Age of Conan

Originally posted by CobraSolidus

Originally posted by altair4

Originally posted by Toolfan

No it's not too late. There's plenty of people playing the game, unfortunetly they are spread over too many servers. People want to write this game off already and call it a failure just because it doesnt have 10 million subs. 200k-400k subscribers in the market is considered a success and to be honest that's all i expected from the game. Of course people left due to missing content but I knew half the people would leave after the first 30 days because of the immersion and lore. Comparing WoW and AoC on that regard is absurd. It would be like comparing Justin Timberlake to Tool. They both are great at expressing themselves in creative and original fashions, it's just not many followers from either end of the those spectrums would appreciate the others end.

I'm sure WoW and maybe Warhammer are good games, but it has no appeal to me what-so-ever. To me looking at my monitor at ridiculously glowing armor and weapons would be the equivelant of hanging out a gay night club with men dancing around with glow sticks in their hands.

 

200-400k is a good number for a MMO, that I agree on. But what we have here is a MMO that costed alot and took a long time to develop and I think they got about 100k players now. Maybe slightly higher number if you count the subscribers who's accounts still havent run out. But no more than 100k active players. And that is not a success for such an expensive game, which is also why the stock is diving and Gaute left.

If it just had been a dissapointment, not having the amount of subscribers they were hoping for. Then Gaute would still be running the show. But it's such a failure compared to what they were both hoping and planning for. What I mostly wonder is if they can actually start making some money from this game or if all their loans and such are gonna eat up all the profit and it being a big reliability trying to fix this game and make it popular. I'm guessing the move they are gonna have to make is setup a ghost crew that runs the game and just get the money they can from the hardcore fans.

 

I think WAR has 75000 paying customers... And EVE possible 35000... Hell since we just started this game I also think LotRO has 90000 players. Opinions are like assholes, everybody get one.

I think has you and 15 or 16 other fanbois left... this means nothing... Im guessing AOC has the least of all the above mentioned games, as for EVE that company posts the numbers pretty regularly.

Originally posted by mintor

retarded poll .

Thank you for your deeply insightful and vastly constructive response. ;-)

AoC is far from being dead.

There's actually more people coming back day by day.

A lot of them from WAR advicing others in OOC channel NOT to try warhammer.

Anyway, i am waiting for the server merges too. All FC has to do is expand current areas like where guild cities are, or add new ones, so guilds can keep their cities and battlekeeps even after a merge.

I find AoC fun right now with not as many people around as i'd like it to have.

Just imagine how much fun it will be with 4-5 times more people online.

Oh and about the WOW expansion, i doubt it will make any difference to AoC numbers seeing as the people that left WOW to play AoC are already back to the blizzard game; and the ones who stayed say they wont be playing WOW anymore. And that is because as they say world of warcraft, WAS a good and cool game to play, once - some years ago.

Looks like a lot of people want this game to succede from the poll results. Is AoC getting any better?

For me, AoC never had a chance and will never come back. I played in beta and saw then that the gameplay was terrible. Leveling is a grind fest, the combat system is button mashing fever and the small instanced zones leave little room for exploration or any form of open ended gameplay. Unless AoC does something drastic that totally alters the entire basis of the game such as the way SWG had the "NGE" then it will never be the kind of game I would be willing to play. And since the NGE was probably one of the worst ideas in gaming history I'm not going to recommend that to the AoC devs. So they may as well admit they made a boring game which many people with high standards will not play and move on.

But can AoC itself recover, fix some of its problems and maybe regain a few of the fans it lost? Sure. Its possible. Anarchy Online was a terrible game when it was released. And although Funcom never made it into the kind of game that I would play myself, they fixed it up reasonably well and got a lot of people back. They could turn AoC around as well. It will never be a very big game and nobody will ever forget the way that Funcom treated the game and their customers over these last six months. But it may get a few people to return. And of course there will allways be the small crowd of blind fanboys who will fight to the death for the game like our buddy Cobra here.

Originally posted by Raltar

For me, AoC never had a chance and will never come back. I played in beta and saw then that the gameplay was terrible. Leveling is a grind fest, the combat system is button mashing fever and the small instanced zones leave little room for exploration or any form of open ended gameplay. Unless AoC does something drastic that totally alters the entire basis of the game such as the way SWG had the "NGE" then it will never be the kind of game I would be willing to play. And since the NGE was probably one of the worst ideas in gaming history I'm not going to recommend that to the AoC devs. So they may as well admit they made a boring game which many people with high standards will not play and move on.

 

But can AoC itself recover, fix some of its problems and maybe regain a few of the fans it lost? Sure. Its possible. Anarchy Online was a terrible game when it was released. And although Funcom never made it into the kind of game that I would play myself, they fixed it up reasonably well and got a lot of people back. They could turn AoC around as well. It will never be a very big game and nobody will ever forget the way that Funcom treated the game and their customers over these last six months. But it may get a few people to return. And of course there will allways be the small crowd of blind fanboys who will fight to the death for the game like our buddy Cobra here.

I saw one of you post in one of the other AoC threads and I just want to let you know that I do not belive you. It is just odd to straight out hate a gamedeveloper to the degree you hate FC. It makes me think that you youself have some personal agenda. No hard feelings, but it looks kind of strange.

Originally posted by altair4

Originally posted by Toolfan

No it's not too late. There's plenty of people playing the game, unfortunetly they are spread over too many servers. People want to write this game off already and call it a failure just because it doesnt have 10 million subs. 200k-400k subscribers in the market is considered a success and to be honest that's all i expected from the game. Of course people left due to missing content but I knew half the people would leave after the first 30 days because of the immersion and lore. Comparing WoW and AoC on that regard is absurd. It would be like comparing Justin Timberlake to Tool. They both are great at expressing themselves in creative and original fashions, it's just not many followers from either end of the those spectrums would appreciate the others end.

I'm sure WoW and maybe Warhammer are good games, but it has no appeal to me what-so-ever. To me looking at my monitor at ridiculously glowing armor and weapons would be the equivelant of hanging out a gay night club with men dancing around with glow sticks in their hands.

 

200-400k is a good number for a MMO, that I agree on. But what we have here is a MMO that costed alot and took a long time to develop and I think they got about 100k players now. Maybe slightly higher number if you count the subscribers who's accounts still havent run out. But no more than 100k active players. And that is not a success for such an expensive game, which is also why the stock is diving and Gaute left.

If it just had been a dissapointment, not having the amount of subscribers they were hoping for. Then Gaute would still be running the show. But it's such a failure compared to what they were both hoping and planning for. What I mostly wonder is if they can actually start making some money from this game or if all their loans and such are gonna eat up all the profit and it being a big reliability trying to fix this game and make it popular. I'm guessing the move they are gonna have to make is setup a ghost crew that runs the game and just get the money they can from the hardcore fans.

Not sure on AoC's numbers but all games, all music, movies pretty much all adventures and projects have investers and loans to deal with. And all those forms of media have had far worse products making profits and repaid their investers. Now I agree this project for funcom seems to have been expensive for them but the investors and whoever else loaned them the money must have believed in them that it will payoff in the LONGRUN.  And I always see people in here talk about funcom's stock but most of you dont seem to undrestand how stocks work, you actually think that the stock price would have stayed at $55 a share even if it amazing was a superb game and retained 100% of initial buyers. the fact is that it wouldn't. Are investors a little worried that it did drop to $5.... probably that's why changes were made. but $5 for a video game company is not bad and it's been stable around $5. And why no comments from these wanna be stock watchers watching Funcom have nothing to say about Activision/Blizzard's stock dropping around $3 a share in about 3 weeks, when they are making crazy profits off their more balanced, extensive and diverse portfolios of titles like WoW and Guitar Hero...even possibly collecting royalties from SEGA from Total War franshise. Not to mention the entire world's global economy is spiraling down. but you all think AoC is going to die just because you dont like it.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ATVI#chart1:symbol=atvi;range=1m;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Originally posted by Dreamagram

WAR is out. WoW expansion coming in 6 weeks. AoC has a new man at the helm. He has given an update on what they're working on.

I see comments along the lines of both "this will turn it around" and "too little, too late". So I wanted to throw up a little poll to see whether people's thoughts and hopes are the same or differ a lot.

The question: is it too late for AoC to become a healthy game? Let us know both what you think (will they go down or manage well?) and what you hope for.

So about 65% of those here think its too late for AoC, weather thrilled or sad, they all say the same thing ... its TOO LATE!