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So what went wrong and whats the order?
arkady09
Member Posts: 245
What are the most important mistakes you think FUNCOM made?
If you love the game, thats ok no need to hire NINJAS to come kill me... tell me what do you think they did right?
Right or Wrong - what made the game for you - or didnt make it for you? Keep it strictly to stuff that can be verified etc etc and dont flame - just state - I was banned from the the forums because I took issue with the game or whatever - not BLAH (swearword) BLAH (swearword) ... this is a serious post :
I was going to edit this post. I think instead I will post a new one... as much as I have posted about funcom and the AoC release, deep down somewhere inside me I would love to see major changes in this game and be able to look forward to logging in each day after work, as I did with so many other games that came before it. Ill post the link to the new thread in a moment.
A more positive approach to the tailspin this game finds itself in:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2339877/thread/203916#2339877
Comments
Releasing too early.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
No DX10, and no good PvP, PvE, and events end game content.
To early yes but they had to so you cant really say that. Lying. Making promises they could not keep. Look Sept they come and say sorry and if they make another promise for a date and miss it the people will kill them LOL. IF they can just add content, PVP like HAHAHA promised the game could do ok. Truth .. I LOVED the game it just died after 35+ for me.. then got dead and your lucky if you can find a server that has people. So now you have to REroll just to find one.
Bad management generally, leading to bad choice of engine and lack of knowledge of how to communicate with their player base.
Well if you must know no exploration; get mission goto X mission place. That got rid of some grind and introduce a whole new evil to the game(laziness)! And even as I was playing with friends they said they would keep playing, but it all dropped off 45 not 55 cause as they looked to the map and saw nothing(dungeons) or anything to goto, they quit there. Well couple that with no siege things ready, no dx10,no decent PVP system in place,bad system performance(even though I was playing the one of the biggest baddest rigs ever built at the time) and poor tech support, and if you asked me graphics where so so. Did I say "and" to many times=) I believe there was nothing good at all but the advertising!
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Its listed as general discussion. If I think the game is generally bad, how does that make me any less valid than you? I see that they sold 800k boxes and 400k in downloads and less than 250k still play the game?? Who is wrong... and who is right? The nay sayers? The few fanbois still left? Thank you for your flame attempt but I think this is really a matter of opinion and being that I asked for those: what is so great that you love so much? There has to be something you love about the game right? So post it here? Stop attacking people with your posts and then threatening them in the same breath... I mean really - I said post the positives too? But you chose to attack me, instead of offering anything like validation of your obviously PRO FUNCOM stance.
First and foremost, launching when they did. Followed closely by not explaining in detail pre-launch what was going to be in at launch.
Post launch they've made many more mistakes. In trying to impress us they promised two patches a week. What they didn't say was none of these patches would contain the missing features or fix memory leaks. Their next step was the detrimental cause to their current reputation, launching a PR campaign basically lying about the state of the game. As well as lying about the state of the launch experience.
After that nothing really mattered anymore for a lot of people, they waited to long to address problems vocally. Then had the audacity to all but say the thousands of disgruntled customers, were batty and nothing was wrong.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Ir-repairable. They should've not launched AoC in this state, or ever. I played it until today, 24th in Ukraine, and the game is very very bad. I got some promotional offer and had paid for the game itself. And never it felt such a waste.
While Funcom may have the uberest ever support system, they certainly are bad at making non-adventure games. Very bad. They couldn't even manage Tornquist's Anarchy Online having swapped the Game Director (Gaute) for Morrison... And they will not stop unless we stop paying them. Norway is a good choice of country when Uwe Boll gets banned in Germany. I'd love to spend rest of my life as Olaf Yatzik just to see how I can make Titanics for the rest of my life.
And while Anarchy Online had no pressure at all and could've been made a niche but strong game, Gaute sank that also down. And not even the respected Craig Morrison got it flowing peacefully.
How do you like month-old threads in Tech Support forums on forums.anarchy-online.com? Oh c'mon, why do we need the 30-days promotional offer in AO if you can't release the silly 17.10 and not only that, you are pulling staff off Anarchy Online just because you used to need some support here.
Funcom shoudln't have sold that mobile games factory.
no emphasis on dungeons (no one did them pre max level), released too early. performance was crap (though expected on this old machine) and once you left the tutorial area it was bloody confusing as to where you should go.
what do they need to fix and in what order?
performance (dunno if they have fixed this)
Dungeons (i dont care if it is a solo friendly game, people enjoy dungeons)
a little more direction once you leave the tutorial area (like a series of quests to intorduce the new area)
and then general improvements to gameplay.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
I couldn't agree more with this post I've been saying this for some time it starts with the management. Everything in this game is sub par except for graphics which in and of itself is dooming as it takes so much power it probably hurts the chances that low end system users will play for long.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
those 100 x level 80 are waiting on the next update to PL through.
I will bite:
1. They upped the graphics engine too much, which excluded too many players and caused too many technical issues at launch. How many memory leaks could have players not had to experience if the graphics were a notch lower.
2. Because they chose to go with the high end graphics, they had to 'instance' most of the game. This left the community feeling not a like 'community' at all. The constant load screens also broke immersion for some players
3. Too fast leveling. They could have hide the problems with endgame if they had made it at all reasonable to level. WOW has very fast leveling... AOC was much faster.
4. Obviously the endgame was incomplete. More effort into making sure seiging and raids worked. More effort into making dungeons interesting rather than just tank/spank bosses
5. stats and skills. Game launched with most stats and some skills having no known effect on gameplay. Some skills obviously didn't work at all
6. Itemization. Because stats didn't work, it was really hard for the devs to do anything with items. This lead to people doing instance to feel 'no reward' when the drops were way out of whack with progression.
7. PvP. Despite what the moron said, this game was hyped as a pvp game. Seiging barely worked, BKs couldn't be captured and there was no pvp experience nor criminal system. Basically this left there nothing to do but gank.. which gets boring for the gankers, and irritating for the people being ganked. It's like putting 10 two year olds in a room without toys and not expecting them to get into trouble.
Some of the stuff was clearly design issues ( graphics and leveling speed) but most of the other stuff just came because they rushed the game out too early. I honestly think if they had waited and released a month AFTER warhammer, they would be the ones filling up servers with dissatisfied Warhammer players. Warhammer has a lot of issues, and in a month or two, players will be looking around and really won't have anything but WOW to go to.
There is a line from a good movie ( Identity). The very last line is " Whores don't get a second chance". that is basically where Funcom is at now. Funcom could do a miracle patch tomorrow, and people still won't come back en mass. Unfortunately AOC (and war) are really require full servers to be fun.
Horrible game design, I am not sure there is 1 good thing about AoC.
The lies
They told us we were buying one thing, then delivered a different product
Stats being meaningless. Even more meaningless than stats are in EQ, and that's pretty darn bad. That's just one things out of dozens. Justmy personal beef.
Too many lies.
The main failure was not living up to their promises, and the deception they used when doing so.
This game's graphics and pvp were the foundations of the game. They failed in both areas. In some ways one was a reason the other failed. They wanted to have the greatest graphics on the block. Doing so, however, affected gameplay for all but those with the top end systems. "Set the effects to medium and..." Why should I do that for a game when my comp can play other games at 60+FPS? Yet theirs I was lucky to have 15-20 FPS on any given day.
This killed the part of the game they bally-hoo'ed: the seiges. Looking like Jerry's kids whenever there are more than 10 people fighting is NOT fun gameplay. With a little toning down of the engine, they could have managed it.
As said above, this led PvP'ers to ganking as their only release. If you just started the game, and someone 10 levels higher than you is wiping you on Tortage, you could give two shites about the graphics. Of course, it got worse after the island, with whole guilds dedicated to a gank-fest in lieu of anything else to do. A lot of people left the game after their first 30 days for this reason.
Of course, this was because the game had little high end content. I got bored around level 40, and quit after 45. The quests were the same old formula, just reskinned and jacked up depending on level. If it was this bad at level 40, I don't want to think about the higher levels.
Anyone arguing about them having to release on time, I got two words: Hellgate: London. They saw this happen over half a year before they released, yet they kept pushing for release, instead of FINISHING THE GAME. The FUD maching they had after two months on the market, when all the warts were visible, didn't help.
This game was based on an epic story, and had a chance to be a great game. If they had taken 6 more months to polish it and up the content, they would not only have their player base, but their reputations intact.
Good job, Funcom.
The big problem was the release, they should have waited 6 months. But they are not the only one doing that misstake... And I guess they couldnt afford 6 more months without any cash.
Funcoms biggest mistake: No higgledy-piggledy orcs, dwarves & elves, no DX6-cartoony-gfx and 1997 sounddesign. No keewl epix arm0RZ with glowing spikez and burning skullzzz!
Even with half a year of more development, more polish & content AOC would have failed. Average-MMO-Joe wants to play the same Average-Joe-Fantasy-BS all over again.
Besides that AOC has enough flaws (mentioned here) for he who ain't Average-MMO-Joe.
The most pointless boring pvp. Which results in people fighting in 20 square yards of Keshetta because the sieges are still no working as intended.
The most boring pve dungeons in the history of mmo's. Inane copy paste trash leading upto boring bugged tank and spank bosses.
The most boring and pointless crafting system of any mmo to date. Also resulting in no economy in game.
The horrific need for multiple instances due the graphics engine not being able to cope. Resulting in a closed non intergrating enviroment.
A fantastic looking world you can not explore due to invisible walls stopping you going anywhere other than your pre-defined route. Just as well play on train tracks.
But most of all the lies that were dealt to us the customers pre launch.
Be interested if one of the people who love the game could answer some of these above points. Because im confused why anyone would play a game in this state.
They released the game probably a year too early. Majority of people have left probably never to return. If the game survives it will become a niche game with not enough income to support for expansions and upgrades.
AoC does have some of the best graphics in the genre, but the rest is...............well................crap
They simply released an unfinished and poorly coded game.
They release an entirely different product than was advertised; MOST, if not ALL the strongest advertised features were absent on release.
Those features are what brought people to the game. When the players realized this, they left.
It's now almost 5 months later and those features still are not implemented in working fashion and regardless if they come in the next year, people have moved on.
I don't see any way of recovering this game to what they intitially planned/promised and maintaining a viable player base.
I figure this game will quickly fade away, much like it has been doing in online 4 months since it's release.
Lesson learned from this is easy: don't advertise missing features and then continue to mislead costumers with false promises. The gaming industry is very unforgiving to this. They hoped that what they had would stand on its own, but it didnt and still doesnt.