The Daily Grind: What will the server merge mean for Age of Conan?

I might... if Warhammer was not out

AoC, already struggling somewhat after most free month players refused to subscribe, received a severe blow from Warhammer Online. Wrath of the Lich King will put it down for good. It'll end up with half the player base of LOTRO or less.

I firmly believe that first impressions mean alot. AoC and Funcom blew their chance with me and many tens of thousands others with a poorly designed game, game breaking bugs and patches, massive missing content, misleading advertising, broken promises and outright lies, and fun enough not listening to the player base. This is damage control. Funcom refused to believe that more than 3/4 of their player base left in three months. Now they have new management and are trying to save the game and investment. Funcom, Gaute, and Erlingson burnt a few hundred of thousands of people... burn me once shame on you, burn me twice... eerr.... no.. no more chances Funcom.

Funcom has already forced me to go to another game (Warhammer) AOC was a disaster and I will never go back to it, it doesn't matter how they try to fix this... If it became a free MMO, I would play it, but I am not paying $15 a month for a game that screwed most of the customer base in the first few weeks after launch... :-\

AoC has been the biggest gaming disappointment of the year for me. Possibly the biggest ever and I've been playing games for about 20 years now.

I had been part of the giant mass of people that did nothing but read the pre-release forums for months up to release. I was in their little open beta. I did their little pvp beta. I bought the collectors edition, etc... I wanted this game to be so great.

It fell flat on it's face.

BK said they'd be lucky to have LOTRO's player base. I think they'll be lucky to have Tabula Rasa's. I at least still want to play LOTRO.

The complaints in the AoC forums are the same now as they were months ago. Nothing has changed and it needed to happen quickly. Most have already left for WAR. With Wrath, Moria, and WAR all out or about to come out theyll be lucky to survive another year.

As for me, I play a lot of MMOs with active accounts in WoW, LOTRO and EVE. If you can't hold on to someone like me who can you hold on to?

Funcom, I want AoC to succeed. I just don't know if you do.

Honestly, first impressions do mean a lot. However, I think many people who buy MMORPGs know how these things work... specifically meaning that all MMORPGs improve over time.

I think the positive word of mouth coming from the game now will entice some people back. Certainly not all and I doubt they'll ever come in droves... but it's seeming as though the hemmoraging this game was experiencing is over.

I didn't go past the first month, but you know, I still paid $50 for the game. I don't want to feel like I have a useless $50 drink coaster on my shelf. And since that main cost of entry is gone, sure, I'm willing to spend $15 some random month once things are supposedly better and try it out again.

And I think a lot of people will eventually feel the same way, particularly as they start to feel tired of whatever else they're into right now.

But personally, with Mines of Moria so close, I'll be surprised if I blow any money on Conan until next year.

Nonan doesn't have a positive future, in the way that it won't recover. Server mergers mean survival, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less.

Geez guys, then please go back to playing crap WOW. That game is definitely done for me, especialy after playing LOTRO. If you think LOTRO has a small playerbase, then think again. I was just playing today and the last two weeks. According to some people here, noone should be doing anything but playing Warhammer now, or WOW to attune for WOTLK. Well the LOTRO servers were fuller than ever, actually. Today they were so full they had use special measures to reduce load on the servers. So I do think that LOTRO is doing a lot better than YOU guys want it to do... and IMHO it absolutely deserves it. It is a beautiful game and does a lot of things right.
I have only played AOC brievely at a friends and I thought it was quite pretty. My friend likes it better than LOTRO (I invited him to try it out) and he is bugging me to go play it. So there are actually people that like AOC. Just because you dont like something and because you feel like your sorry lives have been ruined because a new game had a few bugs, does not mean that everyone else thinks that way.