Free time - report

paul43

10 days ago I recived an e-mail from Funcom that I could play for free untill the end of may. Since I quit  the game over 8 months ago I've never even thought about going back. I've had a good time in other MMO's yet there is nothing like the melee combat in AOC. It's clearly a generation ahead.

Downloading the client went smooth, and I only had to download about 7-8gigabytes before I could start playing the remaning 12 gig or so downloaded in the background while playing  which resultet in some lag the first day or two.

Once ingame I spent my free 50 character  and then added 30 offline levels, so I had a new lvl 80 character instant. This way I could play undercover without having to catch up with the guild for the short time I would be ingame.

During the week I completed most of the starting dungeons in the classic game, such as Scorpion caves, Caravan Raiders Hideout, Atzel's Fortres, Crow's nest, and spent about 3 hours in Onyx Chambers.

The dungeons were great, and it was really easy to get teams going, I spent max 5-10 minutes to assemble a team.

I also loved the changes to the Faction system in Khitai, you could really feel the progress, and you ended up doing far more varied quests.

The economy in the game however is poor, most mob drops sell for close to 1s each(gems, life essence, whorled leather, and more...), yet crafted armor may cost as much as 100g for a set. So you end up having to run around in resource zones to get money for faction gear and some crafted items.

The choices in armor sets for lvl 80's are not so good either although this is silly because there's armor in the game they're just not available to the players. Example: there's a set for each class in epic Khesetta, and another in Onyx chambers. But you never see anyone wear these sets because it would take weeks or months to get them.

While in the Khitai faction system you can get equal gear in 3-4 days max. So everyone either wear the faction sets or junk from the trader or green armor. There's also the ocational rich guy or alt who wear the expensive city/culture sets.

If Funcom had made the sets more available there would be plenty of designs to choose from.  Like for example if the Khesetta sets had been craftable, or Onyx chambers had a token system, so you could see a end to the madness in there.

What impressed me the most  when I returned was that it did not crash a single time for the entire 10 days. Which would be unheard of 8 months ago, I still play on the same computer as back then.

At the moment I haven't yet decided if I'll resub after the free time is up tomorrow. There still is one major problem with the faction system, and that is that there is little point in leveing up more than one faction. The gear in the others are just teasing you while it's next to impossible to get the rare tokens needed for the gear.

Lets take a example, say I play the new solo dungeon 3 times a week. Doing it every day is not really an option for me, so with 6 tokens a week, it would take about 32 weeks to get a single item.

Hopefully there will be some changes to this as have happend to the other parts of the faction system.

For now I'll probably not resub but I'll definitely check it out again later this year when the new adventure zone comes out.