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Right – because succubus nipples is what I was talking about when I suggested going to the forums to become familiar with the problems people might be having when deciding whether the game is really having a smooth launch or not.

Here, I’ll peruse the forum for a moment and see if I can make some better choices than you.

It would appear that many Vista users with 4 GB of memory are having “out of memory” crashes. Funcom recommends a boot config fix mentioned on a CAD forum until they can locate and resolve the issue, a work-around that - in some cases - results in your computer failing to start.

Players are still having problems with the patcher it seems. Either it’s crashing, stuck in a downloading loop, or not downloading at all. Lovely.

Some players are frequently losing their mini-map – it greys out until they restart the client. Annoying.

Here’s a good one. Characters using names which were used previously used by another character and then deleted (re-rolls) are unable to receive new in-game mail from other players. Well that’s good to know in an age where half the population name-claims before ever re-rolling the character up for real

Players are having performance issues they can’t understand. Choosing a “high” quality setting seems to give better performance than a “low” quality setting. No – nothing odd there.

Looks like Funcom has adjusted portions of the character creator after launch, changing the look of existing characters. Uh oh - players never like that one.

People seem frustrated with the amount of time and polish placed on the first 20 levels of the game compared to the lack of quests and areas for players after level 50. Destiny quests cease being unique after Tortage. Disappointing.

Most player petitions seem to get deleted once they drop below 10th place in the queue. That combined with the fact that it takes 6 hours to move 60 spots in the queue = scary.

Same old complaints about a lack of developer feedback. Probably doesn’t help that the dev-tracker on the forum is still broken. The web designer must be hard at work fixing pressing in-game issues – or on vacation.


Well that’s at a glance - while making an attempt to actually make our forum visit useful. – and there’s lots more to pick from. And at the point when this article was being written the game was also plagued by much more severe leveling exploits, dupe bugs, guild issues and bugs that turned particular classes into one-shotting gods. You probably wouldn’t be aware of that without visiting the forums unless you ran into the problem personally. Ignorance of the true state of the game does not equal a smooth launch.

That pretty much sums up your true feelings on AoC. You directly respond to somebody who made no reference of WoW or stunlocking rogues by spending two paragraphs talking about how much more skill it takes to play a rogue in WoW than it takes to combat in AoC. So if somebody likes AoC your basic argument is that WoW is better? Get over it.

What are you talking about?

The very brief two sentence - not two paragraph - comment I made regarding rogues in WoW was in response to the above comment. I even quoted it in my response so I'm not sure how you missed it. I never said WoW was better – and I believe I actually said I liked AoC’s save for a few problems I feel it has. I only said hyping the combat in AoC by implying that combat in every other MMO boils down to mindless auto-attacking is inaccurate and unfair reporting. Analyze the combat on its own merits, don't try to make it look revolutionary by making untrue comparisons.

Between this and RobWright's comment on paranoia I'm starting to wonder if you all are using customized thread display settings that are linking these posts in a different order. I know I can't even see half the posts unless I'm logged in. -shrug-

So, Pmid, what was your true purpose in posting? I'm rather curious. Did you wish to, I'll even give you an alphabetical breakdown, A.) Express your opinion on Age of Conan or B.) Attack tmeacham's impression of the game? As has been stated, this is a thread about AoC, stick to it.
And, as I'm moving throughout the article, specifically your post at the top of this page, you're being compared to a troll due to your constant attacks on tmeacham and the overwhelming level of arrogance you display towards anyone who, and believe me, the hypocrisy here absolutely slays me, disagrees with your opinion.
And, as I'm succumbing to the same folly you obviously have, I'm off topic.
My *impression* of AoC is that it has done rather well by itself. The combat is engaging, in MY opinion, and accomplishes what every MMO attempts to do, bring something new to the table. The initial players at launch numbers were staggering, and they've coped with this fact to an amazing degree. Everquest had server crashes during December, I believe, well into the Planes of Power era, considering they have roughly equivalent player numbers Funcom should be commended in this respect. Having weathered WoW's open beta and launch, I'm impressed. The CS does need improvement though, but this is a facet in which I expect failure to an epic degree.

your post really is stupid
you claim he gave it a review and not "his impressions"
then you fault him for not going into enough detail in his "review" and for not playing the game thoroughly.

well, there's a simple explanation as for why he didn't go into detail, IT WASN'T A REVIEW !
If it was a review then he would have gone into detail, he would have played the game more thoroughly, he would have tried and experiemented with all the features and written about them in detail

you know why he didn't? IT WASN'T A REVIEW !

you even say "I expect more from a review of a massively multiplayer world", well guess what?
it if had been an actual review then you would have gotten that , but do you know why you didn't get more? lets say it just one more time to make it clear to you.
IT WASN'T A REVIEW !

I played a rogue for a number of years on a PVP server. I didn't say playing a rogue takes no skill. I said the only concern for where you are hitting a player is that you're behind them for some skills. I didn't say it took no thought to correctly use your energy and properly use timered skills. What I said was that you don't have to predict where your opponent will be weakly defended. There defense is always the same regardless of where you are attacking.

It seems to me that various mobs tend to attack and defend a certain way. Maybe that only carries through the first part of the game, but I've been able to predict where defenses would be light in a reasonable amount of cases. I can't speak for every mob in the game as I've not faced them all, but from my experience thus far it certainly doesn't feel like I'm completely guessing.


I still don't see your logic on why a reviewer should report bugs that they don't experience from a public forum. Anyone who can read the review is capable of looking at the forums and complaints themselves. It seems irresponsible to repeat someone else's opinions if you've not experienced them or don't agree with them.

The only way I could see any sort of validity in him looking at the bug forums would be if he had a wide variety of hardware platforms at his disposal and he was attempting to reproduce the bugs from information in the posts. Even then it would only be his responsibility to report on the bugs that he could reproduce, which would likely be a small segment of the available bugs if any. This seems to me to be what he reported on. He mentioned the bugs/features that he ran into and gave his opinion on them.

WoW is hard.

Well I made an idiot out of myself by not thoroughly reading clay's post. It must have been to late to be reading. Anyways I think the whole argument about which is better and which takes more skill is kind of stupid and is the prime reason why the AoC forums are a complete mess. I haven't visited since the first day I had the game but I would say easily 75% of the post either started as or devolved into either how AoC was better or worse to WoW or some other MMO. It's one thing to give your opinion on which you think is better and why, but to argue about it or use it as a reason to say why one game is bad or not is just silly. To me as a WoW player I see the AoC combat system as pretty revolutionary. But that's just my personal opinion and it isn't meant to diminesh WoW at all, AoC is just very different.

Purplerat is a class act.

Yes, I have too much time on my hands- because I'm still trolling this post.

The Age of Conan main boards have an interesting letter from the lead dev about content and fixes scheduled this month.

Includes:
New zones
New items
New item graphics
Voice overs for story arch quest past tortage
Better quest content in the leveling gaps of late 30s and mid 50s.
More CSRs are being hired right away
Fixing bugs (of course)

Which either means they rushed a bit to get out the door or they're being responsive. Probably both.

I'm definitely new here. It seems quite a few of you have had these posting "battles/discussions" before. I'm late to this thread to though I see but I just had to post my own thoughts to...

One I completely agree with Pmid's points. They are all valid but maybe they should have been brought up in a less angry manner so to speak...BTW Pmid in one of you posts you mention AoC has 3 class types - it's 4 - soldier, rogue, priest, & mage

To the person that wrote the article - rather than restart your game to fix texture rendering issues - increase the draw distance (the overall draw distance and the high detail draw distance) - that fixed the problem for me and I no longer see the textures being added as I walk up a ramp etc. This also did not put any noticeable hit on FPS.

One other point I have to make, and yes I understand this is just a 1-20 level points of view article - but the different classes had different issues you might not have experienced though I know the logistics of leveling all 4 classes up to 20 and trying all different scenarios might have been to time consuming for just an opinion article. As an example - there was a very big bug not everyone would see - it was restricted to the mage classes. In the night time quests if you chose to wait to do them until you were well beyond level 15 (the first set of night quests are doable whenever - but at a certain point in the chain it requires you to be level 15 to move on) this broke a certain chain in the quest line (Awakening II). Now you could skip this but when you're playing a new game you don't really wanna do that and Funcom listed in the information screen that skipping certain parts of the destiny quest would break it. Kind of ironic is it not that it would break without skipping and require you to skip which Funcom suggested you do not do.

The other alternative was to petition - and I think someone already mentioned how the petitions went and are still going.

And to answer the writer's one question - Yes, I am still playing. I might agree with Pmid on a lot of points but I paid for my game time and I like to experience as much as I can. I would like to see how AoC crafting is which can't be done until level 40.

I also would like to say I also agree with Cyberqat about the launch. Yes AoC had a huge amount of subscribers but I don't think that means that have had the smoothest launch to date. And that is my opinion. A perfect launch is perfect whether it is 1 custmer or 400,000. A launch with 399,000 subscibers without a problem and 1 with is not perfect. Did AoC have a good launch? Yes they did a good job for the most part. Personally I think Auto Assault has had the best MMO launch to date. That was one of the smoothest games from beta to actual play (though yes not perfect) I have ever experienced and yes that was NCSoft to but that is just the publisher. Net Devil I believe would have to be given credit for that.

I think this article does hit on some good points - AoC is unique and refreshingly different in alot of ways and as a game I think AoC is setup to be very good. And of course the graphics though not directx 10 are astonishing for the most part. Funcom on the other hand is very lacking as a company it seems in anything other than actually creating AoC. They have falsely advertised at least more than one thing or just plain provided information that was wrong. Either they don't know their own game or they change things without correcting old information on their website. Perhaps they leave their marketing department with the short end of the stick or don't keep notes? I do not know.

Oh I almost forgot - I to disagree with the assestment that the AoC official forums are mostly a small minority of opinionated users. The simple fact that customer service has been so poor has caused A LOT of people to sign up on the official forums just to look for answers. These are probably not people that would normally have had they not required some sort of assistance. I also do not think most of the issues a majority of subscribers experience is hardware related. Though people assuming that I believe will not continue to play as I have heard them say in the local chat channels. It will be interesting to see how the 400,000 subsciber total ends up after a month or 3 if they bought time cards right away expecting the best.

The voice-over cut scenes extend past the starter island but "only" for the destiny quests. At least at the moment. Lastly, I myself am a pack-rat so I had a big issue with the bank/e-mail system being down. I love finding cool items and e-mailing them to alts to use! Oh well, that's my two cents though I'm sure I forgot something I was thinking when reading all these posts.

I might as well toss in my two cents.

I like AoC very much, but the game launched with many problems. Most of them were known performance and balance issues from beta which Funcom seemed uninterested or incapable of correcting. Whether you’ve personally encountered them or not is irrelevant, they exist and they make the game far from perfect. There’s also been a disappointing amount of bait and switch taking place, and while I’m not sure why it’s happening the simple fact is that it is.

Pmid’s post was a bit harsh but many of the responses were also inconsiderate. For every troll remark there's a fanboi countering it. And, someone else called it, the “Since the game is so much trouble though can I assume that you won't be playing it or visiting the official forums anymore? Seems kind of silly to continue to play a game that you don't like or frequent the forums for a game you aren't playing. Or, are you still playing it. And if so... why?” remark is the author’s way of telling Pmid to piss or get off the pot. If he was truly interested in her response there were much better ways to phrase that question. Perhaps something along the lines of “Well, it doesn’t seem like you’re very pleased with the game, and obviously you can’t return it. Do you think you’ll bother subscribing once your 30 day trial is over?” might have been a nicer way to phrase it. As a writer I’m sure he could have come up with something even better if he tried.

I expect to see the brash remarks from the average forum user, but the author needs to relax his forum-warrior style and remember that he represents Tom’s Games, Tom’s Hardware, and ultimately Best Of Media Network. That means turning the other cheek and not taking pot shots at people who disagree with his reviews. I think Pmid’s reaction was understandable, albeit heavy handed.

This article, whatever we’re calling it, is far from being a satisfactory review of the game and its launch. It doesn’t matter if it’s the author’s impressions of the first 20 levels or all 80, he’s passing his impressions of the game onto the readers. That’s what most people call a review. While they are his personal experiences with the game, they're written in such a way (and in a venue) where they give an extremely misleading impression of the state of the game. If the author wanted to offer his own opinion on a topic without it being open to rebuttal, he probably should have stuck the article in Fringe Drinking and not asked for a user discussion.

For the record, I also feel many of the authors articles come across as soapbox-style rants. Trust me, pal, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are doing just fine without your rushing to the rescue. My advice is to focus more on being a game reviewer and less on being a newspaper columnist. We have enough of those already.

I hope Funcom works their problems out because I, for one, would like to see AoC go far. But right now the game has more promised features than actual features, and I'm not wild about paying for an extended beta.

haha, well, if anyone is silly enough to still be trying to enjoy AoC, I have a few tips, since you'll never get a petition through.

Its a fairly well known issue that the AoC game files become corrupted rather quickly, and it effects your load times. Since the loading screens are already pretty frustrating, this is bad.

I used defraggler to defrag the AoC folder regularly, and can say that this helped improve the problem.

If your particle effects go missing, the most common solution is to use a different version of your video drivers.

If the intro scenes stutter, its most likely sound card drivers. Which, if you are using Vista, might not be easy or practical to resolve.

For the texture detail decreasing and looking like crap, increasing the draw distance (the overall draw distance and the high detail draw distance) helps, like mentioned by thegh0st, but also you may try playing with the AA settings. If you notice that when you zoom out far, that the texture detail drops on your character model, its slight more common to be resolved by bumping up AA. Does this make sense? Nope.

Just as a by the way, if you turn the high detail draw distance all the way down, it makes the game look humorous.

If you notice your graphic settings are reverting back, or acting strangely, you can try deleting the AoC folder found under Application Data inside your windows profile. In XP the path for this is usually something like C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data
-If you can't find the Application Data folder it might be hidden.

If you make a change that causes the game to crash immediately upon entering the game, try the above as well.

There are some shader files, that commonly get **** up, but I can't remember the path to them, because I removed the **** game from my system. I'm sorry I couldn't remember.

As far as individual settings go, Bloom should be disabled on your system, especially if you are running a 7 series Nvidia card, or you will suffer a substantial performance hit. If the game is not playable on low settings, you can try lowing the shader model to 2.0, but the game will look like ass. On my 8 series bloom caused me the same over-brightness as Travis experienced, but with less of a performance decrease as I saw on my 7 series card.

On 7 series cards, you should probably turn shadows entirely off, since they are often buggy, and cause an unreasonable performance loss.

Enjoy paying for extended beta =)

Here we go again...

We don't turn the other cheek here, and we don't ignore the readers. We try to engage the readers on the forum and be accountable for our work. And that includes answering questions and criticisms on the forum without restoring to foul language, personal insults, or unprofessional behavior in general. I'm not sure how you are misconstruing Travis' (or my) remarks on this thread as being vicious or unprofessional, ala a flame-baiting forum warrior. He's responded people's counter points and arguments, and I'm not sure what else is left. I think the pot shots you write of, Bucko, are being made by other members of the forum and not Travis. And while I appreciate the concern, Bucko, I think it's best if you let me worry about how Tom's Games etc. is represented.

Now back to the article -- it's about one author's experience with the game in its first week. Bucko, I'll extend you the same invititation I did to Pmid (and many, many others before both of you) -- if you would like to write an article that you feel would be better than this one, my door is open. I'm always looking for additional contributors. So PM me or e-mail me.

I also want to expand on the comment someone made about "usually" being able to predict the guards of AI mobs.

"Usually"? Are you serious? Most mobs follow the exact same pattern every time. For example, if a mob of a type starts with his left guard open, then his middle, and then right, pretty much all of them will do the same thing every time. The AI in no way reacts to player action. If a mob follows a different pattern, sometimes 1 or 2 other sequeces are in there, to give the illusion of AI, but you will soon recognize this. So, say you are killing mobs with the Left, Middle, Right open guards, and one starts with the Right open, then Left, then Middle. Next time you see that mob type start with right open, he'll have about a 100% chance to then have Left open, then Middle.

There is no reactive AI whatsoever, that I could tell. Just simple patterned behavior.

For bits of "bait and switch", we should elaborate and just name a few. DX10 still on the box, and sieges were the most obvious. In what way is less than 100 player sieges the same as "hundreds of players" in sieges, which was hyped right up until the last minute before launch?

FC's overall dishonesty, is a key reason why players like myself have abandoned ship.

On Pmid... well, you start with a very narrow looking "non" review, which gives non-warranted praise to a flawed product. Which, I mentioned upset me as well. She expressed many legitimate reasons why this frustrated her, and then is basically told to piss off by Travis in his he “Since the game is so much trouble though can I assume that you won't be playing it or visiting the official forums anymore? Seems kind of silly to continue to play a game that you don't like or frequent the forums for a game you aren't playing. Or, are you still playing it. And if so... why?” remark. Then, we have Purplerat trying to defend AoC, and Travis... which I kind of find hilarious. This is made further humorous by Rob defending Travis as well, and adding in "pitch your review my way" comment, which I'm actually surprised Pmid didn't fume over, since it would have pissed me off pretty good. We have impressions that should have never gone up, and someone from Toms suggests a forum user writes new impressions? Obviously, a comment just made to shut Pmid up, since it wasn't reasonable.

Assume I work for a car magazine, and I test drove a car, and write 2 pages of "impressions" encouraging buying it.... but its common knowledge there are many recalls, and otherwise large amounts of issues. The manufacturer is even false advertising the horsepower, and other specifications, and I mention nothing. Doesn't that make me an ******* for encouraging people to buy the thing? Even if I liked the product, I should have said something.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Pmid was the only person to loudly voice frustration directly at the journalist/writer.

Anyway, back on subject a bit, AoC is still being hyped as something, new, revolutionary, or evolutionary. Basically, we see lots of suggestions that its doing something different. The key thing I want people to know, is "No, no its not. Its the same old MMO formula many of us are growing tired of". It just takes a little getting through the combat systems learning curve until this is obvious. Wherever the is a step forward, there are many backwards.

If we compare AoC's "revolutionary" combat system with something old like FFXI, what do we see? In AoC, players mash 123 for directional attacks, and in combos. In FFXI, we have auto attack, and abilities the user must execute... but wait! In FFXI you can perform combos with members of your group, for added damage. Hmm... for small groups, FFXI actually has superior combat mechanics? We can do this with pretty much any game, WoW, EQ, whatever.

Further elaborating on the combat systems' flaws...

Combos are tied to stam. Stam is tied to sprinting, active block, and dodge movements. Combos can break on enemy movement. The regen rate on health is too high. If you concentrate on combos your enemy can just run away. If you should only dodge if you are trying to avoid an enemy combo, and rarely. I was most effective in PvP circle strafing, like I did in the FPS days, and just sprinting off when enemies use too much stam. Midway, I knew how things would go, and be able to decide whether to run or stay, adding a stun followed by a few combos. It all felt poorly done. Much slower paced than the shooters I enjoy, much less strategy or skill than required by other MMO type games, like Guild Wars, WoW, and so on. So, it feels like more button mashing, without any added substance in what would otherwise be inferior stategic combat in an MMO. OK, I suppose some will be satisfied that you can chop heads off... but lets see how thrilled then are when they see the same fatality combo in a row the 5th time. It only gets more boring folks. If a few bloody animations are a draw now, surely after a few months they won't add much value. If they do, maybe you have a fetish for blood... I had an ex-gf like that once.

Basically, what I'm trying to say, is this is a poor PvE combat system, that involves little teamwork or strategy. In PvP, it has frustrating button mashing, and a decreased level of strategy compared to other MMOs. Overall, in my opinion, this is an inferior system.

I could easily attack AoC's graphic choices. We have high res textures, and some pretty effects, but the consequences for this are substantial. The game is buggy, runs poorly on lower end systems, and is both instanced and infested with load screens. Whatever immersion that was added by the pretty graphics is soon taken away by the disjointed feel of the game that resulted. Not to mention a sea of glittering bags.
--AoC's high graphics are a negative attribute, and feel like a crutch hiding uninspired art direction.

Oh, but thats a low blow that will make fan boys freak. Ok ok, I still think its pretty on my 8 series Nvidia at Medium or High settings. But, I do not consider the cost of the graphics to have been worth it.

I sit here, honestly wondering what AoC has to offer at all. I cannot think of a single thing that has been done, that doesn't have large amounts of flaws tied to it, or hasn't been done better elsewhere.

**hmm, I suppose my job is more boring than I thought. I seem to have gone on a rant here.

@RobWright
This is completely unrelated to AoC, but is Toms considering commenting on Valve's assertions that PC gaming is alive and well, and that pirating customers are just unserved customers, who present opportunity for business?

With all the talk about piracy lately on Toms Games, I'm a little surprised Valve's viewpoint hasn't been talked about much...

I've been hard on Travis in this tread, but I really enjoy most of the articles, and videos on Toms. Sorry for being the devil's advocate this time.