Despite the scary title of this entry, let me say that AoC is still one of the best MMOs I've ever played - my main character is level 75 now and I'm looking forward to grinding my way up the PvP ranks once I've hit the level cap. However, I keep tripping upon more and more bugs ranging from midly annoying to game-breaking. Add the complete lack of proper support and the whole game experience can quickly become a rather frustrating and punishing one.
Let's start with the small time stuff: Broken, crappy pets in the cash shop. The newly-introduced AoC item shop sells all kinds of rabbits, wolf pups and even bare-breasted priestesses to make your travels across Hyboria a little less lonely. The cheapest pets start somewhere at around 5 Euros, the most expensive ones may go all the way up to 20 Euros. Let me paraphrase their description: "Summons a social companion to follow your character."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this suggests, that the companions work exactly the way you know it from MMOs like, say, World of Warcraft. Right? Well...
Let's say you shell out a fiver on a wolf pup, summon the little bugger, then start your next journey across the beautiful world of Hyboria. You will soon notice that, should you happen to run a lot or even be the proud owner of a mount, your companion cannot keep up with you. In fact, if you were unfortunate enough to buy a priestess, she will just plain refuse to follow you at all and vanish into thin air. If you zone into another area, which happens pretty much every 10 or so minutes (Hyboria is heavily instanced and split into tons of separate zones), your companion will also vanish. Get dragged into a fight and, you guessed it, your companion disappears.
Basically, you've just wasted a ton of money on a pet, which disappears so much, it's entirely pointless to summon it in the first place. Does it say so in the item description? No. Are there refunds? Of course not.
Social companions aren't the only (broken) pets you can buy with cold, hard cash. There are also the ebony and ivory ravagers - as their names suggest, the former would be pitch-black, the latter is snow-white. These cute little fellows are battle companions, which can be used to pull baddies and who will actually support you in a fight - they don't despawn when you leave the area, either.
The black ravager costs a little over five Euros, the white one costs nearly 15. He's not any better or stronger or different; you simply pay more because he's white.
Okay - so you have a combat pet, whose main specialty is the colour of its skin. Fair enough, you get to show it off to people, right? Well... problem is, the damn thing changes its colour every single time you zone into a dungeon, a different area, a town... you get the idea. And suddenly, your special pet turns into a regular brown or blue ravager. Which is a bit of a kick in the nuts, if you've just shelled out 15 Euros on the damn thing because it's supposed to be WHITE. The only way to fix the colour is by re-summoning the stupid thing EVERY SINGLE TIME you enter a new zone. Once again, the item description says no such thing in the cash shop and there are no refunds.
Let's say you're not a complete idiot like me and you don't spend money on the cash shop. Let's say you want to try one of the awesome new Khitai solo dungeons: The Forgotten City. And I won't lie to you - this thing is absolutely amazing! The landscape, the battles, I could do this thing over and over again! In fact, the dungeon is supposed to reset every 20 hours and scales to your character's level, so you can do exactly that! Problem is, I played it once with my character about a week ago and it has not reset ever since.
All the monsters remain dead, the bosses are gone, I cannot repeat the quests and epic battles there, no matter what. When I submitted a ticket about it, the GM suggested to delete all related quests, wait 24 hours and try again. So one quest-wipe and 24 hours later, I submitted another ticket, because the dungeon still refused to reset. This time, another GM teleported me into *his* instance of the dungeon, so I could finish my quests and kill my baddies in his name. He literally sat and waited 20 minutes while I finished his dungeon. Which was terribly nice of him, mind you, but it didn't fix my problem. The next day I was stuck in my own instance again, which is entirely devoid of monsters. What am I supposed to do now, grab a GM every single day?
Naturally, I have posted about this on the forums and I had a few people telling me about how their guild mates had similar issues or how they hope I can fix this, but I got zero support from Funcom, no suggestions, no fixes, no nothing.
Sure, it's just one dungeon, but every single day I'm missing out on awesome loot, expertise points and a lot of fun. And nobody seems to care enough to help fix my problem. Not very fun.
My main problem right now is how I die about ten times a day, because the game just freezes and entirely locks up my whole computer, forcing me to reset the machine. I can play just about any game out there in full HD with maxed out settings (it's my JOB, remember!) without crashes or freezes, but for some weird reason, Age of Conan loves to kill my computer, seemingly at random. And of course there is yet another ton of threads about that on the support forums and of course there is absolutely no response to be found from Funcom. There is, however, one workaround, which had been figured out by the community: Disable DirectX10, disable the 3.0 shaders and the game should stop crashing. Which really does seem to work for lots of people, including myself, but it's simply not an acceptable solution. Right now I get to choose from crashing over and over again and making my game look like crap.
Don't get me wrong - I love this game or else I wouldn't get so pissed off about all the stupid bugs, crashes and shitty support in the first place. I'd just play something else. But if the guys working on this thing don't get their act together, then I don't think there's much hope for an AoC revival here, F2P or not.
-Cat
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