Age of Conan Game Director Craig Morrison has written a letter to the AoC community outlining some of the updates that will be coming in the near future, including confirmation that they are actively working on an approach to merge servers. The letter is quite long and focuses on both immediate changes and long-term plans.

The AoC team's immediate focus will be on Ymir's Pass and a big change to the PvP system. Ymir's Pass is a large zone that may stay on the test server through several updates to work all of the bugs out of the large amount of content. As far as PvP is concerned, the upcoming consequence system will create ramifications for your actions, adding a "real world" feel to fighting. For example, if you constantly gank lowbies, you may be turned away from some "orderly" areas, but will be able to change your play style by networking with shady camps.

For the full letter and Morrison's take on some of his long-term goals, check the official news post or keep reading below.

So I go out of town and the whole industry goes nuts!  A Funcom employee, a GM in their Age of Conan game, got caught being inappropriate with a player, and is now no longer employed with the company.

The screen shots and chat, including a helpful transcription even, are available on MMORPG.com.

Funcom only stated:

We are aware of this matter, and necessary measures have been taken against them. We have clear guidelines for all employees in Funcom, not least those who work with customer service, and if the guidelines are broken there are consequences

A quote from Age of Conan product manager Erling Ellingsen (Sorry no direct link as I don't speak Norwegian) is being passed around from Itavisen as: This is the behaviour that is not accepted by Funcom."

It won't be possible to get a quote from Funcom until Monday, and we'll try to get what we can, but it's good to know quick action was taken.

Since Funcom is worse then CCP about deleting uncomplimentary posts from their forums, there's not a lot of places to talk about it officially, but you can head over to our AoC forums and discuss !

Gaute Godager, game director of Age of Conan , has published an open letter to players outlining upcoming plans for the game's near future. He focuses on bugs, stability, performance, and new content coming up in the near future.

Greetings fellow players.

While it has been some time since I last gave you an update, I wanted to touch base and let you know what we are working on at the moment and where we are going in the times to come. I want this update to focus on what is actually happening to the game now, what we have done, and also some of the reasoning behind our choices going forward.

As you all know we have been live for some seven weeks by now, and what a period it has been! While Conan has sold more and performed better than even we could have hoped for, we also know that there have been things we had to work on. I will not try to hide from this fact, but I hope you have seen our steady stream of improvements and additions, in fact, even more than I would have thought possible! I am definitively proud of the team and what they have done after launch, and I think everyone agrees that we are making Conan better, all the time. We are also keeping almost the entire development team ON the Age of Conan live team for the foreseeable future, meaning we can make exciting new content updates on an ongoing basis. Still, let me underline that our main - main - focus at the moment are bugs, stability and performance! I might not talk very much about the details here, but the frequency of the patches and their contents speak for itself.

Read the letter in its entirety here .

Age of Conan now available for digital download!!!

 

 

In a press release today, Funcom has announced their newest game, Age of Conan, to be a success!

Funcom is proud to announce that Age of Conan continues to dominate the PC sales charts in all markets where the game is available. Over the last few weeks it has remained the overall #1 PC game in most European markets, while also performing tremendously well on several all-format charts.

In the US, Age of Conan impressively conquered the #1 PC spot for the first two weeks of available NPD data. Due to the amazing interest surrounding the game, more than 700.000 gamers have now signed up for an Age of Conan account. In the second month after release it is also clear that Age of Conan has taken the position as the undisputed #2 subscription MMO in the western world. 

Sounds like they've had a busy time of it over there!  Congrats to the teams that have made this game such a success!  Read on for the rest of the self congratulation.

Not only is AoC going down to weekly patches they've also launched their public (to subscribers) test server!

Today we are proud to announce the launch of our new Age of Conan Testlive Server. This server is open to everyone with an active Age of Conan account. If you can log onto the Live servers you will be able to log onto the Testlive server. Until today our test server has been limited to former beta testers only so we are very excited to open it publicly for all Age of Conan players!

The Testlive server will be the first place to see and experience new updates before they reach the Live servers. In addition to this you will have the opportunity to speak directly with developers and QA staff that are working on the Testlive server.

In order to streamline the testing process we will be placing out special Testlive vendors that will allow you to level up your characters to various levels. This leveling process will also give you appropriate equipment for your level. These vendors will appear on Testlive in the next few weeks.

Read on for the rest of the thread, which is only accessible for those with an active AoC subscription.

Those of us without an Age of Conan account are left out of watching how the game progresses and builds after launch, as all MMOs do. But thanks to a friend who knows I love crafting - we can all see the latest post regarding changes coming to the crafting system in AoC!

I know many of you are concerned about what is happening to the Tradeskills/RnB (resource and building) - I am writing this to inform you more about what we are doing and what is happening to tradeskills soon. I am also writing this in order to explain what has happened to the alchemy crash since todays patch.

Let me start with the bad stuff first.

First off - if you are an Alchemist, opening the tradeskill book by any means will crash your client since last patch. This will be fixed with thursdays patch.

There's *tons* more, and it's not bad! So read on!

Congratulations, Age of Conan! This is sure to be followed by many more awards and nominations.

We are honored to announce that we have been nominated for the Golden Joystick award and now you can help us win the final prize!

The public game award "Golden Joystick" is a tradition in the British gaming industry and this year we are also nominated in several categories! Now is your chance to help your favorite game score a place on the podium!

If Age of Conan is first for you in the nominated categories as it is for us, then please visit the award-page and cast your vote for your favorite MMORPG and show the world that truly the Age of Conan has come!

The official Age of Conan forums has a player run post just so you can keep track of the changes that went into the game on Monday that didn't make it into the patch notes!

Necromancer
* Necros have had their feat trees rearranged in both Nightfall and Reanimation to quite some degree. No free respec for this change.(See notes below on how the tree's have been rearanged)
* Relating to the feat changes- Talent points stayed with their respective talents while being moved so it is possible to have a talent that you no longer have the required amount of points invested into the tree to have.(IE you can have an item available that requires 15 feat points invested when you only have 10 invested.)

If you think you've found an undocumented change, find out how to submit them by reading the thread!

So AoC has realized that in a PvP-centric game, people like PvP.  Shocking!  So new changes are coming to help the PvP system be the best it can be.

Did you know that the majority of Age of Conan players is playing on servers flagged for player vs. player activities? We do, and this month we are about to introduce a slew of drastic improvements that will breathe new life into this important gameplay feature!

Following the launch of Age of Conan we sat down immediately and started fleshing out some ideas for what we wanted to do with the PvP (player vs. player) features in the game, and now we are ready to reveal it to you. All of these changes, additions and improvements are expected to hit within the end of June or very early July.

Breathing new life into a game out less then a month is slightly scary, but hopefully all will go well.