What is the deal with the new patch?

[SamHam]

You know time's are tough at the FC HQ when the CEO has two teeth; one to complain about and the other to open beer with :P

[Ernests]

Edit by Anzu: It could have been fun, but it's not. And insulting people is not allowed on the forums, even by proxy.

Ten balls! Very funny, super!

Sometimes the humor can say more than the comments with the poisonous

[ConanLogan]

Edit by Anzu: It could have been fun, but it's not. And insulting people is not allowed on the forums, even by proxy.

Really state-of-the-art for a "no-budget-production"! Laughed so hard!

Pls tell me where the original video is to be found and what story that guy really tells

[Khaletohep]

Having done some runs with the new content they sold us... time for a review (without aspiring for it to give a complete list of good or bad points).

The good:
- Solo/small group content. That department hasn't got a lot of love in the last few years. Fills a blank spot between solo HM dungeons and 6-person-HM-dungeons.
- Cimmeria. Ymrish, Vanir, Mammoth riders are, imho, the finer examples of AoC design.
- Outdoor content (most of it). Not as dark as e. g. Isle of Iron Statues.
- Something new to spent HM tokens on.
- Reward "idols" can be sold for gold. Nice thought to make the content useful for those who are not interested in faction gain.
- The dungeon and its encounters rely more on character control than on scripts or running really really fast. Bosses can be cc'd. Bosses use abilities similar to characters. No time runs.

I'm pretty amazed by the addition in one respect: The thing they aimed at is almost custom tailored to what I like. I, personally, have suggested to a.) introduce Atzel's Fortress as solo content, b.) create content for small groups with difficulty scaling according to the group size, c.) something new to spend HM tokens on. So, in a way, it is exactly what I, as a person, asked for. And despite that I'm almost horrified of what they did to it - because of the horrible job somebody did there. Sorry, dear creator of this content, if you read that, to say that about what you did there, but frankly, it's just not a good product.

The bad:
- Extremely tedious. Kill mobs. Kill mobs. Kill mobs. Yay, kill more mobs. A quest to kill 125 Vanir. 125. 1-2-5. Do you seriously expect us to do that? And not once, but repeatedly!?
- Time & frustration vs. reward ratio seems to be off. I took about 120 min for a run, lowered to about 80 min when skipping some of the more tedious quests. The amount of time needed will probably decrease somewhat with increasing experience. But still, the distance the character needs to travel hints at it taking quite some time even with avoiding al unnecessary fights and not doing any side quests. I'd say a relastic time scale for many players will be about 45 min. 6 HM tokens are nice and all, but Isle gives 4-6 HM tokens in 10 to 15 minutes, and those are a lot more fun. Killing mobs for 45 min, interrupted only by running a mile back to the quest giver, is not really what will appeal to many players.
- Time required per run is too high in absolute terms. At least I run HM solo dungeons when I want to have some quick action, not when I want to spent half an evening. The Atzel part by itself would be more of the bite size fitting to what I'd call casual / quick action.
- Getting faction rank 4 seems to take a lot of runs. Got 20k to 35k faction on my second run, weirdly varying a lot from character to character. Doing, best case, 25-30 runs of that length just for a ring is just not okay.
- Ymrish mobs (including bosses) have a bugged and extremely annoying knockback. It knocks the player character back for a huge distance - huge enough for the mob to reset right after using its ability, each and every time. This is just stupid. Also, the knockback apparently doesn't give an immunity, which allows the mobs to completely crowd control a player character.
- Some mobs are much more difficult despite having the same level, e. g. level 85 (non-minion) dogs to Ymrish casters. The Ymrish are more like mini bosses in toughness than to other "normal" level 85 mobs.
- The difficulty of the final boss varies a lot from class to class. Needed about 10 tries and, frankly, cheating on my barbarian (full Kithai DPS gear, 2x Ibisblade, AA near completion), but succeeded on the first try with a much less well equipped Necromancer.
- Several annoying bugs. HM didn't start properly with some characters, requiring to log out for 30 min and let the instance reset. Some characters didn't get quests others got, one didn't get the final reputation reward (the crown).
- Only one copy of most quest items, requiring to run around even more in small groups. Annoying in groups - remember the Pyramid of the Ancients back when only one player could pick up quest items... fastest clicker wins the item, leading to frustration among the group.
- Dungeon has several things somewhere between "weird design decision" and "abusable". Some of them are really, really obvious.
- Killing mobs doesn't give faction gain. This is inconsistent with Kithai, and would have made the endless mob grinding needed to complete the dungeon less frustrating.
- Several areas = several loading screens. Annoyingly long distances to travel.
- Side quests appear to quite different in difficulty / time required.
- The rewards are of very, very different usefulness for each class.
-- HoX and BS get super-amazing rings.
-- Soldiers get an improvement above the Kithai/AoK protection rings - 22 +hate isn't much, but okay, it's something. Annoying that soldiers cannot buy the strength DPS rings.
-- Priest/ToS get a ring that is a direct improvement above T4. Makes one wonder about the item budget compared esp. to DPS rings.
-- DPS rings (Magic / Dex / Str) are pretty much equal to T4, with some being a few points worse, and others a few points better. Again, one wonders why itemization for DPS classes tends to be sub-par. Okay, we know why - Cirith Gorgor, e. g., obviously tested the last content published with a Conq, and much of the game heavily hints at soldiers being some kind of favorite of the design team. It's understable, but annoying. A raid built only of rogues and soldiers doesn't really work, but the design decisions taken in the last years strongly favor those classes. This adds one more thing why recruiting a mage is a feat of wonder nowadays.

The ugly:
I've made a collage with some of the visual bugs and... "design decisions" I encountered. These aren't, by far, the only ones, but are meant to give an impression of the attention that was given to detail. I. e., not a lot. The sloppiness is just amazing.



Verdict:
2/5. Some nice ideas, but execution is too sloppy to be acceptable for a commercial product. Content created by gaming communities (e. g. Skyrin, Fallout, Shadowrun Returns, Neverwinter Nights I) is, on average, more creative and more carefully designed. Demanding money for that is, with all due respect to the developers and a company in a financially less than satisfying situation, a bold move. When compared to DLCs for other commercial games, it's just sad. Demanding money at all for content that small and that poorly designed is an outrage, but demanding about 15,00 € ist just greedy.

If that is the level of quality one can from Funcom nowadays... then please, I repeat again, allow players to create content for you. I don't know how user friendly / effective the editor / design tool used for AoC is, but heck, if content like Vanaheim is acceptable to you, the community will most likely turn out something acceptable as well.

To those who didn't buy it so far:

DO NOT BUY UNTIL FIXED & LOWERED IN PRICE.

[Wabajack]

-- Soldiers get an improvement above the Kithai/AoK protection rings - 22 +hate isn't much, but okay, it's something. Annoying that soldiers cannot buy the strength DPS rings.

The rings are class specific??? For what reason?? The ONLY reason I purchased the expansion was to get the strength ring on my tanks

Please REMOVE the class specific requirement on the rings or at the least, add a few classes to some of the rings.

[mrsmoov1]

LMAO and your charging $30 for this bug ridden update!

FUNCOM would def be the worst devs out there atm!

They must be kicking themselves after the MEGA FAIL of TSW and now have no where to go - All of there "2" staff can only release rubbish content like this!

[Nephturi]

I mean seriously, they are NOT giving us the same level of content that other subscription games get for their monthly $15 fee. For instance EVE Online has added ten times the content that AoC has added this year and since we pay a subscription fee, ALL Of the new EVE content was 100% free.

Yeah EVE is on more than 20 completely free expansions for subscribers that all have way more content then we've ever gotten. That is how you run a subscription based game... by coming though on a return of content for your money. Funcom just hasn't figured that one out yet.

Get a grip. Funcom doesn't sell PLEXes, and AoC doesn't allow proper multiboxing. CCP runs mainly because of these two points, that's why they can update the game so regularly. And don't forget that they messed up good a couple of time too.

[Jin-chan]

They must be kicking themselves after the MEGA FAIL of TSW and now have no where to go - All of there "2" staff can only release rubbish content like this!

Last time i played TSW it did pretty good. Steady amount of players, lots of new players. This was 1-2 months ago when they launched the "Improved" TSW.
TSW is soon to be 3 years old game and it is doing a lot better than AoC ever did. Not defending, cause i don't really like it (I liked AoC more), but just stating fact. Game was niche and it still is niche with somewhat steady update cycle etc...

[nikepilas]

TSW is soon to be 3 years old game and it is doing a lot better than AoC ever did.

Cannot believe that.



.

[Bibik]

Pretty easy to succeed when you had better financial & human ressources than the others titles (read: leeching other titles incomes)
Now give TSW the same budget, economical model and manpower they give To AoC and let's see what happens.