How AoC's failure can help WAR

The Greenskin recently did a post on how Age of Conan could affect Warhammer Online in a negative way. While I agree with his points, I was thinking of turning the tables around a bit, and discuss how AoC can affect WAR in a positive way. It's all about learning from mistakes.

Mythic won't rush the release. AoC showed clearly what most players take for granted but developers don't really seem to grasp: a rushed release means a unfinished product, and if it's something customers don't like it's not getting their money's value.
Age of Conan was horribly unpolished on release. I can say that from my own personal experience in the closed beta, early access and launch of the game. If you can't deliver the things you write on the box you are not giving customers what you promise, it's that simple. If you had written "and this we will be patched in the near future" you would tell the truth, however bad it might sound. It's better to promise a whole list of future stuff and deliver them on schedule rather than say you have a bunch of features that you don't actually have. And really, who reads the features on the box anyway these days? If you want to find out what a game is all about you check on the internet.

Customer Support will be good. If you anticipate hundreds of thousands of customers, you have to have the appropriate numbers of people to support that many when they have trouble. The only thing worse than using a product that doesn't work properly is not getting help to fix it when you pay for that kind of support!

You want to know that even if it takes a few hours you will eventually come in contact with a Game Master that can solve your problem. You do not want to wait 24 hours in queue (and see the line in front of you) to get in contact with a GM that maybe can solve your problem. You want to know that if you can't wait all the time for your turn, at least your problem will be fixed, even if your not there. You do not want to log in the following day and find a message that told you that when it became your turn, you weren't there so you have to do it again.

Rather start with too many Game Masters in the beginning so that they have to fight over jobs than too few so that the petitions start to pile up from day one.

Community Managers will actually communicate. People don't have to write twenty pages long threads on forums to get attention of CMs, they will pop in around page two and happily take part of the discussion. Your CMs can't work that much? Hire more.

If all you want is responsible people who can read the minds of the community and what they want, you can get a hundreds of volunteers easily. It's when you want responsible people who can give people the insider answers they want that you have problems. But if players know that a hundred people are browsing the forums reading what they write and forwarding the info to higher places, even if they don't make their presence actually known, they might not be craving so much for the response of the CMs. And by knowing that the volunteers are just forwarding stuff, not actually having a say in anything, they can be a bit more forgiving when they behave unprofessional. Maybe. Ok, not very likely.

The CM's job could consist more of taking part in discussions and compiling the important bits forwarded by the volunteers into a thread posted once per week.

Not having official forums. When I first heard that WAR wouldn't have any official forums I was a bit sceptical. I mean, we have always had official forums for games, it's where the developers talk to us. However, I have seen that Mythic has taken it's own promise of staying active on all big WAR forums seriously, so I'm not sceptical any more. In fact, there are many advantages with this. Not only does it give power to the fan sites, it removes the whole issue of censoring.

AoC's forums are infamous just for this. Threads that direct the negative aspects of the game mysteriously disappear and regular complainers of the game get banned from the forums. What exactly is the worst publicity? Having someone complain about the game, or silencing people who complain about the game? The answer should be obvious, but still we hear about people getting banned on the forums for criticizing the game.
With no moderation power on the various forums, developers cannot really be accused of censoring.

It's all about learning from mistakes. And mistakes from another company are free. Hmm... freebies.

Sandwenches and some wizards

Wizard Sandwenches Wizards and Wenches here reporting live from the beach.

Ok, I'm not really at the beach. I was just looking for a excuse to post a picture of girls in bikini.

I would probably be offended by the ridiculing my blog's name if I weren't baffled why I hadn't seen this one coming. I almost feel like the guy who set up the company Who Represents domain name (this is a true story, you can't make this up) whorepresents.com. Almost.

Since I have got plenty of comments about the name of the blog I thought I would explain the origin a bit. It's what my Age of Conan guild (on Soulstorm EU, gank them when you see them) is called, and fortunately they turned down my name suggestion of "Gutbuster Brigade" (from R.A. Salvatore's books, damn uncultivated plebs!) and went with Wizards and Wenches.

I was planning on doing the homepage for it, as I had done with my World of Warcraft guild (from which most of the members came). I worked out a design, very similar to the one I'm using here now, but didn't get too far on the coding bit. We were looking forward to a bright future of massive siege battles, decapitations, boobs and epic dungeons, but I lost interest in AoC somewhere down the path. Instead I started a blog to air my frustration with AoC and express my yearnings for WAR.

Tomorrow: Scotland and my third annual World of Warcraft guild meeting. Expect amusing stories, frustrating drama, and embarrassing pictures when I return. Who will beat "The Toilet Sleeper" this year?

What do you mean there are no such things as sandwenches?!

Talk around the water cooler

WAR guild beta incoming!
Warhammer Alliance reports that beta invites for guilds in EU will arrive within a month.

Free month ended for AoC - stay or cancel?
The free month of Age of Conan has ended, and now it will be revealed if the game have hooked the players, now that they have to pay for subscriptions. Funcom have not spared on the champagne as the game have been very popular and broken a few sales record. In box sales that is. For MMO's it's the constantly paying subscribers that matter.

Massively asks "has AoC has earned your money for another month?", and got some mixed responses, but the "cancelled" people seem to be in favour. Most people who announce they will stay put a lot of faith in improvements. I cancelled a long time ago, and didn't activate my account when the free month ran out. I have not closed the door on the game entirely however, I might try it out in a month or two.

Dancing, in WAR?!
First they say there won't be /dance in WAR, but when we see a list of emotes, what do we see? /dance! Well, actually what it does is saying"[player] refuses to dance", so that's ok. And a future favourite emote: /waaagh

Blizzard will announce a new game? Woot!
While Ron Pardo couldn't answer the rumours of a Diablo 3 during a keynote speech at GDC in Paris, he more than hinted when he said the following:

So you want me to announce the game before our announcement? No offense, but I think there's like 300 people here, and I'll be ripped apart by 8000 people there [at the Invitational] if I pre-announce it - but it's going to be really exciting. I think everybody here will be really excited about the announcement.

From WoW Insider.

What WAR is all about - video
A new video featuring Jeff and Paul talking about what make WAR special, and some really nice quality ingame footage. Embedded below. Thanks Keen and Graev for the find.



Meanwhile in another part of the world...
And around the writer's personal water cooler, the talk is all about my preparations for my three day meeting in Scotland with my WoW guild (third annual) next week. So much whiskey to consume, so little time. It will be awesome.

Currency of WAR

A interesting discussion began on Warhammer Alliance today, questioning the coinage of WAR. A video showed what looked to be the classic gold/silver/copper system, but was countered with a quote from a attender at a event stating that

"Money is copper silver brass"

So apparently gold is replaced by brass. Outrageous as it might seem, that could be valid because - as a poster pointed out - in history various metals have been used as coinage, depending on access to the metal and what people accept as valuable.

Another poster countered with the statement that in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP), the currency is 1 Gold Crown = 20 Silver Shillings = 240 Brass Pennies (which is similar to the old British Pound system). From there the discussion take on even more kinds of currencies, even orc teeth!

Back when I started playing World of Warcraft I didn't like the way it made silver and copper obsolete after a few levels, and entirely started to focus on gold. If something was worth less than a gold, you didn't really have to hesitate much, just went ahead and bought it. The value for gold decreased fast near the end of my play time, when the daily quests where fast, easy, and awarded large amounts of gold.

I got a pleasant surprise when I switched to Age of Conan where instead of the regular three coin types there was four: tin, copper, silver and gold. By the time you got past the starting area you had a few coppers, for which you could buy a entire set of armor, bought with tin. From that you had to struggle to earn your precious silver coin, and gold felt like a lifetime away. Which it was. By the time I hit level 40 and was eligible to buy a horde, I had no way near the required few gold coins. While in a sense that was bad, as run a lot, it was also good as you started caring about the small coins; if you ever wanted to get that horse, you had to think about how much you spent.

Gold are supposed to be valuable, and the only way it can become valuable in a game is if it's rare. Once you get hordes of gold you stop seeing it as a valuable thing. I can look back at my current campaign in Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, where our Dungeon Master gave us hundreds of gold right from the start, and thousands later. So when we got a mission with a reward of thousands of gold I didn't feel interested, as the reward felt small in my eyes, even thought it was considered huge in the world we played.

Recently I tried the free trial of EVE Online. I was bored and looked for something to spend my time on until better titles came out. I hadn't felt that much intrigued by the sci-fi theme, but the feeling I got when watching videos and reading the news about how corporations joined another in a alliance and raided a system of another corporation, in much the same was a news reporter can announce that a country in Africa had crossed the border and raided a city in a nearby country, dazzled my mind. Epic was the word that came close to my mind. I could write more of what I felt about it, but the topic of the post is currency, so I will skip to that part.

When you started the game you had the smallest of ships, and as you played for a time you could afford larger and larger ships, the price for those biggest in the class you were skilled to have never really being more than half a million. Then you start browsing bigger ships in the Market, seeing what is to come, and see the really huge ship designed for battle going for hundreds of millions. It's then you start feeling small and wondering how the h3ll you can assemble those vast amounts. That's a road block for players, looking up to the top of the ladder.

Me, I started researching in how players are actually supposed to get there, but others might just throw in the towel and say "can't bother!". I almost felt that way when I played the AoC beta and realised how much gold you needed for a mount compared to how much I had. Unless you know that you get more money as you progress, staring up that ladder can really be discouraging.

I look forward to what WAR has in store for it's economy, everything from coins and mounts to trading and crafting.

Age of Conan become... better?

The latest Clan of Conan (newsletter) is filled to the brim with new stuff, king Conan rejoices.

PvP system
One of the things they add is the much anticipated "consequences system", where people who kill people much lower than themselves, or corpse camp them, will get punished. And trust me, on free for all PvP servers, this happen a lot. Apparently the system will work with a certain "fugitive status", ranging from blue to red. When your character become red, players who kill him won't get their own fugitive status affected, probably meaning that high level players can kill and corpse camp your character without consequences. The players marked in red will also drop some of their high quality loot when killed, making it a little bit more interesting.

I'm certain the aspect of becoming a badass criminal, with everyone and their mothers grouping together to kill you, will be tempting for some. And at the same time, being a bounty hunter and hunting fugitives for glory, loot, and the gratitude of lower level players, will also temp other players.

The PvP system also introduce PvP ranking system with gear, which for those who have played WoW won't be the least different. You kill players, you gain ranking, you get gear. Nothing innovative or interesting to see here, move along people.

Quests and dungeons
The 35-40 level range, which I have complained and grumbled about, will get more quests to hopefully ease levelling. They will also add voices to about 60 quests, much to my surprise. I thought we wouldn't see any more voice-overs after the beginning area and the specific lore quests every ten level thereafter - I stand corrected. However I don't really approve of adding voices to quests. It's not that like the voices are impressive to begin with (captain Redrick anyone?), and the time spend on this could be much better be used elsewhere.

The infamous dungeons Pyramid of the Ancients and Treasury of the Ancients will receive some "special loving". Anyone who have been in them will know that they are a joke of a dungeon, far from finished. I never realised the purpose of placing a unfinished dungeon in the game, it only frustrate new players and seem very unprofessional.
They will also add a new high-level dungeon in the Thunder River area. And speaking of high level content...

Improved loot
The game advertised far and wide that they would have plenty of different armor sets to distinguish you from others. That's far from truth, in fact many players complain that they look exactly the same as everyone else when they level. So apparently we will see more visually different armor sets, and making drops more interesting. I would take that with a grain of salt if I were you.

Interface
The horrible interface will become at least a little bit better, I guess we have to be happy for that. The infamous chat box and it's lack of customization will get some customization, rejoice. The friends panel will be improved, but a few main issues still exists, in fact, they simple seem to circumvent it. Adding people to your guild or friends list require you to search for them and checking boxes, together making what in normal games are a simple system, horrible complicated. The system is still there, but now they have added buttons on the friends panel to directly take you to the search box with the "add as friend/guild" check box already checked. Yea that's their solution, I'm not shitting you.

Where is the stand alone guild window? Where is the basic and simple /whois function? Funcom seem to not only have missed the point, they shot themselves in the foot. Improved dance system? How about getting your priorities straight?

Age of Conan's Endgame - is there any?

During the last weeks several of of Age of Conan's first endgame encounters have been killed for the first time. At the spear point of progression can be found the familiar guild Nightmares Asylum known from World of Warcraft.

First to beat the dust by Nightmares Asylum were Vistrix, a huge dragon, with the help of some other guilds. It was done on the server Fury on EU, the server I played on before my guild rerolled on Wildsoul because Fury was too crowded. The entire fiasco with the availability of PvP servers on release is enough rant to fit into it's own post, so I will spare you.
Champion of the Honorguard and Yakhmar, a frost worm, followed. And what all of the encounters had in common was that they were horribly, horribly bugged. Encounters reset randomly, corpses disappeared, and some didn't even give any loot. That the endgame is buggy should be surprising to none, seeing how unpolished the rest of the game have been so far.

Fura, guild leader of Nightmares Asylum, posted a thread on the Age of Conan Raids and Tactics forum about the lack of endgame content.

So the citys are not working, the pvp system is not working, the hi end raids are most defiantly not working, the ui way off from being finished, there are serious game breaking bugs still in this game and I feel that its even worse than most betas out there. and were paying for this.....? Shouldn't there be some kind of law preventing them from false advertising a game as they were boasting about high end raiding, massive pvp, great crafting etc... and none of its in the game. isn't this false advertising or something?

While it's not really false advertising, the lack of polish is a valid point. It's not something one would expect from a product on the release date. Even for a MMO, which are never complete, I consider the game to be too unpolished for release.

Oh and my activity in Age of Conan is pretty much zero. My guardian have been collecting dust since a few weeks, and the recent stealth nerf to one of the actually good combos Overreach just sealed it's fate. I enjoyed playing a bit as Herald of Xotli and Conqueror, where I got both to around level 14, but I'm afraid that unless I can find a class I could actually level to 80 with, the game is closed to me.

Changes for AoC - new content and bigger breasts

Seriously, you have no idea how many times I rewrote that title.

Age of Conan's developers seem to be doing something good for a change. In a "Letter from the Game Director" they announce that they will focus development on certain areas. Not a stupid move from Funcom, as the focus points they are publishing are the main issues that players have been shouting about on the AoC forums (still closed to public, got to keep the complaints hush hush).

We will add content, specifically in mid-late thirties and mid-late fifties and make the leveling speed smoother in those areas, reducing the need to grind.

Something I have experienced myself, some level ranged are horrible as they lack quests to take you to the next level range and new quests.

We will have an overhaul of the PvP system – adding consequence and a host of small things.

Not very surprising, after Funcom got some bad publicity on ganking people in groups. And not only do they show lack of foresight by not setting firm policies on PvP from the beginning, but also badly trained Game Masters to represent them.

Not to only take one side, I must also say that the "victims" of these GM talks is the infamous guild Hordes of Goonheim, who require members to pay real money to be in guild, and use that money to destroy the game by creating bots, farming gold and generally cheating in any way they can. And also being general a**holes to anyone who dare criticize them, a bigger bunch of douche bags you have to look far and wide for.

And this in turn leads to

We are staffing up Customer Service, Quality Assurance and Community departments!

With qualified people I hope? Giving every player in AoC who want a GM tag will only make things worse.

And further changes will be

• We are fixing bugs you reported through all channels we can get information from.
• We will add a new large outdoor region in the 55-60 range this summer!
• This is only a small taster! More information about the exciting summer and fall Roadmap will come the end of the next week!

Overall very good changes, so maybe, maybe the game will be worth spending some cash on in waiting for WAR.

Breast sizes in Age of Conan
And when mentioning changes, Funcom have announced the following:

"Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have
had the size of their breasts changed. This is due to an unintended change
in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the
so-called morph values associated with character models and the size
of their respective body parts. We are working on a fix for this and your
breasts should be back to normal soon. The plastic surgeons of Hyboria
apologize for the inconvenience."

The picture here below should display the terrible change. Am I the only one who thinks the right picture looks better? Female warriors shouldn't have a large breast requirement, small breasts means slimmer figures, which could probably mean the difference between live or die in Hyboria. And this in turn caused people to get upset. Aereniel on the AoC forums writes in the post titled "Massive Mammaries – Hyboria and the Female Form":

Yet when I created my character during early access, the obstinate slider that controls the female chest area stoutly refused my commands to make breasts any smaller than those approved by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Tiny titties, it seems, are out. So too, are humongous funbags. Try as I might, the slider would not allow mammaries that require a forklift and a three-man team to manoeuvre. Needles to say, I felt dismayed and homogenized. Mine was to be a carbon copy of every other female avatar, with a bustier that had a "Hyboria Approved" sticker attached to the only cup size known in Hyborean times, the Crom-ordained D.

I was creating a Bear Shaman, so I refused to be disheartened by the lack of choice. I do, however, feel genuinely sorry for those players that hoped to create an athletic assassin, or perhaps an emaciated necromancer. In Hyboria, it seems, female necromancers receive their tutelage under the greatest necromancer of them all, Hugh Hefner.

And Aereniel got a point. MMO's are all about choices, and having something as a smallest-breast-limit is just plain stupid.
It truly is a age of, er, Conan.

Naughty or Nice - choices in gaming

In Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition the alignment system (which decide if your character is good or bad) will be getting smaller. The previous 9 different alignments become 5, but other than that nothing is changed. The mention of alignments stirred something in me that I have felt for a long time, just couldn't identify. Where is the ability to make choices in MMORPGs, to make your character more than just a name?

The basics with alignment is that if your character is chaotic evil, he will kill kittens just for the fun of it, and if his paladin is lawful good he will help innocent and uphold law and order. Even if your real self would not do any of these things. Playing as your character and do what he would do instead of your real self is the basics of roleplaying. And it's really fun.

In recent years we have seen a huge success for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG, a acronym that make most people slightly dislocate their tongue), mostly thanks to World of Warcraft who is so tuned to the masses that it has 10 million subscribers around the world. Other MMORGPs are Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan and Dungeons & Dragons Online just to name a few in a fast growing group. What all of these games have in common is that they are just simply massive multiplayer games with roleplaying in them that you play online.

Yet there is a disappointingly small amount of roleplying in them, despite the name. You create your character with customized look and a name, and as he play more he gain more levels, but that's pretty much the end of what the game has in common with role playing.
Now, I'm not saying that all MMORPGs should force people to roleplay, that would make them lose so many subscriptions that they would have to shut down. But the actual roleplaying part of these multiplayer online games has not improved a slightest bit in the recent years, despite all the new titles. Character customization gets better, Age of Conan is a proof of that, but there has been no addition of that thing that shape your character. I'm talking about a alignment system.

A alignment is pretty much a short-short version of your characters history. No human is born evil, or good for that matter. Everyone is shaped in the history of their past, and further shaped in what will come in the future. If you start training as a apprentice to a priest or paladin in your youth your chances of becoming a good guy is pretty big. If you are whipped by your father every week or start out in a bad neighbourhood there is a chance you will turn out to be evil.
Not that it's just black and white; the most evil tyrant who torture people every day can be kind and loving to his dog, and the good priest who heal poor people might have a fantasy for small boys.
Just because it says "lawful good" at your character sheet doesn't limit your options. For someone to be good or evil there must be the option to be the opposite; without choice there can be no good or bad. When you reach the prison chambers in the tyrants dungeons there is choice to let the prisoner out, in which case you would have done a good action and your alignment moved towards good, or you can choose to leave him there, and your alignment moves towards neutral, or you could let him out just to kill him, and your character turns more evil.

The most recent MMORPG Age of Conan have a feature that is obvious in any roleplaying game: conversations. However Age of Conan's conversations serve no purpose other than to tell a story, there is no difference between telling them you will gladly serve or say you will kill them. They will just laugh and send you along anyway. This is of course a step forward if you compare with World of Warcraft's quest dialogues that's nothing more than a pointer where the quest mobs are. But where is the choices that make a difference? What will it take to get a real massive multiplayer online roleplaying game?

Good and Bad things about Age of Conan

After having spent several days without playing Age of Conan, and the simple reason that I just didn't feel like it, I logged in today to give it another go, trying to find that lost spark.

It was back to crocodiles, bandits and rhinos in the Stygian desert, river and oasis landscape. I did five or six quests, and just as I was killing a quest mob for a seventh the game froze and I got a black screen with weird stuff on it. Yea, graphical error. It was just to close down the game. And I couldn't be bothered to start it again.

So instead I went into the account page and cancelled my subscription. Not just for the graphical error mind you, it's the building feeling of discomfort and a sense of not getting value for the money that made the decision. And to further rationalize why I felt like I felt I decided to make a list of things I liked, and disliked, about the game.

Read the full post »Things I like about Age of Conan

The combat system
Hitting stuff in melee with big sharp things have never been so much fun. Interesting combos and not relying on auto attack is a refreshing wind in today's MMOs. Head chopping and blood stains on the screen adds another point to the fun.

Graphics
The graphics are stunningly beautiful, not arguing there. If you got the computer to view them and still run smoothly that is, not many does.

Quest system
Having your quest objectives and where to kill said quest mobs on your map is really sweet. Funcom basically took what Wowhead is for World of Warcraft and implemented it into the game. No more following obscure directions in the quest log and tabbing down to a website to find where the h3ll that rock is.

Not that the system doesn't have it's flaws. It's unable to display quest areas as anything except circles. Which means that if quest items is on a straight road or river for a large distance, the system will display a circle from one end of the road to the other, which will indicate that quest items can be found a large distance on the sides from the road. It happened to me a lot of times in the beginning before I figured why this was.

Things I don't like about Age of Conan

Instancing
The idea of making more than one instance when areas get to crowded, to ease levelling and not having fifty people on the same spot moving around, is a nice idea. But it has not been thought trough. The thing about a Massive Multiplayer Online game is that is supposed to be massive multiplayer. A MMO is supposed to be a virtual world, and limiting the number of people in each instance reduce the feeling of being in a living world. The problem with many players on the same quests still exists in spite of instancing. Respawn time for quest mobs or objects are horrible, expect 5 minute wait times if someone took the quest item just before you. World of Warcraft solved the issue with lot of people on the same spot competing for quest mobs by making spawn time shorter, and it works wonders.

Also, by dividing the world into segments that you can't visually travel between make you lose the world feeling. Instead of a world it feels like you are in a big corridor, with doors on each side leading to different areas. The door to the south lies just beside the door to the north, and there is no difference in time to travel to either of places, be it the far frozen north or step into the door to the local inn. It feels like being in a big box, the freedom that usually MMOs stand for is not there.

Having several instances of zones make grouping so difficult that it's just stupid. If you for example answer a tell in the chat about people looking for members for quest X, you need to enter the same instance as the rest of the party. And in a party of six, it's possibly that you are each in your own instance. Deciding which instance to join takes time, and when you switch between instances you get teleported to the closest graveyard. Which can be quite frustrating if you are standing at the quest objective.
Apparently there is a summoning system for just this problem, so that you can summon people to your location in your instance, but that function doesn't work. That it doesn't at the time of release is beyond stupid, it is the difference between a Working and Fail group system.

Interface
The entire interface is horrible. A simple window for guild listing and /who players, would that be too much? Right now your guild list get thrown into your friends list, which is a annoying bit of black box as it is. You can't search for individual players without inviting them to your group or your friends list, and when someone whisper you it's impossible to find out what race, class, level or even guild he belong to.

There is also that is referred to as a "Looking for group" system. Exactly how it works is a mystery, but I have gathered this much from the few times I bothered trying to use it. All groups in your zone is listed, and they can apparently check that they want members. What they want members for cannot be specified. So the basic LFG system is the good ol' chat.

And the chat is also a joke. It can have several tabs, and you can select what channels to view in the window. There is the normal chat, combat chat, and you have the System and On Screen Messages. System show important things like rolls for items, money received, but also totally useless things like that your spell casting was interrupted (by you moving for example), and slightly useless things like your quest goal to gather 15 rhino horns is 3/15 done.

Here is another bit where Funcom show a obvious lack of simply thinking things through. The usual Party chat (/p in WoW for example) has been renamed Group and accessed by /g. That would be fine, except that used to be the Guild command. Guild is instead now /gu, which feels just annoying. Why not name groups party? World of Warcraft won't sue you, Funcom.

The On Screen Messages is even worse. The game is very eager to pop useless information into the middle of your screen, and every new piece of information is displayed in a big black border that stretch across the entire screen. And there don't seem to be a limit how many you can have on your screen at the same time. Do fast looting of 2 quest items from 3 dead mobs and you will have 6 big black bars covering your screen making you not see that a demonologist is starting to cast a big ball of fire on you.

All the information from these black bars can be shown in the On Screen Messages channel, and it's on by default. The first thing that you do when you start a new characters should not be to spend 2 minutes configuring the chat, but that's exactly what you do.

Lack of transportation
You are able to ride a mount at level 40. Unfortunately, they cost 2g plus 1g for the training skill, and the average player will be happy if he has collected 50s by the time he get to 40. You can get a free mammoth or rhino if you had pre ordered, but what the information don't tell is that these are not really mounts used to travel with. They are siege and combat mounts, you can get along faster by running.
And there is no sort of transportation between zones except running. Well there is another way that most players use. It involves jumping from high cliffs and then select the closest graveyard where you want to go. Yea, the death's don't really have a penalty. It's first when you experience the joy of running from zone X to Y to Z for the fifth time that you start appreciate World of Warcraft's flight path service.

And other things that are just as annoying
That simply starting your game from the patcher takes way too long time.
That you have to watch five company logo movies every time you start. One time is enough?
That you can't logout to character selection screen. You have to login again.
You can only have a certain amount of total characters (think it is around 8) on your account, not per server as is the ordinary.

Summary
In my opinion, the negative outweighs the positive. The instanced system absolutely destroy the world feeling, and they won't change such a major part of the game. The other parts on the negative side can probably be fixed in patches over the time, but instancing in the major problem.

People who haven't paid for the game has really no clear idea of how the game is. The game is very fun the first 20 levels which is the starting area, and probably most of the time have been spent on this area. Most game reviewers don't seem to have bothered levelling further than this before giving their judgement. The game after level 20 is a whole different matter. There are no more voice conversations, and probably never will be, and fun quest lore turn into "gather 15 rhino horns" followed up by "gather 15 crocodile tails". And those in turn are followed by "deliver this stuff to my cousin in [zone furthest away possible]". Your standard grind MMO in other words. There are a few interesting quests out there, but they are few.
The lacking content, necessary functions, major bugs and a stupid interface make one impression: unpolished. It should have needed at least a few months more in beta to get everything right. Many praise Funcom for a very smooth launch, but what they mean by that is that servers didn't go down every fifteen minutes.

I was in the (what some call fiasco) Early Access of Age of Conan, and it was nothing less than a last closed beta. Which I and other people paid for. When I ran in to a bugged quest that, from a quick inquiry in chat knew that everyone had trouble with, I contacted a GM. I was promptly told that they would and could not fix the quest, but that it would be fixed when the game "launched". You don't need more proof that you got fooled and were playing a beta than that.

Overall the game lack that which are most important when creating a MMO: a Vision. Age of Conan uses the knowledge from World of Warcraft and implement the good ideas that Blizzard worked out, but other than a interesting combat system and better graphics, it's nothing new under the sun. Upcoming Warhammer Online on the other hand, seem to have no end to new revolutionizing ideas and content, but don't have impressive graphics. As countless gamers have said: graphics are nice, but content are king.
My prediction for AoC is that it will get plenty of copies of the game sold, but in a few months not many will still be here.

The game now has one month of play time left to prove me wrong over cancelling my subscription.

I guess the Freshness is fading

I logged in to Age of Conan today and my awaiting level 34 guardian. The absurd amount of time it takes just to start the game still bothers me. I have fallen into the routine of starting the patcher and then reading the forums while it is "scanning local files" for a minute.

And speaking of the forums, the official AoC forums (which people who don't already pay for the game can't access) is really starting to look like a proper MMO forum should look like. If you have browsed the World of Warcraft forums for a day you know what I'm talking about.
The major points on the AoC general forums since launch have been

• How bad the game is
  
• That the game will fail
  
• The player is quitting

Writers compete against each other on making the worst Doomsday Post and including as many of the above points as possible. Why other normal people want to know this is beyond me. If you have access to the general forums you have already paid for the game, and then you are perfectly fine to find out how the game is on your own. I even saw a topic today that complained that the writer spent more time complaining on the forums than actually playing the game. I'm not sh1tting you, he actually wrote that.

The only AoC forum I read is the guardian forum. Every topic in there is either a question or some advice. There is even a few "I love the Guardian forum" topics, that's how good our forum is. What is discussed is currently how tanking and threat actually works. When you try tank and you need 10 seconds to grab aggro from someone who just body-pulled, something strange is going on. Everyone is just baffled (always wanted to use that word), and the total lack of numbers on combos and feats make it really hard to know what the h3ll you are doing wrong.

But as I wrote I logged into my guardian and tried to level a bit. I saw my levelling parter had a even bigger head start and that I needed to catch up 3 levels. I travelled down to Stygia and started doing some quests that had grey difficulty to me, because I know from previous level adventures that I really need to milk every quest of it's sweet juicy experience if I want to get to level 40. Currently the 35-40 level range is horribly lacking of good quests.

The beginning zone is 1-20, then there is three different zones (frozen north, green wild lands, and blazing deserts) for the 20-37 range. The next zone range is 40+, and you start running low on quests at around 35-36, and almost none at 37-39.

After five minutes of crocodile killing that didn't give me experience to make my bar even twitch I suddenly felt very bored, so I sat down and logged off.
Then I stared at the creation screen for 30 minutes trying to start a alt (or possibly main, guardian had started to lack it's former glory), but couldn't decide on a class that sounded interesting enough.
Maybe the freshness of the game is starting to fade, which would be pretty bad considering I hardly have even started.

A End and a Beginning

I recently quit World of Warcraft, and started a new career in Age of Conan. Why?

I started playing in the open beta back in '04. I rolled a paladin and managed to level him to 41 or something before beta closed and we were pushed into retail. That means my first and last characters were paladins, which I find fitting. I have always been drawn to the holy warriors in games. Not that "holy warrior" is no way near a proper description for WoW's paladin.

Over the years since the game launched I have been playing almost non-stop. No farewell posts and staying away from the game until the addiction fever kicked in. I have levelled five characters to 60 (priest, hunter, druid, rogue, warrior) and two characters to 70 (paladin and hunter). That's quite many characters, considering some can play for years with the same. I enjoy the feeling of starting from scratch too much, I have the same problem in most games that include character progression. I don't even want to start talking about my time with Baldur's Gate.

I'm in the perfect guild, which I have been in for soon three years. I also did the website for the guild, design and coding, take a look. Everyone is friendly and mature (in a sense). The average age is quite high, probably somewhere around 25-30 if we ever bothered to check. I started in it with my warrior, then switched to paladin when Burning Crusade was released. And a level 70 hunter alt also in the same guild.
I was class leader for the paladins and officer, so quitting was not something to be done lightly. But raiding has become so mind-numbingly boring, healing on trash in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple is not as exciting as I was thinking before I entered those places.

Then Age of Conan was released, and as I had played the closed beta and experienced the game for a while, I did the easiest thing a gamer addict can do: switch game! My plate and shield wearing paladin in World of Warcraft is now a plate and shield wearing guardian in Age of Conan.
Wrath of the Lich King seems promising, but I will remain cool until I see what they plan to do with the game and paladins if I will ever officially return to WoW. I have play time for another month, so I might pop in and see how it feels.
And then there is Warhammer. The more I read and see about it, the more I want to play it. The guys and girls that is making it really have a Vision (unlike, for example, Age of Conan - they just did a MMO), and I can't wait to experience it.

My guardian is named Leto and is currently playing on EU Soulstorm (PvP). Wave if you see him, or you might find yourself face down in the mud with a red mark the size of my shield in your face.