I enjoyed AoC because everyone from my work stayed up the launch day and played it for hours. But seriously, weighing in at 30gb I have no willpower to redownload it. The main reason I will NEVER play it again is all my names I claimed for my toons on launch day were erased when the servers merged. Fuck DAT.

I find though, I'd rather play a game I like less with friends than play a game I like more with no-one.

Warhammer still around? Heard its players were declining dramatically after release, I bought it myself and gave up about a month later because I could never get into the servers.. a problem most Warhammer players were having.

Warhammer still around? Heard its players were declining dramatically after release, I bought it myself and gave up about a month later because I could never get into the servers.. a problem most Warhammer players were having.

15k American subscribers. A giant flop and a shabby piece of design that somehow gets worse every time they add to it. That game got boring really, really fast.

AoC's pretty good these days considering its an MMO of all things, but it still falls into some of the classic traps: IE : HEY, let's add an XP meter to this! It also doesn't help that the game suffers from input lag whenever more than 6 people engage in a fight. If they hadn't bogged down the game so much it could have been something more successful; instead they thought it was a good idea to make an subscription MMORPG with high end system specifications and poor scaling performance. Still; the leveling is fairly painless and fighting against npcs is a lot deeper than your average piece of crap MMORPG.

If you still like MMORPGs AoC's a pretty solid game despite it's horrible launch... Kind of feel bad for the developers; actually. They work so hard, and even had some great ideas put into the game (dungeons that are more than just "Kill monsters > kill boss > leave", real time combat streamlining, etc); but bad first impressions are hard to shake off.

15k American subscribers. A giant flop and a shabby piece of design that somehow gets worse every time they add to it. That game got boring really, really fast.

I'd really like to know where you got this number from.

Aion comes out in a few months, so hopefully that won't flop horribly like these WoW-wannabes did. I played in one of the beta events and enjoyed my time in it, so I should at least have fun going through the first 10 levels if nothing else. I imagine the game gets better the further you get in, it was getting to a pretty comfortable place with the complexity as I got near the end of the beta content.

More on topic, I did want to try Lord of the Rings Online, but it wouldn't run on Windows 7 at all, so I gave up trying. My poor trial account, lost in the nets.

Aion is terrible. Like, really, REALLY terrible. I dont know how they did it, but they managed to water down MMO combat even more. There are also plenty of giant grinds attached to it... Oh, and if you remember the early WoW High Warlord / Grand Marshal system, Aion uses that model.

Yeah you have totally convinced me. I will take my personal experience with the game and throw it away.

Aion will flop just like all of the other "GREAT HOPES" of the MMORPG genre. Aion, Darkfall, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, all taking turns trying to fill this role; all failing to meet even the most reasonable of expectations... Of course despite all this, there are people willing to defend it as if it was a family member's name being tarnished. If you don't believe me, go ahead and read up on the game, how the "Abyss" works, and just how much grinding the game actually has.

In the end, the whole MMORPG convention is as tired as it is tedious. You're plopped into the world, and you do menial repetitive tasks for exp. You do enough of this to reach the max level where you reach the "END GAME". A different assortment of tedious repetitive tasks, only now it takes substantially longer to get anything done. 99% of all MMORPGs fall under the former, and if you still enjoy that... Well, have fun. I'll be off playing games that don't hide themselves behind hours upon hours of boring tasks.

There are people out there who actively enjoy playing EVE, Darkfall and Lineage 2 ( ][ ?!) proving once again that people will play and gladly pay for pretty much anything.

Im rather keen to see how the new Stargate MMO will do when its eventually released.

Okay son, you are in a thread about MMO's, taking swings at the genre in general. This is trolling and I don't know why you are wasting your time.

Maybe if the genre as a whole wasn't in such a piss poor state of regression, it wouldn't be so easy. I'm not "trolling" when I say that AoC is pretty much one of the better MMOs out there right now, and for all the problems that game has that's pretty sad.

But I am sorry. I wasn't aware offering a dissenting opinion on something is considered trolling.