The Daily Grind: Has AoC earned your money for another month?

Cancelled very early on. Went back to WoW but now I'm considering checking out Vanguard.

@ Yomamas: I like your descriptions of Vanguard vs. AoC. Would you be interested in doing a guest article on my blog about it?

http://GameZig.com


Send me a comment via the comment form if interested.

Cancelled after less than a week and went back to WoW until WAR comes out...

The game is beautiful, and thats about it....

There is nothing behind the scene, combat system is outrageously shallow and clumsy...

balance is not even a remote concept at the moment...both for pvp and pve.

Those two things could have been beta tested properly but funcom refused to let the game beta tested because... it was not beta testable before , this game in its current state can be compared to a mid beta test phased product.

Of course there are still all the other bugs, it takes about 40 levels to see that you are levelling an avatar that you will be bored with at max level, unless you like sight seeing in a virtual world, move along.. the game has NO content whatsoever.

No plot, no immersion, no roaming pvp, no raid pvp(siege warfare is alterac in disguise) , nothing new for group pve, not challenging/entertaining solo pve, no group pve bashing solo mandatory bashing only which is tedious and socially poor.

Instances, BattleGrounds ( wow style ) and beautiful scenery is all you can expect from this title.

I was going to cancel.. but I am giving it one more month..

Not that I think it will get better in that time but I just forgot to cancel the account before it charged my CCard =)

I only play it once a week so it slipped my mind..(I cant believe I am plating a MMO only once a week)

My reasons for wanting to leave are all already stated..

Shallow game play-if I get one more quest that sends me across the friggin map to go say "HI" to someone and I have to go back to the area i started I will scream

Community- on Doomwhisper (PVP) the OOC chat is generally nothing more then a Large Cesspool of WoW kiddies and basement virgins.

Horrible cust service- They lost my first toon... ignored me for a week (logged in and my /petition had been looked at.. but no response) so I leveled the same toon to one level higher then my first one (30 to 31) and then get a response finally.

Horrible Crashing - As i said before I only play once a week now (due to not liking it too much at all) but on my One day I play I still almost just /exit and delete the damn game.. my system exceeded the recommended reqs ( and i get min of 60 fps to prove it) but the damn game crashes at least 3 times in a 4 hour game session...

Over all I was glad I was in closed beta.. 'cause it showed me that I needed to cancel my Collectors edition and pick up the cheaper normal version...

I still play, and I'm holding a while longer to follow the progress first hand... but the clock is ticking for AoC/Funcom I must admit!

I am kind of torn at the moment between EQ and Vanguard after leaving AoC (as many said it was content light, easy and not friendly to grouping and very half finished). I am kind of torn between EQ which I have loved for a long time and Vanguard which is the most EQ like of the modern MMOs. I've tried just about every MMO under the sun except the weird ones (Matrix, Maple Story, ect) and none have matched the...I guess I'll call it "magic" of the original EQ. Just having so many areas to explore, endless races which all have their own world, countless places to go at any level...it was just amazing.

AoC had one or two areas to go for most levels at the most, it had a half assed crafting system, three races, haphazard starting areas ect. It was the same with WoW, EQ2 and all the rest, just none of the huge open world for exploration. Vanguard did have those things hence being torn between that and EQ. I think I might just play EQ from scratch till a Vanguard expansion then switch back over to Vanguard (which I did enjoy at launch despite all the problems).

I will be carrying on my subscription. It may have issues, but I don't want to punish them too harshly for that. I doubt it's the fault of the developers that they had to release the game when it still had bugs in it. I'm looking forward to being part of the AoC community as new updates come in, trying out the PvP experience, explore the new areas, try the voice acted quests etc. over the course of the summer.

The lore, stunning graphics (I have never taken so many screenshots in a game), and promising gameplay has me very encouraged for the future of this game.

Cancelled and will not look back...

Canceled. Here is a write up on my experience with the game: http://danpixley.wordpress.com/games/age-of-conan-is-it-a-bust/

Not paying for it. I have an AMD cpu and ATI graphics card and the performance (4 crashes a day usually) and the non existent customer support totally put me off.

I dont really care if they think wow is mcdonalds either. Wow got alot of things right from the beginning and the instabilities were nowhere near as game breaking as the ones in conan but they dont really care (or they dont feel they have to show they do).

Its hilarious watching it dive bomb anyway. Its more expensive than wow and daoc and that alone puts me off. I have my fresh beta preorder of WAR and all my RL friends will be playing it so I am happy. I have a friend who is playing conan and he is happy too.

Me, I like good customer service. And I dont like feeling like im paying for beta with no support.

I cancelled about two weeks ago. I plan on returning in the future when AoC has fixed various issues and added content.

I played Vanguard for several days. While it is a somewhat immersive game with great professions and abilities, there are just too many broken/unfinished quests. CS is great, imo.

I beta tested both games for several months.

Sticking with it.

Love the game. Played WoW, GuildWars, Anarchy, Lineage, you name it. I've even Beta Tested many of them. I just don't get that many people wine about the Bugs. Of course they are annoying, I\ve cursed a lot too... But every MMO has it. You should have played WoW when it just came out. Man, that game had some serious issues.

And about the grinding, seriously, where do you look for quests? As another person already said, somewhere between the comments, I had to delete quests to come up woth new ones. I'm lvl 50 now, so haven't played it fully yet (but I'm taking it slowly). And having the most fun of all the stated MMO's above. Of course its just an opinion, but come on, you really are whining about things that are usual to every MMO. Just give it time... :)

And about the 'feeling it is a Single player game', I suggest to join a guild, or play on PvP, cause I've been in massive battles with my Guild and have seen a lot of massive battles (Guild= The Cimmerian Vanguard ;P).

One thing about it though, Funcome has got to pay more attention to the players comments. They're really neglecting people's opinions sometimes. And aren't the opinions of the players the most important?

Well, I'm going back online, ride my horse and severe some heads in the name of Crom!

I cancelled recently. I had really high hopes... I read the dev interviews, looked on youtube for video of the game pre-release. I never got the invite for beta, (wish I had) so I waited eagerly for release.

What can I say.. big disappointment for me. The graphics are outstanding and I didn't experience many of the bugs that others did other than getting the 'gray-map' but the patch fixed it for me.

Combat system was great..loved it until the the combos became 3-4 strings long. Started to think it was a bit rediculous. FFA PvP which I thought would be a blast, is nothing more than a few e-peen griefers camping the rez points so they can do it all over again..and again...and again. Getting 1-shot by rogue specials sucks pretty hard. Overall the PvP system isn't balanced enough nor interesting enough to maintain my own interest.

Healing classes...well they super-suck. I mean that they suck to the 10th power. I think they really missed the mark with the 'I'll moderately heal anything in range' type of healing. Having very poor self-heals was a huge disappointment for me as well. (This is totally my own opinion.)

Armor sets and weapons are pretty close to awful. Nothing like wearing a burlap bag, then find a new one 10 levels later only a different shade of shit-brindle-brown. Some people dig the reality of it.. but meh.. not me. I like the flashy, over-the-top armor that makes my avatar just look plain bad ass.

Group dynamics you ask? There is none. This is where I think they screwed the pooch the worst. Group instancing isn't the tactical experience many raiders are used to. It's basically tank-and-spank with everyone smacking on the mob in one form or another. It's a dizzying confusion fest with everyone mashing buttons.. something fundamentally wrong with your priest doing more dps than your dps as well.

Lastly, and what convinced me that I was going to leave is the 'ninja' patches that Funcom keeps doing. Slowly but surely they are removing the gritty adult themes that made the game stand out among the rest. Sure I can rip someone's head off in the game, but damn if they don't remove every nude npc. I think they managed to get them all now since covering the girls in the Pyramid of the Ancients. Slowly but surely the content is being removed and you'll find very little info in patch notes regarding it. What you can find is petitions 100's of pages long to Funcom asking them to stop on the forums...or at least to address the problem, but you'll find no answers and no response from Funcom regarding it. Then again, the forums are now sooo chock full of angry customers that if a dev does happen to post, they'll likely get spammed with post after post of negativity.

Overall, it wasn't at all the experience I'd hoped for. Seems like there are many who feel the way I do and the forums for AoC speak loud and clear. I see a lot of fanbois asking for server merges in the forums and that surely isn't a sign that things are going well. Right next to those threads you'll find others where people are asking for a class-action lawsuit because of the supposed hype for initial sales followed by a game that lacks content that's stated on the box. Personally, I hope the game straightens out, but I don't have really high expectations given Funcom's track record so far.