Fortesque said:
I frequently buy an Online Gamer magazine for about $15AU everyone month. I went to get the new one this months issue Age of Conan absolutely free with an extra month of subscription fee.
Now is this game really crap or are they just grasping for members with the release of Lich King? or is it both?
The game is crap. It had such potential but they made so many poor design decisions (most of which post launch) that I question the competence of their dev team.
The game started off alright, there were a few balance issues, and a very noticable lack of content in the later half of the game, but alot of it was forgivable because the mechanics seemed to be there.
A few of the crafting aspects didn't quite work yet, and apparently stats granted from items (or stats in general rather) had no effect on your character.
When they started to add features (that should have been there when the game went live), balance classes, and add in content and crafting, the shit hit the fan.
Every week (or rather actually every 2 to 3 weeks since they were unable to follow any kind of consistent patching schedule) they would break something or add some new game-breaking exploit to the game (for instance tank classes could 1 shot people hitting harder than any other class in the game) which would in turn take them another 3 to 6 before they addressed the issue. Classes were constantly having their damage multiplyers turned off or their skills broken, making them useless for weeks on end.
On top fo that, even when they introduced a mechanic that did work, it seemed like they just assigned random values to everything without first testing it to see what they had done. For instance, take gem-crafting as a prime example of how they fucked their game over from week to week.
1. Gem crafting (one of the initial crafting skills) doesn't work at launch. After a month they finally implement it into the game, so gemcrafters can actually do something with the skill they picked up.
2. On second glance, gem crafting still doesn't work. 2 weeks later, they fix it and now gemcrafting is officially added into the game.
3. For some reason, all of the best abilities are placed on one color gem (red). Why would they do this? Why make 1 all powerful gem?
4. People start farming red gems and making exceedingly powerful weapons and suits of armor, giving them the ability to basically 1 shot anyone in the game.
5. Dev team sees the problem and decides to cut the gem drop rate, so now crafting this armor is more significantly more difficult and time consuming.
6. People spend hours and hours farming these now rare red gems now that the drop rate has been nerfed. (meanwhile all the other gem colors have lost all value making them useless)
7. finally, dev team decides these gems are just too powerful, and decides to completely nerf the way the damage coefficients work, effectively making everyone's hard work in farming gems for nothing. Hours and hours of gameplay wasted.
This doesn't even cover the fact that for about 3 weeks, every time you entered a new zone (as every area in the game was instanced) you had to take off all your armor and run through naked because when you loaded in to the other side your armor wouldn't load with gem bonuses.
All the meanwhile they're working on class balance fixes and completely changing the mechanics of entire character classes without even first hammering out basic gameplay mechanics.
The game was just... disgustingly bug ridden, and full of class imbalance. There was a huge lack of communication between the design team and player base. In fact the player base was split up into an EU and USA sections. The dev team almost never communicated with the US player base directly, we always got our news second hand from the EU forums. Knowing this, they most likely didn't ever read our comments or suggestions either. Age of Conan didn't fail because of WoW. It failed because of its incompetent design team.
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