Coulda Been A Contender
The game is fun at first, but suffers from the MMO syndrome that all MMOs suffer from nowadays: it was rushed to release with too many bugs, the developers not delivering on half of what they promised, then bending their original intentions via patches to try and be more like WoW to sell units.
At this point, players are jumping off AoC like a sinking ship because of all the inherent flaws and failed promised made by the Funcom developers, who are releasing patch after patch of fail. Its like they dont even test the patches before they go live. They have finally implemented a test server, but the game has been live for two months and they cant seriously expect paying customers to act like beta testers. Only the hardcore fanboys will hang in.
AoC will be a good game if they actual add a large number of much-needed fixes, but in the games' current state it will take 6+ months (probably a year to be honest) for these to be implemented, and by that time WAR, Spore and the WoW xpac will all release and basically send the final torpedos into this sinking ship.
These are the major problems with AoC:
1. Not enough content. One poster below me mentioned there are plenty of quests, but he only got to level 21 which just gets you out of the newbie zone with all the voice acting, which is as he said great. The problem with the game comes at level 50 or so, when you hit the wall. Beyond level 50, most of the zones are unfinished and there arent enough quests to level, so you are forced to basically grind mobs for the next 20+ levels to gain xp like in a Korean MMO. Which is incredibly boring. To be fair, Funcom is adding a new zone and new instance to help this level range, but its too lil too late for all the people that suffered thru the 50-70 grind, and also doesnt change the fact that there is barely any content for these people at the level cap, so they wind up being bored spending all their time ganking lowbies. I am a fan of pvp, but designing your game so that people have no incentive to do anything else but camp lowbies for fun is poor design.
There is barely any level 80 content. I can understand that they dont have a huge number of endgame raids at launch, but the few raids that they have are bugged and broken, forcing level capped players basically into a state of nothing to do.
2. Too many bugs. I'm middle aged and have been playing MMOs since the MUD days and have pretty much played them all over the years. I understand MMOs all have bugs especially at launch, but AoC has some *HUGE* bugs that should have never have made it out of testing:
a) The biggest bug is that stats dont currently work. Many players have done testing and have proven that the stats in the game actually dont do anything so your gear means nothing. The developers did a lot of softshoeing but finally admitted on the Euro forums that the stats are currently broken.
b) There is an error in the code that makes female characters attack animations slower than male characters. This one is is almost game breaking as it wasnt discovered until a few weeks after launch and again the developers were in denial until again it was actual proven by number-crunching players. To make matters worse, in the latest patch, the developers basically hotfixed all melee combo attack animations so they move slower but do more end damage to try and compensate for the difference in male-female dps. What this actually does though is slow down melee combo attacks to the point where a combo takes 10 seconds to perform, which is incredibly horrible in a game where 1-2 shotting people in pvp is the norm.
c) The melee combo system is flawed. While fun and novel at first, as you get higher level the melee combo system creates a huge imbalance in pvp between casters and melee. Basically to use any special ability, melee characters have to activate an ability then perform a series of directional moves to activate the combo. Now the discrepancy comes from casters not having to perform combos to use their abilities. So casters can click 1 button and nuke you, while you have to wait 10 seconds (due to the recent attack speed change) to get off a combo attack. What makes this bad is that a caster can currently cast 2-3 spells in the time it takes you to get off 1 melee ability, and half the time your melee ability wont work because the caster is circle strafing around you and you have to keep them in front of you and in range (while pressing 4 other buttons for your combo) to get your move off. It makes healers incredibly overpowered since all the heals are 1 click HoTs. A healer can usually get off multiple heals before a melee character can even hit them. This flawed system basically makes the pvp a game of 1-2 shotting (due to people slotting all +damage gems) with whomever gets the drop winning.
d) The seige warfare (its big selling point) is currently broken/bugged. Seiges currently are not working and for the massive amount of cash players have to pump into building battlekeeps, in its current bugged state you can lose your keep even if you win battles due to bugs in the code. Not to mention people randomly get ported out of the battles, and if there are more than 40 people participating the game usually crashes. The actual towers and smaller areas that were supposed to be incentive to actual perform seige warfare dont work, so basically the seige system doesnt work. There is no reason to even do seiges as theres no rewards and the costs dont justify even building a keep.
e) The endgame raids are bugged. The current raids are bugged where sometimes players get ported out of the instance. This causes your raid group to be locked out of the raids, sometimes up to 2-3 weeks since the developers dont have a set timer on the raid timer resets and wont actually tell the players what it is. On top of this, riading is almost useless anyway since crafted gear is better than raid gear.
f) The crafting system is bugged. There are a number of bugs that make crafting almost useless since the turn-in quests used to advance your skill often get bugged and will take your expensive materials and still not allow you to advance in your tradeskill. The game also doesnt allow you to change your tradeskills once you pick them.
3. Patches breaking more than they fix. While the developers have been quick to respond to issues with patches, most patches currently break more than they fix. A few patches ago, the necromancer class was almost totally gutting by a major patch. The developers are catering to complainers on the forums and making reactive nerfs instead of fixing actual problems. When I say problems, I'm talking major issues like the last patch doubling melee attack speed and at the same time making keybinding stop working. The developers have made a number of promised for fixes, with a major WoW-like pvp patch that was supposed to go live in June but has been pushed back to August.
4. Memory leaks. The game has a number of memory leaks that cause major problems, like crashes, gray maps and being booted. There is also a bug that randomly makes your latency spike up to 10k every so often. There is also an issue where the game makes ATi cards only work at 30% efficiency, and the coding of the game is made so the game actually runs better on high settings than low for whatever reason. I'm not a coder, but these seem like major issues that shouldnt have made it out of beta.
5. The developers caving to the whiners. Much of the mature content was nerfed a few weeks after launch due to player complaints (basically parents complaining about nipples and swearing) so much of the promised content has been toned down or has been omitted like the barroom brawls that were promised. To be fair, much of this is probably out of their hands as stockholders want more sales, and PG sells a lot more than M.
6. The pvp doesnt work. This was supposed to be a pvp based game, but in all honesty I didnt really pvp until I reached level cap. 95% of all my fights during leveling were getting killed by people 30+ levels higher than me. The game world is designed poorly so high level characters are farming in the same zones as people 30 levels lower than them, and level capped players have nothing else to do but gank. I dont mind being ganked but never actually fighting anyone my own level for the most part was pretty lame and boring. The game was advertised with mass pvp and being able to level off of pvping, none of which is currently in the game. There are pvp mini games (sort of like WoW arenas/BGs) but no one ever plays them.
All in all, AoC could have been a good game, and might actually still become one, but its going to take at least 6-12 months to implement fixes for all thats wrong with the game in its current state. The developers are chosing the normal 'fail' route though and trying to add more content instead of fixing the broken content they have. They even have announced an xpac at E3. Maybe the xpac will be the other part of the game they didnt include at launch?
I know their hardcore fan base will probably stick it out, but most people are quitting the game due to all the problems I mentioned above. Lots of people (including myself) dont really want to quit because we see the potential, but in its current state the game just isnt really playable/fun as it should be. Many people often state they will try to come back in 6 months to see if its improved.
The problem with this idealist view is that like I said earlier, there are some monster games on the horizon (WAR, Spore, the WoW xpac, Diablo 3) that will come out in this time. Why would people go back to a buggy game when they can play games that probably wont have these problems and actually be good fun?
In the MMO world you basically get one chance to make a good impression. AoC should have stayed in beta another 6 months and released the actual game it could have been.