So here’s my very brief take on this: the core concepts of the game were sound, even if their execution was in some cases awful. It was given an unfair rap by people used to different things (eg. people who came from WoW who didn’t like zoning and instancing – it’s fair enough you don’t like it, but AoC had never promised a contiguous world).

Most of all, it had an appallingly mishandled and premature launch caused by Funcom panicking over the imminent release of WAR and WOTLK. If they had held onto it for anohter 10 months, the game would have had a near-flawless launch. (Whether that would have helped it, considering WAR’s launch was pretty smooth but people still abandoned it when WOTLK came out, is another question, but at least the game wouldn’t have gained the bad reputation currently weighing it down.) I know the company had $12 million in the bank, and I honestly don’t have a clue whether that would’ve been enough to keep them operating for another year, but I rather suspect that they were forced to launch for one reason or another, and that may have been one of the reasons behind Godader’s departure.

Nevertheless, I hope the game recovers and does well (as I also wish for WAR), because it offers something different from WOW, and variety is surely a rare virtue in the MMO business.

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The quests were for the most part, well written and formed small story lines of their own, especially the destiny chain of your character.

But once those quests started to run out it got boring very quickly.

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I’ve helped crash a number of servers trying to stage large-scale battles ’cause of this.

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I bought this game on release but I really didn’t enjoy it, the instanced gameplay just didn’t warrant a subscription fee so they can buggar off as far as I’m concerned.

AoC had lots of issues, but you do realize the instanced gameplay is only for the storyline quests on the introductory island yes? A vast vast majority of the game is open shared world like any MMO.

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I remember the quests being more fun than WoW when I leveled, up until the “oh crap I ran outta quests now I gotta grind” part of the upper 40s to the level cap.

I got into the non-instanced instances ’cause a lot of the PvP was between “my guild tag will save me” imbeciles vs “omg its a guild tag!” cowards, and any small, determined group could get more enjoyment from clearing the people more than the mobs. That said, they tended to devolve into boss-camping a la every other bland MMO.

Then, for lack of anything else to do but the endless solo grind to build a city nobody cares about or can even visit, I did the tiered dungeons.

And got flashbacks to every wasted night in the three years of WoW raiding that I suffered through to get more useless gear.

End subscription.

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I feel dirty.

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It took 2 to 3 years to slowly hand the economy over to the players, and any MMO that wants to emulate EVE’s total market freedom is going to need to do the same to allow it to take off. Most of it was handled with NPC sell-orders at first, slowly removing those to let the players take the reigns more and more.

Most people don’t realise that almost everything about EVE’s freedom rests upon that economy. Without it most of what people see in EVE wouldn’t even be possible. Alliances don’t just fight over space for the hell of it, they do so for economic advantage, for market power.
Those regions of EVE containing the rarest resources are the most fought over and can make their holders trillions of ISK.

Without the constant PvP losses the market would eventually saturate, now it keeps flowing. Supply and demand changing as tides of the wars flow and the economy supports it all. That is what EVE rests on, and what is so hard to emulate.
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!

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It took 2 to 3 years to slowly hand the economy over to the players, and any MMO that wants to emulate EVE’s total market freedom is going to need to do the same to allow it to take off. Most of it was handled with NPC sell-orders at first, slowly removing those to let the players take the reigns more and more.

Most people don’t realise that almost everything about EVE’s freedom rests upon that economy. Without it most of what people see in EVE wouldn’t even be possible. Alliances don’t just fight over space for the hell of it, they do so for economic advantage, for market power.
Those regions of EVE containing the rarest resources are the most fought over and can make their holders trillions of ISK.

Without the constant PvP losses the market would eventually saturate, now it keeps flowing. Supply and demand changing as tides of the wars flow and the economy supports it all. That is what EVE rests on, and what is so hard to emulate.

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