Age of Conan - Launch Day Blues - Redux

As has been noted over the last week, an issue has arisen in the ranks of the "Customer vs Company" forums that is Age of Conan's community.

This all started due to an issue that took place with an event planned for this past weekend. The event, noted as a gathering in a specific zone and location in the game was to take place at a specific time. I will not go over the details, as I have already touched on it in a previous post here (OMG ..What did I miss..?)

The event did not go off as scheduled. This then turned into a blame game, of Funcom stating that the "customer" misunderstood (wait, isn't the customer always right?), and that this was to be a player driven event...but technical difficulties ensued (huh?), and the voice of the players said "Funcommed again!"

The forum wars began. Players were infuriated (especially the ones who stood there for 3 HOURS waiting for something to happen), the threads started to fill up with flames, discussion, and rhetoric...and the ban hammer fell. Threads mysteriously disappeared, posts fell into "oblivion" (as Famine likes to call it).

This then led to another event being announced. But, of interest, this was a "quit the game, and cruise websites" game. The player could win prizes going on a scavenger hunt of various websites that either discussed AoC or were news outlets with a lot of pull (IGN for example). After the last failed event, this just did not go well.

Players were upset that they had to quit their games to crusie websites for prizes. Some of the websites also happened to be in foreign languages to other players (Spanish, German, Italian), and this of course led to Forum Wars Two. Why run an event outside the game (again, player driven) and then have some of the hidden gems on sites that some may not understand?

Now ...of interest... any mention of these events in any light of opposition led to more post deletions and thread removals (I was a victim of a post removal for mentioning that I "thought" one of my posts had been removed...lol).

And all I could think today is...Launch Day all over again. You would think they would learn...

But, to no avail, as this seems to just keep going downhill. Conspiracy has been mentioned (and deleted) that events cannot take place in game as a license deal may prevent these events.

Adding insult to injury is the patch 1.05 situation. Being mentioned as a major overhaul of the game, one of the big deals about the patch was a discussion of gear changes. Yet, there is NO CHANGE to loot tables, and Craig noted "It was not a high priority" in so many words.

So, if gear is to matter, but gear still looks the same, and the god awful loot tables (with a massive amount of raid loot rot happening) do not rectify this...how is a player to care about these changes in the first place? (this also does not mention the 1.05 patch making Tier 1 raids near impossible due to needing Tier 1 gear to run the raid in the first place...that is another story)

I start to think the company wishes their games to fail due to some tax law that gets cash in Funcoms pocket, the same way Uwe Bolls films were crap, and a loophole in German Tax laws helped him recover from these flops.

Funcom is the Uwe Boll of MMO's. Not a great place to be.