Age of Conan's raiding treadmill

From what I heard about AoC it is exactly how I feel. Still, yes, I preordered and will join the ranks for a while. But will I enjoy and stay for long?
Am also a crafter by heart, but AoC doesn't seem to cater to the casual crafter, thus, yet again, not sure if I will enjoy it.

Someone has NOT done their research regarding the mechanics of Age of Conan's PVP plans. There are several comments in this article that are in fact true but they miss some VERY important points.

1. Yes, if you want priority attacking a border kingdom your guild must be ranked well in PvP-mini games. I dont know if I necessarly agree with this tactic but it is in place.

2. Yes, you get gear from PvP-mini games BUT the Devs have stated many times that a players power is based on their skill, not their gear. From personal experience and thoughts from other testers gear is not nearlly important as it is in other MMOs.

What I am trying to stress is that many testers are wearing gear from the beggining levels because it doesnt make that much of a difference. Skill > Gear in AoC and to state that "the Border Kingdoms will depend on grinding out mini-games and doing a fair amount of raiding for the gear to compete" is downright WRONG.

It would be nice to do some investigative reporting rather than taking information from another source at face value.

Posted as a comment on their blog:

"Keen, I decided to stop reading your blog after your multiple errors in your premature “review” of the PvP weekend, but this article was actually served up to me as a “news” article on massively.com, which is quite sad.

This is not news. It’s not even correct. Let’s run down the points.

1) Beta testers have been saying for quite a while that gear has very little effect in PvP. This is not WoW. A person 10 levels away from you is a relatively even fight. A person 20 levels away is doable. This is currently how it is in beta. Gear has never been used as a reason for someone winning a fight, ever. So all this argument about how you’ll HAVE to raid to be competitive in PvP is basing all your assumptions on how WoW worked. This isn’t WoW.

2) You’re missing the point of the PvP xp system. The whole REASON that you lose 2-3X more PvP xp than you gain when you kill someone is that your PvP level is based on skill, not how long you’ve played. If you kill 10 people but don’t die at all because you’re badass, then you’ve got much more PvP xp than someone who’s killed 10 times more people than you but dies a lot. So it becomes skill over time spent. It’s entirely in place so you CAN get a lot of PvP XP in a short amount of time if you know what you’re doing.

3) They’ve noted that PvP gear will be better for PvP than PvE raid gear. IGN’s statement of “The best gear will be from raids” is I think of their own invention. Funcom has said many times that expert crafted gear will be very competitive with Raid gear because it’s the only gear that can be slotted with gems and given those bonuses.

The summary is, for people who want to Raid and really enjoy PvE, they can get really good PvE equipment from raiding. For those who really love PvP and want every edge, they get a reward for their performance in PvP in the way of PvP items. For those who don’t want to worry about PvP levels or Raiding, there is crafted items with gemstones. For those who don’t care about any of this, equipment doesn’t matter all that much in PvP, so they can just ignore it altogether.

Really, I know you have a lack of information because the game isn’t out, but jumping on a few lines of text from a website’s preview, extrapolating all sorts of things about how it “ruins the game” is very hyperbolic forum behavior. I’m very sad that this sort of “journalism” was used for a news post on a relatively respectable site like Massively. I’m even more sad to see that 150 posts have gone by with people just jumping off the ship too thinking it’s on fire when in fact someone just burned some bacon in the kitchen."