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Funcom, the least progressive&active and productive company of an AAA game in the world.Why?
pupurun
Member UncommonPosts: 561
Title says it all. All of us who have been playing AOC since launch feel like this:
You gather us up in an excellent restaurant, great atmosphere , lovely music. The place is decorated like the best restaurant in Paris.They pour us some wine...Mhmmm excellent. And now for main course...HAMBURGERS!
In a few words this game had/has the basis for a thousand ideas and a thousand more. Hundreds of these ideas have been proposed by its player base.Of course noone expected all of them to get fulfilled! But what all of us never expected as well was for NONE of those ideas to get done. ZERO. Funcom would focus on bogus elements. First patches (and we are talking about 1 -2 per month max) would be about a few graphic glitches and some text errors.When Sillirion took over THEN they started correcting crucial bugs and declaring future content for both PVE and PVP. Now how would you fell if you expected 1000 possible scenarios for future content and Silirrion gave you a 1001st? Right...thought so
Now finally they are starting doing the OBVIOUS but now it's a bit too late cause development resources are minimal. Proof for that is the slow pace each patch is deployed PLUS each bug solution patch produces another bug!They couldn't even deliver a 2 quest-halloween patch bugfree! My question is WHY?
-WHY on Earth would Funcom strip AOC from it's developers?Wasn't this title making them a shitload of money at beginning?Over a 1.000.000 copies of the game sold at first 3 months .Do the math.Did the game develpment cost more than 40.000.000$. I doubt it....
They could always hire some more after most of the experienced ones went to" Secret World "project. The game feels like it's being handled by less than 10 people. Am i exaggerating? I think not. Look at all those indy mmos that have daily patches and monthly content and they have no problem admiting they are a small group of developers and they even apologise each time a bug occurs. When was the last time Funcom apologised?
Comments
For a while Funcom was doing great things with AoC, but things have slowed waay down for some reason.
Winter + Norway = Hibernation
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
It is almost impossible to turn MMO around. No MMO ever has started s a mess and turned into huge sucess (i have a theory that the very defnition of mess has been altered by WoW though).
Funcom did the right thing. Focusing on their next MMO, while amply supporting the game that has failed them. Throwing hundreds of men on it would be madness
Phew, there are worse companies than that. Cryptics handling of CO and STO makes Funcom look competent and SOEs treatment of Vanguard isn't much better, it took them 2 years to fix the bugs.
But I agree that FC work really slow on AoC and lost a lot of players on it. The game still miss content (or did when I got back after the expansion launch and a month forward), forcing players to grind a number of levels in villas.
It will probably be until 2012 until the next expansion will launch and if they are smart they can finally fill up those missing zones then, like 30-55 and 65-75. They are just slower than postal service with adding more content. I can live with bugs but not with too much missing content.
But compared to STO is AoC a masterpiece in most aspects. Vanguard is finally fixed up but since they lost almost every player the team is so cut that it split lead designer with EQ2 and updating it goes even slower than for AoC.
Does anyone have a link to the patches to AoC since it's release? Would be a nice read to see how much they tried to fix it.
hey ^^ after nearly 7 years with that company ima FC fanboy actually.
i dont saw such a close relation between the developers and the community on any other company.
when we lost Silirrion as Anarchy Online gamedirector in the past, i was sad a little, as he started changes within AO, changes out of ideas from the playerbase. Lucky we got another rocking personality with Means as "new" direx.
So they are working on 3 games with a similar engine, as there are AoC, AO and TSW, were AO actually gets a shitload of changes to fit in the new engine environment.
I think, they simple have the best people available in the world to make small and high effective developer teams.
That is, because everyone (at least from the AO team) was a former player and the communities within Funcom games are very nice anyways what may relay on our gamemasters and forum moderators too, how they handle situations.
Well, from the Anarchy Online corner i can tell you, they are not soo many but they are incredible active.
Its in their forums.
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6&order=desc
- 14 fixes/patches since expansion.
- 70 fixes/patches since launch.
These numbers does NOT count the number of testlive updates, that also are quite high over the time. those are here:
- 64 threads with updates (some different dates then others)
Half of the FC staff are in hibernation. The other half are flash-frozen in their driveway with the key in the car door.
Excuse me but i do not consider a patch or a fix when they shut down servers 6 hours to correct a bug in a dungeon or a quest.Their actual content and bug curing patches are less than 1/3 of what you wrote....
Well I resubed back a few months ago for 2 months. I left because well the game has areas that lack content. Best thing to do was just log off for a few days and level up that wa, really.
Oh well I left because of the same old stuff, lots of stuff still broken. Lots of bugs. The game has some great aspects to it, to bad they don't staff it well.
Honestly how many folks are working on AOC dev Wise.
Seams the game is at a standstill or from what i could see it was.
Oh well I gave it a try, but sadly to say it is just not my cup of tea.
This was the case after launch, but not anymore. They added enough content for you to be able to level to level cap with it, no need for villas or such. If you found that you were out of quests to do to progress, then you were looking in the wrong areas I guess.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
stopped reading here. you dun speak for me, but you pretend you do, so stfu.
The Conan game is GREAT! If your a new player or an old player Dont bother listening to all these whining little babys on these boards who can only cry about low newbie under level 25 pvp?!??! LOOOOOOL
These babys dont even belong in conan if all they cry about is under level 25 pvp in tortage. Trust me if your have a strong computer with a good graphics card then Conan is one of the best looking and best playing games out. PERIOD! With awesome adult graphics to boot aswell, not childish cartoons. Conan is just getting better and better, Come form a crew & try out REAL PVP at level 80 with your crew. This game was meant to be played at level 80 where it shines most. You can solo up to 80 if you wish to take it slow & enjoy pve, But if you want to go fast and be at 80 in 2 weeks you can do that too with a team. The game has it all. Lots of updates are coming in much faster now that the new tech engine is finished and going live this week.
Sign up now and get all your friends to sign up too now with the cool new tiger swift mount offer ending decemeber 20th for all your characters at $7 a month u cant go wrong. You can all be cruising in style and ready for true pvp action at 80 not hanging with the newbs at level 25 like those pvp posers crying on here. Trust me Youll thank me later. Youll need minimum 4 but 6 gigs of ram and a good graphics card like Any of the new GTX 500 cards and u will be silky smooth at max GLORIOUS graphics. Tho an older nvidia 9800gt can push it just barely if u have lots of ram 6gigs. Welcome to true ACTION mmo pvp! The time to return is now! You can thank me later.
NinjaClaw 2 year vet of Conan.
The answer is easy, your statement is false about Funcom making a lot of money, it has always been the opposite, they lost a truckload of money....They lost well over 40 million so far according to their financial statements.
They spent around 60 million,and 4 years of development before release. Box sales where good but Edios and retailers got most of that and for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit. MMOs break-even and then make a profit based on subscribers so yeah if a few hundred thousand players stayed subscribed then it may have broke even.
I think it is strange that they pumped so many resources into an expansion instead of content updates, the expansion was good for marketing but it drove off many players, if those resources where frequent content updates then there would likely be way more players so way more development. Heck most people got the expansion for real cheap or free with a year sub, so they just wanted to keep people subscribed and frequent updates would do that.
Funcom has reviewed all of its assets relevant for
impairment testing. This process has led to
recognition of an impairment loss of around
3,1 MUSD for Age of Conan due to a decrease in
numbers of subscribers for the game. Funcom Q4 10 report.
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=2926123&postcount=7 500 mains/alts on Tyranny in past 30 days - instead of merge servers let's open a new PvP server, again! http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=106427
Atually I would give turbine that title they have done a terrible job with such a great IP. The game has been going severly down hill for a while now. With F2P all they want to do is create store items and not content for player to play.
join us on seastone (btw no cash shop to run your bank account dry)
http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?83070-Lotro-Players&s=d555bfc9e2f4d22851c5359cb80e5b27
That doesn't make any sense at all, a good number of the AAA titles are 50 to 60 million dollars in development and despite them not selling 1 million+ boxes they've still been doing great financially. Heck, Rift is stated to have a 50-100 million dollar budget and they're on the record saying that a few 100k subs they'd already be satisfied with, while in your flawed calculations that'd mean they would already have huge financial losses. In your calculations all the AAA titles except World of Warcraft would be huge financial losses.
Still on your crusade, eh, even after what, 2 years now? Heh, funny. Ah well, everybody needs a hobby, I guess.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
That's an excellent analogous writing. Funcom had this potential gem that could have really added some evolution to the genre, but fumbled. As others have mentioned, I havent seen any one of the mmorpg's that might have had potential in the past 5-years rebound at all, but quite the opposite; none really breaking that 300-500k sustained subscription base 6-months to a year-out, but spiking and lawn-darting. Aion fared much better with their Asian markets combined.
But the reality is that AoC, along with most other mainstream mmo's are just struggling to tread water with their meager player-base, compared to WoW. And that is not an inditement on CCP and EVE as I think they, being outside the mainstream, but garnering similarly sized player-bases as most other AAA mmorpg's, is a badge of Honor.
No mmo EVER sold more than 5.000.000 at launch....And AOC had over 600.000 subs for at least 6 months...
this game shoulda been huge but instead dressed to fail from the start. not even talking about the missing features like drunken brawling.. thats why i went for drinkin cape ffs.
first they promised all kinds of interesting ideas, like gear wont matter that much. crafted gear will be best . cool combo system awesome dungeons. apropably more that ive forgotten. now how did those work ? they had to start spending resources to fix this desing ! whos going to spend time in tedious dungeon for reward in terms sparkling poop it does look nice butdoenst do much good. now gear matters more than it did, crafted gear truly was the best not any more. i played one of those polearm guardians before first gem nerf, good time indeed sorry for the rest of you
combo system is cool but why mages got away from it ? they had to spend so much time and resources changin these things so obviously its going to affect how the game evolves.
then the skills and talents.. oh man. so many useles, bugged, hard to use.. you know those gazillion coupel second buffs and abilities you supose to be using at right time, all the time? with no global cooldown people with macro keyboard have big advantage. and then in first month or so you doing almost complete overhauls on class talents, somethings amiss. again, time well spent.
too much rant i agree so in the end i see how this game should been in development and testing for another year. they would have not lose much id go so far saying it could have been huge succes. graphics/engine are still number 1 in MMO world thats the only thing they did right who knows maybe we would have gotten more open world style.
wasnt there at launch of AO but i hear similar things how messed up that was.
conclusion they rush theyr MMO`s now lets see if third time is the charm and prove me wrong.
Remember that they fired a lot of staff, then opened a new studio in Canada. Such things have its toll on the timeline of a video game.
It was very enjoyable when I played during RotGS' release. Though they did a lot of faux-pas with their handling of the PVP scene.
AoC Never, ever sustained 600,000 at 6-months pos-launch. AoC sold 700k copies or more; it was a great jump-start from teh hype. I wouldnt be so proud, though. Selling 700,000 or so copies, and within 4-months, tanking to 400,000 subscribers, then at the 6-month point, we'd be generous to say they had 200,000 sustained subscribers.
It is reality though, Funcom sold about a million boxes total and 900,000 of those where the first week. It would have been better if they direct downloaded the release but they didn't so there was no huge lumpsome payments, they made 8 million profit that following http://www.funcom.com/funcom/frontend/files/CONTENT/Funcom_Q308_report_2912.pdfquarter but it wasn't some crazy figure that would cover the four straight years of heavy losses from developing AoC and in future quarters the revenues from subscriptions didn't cover quarterly operating or development of TSW and the expansion so they took losses while the population and revenue from AoC kept declining. The profits from the expansion made the last two quarters profitable but it doesn't cover the losses from the last two and a half years. Not sure what you are implying but I doubt Funcom would be making up numbers for the financial reports as that is illegal.
I can't imagine anyone saying 100,000 subs is good as it won't break-even and won't allow for future development. EQ1 had about 100,000 subs and had much less of a budget and charged the same subscription price as MMOs do today. Warhammer got prety much all development pulled after going below 100,000 subs and even though warhammer has done nothing it has a similar population to AoC.
300,000 steady subs plus racking out expansions would be fine as that worked well for LOTRO even before going FTP. Aion has about 1,000,000 subs and does pretty well and got an expansion out pretty quick.
Funcom has reviewed all of its assets relevant for
impairment testing. This process has led to
recognition of an impairment loss of around
3,1 MUSD for Age of Conan due to a decrease in
numbers of subscribers for the game. Funcom Q4 10 report.
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=2926123&postcount=7 500 mains/alts on Tyranny in past 30 days - instead of merge servers let's open a new PvP server, again! http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=106427
Eh, dude, I don't know what you're replying upon, seems to me you're purposely avoiding the point. The point being that you said that 'for a 60m game you need to sell 5 million of copies on multiple platforms to do well and then sell map packs every few months to make a profit', a calculation that is so offbase and wrong that it becomes ridiculous, as everyone else would agree to.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."