Pumping Irony

I’ve been rather shocked that Funcom has left the Age of Conan beta servers up so long, but it’s at least given me some additional (and free) insight to the game’s development during its first month without needing to actually have a real account. Sure, I pre-ordered the game. I have the card with the code for the War Mammoth sitting here next to me, and the box is in the shelf here still in its shrink-wrap. Overall, the game just isn’t doing anything for me. I find it’s just WoW in another wrapper, and by that I mean it’s all about getting to the end-game where you’ll need to be in a good-sized guild to continue. Add to that the horrid UI, horrid itemization, horrid chat, PvP with zero meaning or consequences and DDR-style melee combat… I just don’t see the point in continuing to fuss over the game. It’s not for me right now. Someday maybe I’ll actually be interested in touring Hyboria but I’m completely uninterested in a hardcore-style end-game.

Despite my lack of interest, I have been diligent about keeping AoC patched up this month and even putting some play time in when I’m bored to see how the “real” game out of Tortage is. Hint: it’s nothing special, just your run-of-the-mill MMO with broken features.

Today however, the test launcher has a new announcement that the beta servers are being converted to retail Testlive servers, so only users with live accounts can use the test servers, which is normal practice.

Conversion of Beta Server

We will be shutting down all beta servers to start the conversion to our official Testlive server today. The forums will temporarily remain up until we get everything set up for the new Testlive forums.

We appreciate all the hard work from the beta community as your testing has been crucial to our development! The thousands of in-game bug reports, community posts and live testing has been appreciated among the studio. Without your help and dedication, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We hope that everyone can continue to do the same as we launch our official test server to the players.

I will continue to keep everyone updated on the process involved in getting set up and testing. To start, I will mention the latest information that has been mentioned in other threads on the forums:

• Testlive will be available to everyone who has an active AoC live account.
• We will be doing several things to encourage people to play on Testlive. We are looking at being able to copy characters from Live, having “buffing” NPCs that will level and gear your character up.

That last bullet point sounds interesting, and just might provide extra incentive for players to join the Testlive server to help out future development of the game. In the meantime AoC-ers, enjoy your time in Hyboria! Perhaps I’ll feel like taking a peek this winter, depending on what I hear as the game progresses.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under MMO Gaming.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.