Age of Conan stands still (no progression)

[SelfRez]

meanwhile activision/blizzard tops 1 billion net income(billions in revenue) year in year out, and Take-Two stashes the billion revenue mark with gta 5 in a few days.

Comparing Blizzard and FunCom is just absurd. Just by looking the amount of gamed developed should be enough to tell you that.

[farmpom]

Comparing Blizzard and FunCom is just absurd. Just by looking the amount of gamed developed should be enough to tell you that.

well Funcom was bigger with AO then Take-Two with their first GTAs, Take-Two got more brains, they are stashing the cash today

[Chaman-bourru]

well Funcom was bigger with AO then Take-Two with their first GTAs, Take-Two got more brains, they are stashing the cash today

Apples and oranges.

But anyway... Quite oddly, i think if AoC had been succesful, i wouldn't have been playing it for five years. Because succesful MMOs look like GW2 or WoW.

[nuadar]

Apples and oranges.

But anyway... Quite oddly, i think if AoC had been succesful, i wouldn't have been playing it for five years. Because succesful MMOs look like GW2 or WoW.

Pretty much...after all it's what made them succesful...

Blizzard also got incredibly lucky with WoW

[Rathothis]

Apples and oranges.

But anyway... Quite oddly, i think if AoC had been succesful, i wouldn't have been playing it for five years. Because succesful MMOs look like GW2 or WoW.

And those two games are... apples and oranges.

Really, the only real advantage of AoC not having been a massive success (it actually did alright, the game that gave FC the real blow is TSW) is that we don't have a lot of ragekids. But we have raging adults

A successful MMO - maybe not at the level of WoW, but certainly at the level of EVE - could easily look like AoC.

[Derled]

Apples and oranges.

But anyway... Quite oddly, i think if AoC had been succesful, i wouldn't have been playing it for five years. Because succesful MMOs look like GW2 or WoW.

I wouldn't say gw2 succesfull..

[farmpom]

I wouldn't say gw2 succesfull..

yea WoW is probably the only truely worthy mmorpg game that made some serious money, rest are mildly profitable at best

[Aell]

@Slith

I understand that you're a committed player and a great help to new assassins everywhere (I have certainly read through most of your guides and regard them as a definitive source on most of the game) but you're not thinking.

The cry of the veteran player in every game is "moar stuffs plz". Every single game. The problem is that PvE content is expensive, almost impossible to balance and creating new tiers, levels, AAs or anything else presents a barrier to entry, ESPECIALLY when that barrier is made of grind.

Put it this way, as Craig Morrison has demonstrated so perfectly, if you want to kill a game, just make it grindy. If you say "you'll need to spend 4 months constantly tapping rocks to get a T3 city" then some people will sell rocks and some people will spend an hour a day and some big guilds will get a T3 city and 80% of the population will decide that a)this is a game b) tapping rocks is not fun and c) TV is better than this.

How many PvP10s are there?

How many PvP10s are there as a proportion of the total number of PvPers active in 1.03?

Even with the Shrines of Boring, this is perhaps the best way to illustrate my point.

Unless all you want is to tap raid pinatas and get phat lewtz, online gaming relies on a decent population. The single best long-term investment is PvP because one it's done, all it requires is tweaking rather than building whole new zones every six months. But turning it into a grind via combat powerups will kill it instantly because your new PvPer or your fresh 80 is looking at a 3 year grind before he can even compete. They realize this pretty quickly and then they go watch TV or play a game that doesn't hate them.

And even those who just raid - well, do that 3 times per week for a year or so and it's going to get very old indeed. So they'll go watch TV. And they have.

I do support Factions because they present something to fight for and something to work for. The battles one can achieve with factional warfare quickly become legendary once idiocies like AoE damage from a single player is removed. You can imagine it for yourself - squads of soldiers moving in testudo, groups of mages as heavy artillery, protected by rangers. Barbarians and assassins as light skirmishers. It could be mindblowing. It isn't, but it could be.

And the thing is, it could be for a very long time. Tactics and strategy against other people never get stale whereas they do against the single designer who just throws down a super-elite raid boss that farts cyanide every sixteen seconds.

Territorial control, population management, trade, smuggling, black markets, law and order, leading armies, balancing the cost of armies against the need for protection and expansion - this, my friend, this is endgame.

Not "let's go kill a big worm".

And not "you can have a pet owl if you grind for two years to get guild renown". And not "You are good at PvP so we will reward you with stuff that makes you better at PvP and you will pwn all the n00bs so that they cry and unsub".

We need the newbs. We need to kill the grind. And we need a GD who can think.

[AngryBarb]

Well Only a few weeks ago the GD said (on these forums) that making pvp content is expensive so....

[Aell]

Well Only a few weeks ago the GD said (on these forums) that making pvp content is expensive so....

And it is. if by "PvP content" you mean ridiculous combat powerups that only serve to reinforce the barriers to entry and make new players quit in disgust. That stuff is definitely expensive, in more ways than one. But then really, that's just grindy PvE content tacked onto PvP; it does not reflect or relate to PvP as an activity in the way that, for example, a league table would.

However, simply allowing players to compete against each other is dirt cheap except that it does require careful class balancing and, given the PvE combat powerups available you have to balance those too. The short-term view would say that it was way easier to have players clicking on raid pinatas and that view is correct, in the extremely short term. In the long term it leaves us with.... this.

The sensible thing to do is deactivate all combat powerups for PvP. That makes balancing a far less complex affair and of course, if somethings out of whack, the league tables will tell you about it immediately.