Play PvE

JoBildo pointed this out first, I can't take credit for the insight, but most of the yummy goodness and polish in Age of Conan so far is within the PvE content. It's not perfect, but when I reflect on the PvE I find myself gushing:

• Immersion is king. The quest dialog is beautifully written, the best I've seen in any MMORPG.
• The zones are gorgeous, large and well designed to hide little secrets that you'll find over time.
• PvE combat is simply amazing, every class has big goodies that can make you cackle with glee.
• Line of sight aggro, sneak up behind mobs ala Thief.
• Gear, while sparse in variety at low levels, is deeply detailed and looks amazing. Funcom is intentionally keeping stats low so that while collecting gear is fun, it's not overpowered.
• Animation and the overall appearance of characters is spectacular. Subtle gestures in the emotes, visceral weapon swings in melee, pyrotechnic flames and lightning with the casting. And of course the much talked about death animation finishing moves.
• The instancing, while at first odd to get used to, supports player choices: Questing area swarmed and overcrowded? Change instance. Run into an annoying griefer or piggybacker? Change instance. Boss spawn too long? You get the idea. It's a convenient solution to a variety of problems.
• Best roleplay community I've seen in years, it's significant, mature and involved.

There are downsides too: The crafting is incomplete, many quests are still bugged, etc.. but I think there's so much raw fun in the PvE experience that it's easy to be patient for the fixes which Funcom is pumping out.

I'm not going anywhere else anytime soon, I'm loving this game on the PvE side.

PvP = meh

Meanwhile, if you're a PvP fan I would guess that eking out entertainment from Age of Conan right now comes coupled with frustration:

• Border Kingdoms are a ghost town, they're too far separated from the rest of the action, with no good reason to go there.
• Sieges are still buggy and involve large guilds, large grind.
• Mercenary system was never implemented.
• PvP free-for-all servers are a circus. PvP is available in good volume, but much of it's baseless and lacks depth. Asshat ganking abounds.
• Mini-games are very basic and poorly designed.
• Mounted combat is lacking, aside from the amusing rear kicks.

Age of Conan's PvP does beat WoW's, but that's a pretty low expectation since WoW's PvP is barely worth noting, of course it was easily sliced and diced with AoC's incomparable combat system.

While I hate to accolade an unreleased game, Warhammer clearly has the leg up in the PvP department. WAR's key element will be in the ease of jumping in and out of PvE-to-PvP interaction from most any zone while including tangible questing throughout.

AoC's PvP content is such a mess that it's going to take Funcom months to redo a bunch of this stuff. They need to pull their PvP out of the fire before it gets cooked.

Funcom should have marketed this game more as a PvE experience.