MMO Gamers

I finally managed to make it to level 50.  Actually it wasn’t that hard.  Sadly it was mostly done solo, with only a couple of duos and no group dungeon crawls or anything like that.  Which is a shame because I much prefer a good ol’ dungeon crawl then soloing.  At least some of the time.

So I reached 50 which is significant in a couple of ways.  Firstly I move up the feat tree and get access to a new spell.  I’m Lightning specced so my new spell is Cyclone of Set.  Which is, surprise surprise, a cyclone.  It’s a ground target spell so you click the spell and then click the ground where you want it.  I does AoE damage and lasts a fairly long time.  It doesn’t do a lot of damage but then I only have one point in it out of five, so damage will increase.

The other significant thing is I now have access to spellweaving, which I seem to suck at.  I’m not really sure if this has any real practical application.  By the time my spellweaving is nice and hot I could’ve already cast three spells.  And I can’t see a use for it in groups or PvP.  It is kind of cool though.  I’ll have to practice with it some more and figure out how best to use it.

One last thing.  I was questing in the villas in the Noble district when I got toasted by four fire magi.  The results speak for themselves.  Pretty cool Funcom.

Ok, I’ve only just discovered this video and it’s been up on youtube for a year, but hey, I was never a big WoW fan. But this is magical. LMAO!

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?

If there’s one class which I’ve really noticed a shortage of in Age of Conan it’s the tank class.  While tanks have always been difficult to find in MMOs it seems more-so in AoC, particularly during the quieter play times.

I had a few quests in the zone next to Laceish Plains.  I’ve forgotten for the life of me what that zone is, but it contains lots of level 45 epic mobs.  My Tempest is currently level 46 so I’d been ignoring these quests, waiting for a good group opportunity.  I saw someone trying to form a group for this very zone and, after about half an hour of trying, this person had some success and the call went from LFG to LFM.  So I figured I’d join also and get these quests done.

Our group was comprised of two Tempests of Set, a Priest of Mitra, and a Demonologist.  So we had a four man team made up of three healers and a mage.  Unable to get a tank so far we decided to try our luck without one.  We had three healers after all, right?  Well, our group wiped about five times in 15 minutes.  It was a massacre.

It’s not the first time I’ve been in a group with three healers, and it’s a rare occasion when I’m the only healer in the group.  In fact, from my experience I could easily believe that the most popular class on my server is the Priest class.  The only thing that makes me think otherwise is that I’ve seen a few “looking for healer” calls for the higher level dungeons i.e. 65+.  Perhaps people tire of playing healers around the mid level range and as a result we see a shortage of them in the higher levels.

Well I haven’t written much lately, nor have I played much lately.  Work has been crazy busy for me last week and this week and since I do almost all my writing at work, now is the first opportunity I’ve had.

So I haven’t had the time to write or even read anyone else’s blog.  Fancy me having to work instead.  My weekend was busy too.  My sister and her man came and stayed with us so it was a socially packed weekend.  My sister lives 500 miles away so I don’t see her much.  She does, however, play Age of Conan as well so we certainly keep in touch via the game.  Since we weren’t playing Age of Conan we instead spent the weekend getting drunk and talking about Age of Conan.  We also watched both Conan movies, so we managed to get a Conan fix, even if it wasn’t in the MMO.

I did manage to read Simple Complexities and saw that the author went back to Vanguard, seeing as how he got free time compliments of SOE.  Vanguard was the game I was playing before Age of Conan released and one that I was enjoying.  Not quite enough to not try Conan but I’d managed to get a cleric up to level 38.  So I was actually missing Vanguard just a little when I read his blog post and I decided, what the hell, I’ll run the patcher and update the game and if I get an urge or the Conan servers are down I can just jump in and have a play.  So I ran the patcher, got to the account login stage, enter my account details, and WTF, I don’t have an active account.  Confused, I log into my account on the SOE website and see that I have the free play time for Everquest 2, and also free time for Star Wars Galaxies.  That’s it.  No free time for Vanguard, MXO, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Planetside, all the other SOE games I have; just EQ2 and SWG.  Perhaps I’d cancelled my VG sub too late to qualify or something; I was playing VG up until about a week or so before AoC released.

What the hell is going on SOE?

Well anyone trying to log into Age of Conan will find that the servers are still down, or rather went back down due to server instability, i.e. crashes, after the first patch.  They’re scheduled to come back up at midnight GMT which is a total of 13 hrs of downtime.  Bad Funcom, very bad.

Of course, they apologies for the inconvenience, and for me it is a huge inconvenience, because I was hoping to get a couple of hours of playtime in before real life took over and I had to go out.  I also have family visiting this weekend and an otherwise jam packed weekend so I doubt that I’ll be able to play again until probably the middle of next week.

And I’m pretty sure the rest of Conan’s subscribers are not happy either, because when I went to the forums I found this:

vBulletin Message

The forums are currently down for maintenance

Please check back soon

At least I didn’t see another Tempest of Set nerf in the patch notes.

EDIT:  At 2240 hours GMT I was able to connect to the server and commence patching.  The community forums went back up also.

I left my Age of Conan guild yesterday.  It’s been something I’d been contemplating for a few days now (hence I haven’t contacted you Openedge).  I hadn’t been with the guild long and my first impressions were a great bunch of people but a guild that needs some help.  Now I’m not saying I’m the world’s greatest guild master, but I did run a successful guild in EQ2.  That guild is still going and has been for nearly 17 months.  So I had some ideas, made some suggestions and offered my help.  So what happened?  Well I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty but there’s been some drama and, lately, some membership issues.

When I joined the guild they had over 30 members.  I played Tabula Rasa when it released and was in a guild there.  That guild had about 45 members, but after the initial 30 days of included play time, we found we only had about 15 members.  The TR guild rapidly disintegrated until it was no more.  Now I expressed my concerns about a similar thing happening in Age of Conan and the reply I got was “I don’t think we need to worry about that”.  Well, guess what, we did. 

So the guild chat has become a pretty quiet affair but worse still is the behind the scenes whining and blaming.  There is also talk of a merge with another guild, a merge that seems inevitable.  Personally I would’ve preferred to see a strategy to rebuild but it doesn’t really seem like the GM is all that interested in saving the guild.  So, after much deliberation, I came to the conclusion that all this drama was too much like real life drama and not enough like MMO gaming goodness so I’ve moved on.  I have my sights set on another guild and hopefully this one will work out.  If not then I may have to write an expose on the status of guilds in Age of Conan.

If you’re one those people who will not be renewing their Age of Conan subscription and, subsequently, will be without a game to play, fear not.  This month sees the launch of a few MMOS so there is something to keep you occupied.

Requiem: Bloodymare is a free-to-play horror/fantasy MMO and has paid subscription options also.  I played the open beta for a time until Age of Conan released.  A nice enough game and has both PvP and PvE servers.

Dreamlords – The Reawakening is a free-to-play MMORTS if you prefer your strategy games.

Rohan Online is another free-to-play MMORPG.  This one offers Township Battles with guilds taking control of towns for one week.  It also has cutesy pets.

As for me, I’ll be busy in Hyboria.