Funcom: A different strategy

[Civilix]

Anarchy online is what made funcom famous and gained funcom the ability to make age of conan. 10 years from now funcom will have only had one known successful mmo that in its time was known by everyone, AO.

The Longest Journey is what made Funcom famous and "what paid for AO", but even before that they had a long history of developing games.

Among players in the future i think(hope) that game is what is known as their greatest game.

[LunaticAsylumLA]

Lots of vets ... I say, write them off.
...
For every vet that has left grab 10 new players. To them there are years of content left in the game.

*Make a level 80 unchained version for every old world dungeon instance with random world drop purples as rewards. Instant content.

* Sub method is dead.

This sounds like either a very bad attempt at joking or the author is just trying to instigate a bellicose conversation, inasmuch as nothing in the message is worth even thinking of.

[LunaticAsylumLA]

By the way, Funcom managed to attract a lot of new players with one small advertising campaign on Steam.

[Warkind]

Lets keep the flames out of the thread.

If the conversation stays civil it can continue, but ones the flames return, I will too.

[clenghat]

All you want is to play the current game for free, play trough and move on to something else.

I dont care if someone has big words on forums, basically flipping Vets off, the people that have payed consistently so AoC still exists today. As long as Funcom doesent take notice of it.

You allso manages to say: "for every vet that leaves, grab 10 new players" Why cannot Funcom grab 10 new players without vets leaving? Im anxious about your answer.

edited by myself, ty moderators

[Deathsader]

The fact of the matter is, you don't need to say screw the Veteran player base and focus only on new players for success. I have been playing this game for years, and I am not freaking out about Funcom adding new content. I would prefer them fixing the content that's already out there, rather then add new stuff in the game.

I think fixing PVP and working on some class adjustments alone would make a lot of people very happy. I know those are my only 2 complaints about Age of Conan.

[Suctum]

There is a load of content for new players. I don't see where new PvE content is any answer for the current population because most of it was not around the first 2 years of the game anyways.

How many people have been playing since release? Me, 20 other people? Sorry, but that's no way to make money, which the game is about.

In fact, most of the current population is 3.0 and beyond so 60% of the people playing have no idea what the 20% so called veteran population is saying. I am willing to bet 50% of the people playing AoC hardly even read the forums.

I'm starved for PvP content, but seeing as most of the US population is on a PvE ruled server, PvP is not the focus of the normal modern day player, so I understand any new content regarding what I want is almost at the end of the list.

Either play the game or don't.

[Deathsader]

There is a load of content for new players. I don't see where new PvE content is any answer for the current population because most of it was not around the first 2 years of the game anyways.

How many people have been playing since release? Me, 20 other people? Sorry, but that's no way to make money, which the game is about.

In fact, most of the current population is 3.0 and beyond so 60% of the people playing have no idea what the 20% so called veteran population is saying. I am willing to bet 50% of the people playing AoC hardly even read the forums.

I'm starved for PvP content, but seeing as most of the US population is on a PvE ruled server, PvP is not the focus of the normal modern day player, so I understand any new content regarding what I want is almost at the end of the list.

Either play the game or don't.

Here is the problem though, it is my belief that the reason PVE is more popular then PVP in Age of Conan, is simply because of how our PVP system is structured. A new player to the game has to do a lot of PVE in order to get PVP ready. And even then, once they get into the mini game scene, they are going to get rocked hard for a very long time before anything positive happens for them. So a lot of them just see it as to daunting of a task, and quit. You can gear out a toon in khitai very quickly. However the same cannot be said about PVP gear.

No one plays video games so they can be the easy kill for someone else. Most peoples attention spans are very short. They understand that at an entry level position they are not going to dominate, but they will only give it so long before they say to hell with it, and give up. Very few people these days have the patience to stick things out. And that's just the issue being run into here. It took me about a year to hit PVP 10. Do you really think the majority of players out there want to invest that kind of time into a single character? Of course not, they wanna try out different toons in PVP, and have the ability to dominate on all of them, should their skill prove good enough. However things like lack of the proper AA's and huge gear gaps make this impossible. I recruited 2 friends to Age of Conan who love to PVP. They were glued to the game, they played till they hit 80. Weren't crazy about PVE, but did it to get geared out for PVP. As soon as they got into minis, they would get rocked hard. But they'd stick with it, then after a while of things not seeming to get better, due to them not acquiring any gear, they both quit. It was just not rewarding for them to spend their limited free time not having fun, due to not standing a chance against the superior geared and AA'd players.

[KullOfValusia]

Listen, the bottom line is with the current financial situation of Funcom we are lucky to have servers and a couple of devs to patch things here and there and try to fix some technical issues.

Brand new content with new dialogue/story/art/code/design is MEGA EXPENSIVE. I'm sorry guys but this is the reality. Plus the monies are split between 3 games to boot... its just not going to happen.

Crafting will roll out some time in May. We MAY see a couple of new content scraps here and there especially for PvP. But that's about it.

What I'm saying is much of the existing content is severely UNDER UTILIZED. Did you know I've actually never been inside black castle and I know a bunch of people haven't either. So, here's an idea...how about when you enter black castle you get two options. First is the normal instance and the second button called "Last man standing" is a level 80 PvP instance where you have to kill all the other players for level 80 crafting ingredients.

[di85ll]

By the way, Funcom managed to attract a lot of new players with one small advertising campaign on Steam.

It's so easy to bring in new players.

It's very hard to keep them here for a long time.