Current state of the game

[cins]

The MMO genre itself seems to be stagnating though, it's not just AoC. Almost every MMO released since WoW has "flopped". Rift, GW2, TSW, Lotro, SWTOR, ESO, Wildstar... all are losing players.

Because they were all ****ing stupid me toos trying to "overthrow" WoW by outwowing it, AoC included. Anyone heard of the Great Videogaming Crash of '83? MMORPG bubble is the exact same thing and is going to the same place.

And this is not a bad thing: MMORPG was originally a terrible, shitty thing aiming to please the worst kinds of nerds and neckbeards. WoW tried to make it something better, appealed to a less terrible shade of human, massively succeeded, everyone and their mother started copying it ad infinitum and then there was so ****ing much supply, they had to invent a whole new way of transaction that's founded upon giving your product away for free in order to create a tiny bit of demand. That's an industry that deserves to crash and burn. The most talented/flexible people will move on to single player, coop or pvp oriented genres, the rest will get ****ed.

While I love AoC, I will welcome and applaud the death of this entire stupid genre. DotA and its clones have already ripped the pvper slice of the pie off of MMO's cold and dead fingers. Minecraft kicked the asses of entire video gaming world and looted the random mucking about in a giant world slice of MMORPG pie from the corpse. Its various clones are slowly but surely siphoning off the crafter slice of the MMOpie. Diablo and its ilk was pleasing the pixel whores before it was cool. Sooner or later, the coin will drop in some developers and a new genre of coop pve games focusing entirely on raidboss style battles will appear. Because when you build a game from ground up to cater to a certain thing, it'll do it so much better than another game that tried to it and everything else as well.

AoC will probably blunder on until it all collapses because from what I gather, they have a sugardaddy who's been keeping them afloat and is likely to continue, so there's no reason to be unduly worried about its eventual "fate". You're all gonna die too, eventually, that doesn't stop you from doing things right now.
[/hate]

[Khaletohep]

Sure this forum can be full of bile, but it's little surprise given how Funcom squandered our sub money on failed projects, instead of reinvesting it into the game.

I fully agree.

And to add to that: the example set by Funcom.

Funcom employees have told so much bullsh1t over the years, that it's hard to believe anything by now. It's better than in the first years, I think, but still, it's far below of what can be expected from an honorable company, sometimes venturing into areas that are legally... dangerous, to say the least.

It's nice to have their people see post on these forums, but sometimes, their seems to be a certain lack of professional distance. Getting into quibbles with players, unrealistic promises and even flatout lies - we've seen it all. If a host behaves badly, he'd better not hope his guests will behave any better.

[Korando-AoC]

To be honest I really appreciate a lot the new work new team ha produced during last 1-2 years.

A good part of that job is about the PvP side of the game, so I understand that thread starter, as PvE only player, doesn't value it that much.
But especially new open world quests and group content are really nice fresh air, aswell as gear revamp.

Yes something is coming late from the PvE side of the game (T5 and Craft Revamp first of all), and that's imo the main reason for population lost during last year.

But with the reduced resources they have imo Cirith and the new team are working great, by setting correct goals and developing pretty nice content.

Honestly in the end game status is fine to me from content pov, though I agree that lack of population is an issue (guilds deathsand merges on the horizon...).

My only hope for the near future is Funcom don't set Tier 5 difficulty excessively high: another Sheng or Bat first versions, though exciting for the very hardcore players left, are not manageable atm for more than 3-4 guilds left, and that's not what current population needs atm imo.

My next hopes are for PvP Tier 4 and new premade and ranking systems.. let's see what King Conan reserve for us

[razorkid10]

The player base you call "toxic or plague" is really mostly the pvp:ers including me!.



And the fact PVP players are competive, what u guys need to understand is that "Taunting" is part of pvp, while I understand some players take it too far and do it too much, thats when it gets annoying and not fun to play.

but i think elitist pve players are as much toxic as super taunting PVP:ers are

[AngryBarb]

The player base you call "toxic or plague" is really mostly the pvp:ers including me!.



And the fact PVP players are competive, what u guys need to understand is that "Taunting" is part of pvp, while I understand some players take it too far and do it too much, thats when it gets annoying and not fun to play.

but i think elitist pve players are as much toxic as super taunting PVP:ers are

It's the Internet, you can find toxic people all over the place

That reminds me of a time when trolling seemed to me to be just doing a bit fun stuff. But some really took that to a new undesireable level, so now Trolling seems to have become "how to be as annoying or horrible to others as possible". Sad but true...

[cins]

The genius who invents the punching device that'll travel through internet and hit whatever obnoxious twat its user is targeting on his dumb face will earn enough money to buy the whole planet.

Also, Funcom sucks at everything related to PR and will never get better. Doubly so for forums. That's not news at this point, we're all aware, beating up the dead horse is pointless.

[sugarspice]

I love this game and will probably play until the last light goes off, but the player base is less and less every week. Guild after guild is folding, Doing a fail coils group or a group where half the folks fail because they can't see the color is not fun. I had a guild member come back to the game after a two year absence and he said that while he would like to subscribe longer than the month that he already purchase, he won't because of the difficulty of everyone requiring that any global group or raid be "experienced" He said yes he has done the instances in the past but is rusty and can't recall most of them. It really is to the point of being ridiculous when I saw a global post for HOC RARE FARM group requiring AA gear and experience. HOC is a great place to get rares to get some nice blue gear and most any group can do it with a tank and healer, but closing out new folks requiring folks to have AA GEAR and experience for HOC is beyond stupidity. SO it is a community problem. Those that wish the game to continue might think about helping new and returning player instead of shutting them out.
I agree with most every the OP posted.

Ahoy!

Time to write again about the game's current state.

My perspective
To give you an impression of what my perspective is, I'll start talking about me (yay!). Been here since early access with a short break, played all classes to level 80 and full T1 (or better) equip twice, guild officer for several years, raid leader (T1 to T4) for several years, avid solo dungeon runner, occasional forum harmony problems - not allowed to talk about details -, made several suggestions implemented in the game later, suck in PvP, spend my life working and gaming (yay, real life!).

Raiding
Raid dungeons are more or less okay, but suffer from population problems.

Our guild alliance had regular T1, T3 and two T4 raids. T1 and T3 died due to interest / players in the last months. Both T4 raids have serious participation problems. Same seems to be true for several other raids. There're regular, very respectable raids looking for additional players in Global on most days - i. e. they're lacking regulars, which shouldn't happen with the "good" raids at least.

The T4 group I currently happen to lead had to cancel some raids due to lack of players, and currently, we have to fill empty spots via Global. Nothing against guest players (to the contrary - got some pretty cool players to help us), but again, that shouldn't happen with a regular raid, at least not that often. Delays the start, brings a lot difficulties to the raid (language, tactics explanation, loot distribution and so on).

The death of our T1 raid was really sad for me, personally. T1 is easy enough to fool around a little in there and spend time on training new raiders / trying out new classes. Lack of players and motivation killed that. The new loot offers (pets, token exchange and so on) are a nice thought (advocated them on the TL forums extensively). Sadly, it came too late to do anything in my range of vision with the exception of 2-3 people buying weapons in T4 that don't use to drop.

Too little, too late.

Group content
Kithai / Turan / Unchained dungeons don't offer much of an incentive to run them anymore for veteran players.

Personally, I've gotten most stuff I ever wanted from Kithai dungeons for all 12 classes about a year ago.

The new unchained dungeons are nice and all, but completely lack a carrot to make us (or me, at least) to grind them. The gear is nothing to write home about with the exception of some soldier weapons (yay, ub0r soldier loot again! *yawn*). The loot they give might be suited to quickly equip new players / characters, but the skill/experience/gear required to run them is too demanding in my opinion for that purpose. I've seen pretty experienced players fail, really utterly fail on Scorpion Cave. I don't think I'd have the nerves to try that with so called noobs.

The new dungeons focus, in my opinion, too much on running around from A to B to C back to A then to B and C or was it A? oh **** we all died.

The classes, the class abilities are one of the unique points of this game - better use them then "running around", which can be done in more or less every game. It's AoC, not Mario Brothers.

One thing: Never ever design encounters that discriminate against colour blind people. About 8% of your customer base probably are colour blind. It's a slap in the face to present them with a dungeon relying on the ability to tell a green from a red light in a split second*. Really, it's stupid. Also, it's AoC, not Senso.

Sepulcher thingy is okay, though too demanding to the tanks. Scorpion and Caravan are more or less okay (except as noted above) - actually requires DPS, nice change of pace. Final boss in Caravan is stupid, though, at least the barrel throwing part. Remove the adds, encounter is stressful enough without them. Ubahn Karl thingy is not attractive - too long, too stressful, to much running around, Senso action, running around, running around and - yay - running around.

*Disclosure: I'm not color blind.

Solo content
Yeah... what solo content?

People used to come only to do quests, solo dungeons and so on. Thus, they were available for grouping, random raids and so on. Not the case anymore much, though. Quests are all done, everything from solo dungeons farmed to death.

Community
We're loosing players. Fast. That is a problem.

Forum
This forum has a problem. I'm happy to see how the merge turned out. And I'm still amazed about how Funcom claimed the merge to be impossible. The sheer audacity to lie so much into the customers' faces... oh my, I wanted to keep silent about that.

Yes, the forum.

The forum has problems. Sadly, it's one of these not-supposed-to-talk-about-it-things. About harmony, biases, volunteer work and these things. If somebody above the level of first level customer service at Funcom is interested, send me a message and/or get an appointment via Teamspeak. Else... don't.

Payment method trouble
Payment by "Lastschrift" / direct debit apparently was cancelled without notice some weeks ago. It seems Funcom missed updating to the new SEPA banking procedure.

This is a boring, but important topic. I don't know much about how common "Lastschrift" / direct debit is in other ****ries, but in Germany, it's really, really common. People buy their groceries, pay their electrical bill and even their taxes in that way. It's great. It works. It doesn't require a credit card (which is not a very common thing in Germany btw.). Offering a service without accepting direct debit is like trying to sell something in a yard sale against a foreign currency without offering change. Whatever you might want to sell, however great it may be, however good your pices might be - you'll loose customers by that.

We lost about 4 regular raiders to that problem so far. Players important to the raid's ability to succeed. And people I'd like to call friends.

Because of Funcom not caring to update their payment procedures.

Yeah... no. Absolutely no. Not. ****1ng. Acceptable.

This concern may trouble European / German players more than US based players - on secound thought, though, European (and yes, German players) subscriptions have kept this game alive for many years.

The Future
What to do now?

I don't really know. I've started to play Fallout 3 (again).

Maybe the new raids will increase activity again, but I'm sceptical. T3, T4 and T3.5 were not in a state really drawing people in when they were relased, at least in my perspective. If T5 will be the same, i. e. horribly difficult, bugged, annoying... the time spent on them might have been invested better in a poem or planting a tree. That's at least something to have for years to come.

That's it for now.

Khaletohep

P. S.: PvP
Don't care much about PvP. Still not interesting to me. Progression too slow, horrible balancing, not fun to play.

[konungr]

Remember when Set and Wiccana merged? They opened up free transfers and Tyranny basically died.

There were two guilds that were raiding friends. It got to a point they wouldn't even attack one another in mini's...so all the stragglers that refused to join one of the two mega guilds were focused.

When both of those guilds went to Set because pvp virtually vanished...Tyranny was dead.

Now the merge has happened with EU/US. Fury is slowly turning into two dominate guilds again. I see 3 main guilds now, my guild just crumbled when the GL left and took most members with him.

I see a bad future for Fury over this move, and others doing it can never be a good thing.

PVP event? Groups of 12, people swapping places to get objectives while group of 6 can only pick a few people off. The event was a failure this month...and I think that's why my guild died and joined one of the zerg guilds. This will make it even worse...and turn it into some pve farm farm fest.

Nothing against the people in those guilds...I just don't want to be in a guild that has no challenge. So where does that leave me? And my 1 remaining friend that plays this game?

People should realize that you can only be carried so far...before lack of competition ruins the game. Recruit everyone...no one to fight.

[Fearthis]

This post is entirely accurate, and wanted to requote it again for emphasis. As for the PvP events, they're farmed like bori when it was released. The top 1-2 guilds form alliances and farm it while everyone else gets left out. They recruit the entire server.

I've been playing on the PvP servers since 2008, but now I'm done. I've never seen it so bad. I've packed my bags and rerolled on Crom.

Remember when Set and Wiccana merged? They opened up free transfers and Tyranny basically died.

There were two guilds that were raiding friends. It got to a point they wouldn't even attack one another in mini's...so all the stragglers that refused to join one of the two mega guilds were focused.

When both of those guilds went to Set because pvp virtually vanished...Tyranny was dead.

Now the merge has happened with EU/US. Fury is slowly turning into two dominate guilds again. I see 3 main guilds now, my guild just crumbled when the GL left and took most members with him.

I see a bad future for Fury over this move, and others doing it can never be a good thing.

PVP event? Groups of 12, people swapping places to get objectives while group of 6 can only pick a few people off. The event was a failure this month...and I think that's why my guild died and joined one of the zerg guilds. This will make it even worse...and turn it into some pve farm farm fest.

Nothing against the people in those guilds...I just don't want to be in a guild that has no challenge. So where does that leave me? And my 1 remaining friend that plays this game?

People should realize that you can only be carried so far...before lack of competition ruins the game. Recruit everyone...no one to fight.

[legionarium]

the big problem is in first point the slow work of funcom ppl , the second point we need realy funcom give we the news up all sitem pvp , latency , and more again!
but i cant play a different game why this for me is the best!