Age of Conan Is 'Biggest MMO Launch Since WoW,' Ships One Million According to Developer
Of that sum, nearly half have been shipped in the United States. The mature PC MMO launched roughly 3 weeks ago, hitting North America on May 20 Europe on May 23. An Xbox 360 edition is in the works, though no release estimate has been provided.
"Sales data shows that Age of Conan is the biggest MMO launch since World of Warcraft," Funcom marketing VP Morten Larssen noted. "The numbers are very promising, and we are very proud to be one of the fastest selling PC games ever in a launch month and the biggest simultaneous Europe/US MMO launch in history."
Known also for its work on The Longest Journey series, Funcom recently commented that the adventure franchise hasn't been abandoned, just placed "on the back burner" while it supports Age of Conan and continues development on other games, including its next MMO The Secret World
-
So.. have they fixed the whole "GM mess" yet?
-
-
They were massively understaffed on their customer service front, probably because they weren't quite expecting this level of success off the bat.
There are, however, ramping up as quickly as possible and bringing new GMs and phone line support personnel online. Of the sorts of growing pains a company could have, this kinda sucks, as it can create a lot of initial anger towards them due to issues not getting responded to, but if they're taking it as seriously as they claim, I'm guessing it will get better quickly. Based just on their activity with patching and improving the game, they're far more responsive than Blizzard ever was, so it's promising.-
Not to be a Blizzard fanboy, but before them, the response time was even worse. The best I have ever seen was from Mythic in DAoC, where a response happened so fast that sometimes you didn't even realize it was a customer service rep. They were quick.
Blizzard is OK, but I also think that as the MMO of choice, they are also the conduit for a lot of new MMO players, and gamers in general, which leads to a lot of dumb questions clogging the queue. It's kinda like 911 in New York City back in the 90's. You had so many morons calling for directions, or asking the cops to come unlock a door for them, or other horribly selfish and stupid reasons, that the real calls weren't going through. You have a fairly high % of newbie gamers clogging the lines with questions like "How do I turn in this quest" and "My pet disappears every time I try to summon a second one" or "He keeps PvPing me make him stop."
-
Absolutely, and I didn't mean to seem like I was bashing Blizzard.. more that.. As bad a time as AoC is having, the massive inrush that Blizzard had was astounding, and they are not a company known for quick turn around times on anything. It's not an insult, just that they are very quality focused, and everything else is secondary. There are much worse problems to have. :)
My main props to Funcom is how quickly they're at least getting in game stuff fixed, patched, and added, even if their customer service problems are still somewhat slow to get fixed.
-
-
-