It’s Getting Hot and Steamy in Age of Conan

Remember that Seinfeld episode where George gets fired for having sex with the cleaning woman on his desk at work?

I came across this on Lum’s blog, Broken Toys. He links to an escapist article about how a Funcom employee, a GM for Age of Conan was recently fired for having cybersex with a player.

I imagine the conversation in the boss’s office afterwards went something like this. (With apologies to Seinfeld.)

Boss: I’m going to get right to the point. It has come to my attention that you and a player have engaged in cybersex while playing Age of Conan. Is that correct?

GM: Who said that?

Boss: She did.

GM: Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time.

Boss: You’re fired.

GM: Well you didn’t have to say it like that.

Popularity: 3%

MMORPG Search Trends

I was looking at my blog stats this morning. When I came to the search terms that people use to find my blog, it occurred to me to have a look at the search trends for the big three games of this year.

Google provides a handy little tool called Google Trends that uses their historical search data to produce a series of graphs showing where different search terms stand in relation to each other. BTW, a search term is the text that you type into Google when doing a search. That’s all there is to it.

Anyhoo. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the numbers and scales of people performing searches for the big three games of 2008: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online.

The Google Trends tool allows you to select a time frame for the graphs. I picked on three: All Time, 2008, and the last 30 days.

On all three graphs, The blue line is Warhammer Online, the orange line is Age of Conan, and the red line is, of course, World of Warcraft.

Trends for All Time (since 2004)

Trends for 2008

Trends for the Last 30 Days

As you can see, World of Warcraft remains the eight thousand pound gorilla for searches. In terms of search volume, there’s only one time when they weren’t the most searched for in the MMORPG world, and that was when Age of Conan was released.

Unfortunately for Age of Conan, the spike in search terms appears to resemble the stats that XFire put out for their members who were playing the game. Shortly after launch, when everybody was keen and interested in the game, searches for info on the game skyrocketed. But when players started leaving, interest waned and  the search volume plummeted. It’s now almost to the point where it was before the game was released. Not good.

You can see a similar pattern starting to happen with Warhammer Online in the 2008 trends graph. With the announcement of a release date interest in the game is starting to rise. I expect a rise similar to Age of Conan around the time when the game is released. I reckon it will then settle down at about 50 percent of the peak search volume… more or less. Providing the game is in a good release state.

One interesting thing, if you like graphs and statistics I suppose, is that the search volume for each game is remarkably consistent and low level until the game is released. There is a small amount of increase in the last year, but then at release, boom, everybody’s searching. It seems to be true for all three games charted here.

The final trend I’ll comment on is that it appears that the search volume for World of Warcraft is waning somewhat. This could be due to a number of factors.

• WoW Players are getting bored with the game and leaving. I don’t think this is the case. It doesn’t gel with the fact that World of Warcraft has 10 - 11 million players.
• WoW Players no longer need to search for information. This is more likely. After four years and few expansions, most players know a lot about the game, and have their sources like Wowhead, Wowwiki, and various other sites and blogs bookmarked. No need to search.

If the trend of players searching on release continues, I expect we’ll see a rise in World of Warcraft searches at that time.

What does the data tell you?

Popularity: 6%

Why Age of Conan Will Succeed

I ended up canceling my Age of Conan subscription today.

When I did, I was directed to the usual cancellation page that firstly offered a drop down list offering a number of canned reasons, and then to a page with an edit box where I was asked to go into a little more detail.

To paraphrase myself, I simply said that I was unsubscribing because the game was buggy and was released too early. I thought about adding that I wasn’t inclined to pay full tote to beta test the game, but didn’t want to be churlish.

So as of today, I have fifteen days left in my account. I might pop in once or twice before that time expires, but given that I’ve got a couple of other things on the go at the moment…

One of the unique experiences of any MMORPG are the official forums. Originally, perhaps somewhat naively, I expected that a mature game might have more mature forum posters. Boy! Was I wrong about that one. I would never have thought that any forums could be worse than the World of Warcraft forums, but the Age of Conan take the cake.

Essentially unmoderated, the bulk of the threads seem to fall into one of two main categories. These are "Why Age of Conan is great" and "Why Age of Conan sucks." The Age of Conan is great mob tend to consist of the fanboi element and their argument contain the logic that not only is the game great, but it is better than all others, that no other game was as good at launch, and we should not expect it to be so. They believe Age of Conan will be around for a long time.

The Age of Conan sucks mob appear to be the disgruntled players who are sick of bugs, but who also expect the world on a silver platter, that everything should be working as intended, and that the game should have five years of highly polished content at release. They also expect that Age of Conan will go the way of Asheron’s Call 2, and Auto Attack and join the MMO Deadpool as soon as Warhammer Online comes out.

While I’m not what you could remotely consider a Fanboi, I tend to side with the first group when it comes to Age of Conan’s future. I don’t think that Age of Conan is going to go for a swim in the deadpool in the next few years but will, after getting over their early release blues, build up to a solid long term game. What follows are my reasons for this view.

1. They’ve sold over 700,000 copies of the game. Funcom have been a bit loose with their sales stats since launch. Press releases stating they’ve shipped over a million copies are nice, but that doesn’t indicate how many were actually sold. Funcom have just recently announced that they have have 700,000 accounts. While that doesn’t also indicate how many will go on past the first month, it does figure into actual box sales. At 60ish US dollars a box, that’s a gross revenue at store front of 42 million dollars. (How much Funcom actually gets of that is another story.) That’s more than enough to pay the bills for a long while.
2. Provided they resolve the issues, players can always resubscribe. There’s two aspects of sales: Getting a customer, and keeping the customer. The fact is Funcom have managed to convince 700,000 customers to part with their money to buy an Age of Conan box. There’s no doubt that they are losing some of those customers now, and some of those have been lost permanently. But… each one of those departing customers has already done the hard part, they’ve spent the money and now own an account. It’s a lot easier to come back later when all you have to do is reactivate your subscription.
3. Funcom are good at marketing to their old customers. They’ve had a lot of experience with that sort of marketing with Anarchy Online. Of all the games that I no longer play, it’s Anarchy Online that I get marketing from the most. Funcom are not shy about putting out the special offers, and free game time to old players. Once they’ve sorted out Age of Conan you can bet they’ll start emailing canceled account holders with offers to lure them back in.
4. Age of Conan is an IP with a lot of potential. It’s clear even from the current state of the game that there is a huge amount of potential for fun and adventure. As I’ve said before the Tortage experience is one of the best newbie area experiences I’ve had. Get the rest of the game like this and players will come back in droves.
5. People still want a MMORPG in the mature niche. And Age of Conan fills this desire. As far as I know, there aren’t many MMOs out there that do that, and there’s not that many in the pipeline either, at least not for the next few years as far as I can tell. When AoC is polished up, that alone will bring subscribers back.
6. Funcom is an established player in the MMORPG market. Though that doesn’t preclude them from stuffing the whole thing up (just look at Turbine and Asheron’s Call 2) it also means that they have been there and done that. The fact of the matter is that they brought Anarchy Online through one of the most infamously bad launches in MMO history and into success. AO has just celebrated its seventh birthday and is regarded as one of the great MMO games. Given this history, I doubt Funcom will just give up on AoC.

Given Funcoms track record, I don’t see Age of Conan fading into the sunset any time soon. I suspect the reality will be somewhere between great success and failure and that around 2015 we will be receiving press releases from Funcom announcing the seventh anniversary of Age of Conan.

What do you think; will Age of Conan have a long and successful run, or a short and ignominious life?

Popularity: 26%

Age of Conan - Past the First Month

"Two of the most beautiful words in the English Language: De Fault" - Homer Simpson

I reckon that most game developers feel much the same way about the word, default.

It’s probably how they get a lot of first month subscription fees from players, who much like myself, leave it a little late to hit the cancel button.

That’s right. This afternoon I logged into my Age of Conan account screen to cancel my account. I discovered that I was a little late and that my first subscription payment had gone through a couple of days ago. At first I thought it had gone through early, but after some checking the resub occurred about when it was due.

I had finally decided to cancel after some dithering around wondering if I should or not. Age of Conan is a game I really wanted to like, and I think it has a huge amount of potential. But after Tortage, it just really didn’t catch my imagination.

It’s also really incomplete. Funcom should have put at least another six months of development into Age of Conan. Large amounts of the game simply don’t work as advertised, classes need balancing, and huge nerfs are being done to classes to reduce damage output. Monsters on the other hand are being toughened up. Major memory leaks are seemingly being ignored. This all should have been done in beta, or earlier.

So while my Age of Conan account has a reprieve for the next month, I don’t see it lasting longer than that, unless Funcom can pull it all together with a miracle patch or two. There are too few hours in the day, and too many excellent working games out there, to spend time playing broken games. And Age of Conan is broken.

I’d like to think that I’ll give Age of Conan another look in six months, but I thought I’d do the same with Vanguard too. As I mentioned above, there are other games out there that I’d like to play, and there is only so much time to do so. There’s also the fact that in the next six months we are likely to see the releases of Warhammer Online, and Wrath of the Lich King. In the slightly longer term Stargate Worlds, Fallen Earth, and a hundred other MMOs are due to hit the shelves.

In the next month I figure I’ll log in to Age of Conan a few times, but I’m not motivated to spend all my time there. I’ve still got a few goals to reach in other games, so I’ll probably go back to a few of the stalwarts for now. It’d also be nice to get into the Warhammer beta, but I’m not counting on that.

Popularity: 14%

Sitting on the Fence with Age of Conan

It’s nearly over. The free month that comes when purchasing the game should end on or around the 27th of June.

And I’m not sure if I’ll resubscribe to Age of Conan when time’s up.

I think the problem is the hook.

Have you noticed that when you start reading a novel there is a certain number of pages that you turn before the author either grabs you and you cannot put the book down, or you lose interest and stop reading?

Funcom has spent a lot of effort on the hook. The first twenty levels in Tortage are well set out and in particular the nighttime destiny quest is pretty well thought out. It even offers a bit of variety if you choose different archetypes.

Tortage alone would normally be enough to hook me. Unfortunately, it’s the problems I have encountered that has spoiled the game for me.

• Yesterday I crashed to desktop twice in an hour, from what I understand is a known memory leak bug.
• Funcoms patches fix some problems and break other parts of the game. Since the last patch some spots now prevent me running past, I have to jump over them. The great boob nerf was also apparently a result of a fresh bug introduced in a patch. And the previously mentioned memory leak seems to occur more often now than when I first started playing.
• I’ve been unable to enter the preorder code in order to claim the mammoth.
• Graphics issues with the map textures disappearing so that I have a gray map with the map icons on it.
• I did have some other graphics issues that I have since fixed.

There are a few game design ‘features’ that bug me too.

• The biggie is not being able to switch characters without exiting the game and logging back in. I find that very annoying.
• Bag space is way too limited. Though to be fair, quest items and resources have their own tabs and plenty of room. It’s vendor trash that’s a problem, on a normal run I have to leave huge amounts of stuff on the ground. sigh.
• The quest GUI is pretty poor. While I haven’t reached the limit, I can only track one quest at a time. It also doesn’t provide the quest level, a feature other games have had for a while.
• The tooltips provided on spells and feats is pretty spare. A feat tip will tell you that it increases some stat or damage, but not by how much. There’s no real way to compare feats until you test them.
• I’m also hearing reports that one of the best features of the game, the destiny quests, have major gaps after 20. After Tortage the next destiny quest is at 30, and there isn’t that much involved. Pity. I was hoping for a sequence of quests like the Tortage quests.

Okay. Now all that sounds pretty negative.

There’s a lot to like about Age of Conan too.

• It had a pretty solid release, even despite the large amount of downtime during Oceanic primetime the first couple of weeks, and that is now much reduced. Like all these games there have been some server issues. That’s to be expected. But Funcom have learned a lot since the launch of Anarchy Online and that’s evident in this launch.
• The graphics are excellent. Of course that was one of the major selling points of Age of Conan, and Funcom have delivered on this point.
• At last there are some skills I haven’t seen in other games like Climbing. I’ve wanted to see climbing in a MMO for years. AoC doesn’t do it exactly the way I’d like — If you’ve trained enough points you can click on a special vine or ladder and climb it — I’d like to see climbing on any face or object if the player has enough points. In this case though, good enough.
• I like the combos. I haven’t done any spell weaving and I understand combos are useless in PvP, but I don’t PvP. The combos add a little bit of additional skill, if you can get them right.
• I like the world. Hyboria is a dark and dangerous place, and AoC brings that feel across. The devs have certainly done a good job and have shown that they know their source material. I think there is a huge amount of potential for a lot of stories to be told here.

The problem is that Funcom have on the one hand hooked me with the good stuff, but by releasing prematurely have loosened the hook with the other hand.

I have no doubt that Age of Conan will come together in the next few months to be one of the best MMORPGs around. AoC could have been released that way if Funcom had taken the time to polish it before release.

So I’m wondering if I’ll keep my subscription going when the free month ends. Do I want to pay to be a beta tester? I haven’t made a decision yet. I’ll give it a few more days.

Popularity: 12%

Kill ‘em, Kill ‘em All

Just a quick tip for those of you just starting out with Age of Conan.

You are probably aware that the starting island, Tortage, gives you two quest choices. A daytime mode where you get the stock standard quests that nearly every other MMORPG gives you, and the nighttime mode where you get your destiny quest line.

While the daytime mode quests are the same for every character you create, the destiny quest mixes it up for each archetype. The archetypes are Priest, Rogue, Mage, and Soldier. So if you roll an alt of each type, your destiny quests will have some significant differences. You’ll still get some of the same tasks, for instance climbing the volcano, but you’ll see the story from four different perspectives, and hear about how your alts have helped out. Something I think is pretty darn cool.

The problem is that you cannot just play straight through the nighttime destiny quests. At certain points in the story you will be required to be level 10, 15, and 19 to continue.

This means that you will have to do the daylight quests.

If you’re like me and have rolled umpteen alts, you might not want to repeat the daytime quests ad nauseam, so here’s a way to minimize the daytime quest grind. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to completely bypass them.

The trick is to kill everything.

From the beach to the gate, make sure you kill all the crocodiles, pirates, Picts, apes, and demons. This will get you a little past level 5. From there head into Tortage and do the quests that get you through the gate into the city. When you get the stone blocks, kill more pirates than necessary and try to level 6.

When you are sick of that, hand in the quests, enter the city and pick up the quests just inside the gate. Go do those. Fight the pirates that stole the whores valuables and kill a few more than necessary again. Hand in your quests — you should be level 7. If not kill a few more baddies until you hit level 7.

At this point head into the Thirsty Dog, hand in the letter to Tina, and start your destiny quests.

You should be quest your way all the way to level 14 before you need to do the daytime quests. The only thing you need to make sure of doing is to kill every mob in the areas you quest in. You’ll hit White Sands island, and the Volcano twice. If you’re a mage, you’ll also do Mithrils Mansion. The mobs you encounter will be at your level when you entered the instance. Killing all the mobs in these areas alone will gain you several levels.

Once you hit fourteen you’ll need to do the daytime quests again. This time level up until you are at least level 18. This might depend on the class archetype you choose since the quests are different and involve different amounts of killing.

From there it’s simply a matter of doing the destiny quests until you complete them and leave Tortage.

It’s likely that starting the destiny quests a couple of levels later, between eight and ten would leave less of a gap and get you straight to the chain starting at fifteen. I haven’t tested this, but I expect the amount of daylight questing will still be similar. Mainly due to the higher levels experience requirements.

So there you go. Getting through Tortage without doing daylight quests isn’t possible, but if you plan on a lot of alts, the steps above should get you through with a minimum of repetition.

Popularity: 16%

A View From The Tailors Shack

Age of Conan may not have been quite ready for release, but there is no arguing that the developers have done a bad job with the graphics. Age of Conan is a graphically gorgeous game. One of the sights that you can see very early on is the town of Tortage — a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Where you need to keep one hand on your coinpurse and another on your knife. And where you always need to watch your back.

It’s also a good looking place in it’s own way, as this view from the Tailor’s Shack just outside town attests.

Popularity: 15%

Age of Conan Announcement

Funcom hasn’t been taking vacation time since the recent release of Age of Conan. On logging in to Age of Conan today, an announcement of the near future of the game by Gaute Godager, the games director, is up on the game loader. I’ll present it in full below. You can read the original on the Age of Conan community site here.

Fellow Hyborians!

As you may have noticed we have had frequent patches the last two weeks. We hope this will soon start to quiet down, but as long as there are major issues – and there have been – we will dedicate the Conan team to fixing them and giving you these fixes as soon as possible! We have a plan on how to move this game forward because as you know, what you have today is but the platform – the dawn of this world. I hope you enjoy the game as is, but I can ensure you, this is but the beginning!
Our focus from now on can be summarized by these points:

1. We will add content, specifically in mid-late thirties and mid-late fifties and make the leveling speed smoother in those areas, reducing the need to grind.
2. We will have an overhaul of the PvP system – adding consequence and a host of small things.
3. We are fixing bugs you reported through all channels we can get information from.
4. We will add a new large outdoor region in the 55-60 range this summer!
5. This is only a small taster! More information about the exciting summer and fall Roadmap will come the end of the next week!
6. We are staffing up Customer Service, Quality Assurance and Community departments!

I will spend some words on a bit more details now.

1. Filling “thin areas” in our content
We have seen that there are certain level ranges of these Hyborian Adventures that do not have the amount of quality we wish them to have. Most specifically these are the end of the Thirties and the end of the Fifties level ranges. We are addressing this in several ways.

• Several mid-late thirties dungeons are getting a complete overhaul (Black Castle, Pyramid of the Ancients and Treasury of the Ancients)
• Several quests are being made fuller and more entertaining. If people wish to revisit these quests, we will add a system to let them try them out again.
• we are adding first a batch of quests in Eiglophian Mountains (lvls 55+)
• We are also adding in a bunch of quests that didn’t quite make it for launch in the 30+ areas.
• Around 60 quests through the game have been flagged as “Lore Quests”. They will now be patched out with full Voice-Over. (Roughly 1 quest per level after level 20)

All this will come in June! In July the first level 80 additional Dungeon will be patched out. More on that later…

2. Overhauling the PvP System
People like our open PvP system. There are many plans on how to give this open free PvP even more meaning and Purpose. In the meantime we will be doing some smaller tweaks, and we plan to get these out sometimes in June. I will not go into 100% detail here, but that will come next week! What I can promise is:

• An update on how sneaking and perception works in PvP (nothing major, but an adjustment).
• A change in the amount of information you get when you hover over an other player.
• An added system of consequence to “ganking”. (Killing much-much lower level players).
• A system of adding consequence to losing a PvP match, and winning a PvP match + turning on PvP Leveling.
• A change in how Crowd Control (Root, Knockback etc) works in PvP.
• PvP gear.

3. New Massive Region
We will unveil this location later, but it will feature a host of quests, new monsters and places of dreams or horror. It will be styled towards the players in the late 50s and bridge the experience on the way to Atzels Approach. We have plans for releasing several of the areas that didn’t quite make it for the release.

4. Fixing bugs and increasing Customer Service
Funcom has always prided ourselves with having great customer satisfaction. The success so far for this title has left us with the need to increase the size of CS. This will go in parallel with the constant fixing of bugs and other issues that lead people to petition. Included in this is even better testing of the game by increasing the size of Quality Assurance and informing you better about changes by staffing up the Community Department. I know a blurb like this will haunt me always, but I will still venture one: We aren’t satisfied until all our customers are! You know we had a very, very difficult launch of Anarchy-Online! That was a very painful process for all of us working on it – 4 years. You might not understand how driven we are to make sure you enjoy this game, and all the support around it!
The future is very bright for Hyboria. There will be many bright mornings following this, the very first. Together we shall surge ahead and build the world even bigger, better and more detailed!

Yours truly,
Gaute Godager
Game Director
Age of Conan, Funcom

Lack of quest content in the mid to late 30s and the 50s has been one of the biggest complaints that I’ve seen in the official forums. It’s good news that this is been looked at with some urgency. It appears that this wasn’t due to oversight on Funcoms part; the content just simply wasn’t ready for launch.

Adding full voice over for the lore quests after level twenty. Excellent. Strongly needed to give a continued impression of polish. But they shouldn’t stop there. All quest givers need to be given a voice. I don’t mean they need a full voice over. But they should do more than just grunt at me. I know the Conan universe is set in a slightly post stone age world, but a "hello there" is much better than an "ugh!"

I had hoped for some comment on the patching during the Oceanic primetime, though that does seem to have reduced a bit and they are doing the patching an hour later now — the game comes down at 9pm instead of 8pm — but with continued patches promised by Funcom (a good thing btw) the Oceanic prime downtimes seem set to continue.

All in all, a good message from Funcom. It does show that they are recognizing the major problem areas early and are working on them. This should go a long way to calming the Age of Conan community.

Popularity: 13%

Age of Conan First Thoughts

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days. I’ve been spending much of my time in Hyboria on the island of Tortage.

So far I have three characters going, all on the Wiccana server. There’s Stropp the male Dark Templar, Perditos the male Ranger, and Marrow the female Necromancer. Out of these Stropp is the only one to have left the starter island of Tortage. The other two are very close to completing the destiny quests.

I haven’t rolled a character in the priest archetype yet, but I probably will soon. Each archetype has a different trainer, and some of the destiny quest line is different. I’m keen on seeing where the priest line fits into the story.

So far I’ve seen only a couple of major bugs show up in the gameplay. On one occasion my avatar stopped responding to commands completely. Which was a problem since I was in a hostile area. I used the /stuck command (the only one that worked) to shift him out of harms way and shut the game down.

The other issue was with the Necro. There were a couple of occassions when my pets just wouldn’t attack, leaving me to fight the mob off on my own. Luckily, the Necro seems pretty powerful (at the lower levels at least) and can dot the bad guys down.

Other than that, there have been some minor graphical glitches like icons and buttons not appearing, the necro pets sometimes being invisible, and some other graphical artifacts that I’ve seen — but not too much. Other players are reporting more serious issues but I haven’t encountered them yet. Touch wood.

There are some annoyances though. The biggest by far is that to change characters while in the game I have to exit the game and log back in. I don’t know why Funcom has gone this way. It makes quickly switching chars impossible. It’s not really a user friendly system.

There is also a major limitation on the number of alts that a player can have. The number of character slots available to players is eight per account. You can have one avatar on each of eight servers, or eight avatars on one server, but that is it. Very limited considering there are twelve classes. A player cannot play each class without deleting some of them. To be fair, this may change later once the number of subscribers settles down. Once Funcom gets some solid statistics they may be able to increase the number of slots. As someone with severe altitis, I hope so.

Having said all that. Age of Conan wasn’t ready for release. The starter area is very polished. The quests all have cinematics and decent voice acting, and are very well thought out. Once you leave Tortage, as far as I’ve seen, none of the quest givers have cinematics. And while the quests are reasonable well thought out, there is no voice acting for any of the NPCs. It’s a little disconcerting after the polish of Tortage to simply have NPCs grunt at you, or "woo hoo" when you talk to them. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to give them a canned greeting, a’la "Zug Zug" when you open a conversation. Sad.

There’s a lot of talk in the forums about the effect of skills and armor stats. No one seems to know exactly what effect, if any, increasing these values seems to have. One forum poster claimed to have tested combat at level 55 in green/blue armor and then in vendor trash armor and seen very little difference in the fight. From what I’ve heard and seen, skills seem to be the same, with little in-game (and out of game) information on what different things do.

Content is also a concern for some players. It seems from the complaints that there are level ranges in the game where the quests run out and players have to grind for five or more levels. If this is correct — not good. However, from what I’ve put together, a player needs to do all the quests from all the starting areas and all the green (and perhaps gray) quests to get the XP for them. It seems at this stage that rushing through the levels will mean much more mob grinding.

The Great Boob Nerf also has some players up in arms. In one patch, Funcom appears to have reduced the size of the female avatar boobs. Players who created the largest size possible have been complaining about the reduction. The biggest, and best argument so far, is that regardless of the anatomy being changed, Funcom is changing an aspect of the players character that they selected, and this is wrong. There’s apparently also been some reduction of the mature content; language of NPCs, and female graphical attributes that has some players concerned that the mature content is being nerfed in response to complaints.

The upshot is that Age of Conan was released a little prematurely. Funcom probably should have taken another three to six months with its development. A little more polish above level twenty would not have gone astray. Some additional work on the game systems before release would have a good thing too.

In the end, Funcom had a nice little window in which to release Age of Conan before Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online. Releasing when they did certainly paid off. Age of Conan apparently has over 600,000 subscribers in the first week or so of release. That’s pretty good going.

Popularity: 14%

Tip For Australian Age of Conan Players

If you are an Oceanic Age of Conan player and haven’t bought or registered your copy of Age of Conan yet, I’d advise you to hold off registering it for a while.

The release of any MMORPG is fraught with problems. Server issues, bugs with the client, problems with class balance, and even exploits cause problems for players and developers. While Age of Conan has had a reasonable uneventful release, there have been a number of things that have needed fixing.

And that means the servers come down.

This hasn’t really affected the US playerbase very much yet. They have only had a couple of primetime server downtimes over the last two weeks. (Yes. It’s been two weeks already!) However, for the Oceanic players who play on the same servers that are located in the US, that hasn’t been the case.

Funcom have been bringing down the servers for four hours at a time at around 10am GMT. This translates into 8pm Australian Eastern Time, smack dab during prime playing time. This has occurred four of the last six nights, with another scheduled to start in a couple of hours.

The good thing about this is that it shows that Funcom is committed to fixing the issues with Age of Conan and making the game the best that it can be. And as I said, unexpected downtimes to apply patches are pretty much par for the course with a new MMORPG.

So unless you’re taking some holidays in the next month and can play during the day, I’d advise you to hold off installing the game until things settle down a bit, and server downtimes are once a week rather than three or four times a week.

Otherwise you are squandering that free month that comes with the game.

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