Age of Conan - 700,000 accounts

Sorry, this comment puzzles me. Is there some problem with the apprentice system? I’ve heard that partying with someone of significantly higher level means you make tons of exp.

EDIT: This thread reminded me I haven’t played in over a month, and I pulled the cancellation trigger.

I have to agree with folks who say it’s the visceral nature of the combat that keeps them comparatively entertained. I’m still tickled by finishing blows and I do pay more attention to combat because of the directional/shielding system.

What’s really keeping me right now, though, is experimenting with other classes. Maybe I’m just not hardcore enough but it takes me a while to work through a given character class until I’ve got a good handle on what it really can or can’t do (as opposed to just siphoning dubious wisdom from forums). The classes in AoC are different, and interesting, enough to keep me coming back to try new ones out.

I think my main’s at L60 but I’ve a L26 alt and many around L10 I’m messing with. My current project is working with some friends to see if we can’t simulate a Zingaran privateer crew as a party. Let’s see what we can do with four crossbowmen, a conquerer and a priest! How will X, Y and Z work together? May be my imagination but it does seem that at low and mid levels, at least, that unconventional party compositions are far more likely to work in AoC than in other party-based MMOs. Could be because most classes can do more than one thing semi-competantly.

That does lend itself to replayability for me.

I’m not quite sure what the apprentice system is. The tutorial and general availability of information in AoC is rather lacking. If I didn’t have friends to explain things to me, I would have been completely lost.

My friends were a higher level and as a result they were barred entry from instances. We could travel together as long as we were in a main area, but they could not follow me into an instance, and I’m not just referring to a dungeon or cave. I mean large chunks of the heavily instanced Hyborian landscape.

I’m playing an Assassin and while the animations are cool I struggle with the directional key combos. The fact that there is a massive bug affecting the female avatars in the game doesn’t help either.

I can understand playing the different classes though. I have heard that they are so very different. What I can’t understand is how you can replay Tortage over and over? It is at least 10 levels too long. I loathed that place by the end. I could not wait to leave.

I don’t think anyone expects AoC to have 700k active accounts having sold 700k boxes at retail. The actual number is somewhere closer to 500k. What you guys seem to be missing is that LOTRO has under 150k. For AoC to drop that much would be a disaster of epic proportions.

Also funcom still hasn’t activated their buddy passes, they haven’t offered a free trial, and the 360 version is still due in Q1 2009 (although that will probably slip).

The apprentice system allows a higher level player bring the combat level of a lower level player up to within 1 level. I’m not sure what instances you’re talking about in the “Hyborian landscape” that didn’t let you in, though. The only one I know of that’s not a personal quest instance that doesn’t let you in after a certain level is Tortage.

And speaking of Tortage, at this point I’ve got questing there down to a science. I have every character slot except one full of characters who have gotten through Tortage and it’s so easy for me now to do the good quests and ignore the time-wasters that it’s not so bad anymore. Although I’m still always glad to leave, it’s certainly no worse than going through Elwynn Forest for the 15th time.

Tom went over this on Fidgit, but just an additional $0.02:

Sales and account numbers are not very significant to MMOs, especially considering Eidos is probably getting most of the box money, not Funcom (though who knows what their contract says). The whole point is recurring revenue from real honest-to-god monthly subscriptions, and those subscriptions have to be convinced not to churn for at least a year to be very meaningful.

I notice, by the way, that Gamestop is currently featuring Warhammer Online far more prominently both on their front page and on the PC game page than AoC, so maybe next month it will be Mythic and EA’s turn to crow over their sales figures.

But until someone actually documents their paid monthly subscriber levels (as opposed to mere user levels), all this is really a snooze. At say 300,000 subscribers, these smaller games can do OK, eventually paying off the investment if the subs don’t evaporate in the first year, but until someone hits a least 1,000,000, it will just be a blip on the radar, or rather a bump on the road for Blizzard.

As an aside, it is perhaps needless to say that even Blizzard usually inflates their own numbers in most of their press releases by counting Internet cafe users and other users who do not directly send revenue to Blizzard accounts – but of course they do get some revenue from those people, albeit indirectly, and of course they do have a huge core of real subscribers, too; it just looks better to quote the larger numbers.

Who knows how many boxes were actually sold. Funcom does an excellent job of marketing and information spin control. But however many were sold, the game is designed around looking good for the first 40 levels and drawing in the initial sale. At least after the first month, there doesn’t seem to be much effort put into the last 40 levels and in retaining subscriptions.

I overdosed on the game and got to the mid 60’s before life intervened and I was out of town for two weeks. When I got back I sat down at the computer and the thought “Well, I could grind out another level on AOC or I could play something fun.” I hit the CIV4 icon. I killed the subscription a few days later.

Yeah, that’s a major issue with the game. They should let you start characters at level 20 in other cities after you level your initial character to 50 or 80 or something.

Funcom does, and being a public company they disclosed it-- 700k copies were sold at retail. They did not disclose the number of active accounts.

I suspect this to be a more or less accurate guess, but from where do you get that number? Turbine never releases their numbers, and in terms of figuring revenue user estimates based on estimated server utilization will be distorted by fallow lifetime memberships that have already given the revenue benefits of 2 or arguably 3 years worth of subscription to the company even if they never log in after the first month or just return now and then to check out new content releases.

Edit: OMG but that’s a long run-on sentence. Leaving it unchanged for posterity to marvel at.

Umm… coughsirbrucecough. OK, fine, but they’re the only numbers we’ve got.

I really think he does as well as anyone can at guessing subscriber levels, but he has acknowledged how hard it is to achieve accuracy.

I know that for AC and AC2 (while I was at Turbine) his curves had the right shape, but were consistently low by 25% to 50% due to all the fallow accounts that people continued to pay for. Back in those days Turbine at least told the team members how well the games were doing…

Looks like the female DPS bug wasn’t fixed 2 weeks ago. I myself have a mangina, although I haven’t played in a month, and find it fairly upsetting. Riots to come, I expect.

I’m gathering from some of these comments that getting to 80 in AoC is like a 30-60 day affair. Is that really true? Unless it’s like Guild Wars, where the level cap is simply the game’s way of telling you “this character is ready to play the real game now”, then I’d find capping my character in under two months incredibly disappointing. Even in LotRO, which is the “easiest” MMO I’ve played to date I’m still only 43 after 5 months or so of playing.

I also think that 700K figure has to be inflated with trial accounts. The way it’s worded seems to back that assumption, and If AoC had actually SOLD 700,000 retail copies (or even 500,000 for that matter) you’d think the Funcom folks would be shouting about it from every rooftop.

As for LotRO being “bland”, I don’t see it personally. Perhaps if you have little to no interest in the books/movies to begin with then it might seem a bit dry and a little too heavy on the lore, but part of the big draw of the game is feeling like you’re a part of events from the story as they unfold. If you rush your way to 50 while skipping most of the Books, then you miss out on one of the best parts of the game. And while the classes may not allow you to play as Legolas, Aragorn or Gandalf, I don’t really want to play as those guys. I want to be Slainte, horseman of Rohan, working my way up the scale from glorified stable hand to Lord of the Riddermark. I want the story to unfold with me in it, and I want my completed deeds, quests and books to be a marker of who and what I am. Classes are extreneous to that, and honestly aren’t all that important in the game overall. I’ve done instances with groups of all melee characters (no healers) and we survived just fine. I’ve also been the only melee guy in groups of Minnys, LMs and Burglers and we’ve survived just fine. I like not being dependant on classes to get things done.

I guess they can’t hack in more damage for women because the code is gender neutral except for animation? A certain irony there.

I’m not really into LotR, and I enjoy LotRO. The incredible depth and attention to detail comes across even if you don’t already know about the Last Stand of Men at Dor Zuglug. I also like how they made a reasonable attempt to have a low magic setting (with the bizarre exception of the Lore Master, where they make a half-hearted effort to keep it low magic that doesn’t really work in my opinion). It sounds like Age of Conan doesn’t bother to keep this aspect of the source material.

The ability to do most group quests with random groups of classes in LotRO is pretty cool. The role of each class changes depending on the makeup, at least for a flexible class like the Burglar. I did one of the hard areas (Dol Dinen) where everybody except for my Burglar was a DPS class. By doing pure healing Fellowship Maneuvers we were able to stay alive. That said, some of the nastier fights (and ones that involve keeping NPCs alive) seem to have stricter requirements for grouping.

Perhaps if you have little to no interest in the books/movies to begin with then it might seem a bit dry and a little too heavy on the lore, but part of the big draw of the game is feeling like you’re a part of events from the story as they unfold.

I love the books, and the ability to walk around inside a lovingly-rendered Middle Earth is the prime draw of LOTRO for me. It’s not a trivial thing.

But the gameplay, the crunchy clicky stuff, the reacting to things in combat and making decisions accordingly, just isn’t there in my experience, which is limited to taking a minstrel, champion, and loremaster up to around level 9-12 (minimal by MMO standards, but still an investment of many hours). I don’t doubt it gets better, but in my experience it was already pretty damn good by this point in WoW, so that’s the bar I measure it by. And as much as LOTRO has the lore and the world and whatnot, a major chunk of the gameplay still boils down to “go out and kill stuff.” I’d better enjoy the killing or I will be inclined to play something else.

I did like loremaster best of those three classes I tried.

Wow, lame.

Guild Wars is an order of magnitude faster than AoC. My friends that hit 80 in under a month did so by playing a lot (the same with me). We’re talking almost every day for 4-5 hours at least.

That’s the thing for me with AoC. It isn’t that it necessarily breaks, or even bends, the typical MMO forumula in terms of questing, but it’s still damn fun to kill those 30 glophoppers for their 30 doodads. It’s what kept me playing City of Heroes for all these years. Doing missions isn’t particularly thrilling for the most part, but the fighting you get to do along the way makes it worth it.

I’d say this figure is more like 4-6 months at the most. Companies, except for maybe Blizzard, cannot plan on keeping a customer that long. Funcom definitely shouldn’t be doing it.

— Alan

Uhm, this is very wrong. But then I guess it’s about the meaning I give to “plan on”.