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.

My guild has settled on a server choice for Age of Conan: Wiccana, a PvE server which has been given an 'unofficial' RP status by a host of other guilds and websites.

I understand Funcom's decision to create RP servers only as RP-PvP, it fit in well with their originally planned features to reduce ganking, but unfortunately those features never made it into the release of the game. No doubt they have other priorities, but it's a shame. We tried the sole RP-PvP server for a couple days, but the spawn-point and quest-opportunity ganking was a bit much for us.

So RP PvE it is, even if Wiccana is not officially endorsed by Funcom for RP.

It's been...

• 3 years since I started playing World of Warcraft.
• 9 years since I owned my first dedicated webserver.
• 10 years since I became spoiled with broadband.
• 11 years since I first played an "MMORPG".
• 13 years since I started this website / blog.
• 16 years since I began working in the videogame industry.
• 18 years since I first played a "MUD".
• 20 years since I received my first "Internet" email.
• 24 years since I owned my first computer.
• 25 years since I learned my first computer language.
• 34 years since I first played a videogame.

I just upgraded and reinstalled my server yesterday. Everything had gone smoothly in my dry-run tests on a local machine, but a bit of bad RAM that needed to be replaced caused a wee bit 'o troubles and more downtime than I'd planned.

It's not very often that I experience direct server downtime. The uptime on my server was approaching 3 years since the last full reboot, but it was also long overdue for a kernel upgrade because it was limiting my software choices.

So now here we are, running on a fresh install. There are bound to be little issues on my various sites with the newer software. I've tried to kludge in a few brute force fixes right away, we'll see how that works. I'll also be fiddling with some new features, so don't be surprised if some things break. Hopefully only minor things. ;)