MMO Gamers

I’ve managed to get a few hours of Age of Conan in and I have to say I’m still enjoying it.  In fact, I’m enjoying it a lot.  According to some blogs AoC is losing subscribers.  From what I can gather people are unhappy with some performance issues as well as numerous bugs.  This is where I differ.  I’ve been quite fortunate in that I’ve experienced few problems.  Here are some of the issues people are having and my experiences and opinions on the whole thing.

Downtime twice a week for patching.
There have only been three MMOs that I’ve played from release.  Tabule Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Age of Conan.  All of these games had bugs and performance issues and were heavily patched.  Unfortunately I think this isn’t going to change with new release MMOs.  Funcom are now patching once a week so that should satisfy some people.

Performance issues and crashes.
I haven’t had many crashes at all.  After a patch a couple of weeks ago I started to experience the Out of Memory crash.  It ruined my fun on the night it started happening, but I haven’t experienced it again since.  Maybe I’m just lucky.

Broken Quests.
Yes, I have at least three of these in my quest log.  It’s a little irritating to not get the XP or quest reward, but it’s been pretty easy for me to get over it and move on.

Crafting is Broken.
Probably.  I’ve started Gemcutting and Weaponsmith, but I find harvesting so unbelievably boring that I can’t do it for more than ten minutes, so my crafting hasn’t advanced at all.  People are complaining about losing gems from crafted items due to bugs, gems that they paid good gold to buy/craft.  Well ok, that would give me the shits.  Having to grind for gold or craft another sword when that time could be spent doing something else.

Nothing to do at higher levels.
Ah now this is where I’m lucky.  I’m only level 46.  I’m still discovering new areas, grabbing new quests, meeting new players, and playing with my guild mates.  In fact, I have so much to do that I sometimes feel like I’m spreading myself thin.

I’m probably coming across as pretty optimistic about AoC but I read more bad comments than good ones, so I’m trying to balance it out a little.  For me AoC is still fun and I look forward to logging back in.  Perhaps if I were a hardcore PvPer I’d probably be unhappy with the PvP, or if I were a raider then I’d probably complain about raid dungeons or the lack there-of.  If I were one of those players that rushed to the level cap I’d complain about no end-game content.  Maybe in another 10 levels I’ll start complaining about the levelling grind.  But right now I do the occasional PvP mini game, I PvE, group when I can, I’ve started crafting and I play with my guild mates.  I’m selling things on the trader and I’m having fun.

At least someone is, right?