Craig Morrison: Genius

[End-of-Clothies]

Craig destroyed this game, his big game change update 1.5 was the beginning of the end, followed with the disregard of the pvp community, he selfish and foolish ignore pvp and focused just in pve when the potential of this game is or was the innovative combat system almost perfect and fun for pvp, when this game was advertised and purchased most or totally just for pvpers, he ran all the player base and entire guilds and servers away with his failed changes and updates.

[Mathieulombardi]

Why do you guys even bother with this guy.

[viroku]

Why do you guys even bother with this guy.

I also genuinely wonder. He start such silly topics and people always respond and even on few pages.
Good job Ring, cookie for you

[Loaf-of-Evil]

Ringofset, I just realized who you are.

Protus-Aoc

[gcustoms]

The comedy network called. They're giving you a one hour special

[Derek-Drake]

Looking back on it all, I'm of the opinion that Craig Morrison single-handedly saved AoC from certain and complete destruction. Hear me out. By 09' AoC was hemorraghing players, and the pay 2 play model wasn't working. I think Craig may have actually stopped the mass exodus of players and helped turn the game around by correctly spotting the PvE aspects and trying to add some context to the PvP as well through Bori.

+ By 2010 the game stopped losing players and was turning around.

+ Rise of the Godslayer was a roaring SUCCESS and critics/players alike loved it.

+ Craig succesfuly (and correctly) turned the game into F2P, knowing the business model will be more profitable for Funcom.

+ Mr. Morrison helped balance out the game,stabilized it, fixed a lot of bugs and added structure to PvP through Bori (helping players attain higher PvP levels through grind...but gave them a fighting chance).

+ Finally, Mr. Morrison was PROMOTED (<-- Key here), he was promoted to head the future of Funcom through the mobile games division and specifically with the Lego minifigures game (a HUGE and MUST BE SUCCESFUL game for Funcom). To give this critical project to someone who Funcom considers has failed is unthinkable.

I really don't think the pbase here realizes how much of a badly needed asset Mr. Morrison was. THIS GAME WAS SAVED BY CRAIG MORRISON.

1) The game did not stop losing players and magically "turn around" in 2010. There was a very brief uptick due to the expansion, but after people discovered that it was an Asian Grindfest tacked onto the core game, they quickly left again.

2) ROTGS was not a roaring success, and any critical praise that it received came from reviewers that didn't spend months at a time grinding MoA's and imperial insignia for multiple characters. They dropped in for a week, did a few quests and went and wrote some bloated crap articles about how beautiful and large the expansion was. Western players generally despised it.

Nevermind the fact that in all of REH's original material, he only mentioned the eastern lands in a handful of sentences. But there was a business problem at hand for Funcom. The Western audience, who could read the box cover, realized that a vast majority of utter crap on the box cover wasn't in the game and wouldn't be for years. However, the Eastern markets didn't have box covers that talked about sieges and DX10, so the expansion was aimed directly at that market and playstyle (grind fest) in order to help prop up slagging subscriptions.

3) Age of Conan is NOT, I repeat is NOT, free to play. It's free to try, but any of the gear worth having in the game is off limits without paying.

Not only that, but the free to play model is one of the most restrictive and expensive I've ever seen aside from TORtanic's model.

The prices for things are absurd. A bag for ONE character costs twenty dollars. Want to ride a white tiger on a brand new 80? Shell out 30 more dollars for the Tiger+Advanced Riding+Exotic Creature Handling. Want to have all five feat specs? Shell out another twenty dollars.

This is over the top ridiculous. An entire suit of armor in Planetside 2 costs three dollars and a new gun costs five dollars, not to mention there's not one single part of the game restricted to Planetside 2 players... they simply level slower as a non member.

4) Honestly, and I mean this, I want to know what stabilization and bug fixes you're talking about. I red line once a day at the very least. I have no clue how many characters have lost out on gear due to red lining after the boss is killed and no one can open the box.

I could write out dozens of bugs in this game, but the most amusing part of the bugs in AoC is the following "Law of Bug Fixing" that I have come up with: If the bug affects the acquisition of gear in any way, then it will be hotfixed within hours. If the bug does not affect gear in any way, then no matter how annoying it is, they couldn't give a ****. (i.e. if it doesn't keep you playing longer, they don't give a rats red ass how annoying it is)

Oh and PVP. The man doesn't know anything whatsoever about what makes PVP good. See the thousands of other threads concerning this topic to understand what I mean. He took one of the best features of the game and turned it into another level based gear grind. Bravo.

5) Not really sure on the inner workings of the company at this time, but I was of the opinion that Craig has moved on to developing their kiddy MMO Pets and Monsters or some such crap. The Western and Eastern markets didn't pan out, so I guess they're doing it for the kids (The kids!) this time around.

[KullOfValusia]

FC is too afraid of going down the path of true F2P. I kinda understand why. It's like a starving person living on the streets who spots 50 dollars crumpled up in the gutter. It's like he found the holy grail. He runs over and grabs it and squeezes it until his fingers break. If he just took the time to look up at the signpost he would see an ad for a job with his exact qualifications posted right in front of him.

Likewise, Funcom (the corporate side) only see's that SOME people will pay them 20 dollars for a in-game hate or sub up for an entire year. In their desperation to hold onto any kind of revenue they don't realize if they just make the in-game store prices reasonable and add more stuff to it, sell entrance passes into raids/dungeons (for a reasonable price...not 5 bucks just to get into Vissy 1 time) and made the game truly F2P...they can double or triple their revenue. But right now, the FC business people in their short term "I'm only here to make myself and the numbers look positive ..until I can find a job with Blizzard" sightedness really don't care about the long-term health of the game. Strangely, it's just the passionate players that do.