Following much criticism over their twice-weekly patching schedule and quality assurance issues, Funcom has moved to a weekly patching schedule and is now providing a test server hosting the next upcoming patch.

Details for downloading and installing the Testlive client are listed in this AoC Forums thread. An existing and current Age of Conan account is required.

Hopefully this helps them hit that threshold where a significant amount of bugs get squashed and the new content begins to outweigh the issues.

I've also noticed that today's patch contains mostly bugfixes.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.

I've just realized my error on my previous post about player patience.

What's changed lately is that I've jumped into a game at launch, that's skewed my perception of the playerbase, I apologize for roasting them. There are likely many patient players that are under the radar right now.

Ever since Ultima Online, I've recommended players wait for stability before playing a new MMORPG.

It's a wait for three important ingredients:

• Stability.
• Fixes for bugs.
• Patching content holes or balancing issues.

It became obvious very early on that these 'massive' online games involve a score of complexities not found in other games. Every ounce of content (and the content tends to be vast) has to deal with latency, security and all of the issues involved when multiple members of the human race approach that content all at once on the same playing field.

I don't think most players realize what it takes to make bullet-proof content. It's astounding to me that these games achieve stability at all over time, but they do.

I know the hardcore among us won't follow this advice and I don't expect them to. I try to myself, but I usually fail and jump into these games sooner than I plan, but rarely on launch day. I've always been witness to the carnage, it's been my job at times to do so, but I've withheld my own deep involvement until further down the road, after the patches of sanity come in.

I don't think these industry problems are going to be solved anytime soon. The next game that has a full range of content (notably Endgame) and is also stable with few bugs-- That will be the first game in this genre to claim that milestone. When it happens, I'll shower accolades, because I will be beyond impressed.

Meanwhile, if you are going to play, then the previous post does apply, it requires patience.

Myself and my guildmates, we'll be exercising this patience.

Age of Conan hit its first real day of server-instability today and if you go by the forums you'd think the Titanic sunk or something. Openedge1 has quit the game over it.

I find myself boggled, given that AoC's launch has been more stable than most MMOs by far. Ultima Online went down for 3 days immediately from launch and players were made to disperse any time they collected in one location. Everquest had servers bounce up and down for months, plus lag issues to the extreme. Blizzard stopped selling copies of World of Warcraft for 6 weeks due to server instability and Penny Arcade revoked their game-of-the-year award from WoW for the same reason.

During all of those, there were players freaking out, for sure. For UO there was even a class-action suit, which led to the EULA-disclaimer-heaviness of today's MMOs.

Everyone's entitled to their complaints. They are paying for a service and when it's not there, they get upset. I get upset when my power goes out, it drives me nuts that it happens in a big city. But I lived in a small town for awhile where the power wasn't exactly-- consistent. Whenever there was an outtage, we'd just shrug.

In MMORPG land, expect troubles in the first 6 months, that's just pragmatic.

It feels like there's some new kind of intolerance. Maybe players have had enough, maybe more than a decade of stability issues being 'normal' for MMOs in the first year is just too much for players to take anymore? Maybe it's a generational gap?

I suspect the complaints are more noticeable now that blogging your MMO experience has hit its stride, not to mention the wealth of established MMORPGs that are stable now that you can choose from.

Whatever it is, I think people should be ready for more disappointments, because this sort of thing isn't going to magically disappear anytime soon.

My advice: Don't take it personally, the bugs and downtime aren't tailor made for your frustration. Take a break now and then, have backup plans if your nite of gaming is disrupted.

Or don't play a new MMORPG unless you have a lot of patience, because it's either going to have issues or it's going to be delayed heavily for a cleaner launch (even then it's a crap shoot). Either way, there's waiting involved.

Update: Discussion on the Wiccana forums seems a lot more reasonable than the general Age of Conan forums, as usual. Most players there seem to also be suggesting patience.

Update: It looks like there's another patch before launch, so they've pushed the official launch time back to ~1pm Pacific (8pm GMT).

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Age of Conan launches today and so far the 'early access' client has already received a number of patches over the past few days. This is actually how I prefer it, I'd rather a lot of frequent small patches than the less often monolithic patch.

I know most people hate the delays, regardless of how small, but it seems far less problematic. I hope Funcom keeps it going this way, although for them it will probably be easier to wait for the larger content patches and do it all at once. That's what most players expect anyway.

I hate patch day. Some folks love it, I probably would too if WoW patches were all about new content, but they aren't. And my dislike of patch day isn't just because of the inherent bugs or the server downtime, it's something more to the core of the game.

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet: Blizzard has created a Metagame out of "balancing" within WoW, by changing how the system works each major patch.

Yes, I'm very jaded and cynical.

I used to think it was just ordinary mundane balancing, the sort that comes along with nearly every MMO and gets tedious after a bit, but settles down over time. I strongly (that would put it mildly) disagree that any game needs "constant perpetual balancing", that's akin to game designer wanking. But I don't even think that's what they do with WoW. I think the whole point is to keep players occupied and busy with a new system every month or two. I'm certain that the peeps at Blizzard also feel like they're improving the game with each of the systematic changes, but much like The Vision wasn't really about the "epic" aspects of EQ, Blizzard's systematic changes aren't completely about improving the game.

I think most players are perfectly fine with that.

Here's how I became aware of WoW's Systematic Metagame:

A friend's comments about "skill" in WoW threw it right into my face. WoW does not have strong strategic or tactical elements and it certainly doesn't involve any physical or twitch abilities, but it is a systematic game. If you do not learn the system, you're labelled a noob and won't be able to play to the best of your abilities. Learning the ins-and-outs of the system is in fact a large portion of the game. This is true for most MMORPGs, especially ones that use the Tank + Healer + DPS paradigm.

So Blizzard perpetually changing the system, does keep a lot of players from getting bored. Except, for me at least, it has worn me down. Oddly, I'm more bored with having to re-learn the system each patch. For once, I'd like to jump into some new content WITHOUT having significant base elements of the game changed.

I'd like to feel a bit more comfortable, after playing for 3 years, there's a point where I do not wish to be on the edge of my seat. =P

Note: This is a followup to my previous article about the audio issues introduced by WoW Patch 2.2.

According to a Creative Labs post, during a discussion with Blizzard's director of audio it was revealed that:

Initial efforts to turn on hardware support with the new audio implementation were unsuccessful and they didn't have any time left to work on it prior to the patch release. However, he has assured us that once they have had the chance to clear up the immediate issues with in-game audio they will turn their attention back to enabling hardware audio to work again via the new scheme. Creative greatly appreciates the positive response that Blizzard has offered in answer to its concerns, and while there can be no guarantees, we are optimistic that Creative soundcard owners will once again be enjoying a fully immersive WoW experience complete with hardware based 3D mixing and effects in the not-too-distant future.

It seems that Blizzard plans to completely get software sound working within the new system before enabling Hardware sound.

It's encouraging news that they haven't actually abandoned hardware as they indicated before, but they also have not posted this plan on their own forums-- Then again, when does Blizzard ever admit setbacks or compromises on their part?

Aside from poorly communicating with their playerbase, there's still the issue that much of the hardware was never designed to run the way they've tried to push it to run, so I doubt they will get a perfectly working solution until after hardware channels are re-enabled.

Blizzard CMs have been asking players to test the sound on the PTR realms, but patch 2.2.3 is now on the main servers and the PTRs have been shut down pending the next patch.

Blizzard is essentially testing and debugging on a "Live" product, but that's nothing new for MMOs or even PC games overall, so hardly something to uniquely roast Blizzard over the coals for. But they've no doubt lost some subscriptions over this, frustrations for technical issues can get high (as Cyndre pointed out recently with an LOTRO issue: CS and Tech Support Matters).

Patch 2.2.3 does include fixes for software sound but still does not have hardware channel mixing support and numerous problems are still being reported, but hopefully they will make progress with more patches down the road shortly.