What is steel compared to the hand that weilds it? The strength of steel is in the weilder's hand.

Just for Fun :)

Honestly, last night was as bad as some of my Beta 4 nights. The lag was terrible, and at one point during a mission, I couldn't walk through a door, the whole jiggy screen lag effect. But the Mobs could shoot me through the doors, and cast harmful programs at me as well. I couldn't get to them, problem with being a Martial Artist. I had to quit out, and come back in. I really don't think we should be billed yet. At least they fixed the disconnect thing though. *laf*

I must just be lucky or something. Or maybe my standards for what makes a game "playable" are a little different than others, I dunno.

My background: Been running around EQ since barely a month after its launch, gone through heck and back with connection problems, but on the whole, nothing world-shaking. Started with AO on July 4th. My EQ time is generally every night during the week, and most weekends. I only get into AO about every other weekend, but then I play about 8am-3pm Eastern.

So far, I've had a pretty good experience with the game. I know that no product like this is going to be perfect "out of the box," so I do my best to be patient instead of going ballistic whenever it gets flaky. I'll admit, logging in on the 4th of July, creating my character, and then as soon as I enter the training grounds getting "The servers are coming down now, please log out," did kind of irk me, especially since that day I only had about an hour and a half to play and really wanted to try AO out (didn't get into beta quick enough). The patch time? 2 hours, natch. *shrug* Oh well, more time to study the manual better and learn more of the basic controls.

Got back in that Saturday, and had a pretty good time. There were moments when lag got kinda rough, but I took advantage of it-- went over more of the in-game controls, read up and tested some of the emote animations (I don't know which made me laugh more, /disco or /moon *grin*), and generally fiddled around with settings. I think it went pretty well-- learning everything from scratch, no gifts from any more advanced players, but I made level 6 in about 5 hours of play and only died once. "Never enter a mission with only 24 bullets left if your only weapon is a slug-thrower, Sammy," I could hear the old men saying when I was reanimated.

There was ONE place where I had trouble with frame/lag that became irritating, and that was when I explored the main part of town looking for a Nano shop. I got to close to what must have been the local "bazaar" because my FR went from smoothness to about 5 seconds per frame (no, I DIDN'T reverse that, I was moving in 5-second jerks by my screen). Once I eventually stabilized back in the direction I had come from, I RAN away and didn't go back.

Overall, though, I have had a pretty good experience with the game. Could it have gone better? Sure, but you can test something like this to death and STILL not get everything ironed out until sometime AFTER it's released, simply because there's no substitute for trying it out for real. The players after release can put in more man-hours in a single day than their whole company PLUS the beta testers could do in probably a week or more. Wider range of system configurations, playing styles, thought processes that lead players to try different things in different ways (which is how most "exploit" bugs are found-- if the testers found 'em first, they'd have been corrected ahead of time, unless the tester who found it was unscrupulous enough to hide the fact from everyone, hoping for an advantage after release *shrug*), and just sheer numbers stressing the systems-- all stuff that's essentially impossible to duplicate in the closed environment of a beta test.

As for saying they should keep us in for free until they "get all the bugs out," how then do they make the money they need to recover their initial investment in developing the game AND the additional funds needed to keep things going AND pay their programmers, support staff, internal testers, etc. if they DON'T start the paid periods? Bandwith and servers don't grow on trees, don't fall from the sky, and aren't left under the developer's pillows in exchange for teeth by some mythical fairy of MMORPG. They've gotta be paid for, and the cash has to come from SOMEWHERE. Of course, they COULD keep it free and keep going deeper and deeper into debt until they had the bugs worked out to everyone's satisfaction. Then they'd just have to scale up their charge to recoup the losses at that point.

Am I the only one who'd rather go ahead and pay $12.95 now instead of having to pay $30, $50, $100 a month a while down the road?

Hey, if you're REALLY that put out by it all and don't want to pay for something "unplayable" (no, I'm not going to say "take it back"), close your account for a month or three, then come back and try again. Why beat your brains out day after day trying to play if you feel it's unplayable? Give 'em time to fix things up, and THEN try again. Save yourself a whole lot of headaches and frustrations in the meantime.

Think. Then think some more. Then, if all questions are answered, consider how to act.

Samsheed

Simply, the game has great potential but is not up to the playability standard of other like-games (EQ,AC). Keep working Funcom, we'll keep trying to play and be patient. Just don't charge us a users fee yet.

I've had just about every problem with this game that everyone else is having. I've also seen some dramatic improvements just since last week. However, I did make some choices about what I was going to do that affected my performance.

Once I get logged in, which is still tricky as hell sometimes, I get as far from a city (especially Newland, Athen, Tir, Omni, etc.) as possible. The reason is there are too many people there and the game is (in those places) unplayable. Once out in the world I find a remote outpost with bank, mission, insurance and reclaim terminals and use that as my base. I'd tell you all where some of them are, but for now I like my privacy. ;)

Once in these remote areas I have no problems with frame rate and only rare problems with lag, crashes and no problems with frame rate. Also, the money and reward items tend to be better since you have to go a litte farther for your missions.

As for the missions not working, I only saw that for non-assassination missions *within* city limits. In Borealis last night I accepted 4 missions that were for in town. 2 were assassinations, the other two were item retrieval and observation. The assassinations ones worked fine. The other two didn't and I heard others shouting the same results. Then I took a couple of modification missions that took place in Stret West Bank. Guess what? They worked great.

As for tech support, I did send a message in last week regarding graphics display and login issues I was having. I got a replay 3 days later asking if I was still having the problem. I responded that I had corrected those problems but listed a whole lot of others I was having in detail. The next day I got back a response asking me to send them a copy of a file from my AO directory which details all your system specs. I sent them the file and am just waiting for the next response. To me that shows me that they are listening and trying to follow up which goes a long way in my book. I'm guessing that part of the reason I may be getting better response than some is that I took the time to calmly detail my symptoms, what I had tried so far to fix them and then *asked* them for help.

Having worked tech support for a few years I can tell you that if you yell, scream and threaten the support folks you're shooting yourself in the foot. They'll just tune you right out and move on to the next person. Sure, you paid for the game and want it to work. Guess what, they want it to work too. If it works, people will keep playing, they keep making money and they can make more money by being able to reduce the number of support staff they need.

And to all those who compare buying a $50.00 computer game to purchasing a new car or other high ticket item, give it a rest. There is no comparison. You buy a car and you expect it to transport you and your loved ones safely and reliably around town and that's a justified expectation. That's why they have warranties. You spend $50.00 on a game to relax and have fun (hopefully). Your personal safety and that of those around you are not at stake (unless you're homocidally psychotic to begin with) like it is with a car. That means the developers don't have to spend billions (which, except for MicroSloth, they don't have) on testing every component for many years before they can even think about releasing it to the market.

If the game doesn't work to your satisfaction you have a couple of options...

1. Quit the game and try to get your money back for the purchase price. Depending on where you bought it, you might have little or no trouble doing this.

2. Be patient and wait for them to work the problems out. If they don't, you can still quit.

3. Fly into a apoplectic fit because you can't play with the whizbang new toy you got and blame and threaten everyone in the world over it due to your psychological shortcomings.

That's about it. Flame on.

Bah. Listen. How can you call a game playable ONCE you get out of the city? How ... pray tell... do you get out of the city when you can't even move due to lag? And how can you call a game "playable" when you claim you don't get lage between 2:30 and 5:30am? What about players having lives... and doing frivolous things like sleeping? And it is outrageous to point your fingers at the players for not optimizing their systems properly to play this game. The problem, my friend, is not with the players. We purchased a game and read the box for system requirements.. and the vast majority of us are sophisticated enough to modify our systems to bare bones graphics, etc, to attempt to reduce lag.

To attempt to argue otherwise and tell us to "relax" is simply ridiculous. I am quite relaxed and in full capacity of my senses.. thank you. And as far as having sympathy for the workers at Funcom... I have lots of sympathy for them as human beings, but that DOES NOT change the fact that this game was released FAR TOO EARLY in order to attempt to make a profit. Those workers are not victims of the MMORPG community, they are victims of a greedy and poorly run business which goes by the name of Funcom. The MMORPG communtiy is justifiably extremely angry over paying $49.99 for a game which does not meet anyone's reasonable definition of "playable". Period.

I was able to play for 3 straight hourst without any noticeable lag, no zoning problems and no disconnections. Of course, this was from 2:30 am to 5:30 am on a Tuesday morning Pacific time. The game is playable, but not by the number of people who are attempting to play it. Can't say whether the problem is with network code or with network hardware, but Funcom either needs to increase the amount of people their game can support, or open up another dimension so that the load is split up. Either that or deal with the fact that only a few thousand people can play the game. I'm sure the corporate machine behind Funcom won't like the financial results of that last option.

The writing is on the wall. Do not support this game.

And to ArtyD's post... several back... that is oh so helpful.

Just read the posts people.. and save your money.

No way Jose, too laggy.

FUnny thing is, last night after trying to patch the game from 11.0 to 12.1 twice, I got online...didn't get dropped once. Better than my beta experience. I still won't say it's 100% ready, and I still don't think they should charge for it yet, but it is getting there. My big problem is for some reason my nano boosts don't seem to stay active all the time...my attack level wanders all over the place...*sigh*