It's not that I'm trying to be fair or balanced here, but after the glowing praise it only feels natural for me to let out the gripes too. Here's a list of things that I hope Funcom addresses ASAP for Age of Conan. It's not a nicely rounded top ten list because I'm not dredging the bug list, these are actually the bugs I find hard to ignore.

These are listed in the order in which they affect my fun factor:

• Polearms became toothpicks. Someone at Funcom was overzealous in fixing the animations and they went and made Polearms all the same length. Aside from the blandness that delivers on the weapons that already have the worst itemization, many of them haven't scaled well: appearing toothpick-thin and pathetic.
• Falling through floors. This happens to NPCs and mobs more than players, but regardless the collision detection needs work. It's no fun getting attacked by an 'invisible' mob or having a boss you need for a quest just drop out of existence.
• No one can visit our guild city?!? Funcom has locked the guild city instances so only ourselves and our direct neighbours have access, no one else can be invited to see our guild city. I strongly detest that guild cities are primarily just a timesink toward PvP Battlekeeps, they need real PvE usage and customizations. Let us have more pride with our cities!
• That 'Out of Memory' error. Memory leaks are pretty common with any MMO, hell WoW still has some, but they pile up pretty quick in AoC. Zoning in particular has a nasty habit to either lockup or provide this notoriously useless error message.
• Dismounting in combat is broken. The animation for getting forcibly dismounted often repeats multiple times or makes you skate around a bit before resetting your character. Worse, if you try to dismount manually while in combat you can get stuck not able to attack.
• Unknown PF. On my friend's list everyone's location is 'Unknown PF' followed by a long number. I keep getting requests to meet people and have to ask where they are because they assume I can see their location.
• The Guild Bank does not sort. On a daily basis I have to manually move items to my bags to sort the guild bank because items won't automatically stack. As a result of this annoyance our guild bank is constantly 'full' and our guild members are selling items we would otherwise store.

None of these are show stopping for me, they're just the glaring problems that I'm patiently waiting to see fixed.

Not only has Penny Arcade sussed the whole Portal as Game of the Year thing, but Tycho's end of the year musings have me floored.

It's not that Tycho is saying anything I didn't already understand, in fact we're so much on the same page his words have stamped all over me like tattoos. He says it so perfectly: elegant and foot stomping (slamdance steel toe boot style, not a hokey cowboy dance) at the same time.

I'm gonna yank out and dissect quotes like a madman, but summing it up is kinda overkill, because you could just read the whole article in a more linear fashion to get the picture correctly.

Yeah, that's pretty much half the paragraph, but if you count yourself as faithful to me in any sort of way, whether it be as a casual reader to this blog, or in some sort of more intimate scenario, then you'll grok what's there.

Now some good old fashioned bold for emphasis:

And the final sad truth and reiterated conclusion:

I'm one of the diehards, I'm not giving up on my PC. I may not want to be one of those out-of-touch dinosaurs stubbornly refusing to move forward, but I'm feeling trapped in a corner. I want to move forward, but the future of gaming on the PC has been looking steadily bleak since 2003 or so. 2007 has been a harsh kick in the teeth. I can play games on consoles, but I don't get the same visceral fun that I've gotten from my PC.

A key part of why I'm stuck away from the transition: I love my desk, I love my mouse, I love my ability to multitask my music-listening, web-browser, etc. while I'm playing my games. I love going to Fragapalooza and sharing that experience with a few hundred other PC boxes under the same roof.

I do NOT want to give that up. I have more than a few friends who don't want to either. I've been a computer gamer since the day I unwrapped my C=64 (and threw my 2600 & Coleco in the closet).

I'm not about to stop now.

"MMORPGs Are Too Easy?" That's the debate travelling the blogosphere today.

No.

Okay simple answer done, I agree with Ethic @ Kill Ten Rats when he quotes the "easy to learn, difficult to master" cliché. It's true.

The very point of an MMO is to be massive, which logically requires attracting the teeming masses. "Easy" implies that anyone can do it. Exactly. Anyone should be able to login and get started, otherwise the MMO is going to miss out on that first M. If you want a greater challenge, either find another kind of game or dig deeper into the one you're in. If you've already done that, then the real gripe you have is a lack of depth.

So the real question: Do MMORPGs Lack Depth?

A lot of us hardcore types wish MMOs were a bottomless pit, with depth into infinity. I think our scales are unrealistic.

World of Warcraft is the obvious measuring stick and while I can complain endlessly about running out of good content and Blizzard's awful concepts of repeatable content-- I'm also a realist and I'm fully aware of the sheer number of man-hours it has taken them to create the massive world of content that they have. Yes, it's finite and sometimes that means moving onto the next game, even if you've made a solid home in the current.

As long as other games have that to measure against, I think things will work out just fine.

Myself and some guildies ventured over to Ogri'la, to try some of the dragon boss summons. We're pretty fly-by-the-seat of our pants kinda peeps, so we made the attempt before realizing the encounters were bugged.

The Encounter:

To summon one of the four Ogri'la dragons (in this case Obsidia), players first collect 35 apexis shards, which drop from nearby mobs. Then you click on the egg (using up the shards) at the dragon's roost, which hatches a whelpling to attract the dragon. The dragon flies down and you kill it. You're expected to repeat this procedure until you get the loot you want. At least, that's how it's supposed to go.

What happened for us instead is that the 35 apexis shards got used up and the egg disappeared instantly. No crying whelp, no dragon.

The GM Reports:

I got very little information from the GM that I paged, other than it was a known issue. What astonished me, was the refusal to reimburse the shards which we had farmed for. In the grand scope of WoW grinding there are worse timewasters, but it still felt like a slap in the face to our team's efforts.

The GM was verbally polite, but cut me off when I was stubborn. Of course I wanted a proper resolution, why not?

I also disliked the suggestion that I take this in-game issue to a public forum, one in particular that is never responded to by any of Blizzard's staff. Just what I need to fix my problem, bury it where only forum trolls will see it. Hell, bringing it to my blog would be more productive. =P

Sakkara got an entirely different response from the GM that she paged, that the encounter is working as intended. This GM implied that players are expected to make sure the approproate dragon is hovering close by when the egg is used. There are all sorts of problems with that, but her GM also demonstrated that they clearly didn't understand how the encounter worked, suggesting "wait and see if this NPC lands then try using the shards", which is of course makes no sense since the shards are consumed prior to the dragon landing.

I've heard other people complain about Blizzard's customer service, but until now I had no troubles worth mentioning myself, occasional abrupt GMs aside. This time I found myself on the frustrating end of a direct refusal to resolve my problem. I still do not understand why the shards I had farmed for could not be returned to me when erased by a known issue.

The quest is either bugged or poorly designed or more likely, a bit of both. Blizzard's customer service failed either way.

Update (June 19, 2007): Patch 2.1.2 resolved the bugs that created this issue, although the shards were still never returned to my character:

"A problem that could result in Obsidia, Rivendark, Insidion, and Furywing not responding to their respective dragon eggs being used has been resolved."

So I'm farming for motes and some Rogue nearby sends me a tell: "You do shitty damage".

My pride in 1k+ spell dmg in mostly blue gear nonwithstanding, I was playing one-handed mouse-only at the time and responded "I'm lazy farming while eating dinner, but thanks for the critique".

Sometimes I really boggle at how competitive the average WoW player is. It's over the top when I can't manage to do something moderate and relaxing that fits the very idea of casual activities, without someone comparing their DPS to mine. What's worse is that a friend I mentioned this to just commented "what do you expect playing a Warlock?"

I've had an opinion about this topic for awhile, but just what the hell went wrong with the Punk scene?

Sometime around '92 or so, I went to a party where a DJ-wannabe introduced me to the sounds of Green Day. I think my comments were along the lines of "Not bad for a garage band" and his response was akin to "Garage band? They're punk". I definitely recall laughing and more than a little scoffing. I don't care what scene Green Day grew up in, it wasn't punk to me then and it's even less punk to me now.

The Sex Pistols are punk. Dead Kennedys are punk. Black Flag is punk. WTF Good Charlotte? Emo.

Emo Punk? Fuck off, that's a contradiction in terms. Pop Punk? That's just proof that punk is dead.

I've put in my prepaid order for the WoW expansion: The Burning Crusade. I'm hoping that it exceeds my expectations, because I'm rather pessimistic towards Blizzard lately.

Blizzard has been resting on their laurels, making some abyssmal assumptions about their player base. It's a common MMORPG mistake, assuming that what players occupy their time with is the same as what makes them happy. The truth is, once players are into the game, they will do all sorts of mundane stupid things if you tell them to... until a better game doesnt come along. Blizzard took the old grind and just moved it all into endgame content. Leveling is easy and fun. Dungeon crawling is also fun, for awhile. Raiding is the grind.

Speaking of which, our entire guild has quit raiding. After 9 months of non-stop scheduled excursions into 40man instances, we're done for awhile. It's not that it was so horrible. There's just TOO MUCH raiding that takes TOO LONG with TOO LITTLE ENTERTAINMENT. And we're NOT CASUAL GAMERS, we clock in a lot of online time. Sorry about the caps, but on the off chance that Blizzard's designers read this, I had to drive home a direct message. You're screwing up your game Blizz. We hope the expansion fixes it. Meanwhile, it's a "let's re-explore the 5man dungeons and wait and see". We'd planned on WoW being our home for a long while, but we didn't expect the endgame to be so limiting when getting there was so glorious.

At the heart of the grinding is Blizzard's determination to make WoW a highly competitive game. I don't mean PvP (though the PvP ranking ladder is horrid), I mean the PvE content. They've designed the dungeons and gear with progression in mind. Each class gets a lousy couple of sets to work towards and it's all on a single scale. There are no choices of gear once you hit epics, it's a visually identifiable ladder. At a glance players can see what 'accomplisments' others have, there's so little high end gear to choose from. This naturally pits every player to compare their status with one another.

I don't have the exact quote handy, but I recall Richard Garriott having wise words about the nature of MMORPGs: Single player games can afford to have singular goals. Even small multiplayer games can have a solitary winner. A massive multiplayer game should not put players in a single linear competition. Players should be able to determine their own success, but the linear status-symbol nature of gear in WoW undermines that.

Blizzard is very lucky.. scratch that, it isn't luck, they've dominated the market with a better product. But now, in my opinion, they are exploiting their position and have joined the industry in stretching their content and putting players in petty competition with one another in unimaginative and cheap ways.

WoW needs a big injection of real and varied content, not just a little more of the same. I'm really worried that all the Expansion amounts to for endgame content is pushing it to 70, with less endgame maps and dungeons than I can count on one hand. I hope I'm wrong, but everything stated so far just doesn't measure up.

....

I also put in a prepaid order for Test Drive Unlimited. Regardless of whether The Burning Crusade delivers or not, I'm wanting some gaming downtime from WoW.