Out with the Old, In with the New

Funcom appoints new Producer and Game Director for Age of Conan

Former Producer and Game Director Gaute Godager has chosen to resign from Funcom after working on Age of Conan since the initial conception, and he leaves the company after 16 years. Godager was one of the original founders of Funcom, and leaves a large legacy, having contributed to making Funcom the largest MMO company in Europe. “I have done my very best making this fabulous game, but I have concluded there are elements which I am dissatisfied with. I have decided to act on this, and as a result I have chosen to leave Funcom. It is time to get new, fresh eyes on Age of Conan, and I wholeheartedly support the appointment of Craig.”

Silirrion Speaks

Letter from the Game Director- Anarchy Online Bulletin Board

There isn’t any easy way to start this letter to the community. For me personally it’s definitely a little sad to be here writing this to all of you that have made my time as Game Director on Anarchy Online so very special. As many of you will already know it has been announced today that I have been asked to take a new role leading up the team on Age of Conan.

Greetings! – Age of Conan Forums

It’s definitely a little strange to be back here on the forums after having been involved in starting up the original Age of Conan community over three years ago (and a big hello again to those of you who have been around since those early days!). I have been very excited to see how the game and the community around it have developed since then and I am thrilled to have this chance to guide and support your adventures in the world our team here has crafted and built with such hard work and dedication.

Initial Reactions are Positive

Age of Conan Forums

It is the best news AoC could have got. I am very sad because Sil was an excellent GD for AO and I fear the void he will leave behind will be too great to fill

I’ve been back playing more AO than AoC lately, so I’m really torn over deciding if this is good or bad. Good for AoC no question though.

Age of Conan Forums

He has been the GD at Anarchy Online. I can tell you from personal experience that he was the best thing to happen to that game. He cleaned up a lot of problems and added a lot of new content for both the hardcore gamers and casual/social players. You should expect to see interaction and communication with the community vastly improve.

Can Craig turn the game around? Well the announcement has convinced me to leave my subscription running for just a little bit longer, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. However, I may give it a month or two before giving it another serious go.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

• Lacheish Plains near Conarch Village
• Pointain near Old Tarantia
• Purple Lotus Swamp near Khemi

Common Resources

With the exception of Cotton/Cottonwisp all weaver and skinner resources are mob drops. The rest are harvestable nodes.

Rare Resources

Rares can also drop from the mobs in the harvesting instances.

Posted by Ulija on http://mmorpg-info.org.

I’ll start things off with my bookmarks:

EU Forums
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/index.php

US Forums
http://forums.ageofconan.com/index.php

General Reference:
http://www.wikiaoc.com/The-Age-of-Conan-Wiki
http://aoc.wikia.com/wiki/Age_of_Conan_Wiki

Feat Calculators
http://feats.goonheim.com/
http://www.conanarmory.com/feat.aspx?id=11

Bacchus’s Gathering FAQ
http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=22680

Ranger Bows and Crossbows
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=62450

Entertainment
http://www.thebrasse.com/comic-category/1

So go on – what are your favorite Age of Conan sites? Which ones have you bookmarked because you find yourself going back repeatedly for more info? And also, what reference sites are missing that you’d like to see? Maybe someone else can help.

Now, I’m off to play for a change! ;)

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

DarlingOne found an odd problem with guild creation:

Why in the name of all that is Hyboria is the word Drunk forbidden in guild names??? Is my version somehow censored?

This is ridiculous!

Tahitoa, Head Moderator, had a rapid response:

Hello

Concerning the Naming Policy in game and the use of profanities on the forums:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Social Guidelines
Please respect other users and do not use foul language and profanity in your posts. This includes trying to ‘mask’ such language by substituting letters or symbols.

Foul language and profanity? What about the drinking cape – and the NPC’s asking you if you are drunk? The point of the adult rating was to avoid having to worry about being a bad influence – and certainly there’s no shortage of booze in the game. Ah, but it’s not about that.

Tahitoa wrote:

Originally Posted by DarlingOne

What are we supposed to understand and in what way is that word a profanity? And why would Drunken be a masking of Runk?!?!?

Sometimes it does happen…for example, the word *runk* is added as it is offensive in some countries…then you go in game and try to use the word *drunk* to name a guild…the result will be d**** due to the filters.

So is not *DRUNK* that is filtered but *RUNK* only.

Hope this makes sense

Well, it turns out that runk is a Norwegian slang term which can also mean masturbation. NOW it all makes sense. Drinking isn’t a problem and hey, raping and pillaging is just a way to work off some steam. But don’t you consider taking matters into your own hands, you’ll go blind! Find yourself a prostitute, you pervert.

This is an adult game. We’re allowed to drink alcohol and we’re allowed to touch ourselves “down there.” And even if the word is just too rude to subject Scandinavian adults to, then perhaps some clever filtering is required. Trying to ban every swearword in every language to apply to every language, no one really thought that was going to work, did they?

It could be worse. The initial chat system on the Mines of Moria website had a rather bizarre filtering system which blocked the hell in hello, along with sm, tit and other such useful morphemes – so the fun became finding phrases for people to struggle to decipher. My personal best was smelly blacksmiths petitioning tailored stitching which turned into [FILTERED]elly black[FILTERED]iths pe[FILTERED]ioning tailored s[FILTERED]ching.

Just when the poor people of Scunthorpe have finally managed to bypass school filters, we hit a whole new range of bizarre banned words based on simplistic pattern matching. But if anyone does set up a guild called the Drunken Runkers, send me a tell. I’ll join!

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to see the Voice of Crom on the US forums. Also, the devtracker tab results claims there are no matches and right-clicking Sharum’s name to find further posts from him only works on the European servers. So I have been limited to the Euro forums for my information except where someone has given a direct link to a post on the US forums. I hope this is a blip and not intentional!

Sharum cross-posted the details of the Male vs Female attack-speed issue to the Euro and US forums on Monday afternoon.

Let me begin with saying “yes, we here at Funcom agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug”. We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender, and we have been working on making the necessary adjustments to correct this issue for quite some time already.

He explained that some 800-1000 animations that are affected and warned people not to expect to see a fix for another three to four weeks.

And finally, I have to stress that even with our internal goal set and everything currently proceeding on schedule I cannot currently promise that this will be patched to Live at the projected date. There’s a lot of stuff that, while totally unrelated, might cause a certain patch to be delayed or even pushed out without containing this data. What I can promise though is to return with another update about a more specific patch date as soon as possible.

Sharum then gathered up questions from the resulting feedback threads and posted answers, including these interesting points:

Originally Posted by Sennacherib
Will only female combo damage be affected, or will this result in different damage output for everyone, male and female?

Almost every combo-finisher will have its length adjusted during this process. In most cases the female ones will be made shorter, but in some cases (if we are unable to make the female version short enough without impacting the visual quality) the male counterpart will be lengthened. Once the animation-length has been finalized every combo will then be re-balanced based on this new value.

Originally Posted by gurgelstock
Sorry but I still dont understand how this could have happened in the first place and therefore my tolerance is very low regarding this matter. How did this happen, what where you thinking, “lets just animate all females at different speed than males and see where it takes us”?

Because, as stated previously in the post, not a single movement or combat animation in the game is hand-animated; it’s all MOCAP data.

So MOCAP (motion capture) is the cause of the difference in length as opposed to some over-enthusiastic artist carefully hand-drawing each movement as I had imagined: shame. The net result is that Funcom are going through all the combos again for every class and gender.

As of today, news was good:

Originally Posted by eafreak
Hehe, anyhow, just trying softin up the mood. As a 3d animator, character animations is a real pain to fix up. However, on a production side of things, fixing one animation (which is by all means do-able), could mean a great moral / balance boost to the community. I am sure that the community will support you in this.

Probably, but we also risk causing more strife by unbalancing things further with this type of approach; which is why we decided to just do it all in one big bulk. It looks like we’ll be done with the majority of the tweaking during this week, so we’re actually slightly ahead of schedule for the time being

Reaction seems to be mixed, ranging from “yet another nail in the coffin of a game released too soon” to the positive glow of seeing game issues addressed directly. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of other bizarre bugs to be complaining abut while this one gets fixed.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

Could it be true? The owner of a female Herald of Xotli decided to test it. Jssa27 took two characters, both level 61 and naked, using the same sword and attacking the same mob. The result was clear – specific attacks varied as much as 11 seconds between the male and the female character doing the identical move.

My first test shows females do indeed swing much slower then males , as well as much slower combos depending on the attack directions used.

Jssa27 proceeded to check the damage output and found that over the course of 50 swings, the damage output between the male HoX and the female HoX was the same.

Result: Female Heralds of Xotli do substantially less damage over the same amount of time.

Sexist pigs! How dare they? Well, they didn’t intentionally set out to show that girls can’t fight. It appears that the culprit simply was an ill-thought through process within development. It would appear that the animators who lovingly and painstakingly designed every swing and twist of the hips during fighting might have indeed paid too much attention to the female form.

The animations on some of them are clearly that little bit slower – but the combat round itself is based on the timing of the animation – so although it may look a bit more graceful, it also means that the swing is slower and over time, there are less swings.

So the phrase “you hit like a girl” suddenly has real meaning.

Thread after thread was started about the subject on both the US and the European forums – asking if it was true, if the difference was intentional, whether the devs intended people to choose between boobs and dps. On the 11th of June there was a post stating that the difference, if it existed, was not intended.

There should of course be no difference between a male and a female character of the same class (other than the looks ). But we have gathered the feedback about this and are looking into it.

And then there was silence.

The fix-it-now crowd have been less adamant than one might expect. Everyone realises that animations are an expensive and time-consuming process, it seems clear that any fix would want to avoid dumping these. However, giving the characters in question a 25% damage boost would give a great advantage to female shape-shifters, who could return to normal base-level damage and then get 25% on top. The user-base is in agreement that it may be a complicated fix – but an acknowledgement of the issue and a statement of intention didn’t seem too much to ask.

A Funcom Developer finally made an appearance on the European Forums on one of the threads begging for an official response. Svein Erik “Sharum” Jenset responded repeatedly in the thread, saying that he would do his best to get an official response for the end of the week(end) and describing it as “a major issue that has involved several departments” as an effective confirmation of the issue.

The userbase showed a fair amount of frustration the following day – why the wait? Sharum tried dealing with it rationally:

So, to summarize: when I said that I hoped I would have an official reply ready and approved by the end of this week(end), I didn’t mean approved by marketing so we could put a PR spin on this; I meant approved by the other department (leads) that have been involved in the process. Yes, it takes a little extra time, but at least I can then say that I’ve done my utmost to ensure that both my co-workers and the community is pleased by the outcome, and that I don’t post any information that is incorrect.

As the evening went on, his temper began to fray:

Oh, I can just about feel the love on these boards at the moment…

Yes, I understand that a lot of you are frustrated about this issue. Yes, I understand the need to come up with all kinds of what I, at the lack of a better term, will dub “conspiracy theories”.

What I don’t understand however is your need to publicly attack me when I make a post promising that there will be a big update soon. For the sake of the community, which I care about and want to communicate/interact with, I will keep my promise. However I will honestly say that I’ve never been any closer to canceling a board account and never again visiting the forums of a game, be it released or still in beta, than I was directly after reading through a few replies in this thread.

And finally; no, this is not a threat about me leaving. Like I said above I care about the community, and I wish to interact with the community. However, there are people that seriously should re-think how they project themselves to the public. Being a paying customer gives you certain rights, but it does NOT give you the right to treat anyone like trash.

Meanwhile, the same-thread-only-different started up on the US forums, asking: Who else is waiting for the “Official” position on female attack speed? Famine, the US community manager, jumped in to say nothing much:

Well I was going to touch the original threads on this but we can start here for now. I had reviewed over some of the reports that the developers were working on for the update. This included a few issues where the attack speeds were indeed not on par with their counter-component. This of course did not make it in just yet but it’s very close to being addressed. So we will have some updates on these reports (combos included) very soon. I will keep my eye on it as we progress into the next update. Hopefully we can get some more info on this later this week.

The players informed him that Sharum was working on an update and he replied that he would speak to Sharum to find out if he could get an ETA.

Sharum, who gets to post on both the US and the Euro forums, cross-posted to state that his update was waiting on translations and expected to be on the boards early next week – sprouting a whole new set of grumbling on both sides of the Atlantic that Funcom were delivering PR spin rather than a fix. Then Sharum ended up in the same state again, reacting to US posters complaining that they shouldn’t need to wait for translation and that Europeans were receiving special treatment.

Sharum tried to stay calm:

I sent it off yesterday, and quite late in the day if you look at my post. Now, even if we were to assume that the translators are otherwise just sitting around and doing jack **** while just waiting for me personally to dump something in their lap for translation, and knowing that today is the last day of the work-week for many departments; it’s really quite literally NOT days until the beginning of next week.

This time, he limited himself to two posts rather than half a dozen – I think he’s getting the hang of dealing with forum trolls! Meanwhile, stay tuned for an update on why you shouldn’t hit girls this weekend early next week.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

In Age of Conan, your primary statistics are Health, Mana and Stamina.

Your attributes help to define your primary statistics, as follows:

• Strength impacts melee damage (except daggers), resistance to melee attacks and affects stamina regen
• Dexterity impacts melee damage with dagger and ranged damage, ability to evade and the chance to perform offhand attack. It also affects the maximum stamina pool and stamina regen
• Constitution affects health pool as well as both stamina pool and stamina regen
• Intelligence impacts spell damage for mages and affects mana pool and mana regen rate. It also defines the ability to resist fire, cold and electrical damage.
• Wisdom impacts spell damage for priests and affects mana pool and mana regen rate. It also defines the ability to resist holy and unholy damage

You start the game with these attributes preset and they will increase automatically as you level up. You can also increase attributes through equipment.

You can see the affect of the attributes on secondary traits by hovering over your combat ratings:

• Defense rating is affected by your strength.
• Attack rating is affected by your strength for most melee weapons and by dexterity for daggers and ranged weapons.
• Magic Rating is affected by intelligence for mages and wisdom for priests.
• Evade Chance is affected by dexterity.

Protection is your ability to mitigate magical damage as opposed to physical damage which is mitigated by your combat ratings. Magical resist is a general resistance and is in addition to the specific resist type which is applied. That is to say, if you receive fire damage, your resistance will be based on your fire resist added to your magical resist.

• Magical resist is affected by your Magic Rating.

  Theoretically, mages can increase their magical damage and thus their magic rating through intelligence and priests can increase their magical rating through wisdom. Fighters and scouts may use a combination of the two.

• Fire, Cold and Electrical resists are affected by intelligence.
• Holy and Unholy resists are affected by wisdom.

Note: this information was collated using the manual, the in-game documentation and some simple tests. There have been reports that secondary effects (for example spell and combo damage and magical rating) are not being affected by the primary stats as expected. As of writing, there is no official response to this issue.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

Actually, I’m pretty sure they are aware of this – I don’t think anyone in the game industry actually believes that these Chinese walls are for the benefit of the players. Funcom has disappointed me twice: first by forcibly separating Europe from the US and then by coming up with a ludicrous explanation as to why:

First of all, when it comes to our main server centers for launch we are splitting them into two primary territories; North America and Europe. This is the core divider. This means that your primary server destination will be decided according to where you buy your retail box. So, North American gamers will only get the choice of North American servers, and vice versa. It is important for us to mention that this is done in order to ensure a best possible experience for US and European players respectively. We are aware of the fact that many would like to play with their friends across the ocean, but we have decided on this approach for the overall performance for the largest amount of players. Should you play on a server on another continent it would mean a potentially poorer gaming experience, latency wise, and we would like to avoid that at all cost. As most of you are avid MMO gamers you are well aware of how important latency time is in a genre like ours (not to speak of FPS games;), and this comes as a consequence of that. We are therefore not doing this to set up artificial boundaries, but to give you all the best possible time in Hyboria. If there is an absolute wish for you, or your guild, to play on another continent you will need to do so at your own initiative, meaning having to secure copies from abroad.

This is a mature rated game, so we are all adults, aren’t we? They say that most of us are avid MMO gamers. So explain again why Funcom decided that we are not capable of choosing the most appropriate server?

Now really: if latency is such an issue, then clearly the way to deal with it is to rank the servers in order of best connection. Remember for a moment that your best connection is not necessarily your closest connection. Think of it like a subway or tube system, where your nearest station is based on the route of the connection, the hops you take to get from A to B, not how physically close you are to it. Distance makes no difference.

But you know what I really want to know? Why latency is so damned important for my forum browsing experience. The FPS on those gathering guides must be something pretty awesome – because nothing in the above explains why else there would be two different forums (on the same set of machines) with two different log-ins. If you bought your box in London, you can’t take part on forums.ageofconan.com. I can’t actually see this as anything except as the “artificial boundaries”
Funcom state they are trying to avoid.

Turbine finally saw at least an inkling of the light and has deigned to allow European customers to update the Lorebook after months of campaigning that there are lots of English speakers in Europe, honest.

European subscribers to The Lord of the Rings Online™ are now able to use their Player Account System (PAS) username and password to log into and edit the LOTRO Lorebook for the first time.

This is a fantastic opportunity for the European community to take part in the day to day updating of everything to do with The Lord of the Rings Online and help to support the global community with our wealth of knowledge.

Right, a fantastic opportunity which you took away from the European community in the first place. That’s what is so bizarre about this – the implication that new ground is being broken as opposed to false barriers being knocked down by the people who put them up.

What would you all say if I told you that I was checking your browser and, if it stated that you were located in the US, you could not comment on my blog? Would that not be totally crazy? So why are we accepting this from game distributors, who are then on top of everything else claiming that it’s for our own good?

Meanwhile, full credit to Sony who still offer choice to their users. They’ve just added a section on choosing a server to their FAQ – offering their users information to make a decision. This compared to Funcom who have condescendingly explained that “as most of us are avid MMO gamers” we should understand why they’ve decided on our behalf rather than letting us create the gaming experience that is right for us.

*splutter*

I had already pre-ordered the game before I realised what they were going to do but I have to say this has taken a lot of the joy out of it for me.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

But I have to admit, I did laugh. And then I watched it a second time and laughed some more. So here you go: Good Times with a Horse on AoC!

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.

The race you choose has two game-play effects: it determines your basic appearance options and restricts the classes you can choose.

Aquilonians can play Guardians, Dark Templars, Conquerors, Priests of Mitra, Barbarians, Assassins and Rangers.

Cimmerians can play Guardians, Dark Templars, Conquerors, Bear Shamans, Barbarians and Rangers.

Stygians can play Tempests of Set, Assassins, Rangers, Demonologists, Heralds of Xotli and Necromancers

Soldier Classes

Guardians are high mitigation fighters in plate, the archetypal tank.

Conquerors are dual-wielding fighters with group buffs and strong mob debuffs.

Dark Templars are high damage fighters with dark magic, similar to a shadow-knight.

Priest Classes

Bear Shamans are priests of earth magic with fighting and healing abilities.

Priests of Mitra are the primary healing class with basic fighting ability and cloth armor.

Tempests of Set are mage/priest hybrids with both heals and lightning based nukes.

Rogue Classes

Barbarians are a toe-to-toe DPS class with special enrage abilities and the ability to immobilize their opponents.

Assassins are the traditional stealth DPS class with fast damage and the ability to use poisons.

Rangers are a ranged DPS class with the ability to wear medium armor in order to survive for brief periods of melee combat.

Mage Classes

Demonologists are sorcerors with fire and lightning magic, effectively a wizard class.

Necromancers are the primary pet class and do cold and unholy damage with their spells.

Heralds of Xotli are mage/soldiers wielding 2-handed weapons and causing high damage, with the added benefit of being able to turn into a demon.

Posted by Taymar on http://mmorpg-info.org.