"being foolish, stupid and rude since 2002"
Here we are once again at the doorstep to a MMO's release. Needless to say that AoC bombed, all the warnings I gave in beta about untested end-game content fell on deaf ears. It was pretty disheartening as I was very excited for that game, although that excitement may have been inflated by the free trip to Norway. I didn't even have the heart to close up shop and decided to make a clean break and just go live life for a couple months. I want to thank all our friends in AoC and apologize that the game didn't turn out the way we had hoped.
Warhammer officially begins tomorrow morning and I can't say I am overly thrilled. I have a bad gut feeling that the game will become stale and old. I'm not a huge fan of the combat system nor the graphic style since it too closely resembles WoW. However, Mythic knows their shit, they know how to beta test, they know how to balance. I always knew this game would offer great pvp, but at what cost? I don't know, but I am willing to find out and so is PfB.
We will be up bright and early Sunday morning to begin the Collector's Edition Headstart on Skull Throne, a Core ruleset server. We won't be hosting any guilds as guests and our membership was cut down to a bare minimum. We tried the big guild thing and it just wasn't for us, in WAR we are opting to stay small and elite as before AoC. There is no need for big guilds in WAR, which is nice, since as a realm we work together to accomplish the larger goals.
We chose Order as we feel Destruction will have the majority of players and Order will house the smaller more organized guilds. In the end, when it comes to realm warfare I don't want deal with the clusterfuck and rely instead on competent guilds to achieve victory. I had that headache on Archimonde when we rolled alliance, ugh the nightmares still haunt me.
Anyway, we hope to see some of our old friends and enemies on Skull Throne. It's shaping up to be a nice competitive server as you can see from a list Fistina has been maintaining here: Skull Throne Guild List
See you on the battlefield!
It's all about the gold.
One of the major selling points and drives for Age of Conan is the Borderlands and their associated Border Keeps. This is where all the major guilds on your server will be competing for 1 of 8 siegable cities, large fortifications that will house upgrades for your player cities and bonuses for your guild the longer you hold them.
It's a long road to be able to take a border keep, you need to attain a tier 3 player city beforehand. This requires a major effort on your guilds part, pooling of resources and gold in order to quickly progress through the city tiers. Now, originally, Funcom had a bank/guild bank/AH/postbox NPC (yes, all together) to help with the organization of this effort, but with many things at launch this became broken and disabled for a week. In the meantime, as any respectable guild would do, we pooled our resources by hand and designated one person to hold these resources and gold. Being the guild leader for AoC this person was me, as I was also the architect for the guild. I continually collected most of the gold our players earned which was alot of gold considering we were fielding the highest leveled players on the server, of the first ten level 80s we had six of them.
The patch finally arrived that was to fix guild banks and upon logging in I noticed that all the gold I had was gone, every last tin. I had over 30 gold at the time so you can imagine my shock. I /petition and wait in a 70 man queue for an hour when I was disconnected by the server. I am now unable to login. About an hour later I receive an email from Funcom:
Hail and well met adventurer!
The Funcom team would like to thank you for becoming part of the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures experience. As you can guess, this is a very busy time for us at Funcom. We are constantly working to improve our systems to make the experience for you, the customer, more enjoyable.
In our efforts to make improvements, mistakes are occasionally made which can affect our customer base. We try to minimize the impact of all such issues as much as possible, but unfortunately sometimes the issue in question is so volatile that it cannot easily be contained to a select few accounts.
Recently an exploit was discovered that allowed certain individuals to generate large sums of money well beyond the normal amounts expected for this stage in the game’s lifecycle. We will be removing the ill-gotten currency from the system in order to ensure that the economy of Hyboria remains stable for the rest of its law-abiding denizens.
Due to the nature of the exploit, we are not able divulge any details, but at this time your account has been suspended while we investigate. If you feel that this incorrectly affected your character, please send an e-mail containing your character name, account name and server to account-status@ageofconan.com. Only e-mails pertaining to this issue will be answered.
Thank you for your understanding
Regards,
Funcom
Pretty absurd, no?
At first the email address they gave didn't even work, and I had to send off several emails to various funcom addresses and PM's to devs and QA people on the boards. Only one ever got back to me and I greatly appreciate his help. I then resorted to posting all over the official boards, beta boards, and random gaming boards trying to draw attention this; that Funcom mass suspended players with an excess of gold to try and cover up a gold dupe or exploit of some kind. Many guilds were slapped with the same thing, having their guild leader or money holder stripped of their gold and suspended, guilds like Sinister, Darkhand, Rising Arms, PfB (thats us), Lords of the Dead (no suspension just gold wipe), and many more smaller guilds from all servers.
The worst part about all of this is the lack of communication between Funcom and the playerbase. We have no idea what is going on half the time, and especially in this case. Scores of people sent Funcom replies to their suspensions, I myself have sent multiple emails to multiple addresses everyday, and not until today, 3 days later did we receive a reply:
Greetings,
Your account is still under investigation. Sorry for the delay.
--
Regards,
GM-xxxx
Funcom Customer Support
Timely and informative response, eh?
Where is our community manager? Why isn't he getting involved in this and help sort out the glaring errors made by Funcom? This game is still under launch status and to screw up massive suspensions by sweeping players who had over 10g (random guess here) into the exploiters catagory is absolutely unacceptable. This is a major concern and the root issue isn't the suspensions, it's the lack of Customer Service. This isn't 1999, MMO's are no longer in thier infant stage, the community has an expectation level that is not currently being met. This is a billion dollar industry that revolves around the interaction between company and consumer.
I have faith in Funcom to rectify this situation, they did great and amazing things getting people involved in their release. I, myself, was able to experience their enthusiasm by being flown to Oslo to participate in their launch party, which was amazing amounts of fun and you can read about that trip here.
The ball is in your hands now Funcom. What are you going to do with it?
If you would like to comment on this article, visit the discussion about this on the AoC Source forums.
It's now a full week after launch (counting the 3 day headstart) and things are looking great. Age of Conan is the game to be playing right now, and Deathwhisper is the server to be on.
We dove right into the game and have continually been one step ahead of the competition. We are proud to house the first 80 on the server, Socratic, and he was quickly joined by 6 more PfB. We created the first player keep and most likely finished all the tier 1 buildings before anyone else, though that one is hard to know for sure. We are well on our way to take the first battle keep and maintain dominance on the server.
We are still focused on leveling, PfB leaves no man behind. We have taken over Kheshatta, the highest level zone and have consistently maintained control in the zone expelling guilds like DDH, The Box (lolterrible), and Wetdream.
All in all, we are having a blast in a true FFA PvP game. We hope to see more balance in the future and a harsher death penalty, but for now we are just rolling around and raping kids. See you on Deathwhisper.
Age of Conan? Or Warhammer Online?
2008 is going to be the year of MMO, with both aforementioned games set to be released and the next World of Warcraft Expansion. PfB is laying the groundwork for the next big game, we are contacting all ex and current members to come back and get ready to rape faces as a team once again. We are gearing up for either game, Conan or Warhammer (Most likely Conan), depending on how each game goes during their respective betas. We want to go full force into the next big PvP game, doing what we do better than anyone, and I think Sidonis put it best:
"a bunch of people who like to roll around and rape kids"
Hell yeah. It's time to get back into a game with real PvP.
Now, lets see how this is going to come out...
Its a game... with pvp... you have lag... its beta... moderate grind... Destroyers are IMBA... Im always LFG... kids chase me around objectives for days while I just heal... Its a decent game. Alright, Ill say it. I like the game and I wish I could find a decent group to play with.
Does one really have 10 hours a day of free time to invest into a fucking video game? I did once, but fuck, I had to grow up. The fact that I have to sit back and watch fat, bitch-ass kids(or better yet, adults) make money in this game because they A) can communicate to other fellow nerds in a peaceful manner B) Are little bitch fufu faggots C) can stand grinding gear for fuckallever in a game full of zit-faced, bitch-titted van-halen t-shirt wearing habitual masturbating nerdocracy having cunts. Case in point: It's unacceptable that this kid probably has 5x the gear I do, yet even with .02% the skill, he could probably keyboard around with one hand while shoving handfuls of cheetos into his mouth and still come out on top.
Ive come to a point in my gaming career where I can either sit back and become a shitbag spectator who plays or suck it up and kiss some netpower hungry fat fucks ass to get on a Professional team again.
Don't get me wrong, time does equate into actuall skill but thats about 2% when you have been playing as long as I have. So, I have decided to hang up my hat and sell my warlock for a dime bags worth of cash, pack my shit up and move to a new game.
Since any and all games on the horizon are either gay knockoff remakes or promise too much and will probably deliver shit on a rope. Since I am the only member that actually does shit constructivly for my guild. Ill be posting my future game interests below.
- Warhammer Online: 40% interest
- Age of Conan: 60% interest
- World of Warcraft - Lich King: pileofshit%
Conan is looking good but I have yet to play it. Warhammer has a long way to go but its a decent game so far. Lich King expansion looks like the asshole of a gay man that used a pogo stick upside down for an hour straight.