Tempus Fugit

...and the hours melted into days and the days into weeks.



I don't believe that I suffer from the MMO variety of OCD, but the launch of a new game does tend to engender a type of tunnel vision in me.

At the moment, if I'm at home, I'm either asleep or online in Age of Conan.
If I'm at work. I'm either carrying out the random whims of my Boss or sneaking a peek at the the AoC forums or Massively for my daily fix.

In fact, if I'm honest, I usually have the websites opened up underneath any presentations or analysis he has me working on at the time.

I can see some of you sat here reading this and nodding sagely in agreement, having done the same on a regular basis at your own places of work.

Don't deny it! You know it's true!

Anyway, the one certainty in the launch of a new game is the plethora of bugs that accompany it. I think I've yet to see a brand new game go on general release with a perfect client, stable servers/connection and few to no bugs or glitches.

Emergency hotfixes and patches are so commonplace these days that people very rarely raise an eyebrow when they occurr.

Obviously they reserve the right to bitch and moan, but anyway...

AoC is no exception in this case and, while there can be no doubt that the game does have a high level of polish, the first few weeks have had their share of bumps.

The proof of this can be seen most prominently on the official forums, where fanbois, whiners, 12 yr olds and CM wannabe's alike gather to berate or defend the choices and actions of FunCom and it's this that I wanted to write about.

It's kind of like the Forums version of the Bartle Gamer Psychology results!

I guess I'd be 75% Fanboi 90% CM Wannabe 25% Whiner 10% 12 yr old!

Recently, the general threads have been plagued by people expressing their outrage at FunComs handling of the problems which have been identified in game.

Now I can't deny, I've already had cause to /petition a GM twice so far myself due to broken quests which prevent you from progressing your character past the starting zone of Tortage. When the Games Master finally arrived in all his/her lvl 100 glory complete with shiny armour, the service was definitely above average. They literally appeared to me and discussed the exact nature of the bug and precisely what steps I had taken before taking any actions to rectify it.

The actual problem was solved in about 2 minutes flat and I got a sense of the GM knowing exactly what to do and having a conversation with me - rather than some scripted macro responses that GMs from a certain other MMO are well known for.

That said, some people have had slightly different experiences in this area.

For example, seeing the following in your chatlog is not exactly reassuring:

>/Petition Status
>
> Your petition is currently 195 in the queue

As more problems are arising, people are reporting having waited for over 7 hours in many cases just to get their issue seen to. That's 7 hours of not being able to use your main character.

So what do you do?

You roll an alt right?

Right.

Ok, so there you are running around Tortage...again.

Doing the quests you've finished the previous or the same day...again.

And you decide to test a theory.

>/Petition Status
>
> Your Petition is currently 134 in the queue.

Cool! You can check the status of your problem while playing your alt. That should make things easier. I mean, if you can see how your fault is progressing in the queue while playing a different character, it must be tied to your whole account right? Not just one character.

Surely it must be...

Surely...

So, over the next few hours you watch your place in the queue get closer to the top spot. And then, as you feel the tension mounting, you check one...more...time.

>/Petition Status
>
> You do not currently have an open petition.

W T F ??

You log back on to your main character only to find a buffered message from a GM. "We recently attempted to contact you regarding your petition 'Bugged Quest: Unable to leave Tortage due to quest-specific boss mob despawn', please feel free to resubmit your petition if the problem persists".

/wrist

It doesn't exactly paint a positive image for potential customers. Especially following on from FCs pervious bad publicity of the Open Beta client debacle.

The fact remains that this game is still in its infancy. This isn't an excuse, nor should it be used as one. But I think that some peoples expectations are more than just a little unrealistic. Some gamers are already using the 'screw this, I'm off back to WoW' emo post with a little too much enthusiasm for my liking. These same people are more than likely lashing out in frustration without remembering why they came over to AoC in the first place.

...either that or they are actually Blizzard employees sowing the seeds of propaganda!

I do believe that FunCom could do with a few more GM employees on their books to help in this formative period. Not only would this stop a fair few players from getting quite so pissed off but it would have the knock-on effect that those same players wouldn't then start whining on the forums like little biatches!