Age of Conan

It was a huge mistake (among many) for Funcom to spread their playerbase out so much, especially in an instanced game like AoC. For an instanced game, having so many servers is simply retarded and suicide, especially given the mass exodus that's been occurring in AoC for months.

Even if AoC was a good game, having 40 servers worldwide still would have hurt the game badly. There should only be 1 PvP server and 1 PvE server. That's it.

Just look at Guild Wars, an instanced MMO (yes, it IS a Massively Multiplayer Online game). Guild Wars had over 4 million players and that game only had 1 server, Everyone across the WORLD plays on 1 server. If they had 40 servers like AoC does, that game would have died a long time ago.

The longer Funcom doesn't merge their servers, the more people are going to keep unsubscribing. I'm not saying server merges will stop the mass exodus of players, but it will minimize unsub numbers by giving those who are dumb enough to stick with this game, more people to play with.

Perhaps the game engine could not handle it all on 1 server, eventhough it is instanced.

Anyway, I doubt this is the biggest reason for the AoC failure.

Then the player base has to take part of the blame because they were screaming for more servers during early access and the first month of launch.

Funcom was banking on millions of people playing AoC.

The flaw in that theory was they thought we would think the game was good fjust because they told us it was good, seems that plan backfired.

If they merge servers they're admitting that they don't have enough subscribers and this will not look good to investors.

I seriously doubt it will happen any time soon.

Originally posted by TalRasha

Perhaps the game engine could not handle it all on 1 server, eventhough it is instanced.

 

Anyway, I doubt this is the biggest reason for the AoC failure.

I said it is ONE OF Funcom's biggest mistakes.

There are several others.

Another one of their biggest mistakes: charging a monthly fee for a broken and incomplete game. If they were to have used Arena Net's business model, there wouldn't be nearly this much hate for AoC and Funcom.

Originally posted by Noggin

If they merge servers they're admitting that they don't have enough subscribers and this will not look good to investors.

 

I seriously doubt it will happen any time soon.

 

Not consolidating servers buys Funcom 2-3 months to attempt to fix things.  Conversely, it also will affect its AoC subscription numbers, harming its revenue streams.  It is a risky gamble.   By doing this they obviously think that bleeding subscriptions out on dead servers is less painful than the headlines (and thus, cancellations) that would result from an official announcement of contraction.

Personally I think they are not realizing how the fanbase recognizes these shady tactics and this contributes to server attrition on other servers.  Food for thought at least.

Lit

When the head guy dumps his stock in Funcome the investors follow suit. Stock is down from 55 a share to 13 what would you do if this was your money. They can not keep 40 servers going for much longer and then what happens to the keeps ownership. I would say these guys are ripe for take over.

Durring the first week all the servers were full.  I remember a few times there was a que to get in.  Had to wait 5 to 10 minutes to get in game.  After everyone discovered that the game was garbage the servers went barren.

I have never seen an mmo lose so many players so fast.  3-4 months after release they lost at least 90% of their player base (imo).   Hence why all the servers are deserted.  That is totally unheard of.

But another poster said that if Funcom did merge the servers now that it would prove that AoC is a total failure and they arent ready to throw in the towel yet.  Give it 6 more months(if it lasts that long) and I bet they  will come up with some crazy excuse like "we have upgraded our servers to allow twice the population compared at release" to do a merge.

From what I know, Funcom said each of their servers could not handle more than 5000 players at the same time.