FunCom has earned a reputation for being extremely incompetent and dishonest with this game. They have a wonderful art department, good 3-D programming/texturing/animation people, semi-crappy programmers, and total sleaze for management. Whoever made the executive decision to hire about 10% of the GM/CS staff that they had to know would be needed should be out on his ass sucking off that great Norwegian socialist welfare system.

I realize that most of the "AoC is awesome" posters here haven't gotten a character to 80 yet and thus their opinion is 100% worthless, but for those of you that have been "end game" for a while, are you really enjoying yourselves, or are you just so damn bored with WoW that you're just goofing around until that WAR beta invite arrives?

[Tolanin]

aoc is really just lack of other shit to play.. they have no endgame content, the sieges even if they were working are meaningless for the most part, the raids are ok i guess but i cant believe they wasted time designed x tiers of raid content, it seems like people picked up aoc to not raid not to get into a game with shitty buggy raids that suck compared to like 5 other available games.

WAR if done right i guess might be ok, if its daoc 2 ill play it, if its wow style then prolly not... i dont get these companys, they should be focusing on doing all the stuff wow isnt doing instead of trying to copy wows raids and arenas except doing it worse because they dont have the money or talent.

[Rhym]

I won't ever again be playing MMO's for 12 hours straight like I used to in EQ and WoW but the 15ish hours I log onto AoC per week with friends suits me perfectly. It's not surprising all the jaded fucks who play these games until burn out the moment they release don't enjoy it. They don't enjoy anything. They're all disgruntled and bitter and would fucking find something to complain about the day they won the lottery, but oh well.