MMO MMOnkey: Why I stopped playing Age of Conan
Filed under: Age of Conan, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, Bugs, Launches, MMO industry, Opinion, MMO MMOnkey
As everyone playing AoC knows, Funcom also got a lot of things wrong. Announced features like DirectX 10 support aren't in the game, many of the features that are in the game aren't working properly, technical issues cause frequent crashes for some players, in-game and tech support are apparently dreadful, bugs abound. Although Lord of the Rings Online showed us that an MMO launch doesn't have to be terrible, most of them are. I expected AoC to have these kinds of problems at launch and wasn't upset by them. With the disaster that was the Anarchy Online launch looking over their shoulders I also expected Funcom to work hard to eliminate AoC's launch problems and all indications are that's exactly what they're trying to do.
But yet I've stopped playing the game and I think game developers would be interested in knowing why.
You can draw a distinction between quitting a game and stopping playing. Players quit when something about the game angers or displeases them. They quit with attitude and sometimes take to the forums to rant about why the game sucks. They need approval for quitting, they expect you to feel their pain, and they want you to quit too. In the more extreme cases they play other MMOs and fill general chat with invective about the game they quit. They can be funny in their extreme overreaction but usually they're just annoying and sad.
Not everyone who quits a game reacts this way and not everyone who quits does so for frivolous reasons. Players who quit Age of Conan because they got fed up with the out-of-memory error that causes the game to crash repeatedly have reason to be angry. Not so much the guy who was beside himself because the breasts on his female toon had gotten smaller. (Really. I'm not making this up.) Game developers should be concerned about players who quit in anger because the game continually crashes; they might be excused for thinking their game is better off without players who are outraged about shrinking breasts. Funcom, however, does not appear to share this view as they announced they were all over the tiny-tit problem and would have it fixed asap while the last time I checked the out-of-memory error was still there. Maybe they don't want to lose those "mature" players.
In contrast with quitting, players don't stop playing a game out of frustration or outrage; they stop playing because they find something better to do with their time. For me it was Guild Wars but it could have been anything. This isn't about the relative merits of Guild Wars and Age of Conan. They're very different games in many ways and I enjoy playing both of them. Guild Wars just happened to come along at the point in time when AoC's grip on my attention had weakened.
Many of us are familiar with the process. We've been eagerly awaiting an MMO, it finally launches, and we're right there. We become fully immersed in the game as we explore a new world and a new game system. We find things we like and things we don't but the former outweigh the latter and we continue to play. Sometimes we even get a little obsessive about it and play every moment of our spare time or even play when we really should be doing something else. (Yes, I know it's hard to believe but from what I've heard it's true. Some people actually ignore their real world responsibilities to play computer games! ) However, the time invariably comes when we get comfortable with the system and have played enough that we know the next play session is going to be pretty much like the last one. Enjoyable, yes, but also both familiar and predictable. We think maybe we'll do something else for a bit before we play. This is the moment that game developers should fear.
I took a look at Guild Wars simply because I happened to read an intriguing post on massively.com right around the time my initial surge of interest in Age of Conan had waned. One of the first things that struck me after I set up an account was how easy it is to get in and out of Guild Wars. No waiting for interminable minutes for the game to load. No crashing out of the game, having to reboot the system, and then waiting for the load process all over again. No having to reboot the system after play because even on a successful logout AoC left enough garbage behind to cause instabilities and conflicts.
Now I know that AoC puts much higher graphic demands on your system (and mine is fully capable of handling them) and that Guild Wars has had years to eliminate the performance bugs that still plague the early days of AoC but none of that mattered. Playing Guild Wars made something instantly apparent to me. Age of Conan is an enjoyable game with a great deal of potential but after a month of intensive play I'd gotten to the point where it just wasn't worth the consistent and mundane technical hassles involved in playing it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't frustrated, but at that moment in time I'd found something better to do and so I just stopped playing.
I don't expect the particular reasons why I stopped playing Age of Conan will be of much, if any, interest to many players. I'm not complaining about AoC and I'm not trying to convince you that my reasons for stopping are sensible and justified or that you should stop playing too. On the other hand, Funcom and any other developer preparing a game for release should be concerned about why I stopped playing because when a player finds something better to do it can be hard to get them to go back.
Full scale MMOs like Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online give us rich game worlds and complex game systems that demand a great deal of time to fully appreciate and enjoy. That's one of the reasons we play them so avidly. We love games that provide hours upon hours of enjoyment. While this deep level of engagement keeps us playing the game, it can also pose a problem for the game developer. The combination of the time needed to really get into one of these games and the monthly subscription fee results in many players devoting most, if not all, of their MMO gaming time to one game. Players check out new games at launch but if they find something better to do, they stop playing.
The players who quit in anger over technical failings may return to the game if the problems that frustrated them are fixed. This is more likely to happen if they quit fairly soon after starting the game. Players who stopped playing because they found something better to do are likely to have played longer and this can make it harder to get them to come back. You don't want to start all over again with a level one character but when you log in your high level main you can't remember what all those icons in your quickbars do, you've forgotten a lot of basic information like where things are and how to get from here to there, the half finished quests in your log are a complete mystery to you, and your skills are so rusty that greens are kicking your ass while you keep hitting keys mapped to the attack functions in the game you were playing before you returned. If players regularly returned to games they had stopped playing, SOE wouldn't be reactivating cancelled accounts in Vanguard and Everquest 2 and giving them free play time.
Game developers can afford to ignore the player who has a tantrum and quits because he can't play without bigger breasts to ogle. They can't afford to ignore the players who stop playing when they find something better to do because these are the subscribers who are more likely to play for a long time and have a harder time returning once they've left.
The solution, of course, is to design your game so that players are less likely to find something better to do with their time. Easier said than done. The first step is to identify the points in the game where interest is likely to flag. When does the player begin to feel like they've done all this before? When does the next achievement seem so far away that continuing on with the same-old, same-old doesn't seem worth it? New goals and game features that will interest players need to be overlapped with ongoing game elements in such a way that the player is motivated by the new before the old gets old.
New games at launch have the additional problem of making sure that the bugs and technical problems that were easily ignored in the initial flush of enthusiasm don't hang around too long. On average, how long does it take before other things in the player's life begin to look interesting again? A week? Ten days? A month? Whatever the answer, that's how long developers have to kill their launch problems if they don't want players to stop playing their game. I have no idea whether or not I'm typical in this regard but, for me, Age of Conan didn't get it done in time. With Warhammer Online on the horizon, I hope EA Mythic is listening.
And, no, you can't have my stuff |
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_thumbnail.jpg "Aion Beta: Asmodian Ascension Quest")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
br3ntbr0 said on 9:24AM 7-01-2008
The technical problems weren't what made me quit, despite the fact that I had to run the game on its lowest settings for it to be playable. I was quickly fed up with all the features that didn't get put into the game. PVP had no meaning with no PVP experience and no PVP rewards (although it might be in the game now, it wasn't when I left), I knew the end game was going be a buggy disaster since no one tested it in beta, there was terrible itemization (if any at all) for most mobs/dungeons in the game, crafting was just terrible, etc., etc.
I stopped playing before the free month was up. I'm not going to give game companies any more of my subscription dollars to fix and improve their game when most of that should have been caught by the time beta ended, or the launch should have been delayed. I'm not as forgiving as I used to be about this stuff, having been burned by games like SWG and the like. This is likely the last game I play from Funcom.
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br3ntbr0 said on 9:26AM 7-01-2008
The technical problems weren't what made me quit, despite the fact that I had to run the game on its lowest settings for it to be playable. I was quickly fed up with all the features that didn't get put into the game. PVP had no meaning with no PVP experience and no PVP rewards (although it might be in the game now, it wasn't when I left), I knew the end game was going be a buggy disaster since no one tested it in beta, there was terrible itemization (if any at all) for most mobs/dungeons in the game, crafting was just terrible, etc., etc.
I stopped playing before the free month was up. I'm not going to give game companies any more of my subscription dollars to fix and improve their game when most of that should have been caught by the time beta ended, or the launch should have been delayed. I'm not as forgiving as I used to be about this stuff, having been burned by games like SWG and the like. This is likely the last game I play from Funcom.
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Justin said on 9:27AM 7-01-2008
I wrote about a similar experience on my own blog (http://orboro.net) in the fact that I didn't "quit" AoC so much out of anger or frustration (but there is a sense of disappointment) but rather I just didn't find it to be a very "fun" game. It didn't hold my interest. It's rather hard to put my finger on any specific reason but I think it's rather a combination of many things from people being so tired of their other MMO (WoW, EQ2, LOTRO, etc, etc.) and looking for something, anything, new. However once you get that new shiny toy (AoC), it's luster rubs off rather fast and you realize the grass wasn't quite as greener as you first thought or you just find other things to do. Maybe I'm just jaded on the genre as a whole and need something truly innovate. I don't find AoC to be innovative in the slightest.
For me, it was exploring some single player games I had neglected for months while playing World of Warcraft. Hopefully I can look at my next MMO with a little more objective view before jumping in.
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pufonthis said on 9:46AM 7-01-2008
To the article's author:
Unfortunately, even though your article was well written and obviously not a rant about AoC, if you had posted this on the AoC website or had even expressed these views to the people who play AoC you would be thrown to the fire pit.
Conan has absolutely the worst community I have ever seen in an MMO. This is another big problem of this game that people don't initially see because it's not a real, touchable thing. But try expressing concern about things in the game and they attack you unrelentlessly. I think this has to do with the "mature" rating of the game, all that did was attract all the immature people.
I played AoC for the first month, got a character to 80, realized the game was a complete mess and went on to play Lord of the Rings Online. Like your experience with Guild Wars, it is just a wonderful feeling to be able to jump in that game and play for three hours straight and everything just works. All my quests work, I don't crash, I can craft, I don't run out of memory, everything works. And just that fact alone makes it a joy to play after having tried AoC.
Though I do find fault with one little thing you said in your article. Or maybe I just disagree. You state other games have a "go make a cup of coffee" style of combat. Myself, I play a Burglar in LOTRO and let me tell you, there is more action going on during a typical fight than ANY battle I ever did in Conan.
In conan I played a tempest of set. Combat was literally - click 3 buffs, run into pack of mobs, click 2 spells, stand there for 5 seconds, everything is dead, repeat. Not exactly the "active engagement" combat system you describe. I played melee classes too and they weren't much better. It was all pretty much just a click fest - do as many skills as fast as you can, not much actual strategy involved at all. In fact this was one of my big disappointments.
In LOTRO as a Burglar I'm constantly crowd controlling, applying tricks, conjunctions, damage, twists, all kinds of stuff, its WAY more "active" then conan could ever hope to be.
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Heraclea said on 10:40AM 7-01-2008
It's hard to imagine anything worse than the World of Warcraft official forums. There, the Armory misfeature invites a host of irrelevant attacks on your gear, your talent selection, and your PvP rating if you post on the character you have questions about. Not surprisingly, much of the activity there is posted under the names of low level alts. Age of Conan's official forums are not quite as bad, at least not yet.
Some areas of the official forums, like some of the individual server forums, are not that bad. I play on Wiccana, the "unofficial" RP-PvE server, unofficial because all of the other servers flagged for roleplaying are PvP, and most of the roleplayers don't want to deal with that malarkey. As such, that forum attracts mostly a literate crowd. Unfortunately, Funcom's moderators amateurishly and aggressively move threads to less congenial forums almost constantly.
Jusk said on 10:43AM 7-01-2008
I stopped playing after my month and 10 days was up because I was a lvl 65 single target dps class ( assassin) left to compete with the reality that is AoE grinding. Even as an AoE class, I would have quit. There was very little content left, and it was all bottlenecked around a few camps, where all of the people in the level range were AoEing down the same group of mobs, then waiting for respawns. Oh, did I mention I was on a PVP server? Thats probably the only reason I made it as far as I did, but it presents a real problem when competing for camps.
To deal with that kind of frustration, I need a carrot to lead me along. I play WoW as well, and if I want to raid, thats where I will do it, not in AoCs version, where gear is almost laughably inconsequential, and the dungeons are only barely working. That left me with sieges, which are unplayable ( you can try, but expect 2-3 frames per second, even on a beast of a PC). I have no faith that that problem will be solved within the next month or 2, so I found better things to do.
I still think its a great game, especially Tortage. I like the combat system. They did alot of things right. However without much to look forward to, I was lacking motivation to play.
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Azzura said on 12:28PM 7-01-2008
I see soo many mistakes in AoC that were done poorly in Anarchy Online. I don't see why Funcom didnt learn from their first MMO?!?!
I see you mentioned AOE grinding the same mobs - that was my biggest problem with AO...when a game has a zone that you have to take turns killing lines of mobs over and over again for 40 levels - something is wrong.
All of you AO players know what I mean - level 90-145 is spent killing Hecklers in the water....then 145-200 is spent killing Hecklers in Adonis....and you have to ask in general chat if there is an opening in a Heckler team...Then....Spirit teams...
AND, if you want to be lazy, you can sit on the ground while ONE person does the AOE killing for the team.
They REPEATED that in AoC?????
Acolyte said on 10:56AM 7-01-2008
I was excited for AoC and so were many of my friends. But the memory leak sent us packing. If you can't play, you can't play and it really doesn't matter what your game has going for it. But AoC led me to EQ2 and I have been playing that for 2 weeks now and loving it!
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GRT said on 11:00AM 7-01-2008
You lost me at: "I like the combat system that demands active engagement rather than the auto-attack, go-make-a-cup-of-coffee style of combat used in so many other MMOs."
I don't know if you are ignorant or exaggerating, but I'm hoping the latter. But in either case, I really can't trust anything else you say.
I'd be interested in what games you play where you can turn on auto-attack and go make coffee and be successful in a challenging battle.
You must be a big hit in raids.
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Pingmeister said on 11:31AM 7-01-2008
Oh c'mon, he just meant that you can target a mob and walk away and come back and be victorious.
It IS true. I have been pulled away from the PC on many MMOs and was reasonably certain when I returned that I was still alive.
That's not the case with Conan. It's an important distinction and I think he explained himself just fine.
But I still quit Conan. :( Just wasn't enjoying my time.
GRT said on 8:27PM 7-01-2008
Ping, yeah I know what he means, but I'm calling him on the coffee comment because, to me, its just so dismissive of the games so many of us love. It'd be like someone on a FPS blog saying that the games are just about placing a cursor over your enemy and pressing a button. And sure, that's literally true but it doesn't capture the spirit or the fun of the games.
I mean, did anyone feel the combat in AOC was inherently more challenging because of the lack of auto-attack? I found the game to be awfully easy, frankly.
Getting in a group in a game with auto-attack, and taking on a challenging enemy, and having to know your role, which of your tools to use when, managing aggro and all that...there's a lot to playing a 'traditional' MMO well that the author here just brushes aside.
Honestly for my time in AOC, I never found anything nearly as complex as the combat systems in EQ2 or WOW. Sure, not having auto-attack made for more busy-work, but to me at least, it didn't make the game harder or more challenging to play.
Pirate Penguin said on 11:43AM 7-01-2008
A number of things left a bad taste in my mouth about AoC. Some of them include technical problems, poor itemization, unfinished crafting system, broken and poorly defined feats, weekly massive balance changes, and demanding computer requirements.
The reality though is that I quit because I simply was not having fun. Computer performance played a role in that, but the game was still playable. The game just has a very strong 'beta' vibe to it with all of the constant patch, massive balance changes, and broken and/or untested systems (crafting, sieges, etc).
The female characters doing less DPS is just another example of why I just don't think the game was ready, but to be completely honest I think my main problem is that I just don't like the underlying 'core' mechanics of the game. I like the idea behind the active combat, but I just don't see it working out right in the long run (example: my reward for leveling is 'new and improved' versions of combos that I already had, except that they are harder to pull off and can now be done less frequently).
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Thorsten said on 11:49AM 7-01-2008
What is this article about? Trying out a game & then leaving it, isn't it? Sry, that I can't follow your argumentation (@Kevin), but this is simply what I understood.
You have no anger with AoC, are not frustrated but also stating leaving because there is something different waiting for you? Then you are quitting/ stopping whatever, as OF COURSE you are frustrated of the game. Even being bored is a kind of frustration.
I guess you meant there are typically two types of gamers: the ones, leaving a game as they got bored of it and the others, being highly interested and maybe frustrated, therfore leaving a game with a certain chance to return after a while. But in the end, you only have 0 or 1, good or bad, black or white: play or leave!
I keep on playing AoC till the day will come, when I stop and quit playing :)
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Bissrok said on 11:52AM 7-01-2008
The game ran fine on my computer, and my system's not great. And I liked the lore, liked combat, I like Funcom, and there were less bugs than I expected. I quit because the game felt too much like every other MMO on the market. I didn't have much time to play, and I spent my first week running back and forth between towns killing wolves and generic savages, picking leave, and going through dozens and dozens of the same quests I've done a million times before.
It's a solid game, I'm just so burnt out on the whole fantasy MMORPG genre.
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pufonthis said on 11:56AM 7-01-2008
GRT .. your comments.. hmm, made me lol. And I completely agree with you on this.
But let me say it in .. another way =)
I kind of said it in my first post. The combat I saw in conan had no real strategy to it. Yes, they made you press 2-4 buttons to do an attack instead of 1 button, but that alone doesn't make combat any more interesting does it?
So once you get past the fact that you are only pressing more buttons to do a single skill what are you left with. I'll talk about the two classes I played.
Tempest of Set, level 80: In a group - Cast buffs. Cast Heal over time spells. Cast lightning strike. .. thats it. Sounds just like any other game right?
Herald of Xotli, level 53: In a group - Cast AOE fire, do a few combos over and over. .. thats it.
Where is the "innovative combat system"? The fact that I press 3 keys to activate a skill instead of 1 key is not innovative. It's a little mini-game thrown in so they can put a bullet point on the back of the box.
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danarchy said on 12:01PM 7-01-2008
I am a unabashed member of the AoC fanboy club. Then again I stuck it out through the age of conan and daoc launches too. I'm a glutton for punishment I guess. Stated bugs aside the only issues me and my friends are really having problems with is the lack of places to go between 70 and 80. We are constantly competing with other groups for quest mobs, and the best xp spots are continually farmed by gold/character farmers leveling there merchandise. I dont know how many times I have had a guy with a random generated name yell "You steal! You leave camp now we call gm!". That and the fact that I can't turn my tell messages on or I wont see guild chat through all the spam. But having to compete for every single spawn with the rest of the "power gamers with girlfriends" is getting to be really annoying. Spawn more overlo.....er instances!
The other annoying thing is that they are nerfing classes before there fixing bugs. FFS I know people are leveling faster than you expected but how about first making the game run THEN worry about balance? I am a tempest that plays with a set group every night. I know I could easily level to 80 just aoe grinding things a level lower than me but whats the fun in that? I wasn't surprised when they nerfed my class, hell I will admit it reallllly needed to happen, but what they did to necros and guardians was just absurd. Of the 3 guardians I knew only 1 still plays his character, which is going to cause huge issues later when were trying to do raids with DT tanks because guardians have all quit. WoW did this to warriors at one point before bc release and raiding ground to a halt for allot of guilds. Your core classes need to at least be fun or end game will die, then your customers will only be around from 1 to 80 before they move on.
I love aoc, and I will continue to pay and play until my friends start quitting. I am in the warhammer beta but at the moment it really is looking like more of the same so I would like to stick around. We will see if Funcom can take enough time away from rolling in the piles of there new found wealth to actually keep it coming in.
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pufonthis said on 12:03PM 7-01-2008
Pingmeister - I'm not calling you out, but I would like to ask, what game have you played that you can literally just leave the game as your guy is auto-attacking and he will eventually win?
This is a game I have not played. Unless of course you are fighting mobs WAY below your own level, usually games will require you to do "something" other than auto-attack in order to beat your foe.
I'm just saying this cause I have played a lot of MMOs and I've never seen this happen before. Usually players go after mobs just above their own level and you certainly can't just auto-attack to beat these.
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rinks said on 2:21PM 7-01-2008
I think the comment was hyperbole to prove a point, but playing a paladin in WoW (or any other unkillable class that deals poor damage), yeah, there were a lot of times I could tune out and let pally bang on stuff.
pufonthis said on 12:12PM 7-01-2008
On a side note, since the devs of Age of Conan have been talking lately about subscriber number. Look at the people who posted here. I would assume that anyone reading Massively is pretty into MMOs. So right here you have the influential people for this genre.
Of the people that posted most have said they have already left the game, with some saying they might leave soon. And not only that but they say "me and my friends" have left. I know personally myself and six of my friends started AoC together. None are still playing.
If this is indicative of what the future holds then AoC subscription numbers for as soon as next month might be only half what they are right after release.
If you enjoy the game, great, I'm glad you do. Please stick with what you like no matter what people say (long time Asherons Call player here, so I know what it's like). But do allow the rest of us who felt ripped off to give it a good bashing =)
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Thorsten said on 12:23PM 7-01-2008
this is not logical, as you might also know the 1%-rule of communities.
Human beings are communicators, they like it - they need it. Concerning online games & communication possibilities like today (Internet) it is more likely to criticize (and people are having mor motivation to do so) than saying again & again "it' s wonderful!".
People need a valve for frustration - forums and blogs can serve as vehicle for that - brilliant.
Taking this into account, I would say, a lot of people out there (namely 90%) are just reading & thinking. We don't know, wethter these 90% are confident about AoC or close before leaving the game.
Maybe this is often the editors wish ;)
Finally, imho there are a lot of people outside, loving the game, not understanding this real big wave of outrage in this early stage after launching commercially.