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Regarding Age of Conan’s Early Start…
By Cameron Sorden | May 19, 2008
Talk about a shaky way to start your game launch… As if it wasn’t bad enough that Funcom charged its players $5 in the first place for our “three-day early start,” it was a slap in the face to hundreds (thousands?) of players when they found out that Funcom’s “supplies are limited” disclaimer actually meant that supplies were limited and were unable to get a slot in the early launch program because Funcom had limited bandwidth for people to download their client. They could have fixed that in part by letting their beta players, many of whom probably pre-ordered, patch their beta clients instead of re-downloading the files (but that would have made too much sense).
Of course, for those of us who did manage to order our early access before supplies ran out and had the privilege of shelling out five bucks to Funcom, things haven’t exactly been working as advertised, either. The early access was supposed to start on Saturday, the 17th — it only took them most of the day to get the servers up and running. I think I was able to log in and make my character around 7 PM. Then, I was busy all day Sunday with family stuff and most of the day today with graduation, but I planned to log on for a bit this evening and get ahead of the crowds during my last day of early access… except that apparently they’ve killed the servers for five (supposedly only five) hours this evening to “get them ready” for launch, whatever that means. So, my three-day early start that I had to pay five bucks compete with tons of other people for actually only ended up being a 48-hour head-start anyway?
I know it’s a small thing in the big scheme of things, but come on. Small lies and half-truths are a bad way to build trust with your core player base. Sigh.
I do have to admit that it’s a relatively smooth launch, as they go, though… The game itself seems to have had it’s performance smoothed out quite a bit, too. I’m probably just venting my minor annoyances.
Lets see how the first week or two goes. I ended up going with a Herald of Xotli. I like the idea of being a sword-swinging, demon-morphing mage who looks totally harmless until she transforms and starts breathing fire everywhere.
See you all in Hyboria.
Topics: Random |
May 19th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
It has been a much better launch that at least I expected. The five hour (now seven hour) down time started just as I arrived home, so that did not work out too well. But overall I think I have received my five bucks worth.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Yeah, at least we get 10 days of play time for our money too, so I can’t complain too much… but still. Meh.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Yeah the 10 days actually helps. At least my money went to something.
I went with the Tempest of Set, Cam.
You thought about joining Boomjack, Cody and I with the TTH guild?
May 20th, 2008 at 9:11 am
We’ll see. I’ve got a bunch of RL friends and possibly WoW guildies on the server too and I’m not sure what’s going on guild-wise yet. I want to make sure that I like my class before I start joining guilds and all that.
I’ll let ya know when I’m settled.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:45 am
I am worried about their patching. Beta clients required a new client download almost every phase and its a BIG client download. Even patches were monstrous.
If they can’t support early access, I’m not sure where that leaves them for their first large patch.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
All these posts about Conan. It’s tempting, but right now I’m passing because it’s not standing out enough from WoW. I quit WoW a while ago, but y’know, I still use it to set the bar.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:04 am
[...] Many people reviewed Age of Conan. Many many many, too many for me to remember whose I’ve seen. Here are Ethic, Saylah, Keen and Graev, ferv0r, and pretty much all of Tobold and Bildo’s sites for late May. Need a leveling flowchart? Jalum’s review that I linked earlier is probably non-relevant, especially since the miracle patch(es) seems to have miracled pretty well (by varying accounts). I hear a strange mix of “great launch,” “meh, yet another WoW clone with 5% difference,” and “game-breaking bugs and exploits” (to say nothign of the early launch). [...]