K&G’s AoC Open Beta Podcast

Our AoC Open Beta podcast is available for listening. It’s longer than we wanted it to be (~38 minutes) but we had a lot to say. It’s crunch time for us in our decision of whether or not we’re going to get the game. With AoC’s performance and polish issues we’re skeptical of being burned by another Vanguard.

Here is a quick rundown of the podcast:

  • Open Beta’s performance on the “average” machine and why it may keep us (and a huge potential playerbase) out of AoC.
  • Open Beta’s stability and performance compared to Closed Beta – an older client?! … WTF is Funcom thinking?
  • Stylized vs. Realistic Graphics
  • Button mashing = Revolutionary Combat? Graev and I disagree about Funcom’s “active combat” being button mashing.
  • AoC’s future on the console… is it destiny?


We ramble quite a bit and even disagree pretty strongly on the button mashing. Some good discussion in this podcast and hopefully those of you who listen will take something away from it.

PS. You can listen to the podcast right here on our blog at the top of our main menu.

  • btw this thought crossed my mind what if…fileplanet payed funcom for a client just to get more people to subscribe …i still cant figure out why funcome put a crappy client in open beta

  • I have no idea if Fileplanet payed for the beta. However I do know that it’s common practice for hosts like Fileplanet to be used since the bandwidth requirements for hosting a 12gig download are very high. If Funcom hosted the files then the game would be lagging and upwards 12,000 ms. (unplayable)

    It’s Funcom’s client, just hosted on Fileplanet.

  • Keen and Graev. afread i only have one thing to say to you and your laptop playing…. xbox360…

    PC gaming in my opnion is for the Higher Running people. i mean i have a bardn new pc and i run age of conan of Full spects. all shadows, highest resaltion and everything check that incresses the “look” and i have no problems

    You want a average player to play age of conan. well then play the xbox version. thats what its there for, for average people….

  • Thanks Eslpath. 😉 That’s exactly what we were saying. And that’s exactly why Funcom is in trouble. The average user is being pushed out of the game. Most people can’t afford a new comp every 6 months to keep up with the bleeding edge of technology. 😛

    Graev is on the Laptop though. I’m on the desktop.

  • Content distribution networks like Akamai are also used to offload all bandwidth requirements from origin servers – CCP used ’em (possibly still do) for the downloads of the “Premium” graphs content when the new Trinity engine was released – 200,000 re-enthused players grabbing an 800Mbyte bundle of data from your game’s pipes == brownout, indeed. 😉

    Now, that cached bandwidth would still be charged back by the CDN to the company, so if Fileplanet were to host it for “free”, making money for themselves from the process from the subs/advertising spike, then that’s a net benefit to Funcom.

  • buttonmashing is hittin buttons randomly with no intentional order/sequence. a combo that you may repeat 20 times per fight that you use the extact sequence is not buttonmashing. it’s just repetitive. so while graev is correct (it’s not tekken random-attack-button-mashing in hopes of firing off a barrage of attacks and a lucky combo that was not sequentially intended) it would also make keen correct in saying that repetitive key-seqencing can become laborous and leads to macroing. for some longtime mmorpg players the novel idea could get old fast.

    personally, i’m not a big twitch gaming fan. i prefer the pace of rpg’s for longterm gaming. twitch makes me think of arcade genre and fps for consoles. that being said i’m still excited to give AoC some quality time.

    agreed….. funcom seems fishy here. hope it plays on my computer because i always give a new game at least 1 month of my time. here’s to hoping they are running a fantabulous client on their closed beta that will rock our world upon install.

  • Cant say im happy about anything on the 360 but thats the way gamers want it. One thing your podcast really dose call for more games on 360 only forgetting about the pc then the other way around… But one thing looking at the interface you can see how it was made just for a 360 controller. everythings easy access with left and right controllers

  • This podcast seemed like one big rant, trying to make something out of nothing and somewhat ill-informed.

    Age of Conan is fun. The Fileplanet Beta is problematical, but still fun. Let’s not try and second guess what problems there are and let Funcom try to solve them.

    I am surprised how positive people are considering how slowly the game plays. It bodes well for the game imho.

  • Just in reference to the hardware that was talked about. The 7900 (gs) is quite a bit different then your (gt). Also the “Go” models specifically are never as powerful as their desktop counterparts, there are many many reviews of video cards that show the comparisons. So I think your machines are quite a bit different.

    That being said, I do think it will run on those systems in the final release. And also I think you might have mentioned more the performance differences in the OB, CB, PVP, weekend clients while that was being discussed to shed more light on it as it really came across strongly that your entire opinions were based on the OB client which I don’t believe gives a good reprisentation of how the game will run at release due to many things that have come up.

    Thanks for leaning on Funcom about the shoddy decisions they have made, they could have been much more open in communication about what they were doing. I have rarely been so dissapointed in a company and in my opinion this OB test was a complete failure on many levels.

    If they needed to release an old client with debug code to get a proper test, I have no problem with that, but they should have told us and the 50k potential customers who in a lot of cases don’t research CB vs OB and all that. I think they are going to lose a lot of customers because of that. And not only just the few that didn’t post or read online, but those people have friends in MMO circles, and in general entire guilds in other mmo’s they are playing that they will now spread “their own experiences” too.

    Funcom, fire your marketing team and get a new one, huge failure here.

  • @K&G: great podcast.

    One of the things (so the Interweb says) that caused Tabula Rasa issues on launch was their mis-handling of the final phase of Beta, when media/bloggers published their pre-release impressions of the games. These seemed to be mostly that the game was “Decent, but kind of *meh*.” When released, the game was improved, but the “poison” of the original poor publicity had spread, and it took time for perceptions to slew.

    Do you think maybe that, when planning beta phases, Funcom hadn’t been paying any attention to the TR experience?

  • @keen, btw I read a developer interview about the 360 version. They are going to have seperate servers deffinately, and are tossing the idea around for combined servers but have no definitive answer at this point.

  • That does make sense to me…

    1) Press “A” for Fireball
    is the exact same thing as
    2) Press “1”, “2”, then “4” for Fireball.
    but it just takes longer (with a greater possibility of you messing up).

    The key to making a good combo system is making it MORE than just separating skills into a series of more skills.

  • @Scytale2: Yeah, it did sound ranty at parts. Unfortunately that’s because the past few days have been rough. It sucks to go from really looking forward to a game to suddenly having the realization that we may not be able to play together and enjoy it how we want. And I hope you know that I agree. Age of Conan IS fun for the most part.

    @Michael: Richard Garriott felt they let too many people test/play Tabula Rasa before it was polished and ready for release and in doing so it hurt their game. I think he was correct. I also think that Funcom has made the same error, except they not only let too many people play their game before it was ready but they also created 3 different clients and exposed more than 65,000 people 2 of them which are/were completely buggy. It could come back to bite them.

    @Kmxs: Ah okay. We’re not very learned in the ways of subtle hardware nuances. I thought a 7900gs would be very similar to a 7950gt all things considered. I’ve been trying to differentiate between the pvp weekend, ob, and cb client performances as best I can.

    The PvP Weekend was stable but not optimized for hardware performance.

    The OB Client is a complete mess. Crashes, lag, stability,… a complete pos.

    The Closed beta client is very similar to the PvP client but slightly more optimized. Still SOME issues though especially with multi threading or dual cores or something making load times and stalling really bad..

  • This industry is no longer the infant that we often claim it to be.

    Soon it will be a troubled teen that will (hopefully) mature into something better. The industry knows better at this point. Years of successes and failures pretty much bounce off developers recently, as they plow forward making the exact same mistakes.

    I mean the EXACT same mistakes.

    And then when someone dares to try something different, it dies. NOT because being different = failure, but because it simply wasn’t implemented smoothly enough.

  • @keen: Yah the GS series is the consumer version of the more enthusiant GT GTS GTX cards. If you like I can get some performance links and what not, I wrote massive review on PC’s and 2 options for my WoW converting guildies to that would run Conan fairly well. One budget and one more performance/budget. The big difference in those cards is the amount of pixel pipelines open on the individual cards. They generally run at the same clocks speed but GS versions will have less pixelpipes, while also having less texture memory. The GO version generally take the GS or GT version and lower the GPU and Memory clock speed to compensate for the lack of power and cooling that is available in a laptop.

    I can confirm about the dual core thing. I had a few times turned off the affinity of my second core and it did not impact the game whatsoever FPS wise. So I know the OB client is not using the second core. Also the DX10 functions are a choice in the video options but don’t actually work in game.

    Although I am dissapointed with the OB, and how much research I had to do regarding the clients. I am deffinately going to give the release a go because I do like the gameplay a lot and am taking the risk of putting my faith in the CB testers saying the release client is going to run a lot better.

  • I agree with Graev that what Age of Conan melee combat is not button mashing. The context of button mashing comes from those kiddies(no offence) that play fighter games and just press random buttons not knowing what there are used for and its abilities.
    In Age of Conan, you know where each blow is going to land and how each combo is going to be used. Yeah its going to get tiring, it needs a whole lot of concentration for the whole playthrough but its not button mashing.
    You are more than welcome to name this feature though.

  • Good podcast guys. I like the simple back-and-forth style.

    Sounds like AoC is in for a rough release though, we will see what happens. If nothing else, the beta period has been handled rather poorly so far.

  • I’m enjoying following the progress with you guys in beta, but honestly I don’t know what the big deal is about deciding whether to buy the game, especially based upon a beta.

    Seems a no-brainer to me, any MMO is damn cheap entertainment, I’d rather bet less than dinner and a movie on the full game than get worked up over the beta. Funcom is obviously going to stick with it, it’s not going to disappear or anything.

  • Correct me if I’m wrong here. There are two server up for this open beta? There are 50,000 players in this open beta?

  • 4 Servers, but server side lag only accounts for a very minor portion of the performance issues and in game bugs that are occuring. The DC’s and in game lag spikes aren’t a problem, i mean it is a stress test. But there are a lot more issues then that in the current OB client.

  • Graev was right, it’s not button mashing. I don’t know why you are basing any opinion at all on the open beta/stress test… its an open beta/stress test lol. Sure, they shouldn’t of used an old client, but w/e, the closed beta and PvP weekend both run well. The retail release will be much more “polished”. Graev, your graphics card is the problem with AoC and a little more RAM would help as well.

  • Hmm 50k chopped up 4 ways on any server any game beta or no beta is going to be for the “average” pc a big problem not even taking into account that they are all starting in the same zone. The old days of Camelot you had 300+ on a relic raid and more times than not it meant server crash. I’m sure they arent and why would they get out the good china for beta 🙂 no offence but sounds like a player stress test to me 😛

  • Yes it’s a beta with bugs and people “playing” it are supposed to be “friendlies” w.r.t. Funcom’s efforts to producing quality. *BUT* this is exactly where Keen is right with his gripes (which I respect). Their lack of disclosure as to what the player may expect is bothersome. It shows lack of respect for beta testers. In an iterative development environment which Funcom claims (I read the word “iteration” w.r.t. this game I believe more than once), release notes and letting the customer know what they’re getting and what to expect is fundamental.

    BTW interesting podcast. Was hoping Graev was going to pounce on Keen when Keen insisted on some weird definition of button mashing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_mashing. AoC doesn’t have button mashing because not only is there a sequence of buttons to be pressed, there is an associated timing to each key press (from what I read).

  • I have to side with Graev on the button mashing issue. The combo system might get repetitive, dull, and boring after a while, but it’s not button mashing since you are hitting specific keys with a specific intended outcome in mind. I think it’s only button mashing when you have no clue what you’re doing and are just pushing buttons in the hope that your character will spit out that “magic” combo attack.

  • @Kelji: Agreed. And I hate to say it, because I appreciate many of the opinions and perspectives they’ve brought up here, but whether you’re an official news media outlet or just a blogger, I have to question the validity of indepth reviews with a beta.

    Reviewing beta and pre-release was always a debate when I was working in videogame journalism (I won’t say where, it’s not hard to find out, but I don’t speak for them officially at this time). It usually won out, because players anticipate games before they come out, they won’t read as much later if they’re too busy playing.

    But one thing we put our foot down on was that tried not to give performance reviews until it was either released or gold marked ‘for review’, which is distinctly different than just a lack of NDA. Some review copies would even be marked ‘for performance review’, because there was an implicit agreement that gameplay was the real material subject to review.

    If a game releases and it doesn’t perform on reasonable hardware, it will tank on its own. It is only fair for the media to give the developers that opportunity to make their own mistakes, not to shortchange them before they do. No matter how close to release.

    Now, some caveats about the debugger and beta versions go a long way, plus minimum specs are fair game. I don’t want to totally roast K&G here, they’re showing better restraint than others, which is oddly why I’m posting this here rather than elsewhere.

    I’m really thinking the EA-Mythic way of going dark and controlling ‘exclusives’ for info is going to be the future. It’s such a shame.

  • Playing a class in age of conan is just like playing a game of Dance Dance Revolution.

    Pattern recognition and emulation.

  • If nobody has mentioned this yet? I have a feeling that lag induced deaths could become more frequent without the auto-attack feature. At least when I lagged or got dc’d in WOW, I knew my guy would fight the good fight without me watching…

  • Enough about the button smashing plz.

    Anyone that played a Combat Rogue in WoW pressed A-A-A-A-A-B
    from lev 1 to 70.

    If this game brings just an extra layer to make some combos and a chance of fatalities then im gonna be way happy.

    I was looking forward to read some sort of PvE class reviews much like the very good PvP ones you did in the PvP weekend.

    Havent decided between Conqueror and Barb yet. But id like to hear your thoughts about the PvE.

  • Okay, okay, okay. So “button mashing” is not the best terminology. You win this round Graev. Let me at least reword it then.

    “Excessive Button Pressing compared to other mmorpgs”

    Does that work better for everyone?

    In order to use abilities it takes 2-4 key presses (at low level) to use a skill. At higher levels it may increase. Since every action from the character is dictated by a keystroke it stands to reason that I am correct in saying that the game is far more active than any other mmorpg.

    Does anyone out there disagree?

    The game adds that middle step between inputing a command and seeing a result. That extra step is a series of keypresses that require some thought (or a decent macro device). My worry here is that it will begin to feel tedious and annoying. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

    @Higgs: Look for those this week. 🙂

  • lol @ Bartlebe *dances* or maybe like a daily quest in Ogrila? hmmm wasnt that like Simon? I loved that game 😉 to a point.
    @ Graev or Keen brothers? I could almost feel Keen flipping Graev off as he stood fast by his “thats not button mashing”Lol

  • It was a great podcast, and I always enjoy bickering.

    Does the combat look visually impressive enough to justify the excessive button presses? I really don’t want to have to hit like 4 buttons to get “generic finisher #3”.

  • Great question Railtih. Keeping in mind we only have levels 1-20 to really gauge right now I would answer that by saying Yes. The finishers are nothing short of amazing. Watching the enemies head fly off or blood splatter on the screen as you impale them with a hunk of jagged wood is impressive. The animations are top notch in combat.

  • @Keen:
    “The game adds that middle step between inputing a command and seeing a result. That extra step is a series of keypresses that require some thought (or a decent macro device). My worry here is that it will begin to feel tedious and annoying. That’s the point I’m trying to make.”

    You sneaky dog, we went over this in the other thread. *hand on face*

  • So brothers eh, how old are you 2? At first I thought you were some old guy but now I’m thinking your youngsters… and I’m the old guy *sigh*

  • @Horpse: Let’s hope it fixed their messy client, adds dual core and SLI support, and makes the open beta playable. All I’m asking for is a miracle!

  • I have been listening to your podcast for weeks now and read your posts daily. I think you guys have a great podcast and I would love to participate in it. I think you guys are passionate about it which is great.

  • I enjoyed open beta, and it reminds me alot of Diablo II: LoD, which is great. As for crashes and performance, yeah it’s pretty annoying.

  • today I finished getting my desk together and put my computer back together, AOC keeps trying to authenticate, I get to it a yellow bar fills, then it sits for 10 seconds, and says fails to authenticate? Anyone else getting this?

  • “Excessive Button Pressing compared to other mmorpgs” -Keen

    I would argue that other mmo like wow are far more of a button masher Keen. The difference I see with AoC is that every ability seems to have a small cooldown and also there is no queeing of the key presses right ? No matter how fast or furious you press the keyboard in AoC you will not hit faster right ?

    So it is not like in wow where a top rogue or hunter etc will be smashing the buttons so furiously fast that their keyboard gets broken. Trying to queuee up the next attack in line after the other. This is button mashing to me.

    Also I get the feeling that in AoC there might be many different combos at higher level that are good. In other mmo I played such as wow, gw, eq there was usually a few OP abilities on those toons I played forcing me to use the same damn attacks over and over and over.

    I hope that what AoC will bring as you get better at it is a certain flow to it in terms of gameplay.

    I am also curious if it would not be very difficult to use my g15 to set macros if all the different combos have different speed to them as in you gotta wait x ms before next keypress ? That sounds intentionally to me as a way to combat something like a g15 keyboard. Perhaps you would have to record the keyboard for the combo and then it gets very dicy I would think.

  • I agree with the mashing, I have played every class so far, barbarian mostly. It is INSANELY button mashy, for every mob I kill I have to press maybe 30-50 keys. If I wait for the combo to start and click once then maybe 10 but I hit the key a few times for it to go off right when it starts to do the best damage. I can’t imagine how much mashing I would do on an 80…

    The client is HORRIBLE! I have a newish system, less then 5 months old. I get decent frames, that’s not my problem. The problem is with the HUGE lag spikes, at some points I was running smooth at 50 frames then get a 20 second lag spike for no reason. Everyone playing with me and from what I have been reading this is happening to a lot of people.

    People claim this is an old client with tons of background and uncompressed data etc etc.. Why on earth would they put this PoS up for 50k people to see? I bet they lost at least that number of subscribers just off this 13 days demo. Yes yes its a beta, sure. 14 days before launch and this is what they chose to show to 50,000 people when they had a better client to show off, nice.

    Aside from the terrible lag spikes we’re the load times. I had to delete my first rolled toon because every time I’d try to log in I would get a 15+ min load screen. Tons of people complaining about that as well. Pvp is just not fun for me when I die I get a 30 second load screen at times. Other times it’s instant and great, mostly not though.

    I think the game will run great at launch, as of now I don’t even want to play the beta…

  • Just a quick side note, tempests of set are still MASSIVELY overpowered. Last game I played as a ToS I went 16 and 0 with ease, best pvp dmg of anyone I have seen(Barb seems to be best pve dmg). The main problem is that the melee classes are just strait not fun in pvp for me. To get any combos off the person I am trying to hit has to stand completely still. If they move or I move it doesn’t work, if however they do stand still.. I can do over 400 dmg in one hit on my barb.

    Overall I think it needs a lot of pvp tweaks before it is at the “wow level”.

  • How do you stay alive as a TOS? Im lvl 10 and get straight MURDERED by even 1 person.

  • Well, you have a aoe root you can cast even with people on you, and you have an instant cast 5 second stun. That with running away and you never die. However, I find the best way is to just 2-3 shot everyone.

  • the closed beta IS much more stable than the open beta. i cant beleave FC did this. seems to me they would want a great first impression. i just dont get it.

    @keen and graev =)
    listened to ur podcast and i gotta ask, have u lost ur marbles Keen? button mashing… dont u remember street fighter II? Tekken? come on man. i agree with u on the macro thing, but u are so far out in left feild saying AoC=button mashing. Graev next time he goes off on button mashing, take u sock off and stuff it in his mouth lol =). i cant beleave u this time Keen. i mean i have listened to u complain about some pretty trivial shit before =), but button mashing in AoC? what u wanna go back to auto-attack? come on bro, get with it. =)

    ps: u guys are really starting to grow on me. Graev keep pumping that brother of yours (u are brothers right?) with common sence. button mashing lol thats funny. sounds like convos i have with my brother lol

  • well, I dont have the stun or root yet at lvl 10, so that will come by 13 im guessing, and I cant really cast, cause every single class stuns the shit outta me hah

  • @ bigredjeff

    The attack system is cool, but I still prefer auto-attack and normal single press abilities. I think It would be the best system to have no auto-attack but drop combos all together and just make it click abilities.

    At this point I have the most fun with casters because I don’t have to spam the hell out of keys 24/7 to play.

  • I went from bretty bad choppyness to 70~fps just by setting shaders to 2.0, and turning off all the shadows.

    I think most of the problems(at least for me) are caused by this and shadow mapping.

    I hope the dx10 and shaders are fixed in vista on release :/

  • @skullforged
    ok after this im of to bed
    im not compleetly happy with the combat system. i wish there where NO combo “buttons” and insted there where combo instructions (in ur jurnal or w/e) and u just direct ur attacks acordingly, and if u hit the right keys and had the right timing u would pull off the combo with devestating impact. that for me, would be ideal
    o and about the auto attack thing. i dont care if u like auto attack, thats cool with me. i just hate mindlessly waiting for my toon to harvest some xp / trash loot from a mob. i enjoy tactics and challenge that doesn’t revolve around time spent. in AoC time spent playing might still be a large factor, but at least i have something else to think about while im investing the time. i dont know if that makes sence, but im always looking for new things to do in mmos because they are boring in a way, or as my fellow clan mate says “foo foo unicorn bullshit.”

  • @Anders
    The issue is exactly that there is no queueing. As your character will only do anything when you press buttons, you better hope you pressed them as soon as your character could take another action, since you couldn’t queue it.

    @Keen
    From what my friend tells me, he’s already seeing quite a bit of a performance increase by using SLI compared to running on just one video card. As for dual core, I’m surprised they haven’t gotten it to run on those CPUs without the need to set affinity, I just hope you and others aren’t expecting a huge performance increase from dual core support, as that is unlikely to happen.

  • @Xaanin

    SLI, Dual core optimizing, DX10 etc is NOT in the beta. So I would be impressed if your friend is getting better performance with SLI hehe. Most just turn off SLI and the extra cpu for beta testing. It will be there all att launch or so they say anyway 🙂

    And wtf having to actively play the game is a bad thing ? From the sound of it many here should go back to wow. Can´t go wrong in that one here

  • @Verus

    It’s not having to “actively play”, typically when I play an MMO I am relaxed and having fun. Not perfectly ready to have to do so much work to play. In wow I spammed just as much as I do in aoc, on a 70 druid though, not a level 4. I am not sure how it plays at 80, but from what I have seen and heard I think single click abilities would be much better.

    The main problem(AND IT’S HUGE) is that you can’t do combos in pvp unless the person you are trying to hit is standing still. If you move at anytime it will cancel the combo, as well as if they move even 2 feet out of range it won’t do a thing. However with a ToS for instance, I can cast any spell as someone is sprinting away and it will hit them no matter how far they run and will even go through any objects.

    If they make it so you can do combos while moving then I would love it, either that or make it one click abilities.

  • @Ghecko

    I just played with the new patches, I got a good 10-15 fps boost everywhere. However, it seems that the loading is even worse and still get 5 second stutters all the time.

  • I can’t see your podcast.
    Although I could see your last one.
    There is just a blank space in its place.

  • Same here just listend to it and cant seem to find it anymore.

    Also where can i still hear that pod cast about server discussion choice and why its so hard?

    Regards Sefran.

  • Both Podcast links (Contents list and in the post) are missing – just see the Podcast graphic but no way to Play or Download.

    Keep up the good work – I’m following your BLOG avidly and like you am torn over AOC. After many years in the “MMO Market” I have developed keen instincts when it comes to new MMOs and AoC is the first once which is confusing me: looks great on paper but I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near ready.

  • Torrents are great & cheap way to distribute the game, there is no sense making it directly downloadable unless you are Blizzard and making billion dollars a year 😉

    Btw. has there been any info on how the characters will advance past level 20? The AoC sites just tell that you will get “fire based attack at level 2x and fire based aoe attack at level 4x”. It’s gonna be awful if everyone has just handful of skills that are AoE versions of earlier skills.

  • Button Smashing!!!

    Well i listened to the podcast and i found the button smashing conversation interesting. I can understand both sides of the argument and although i haven’t had the chance to play the game at all yet i do not feel the combat system is button smashing.

    Compared to warcraft ( im using wow because its the last mmo i played) the combat system will be more based on skill. I know people hate thinking of mmorpg’s as a skill based games but i feel after looking at clips of conan game play and reading what people think of the game that at high end pvp and possibly pve that conan will be based around skill.

    Before someone goes comparing skill in an mmorpg to cs1.6 or cod4 i would just like to clarify what i mean. I define skill in an mmorpg as one player being smarter than the other, in other words he knows his class inside out and is a skilled player.

    In conan much like warcraft skill will be determined by how well you can capitalize on your oponents weaknesses but unlike warcraft conan will take skill to the next level by making it harder to do ( sorry if i am stating the obvious).

    So i guess what i am trying to say here is i feel the combat is more skill based than button smashing.

    On another note, because there are no auto attacks in conan it will cut out alot of the flaws which warcraft has at the moment, by this i mean no one person will be running around with 4 characters multiboxing eg. 4 shamans and a healer instant nuke ftw as seen in wow. I could also cut out leeching for gear although funcome have stated that only the best will get the best gear, i hope they stick to there word on this because one of the reasons i left wow was the fact that because i was good aka arena teams at 2300+ rating people were getting the exact same gear as me just a few months later. I know i sound elitist here but its a joke that your skill level can be so much more than another player and they can still end up with the same gear.

  • I think its just laging like crazy because they perpusoly are making it lag for testing purposees, i hear it runs great in the closed beta

  • ive got one thing to say. f*ck the guy that says ” Keen and Graev. afread i only have one thing to say to you and your laptop playing…. xbox360…

    PC gaming in my opnion is for the Higher Running people. i mean i have a bardn new pc and i run age of conan of Full spects. all shadows, highest resaltion and everything check that incresses the “look” and i have no problems

    You want a average player to play age of conan. well then play the xbox version. thats what its there for, for average people….” thats bullshit man. why do you think that vanguard failed? MMOs like AoC should be for the mass people that dont have that 6g comp that people buy every 6 mnths. Thats like selling food to homeless people for money…. think realistly, how many people actually have the “top of the line” comp? my labtop is a GAMING labtop. hint hint meants for GAMING. i fiexed the problem that i was having with the AoC problem and i love to hear people that say well if you dont like it go get the xbox version. i shouldnt have to. i can play any other game with ease. so IMO… stfu KMA kty

  • I’ve heard a very mixed bag of opinions both on this Blog and other forums about AoC at the moment but I still feel its worth £25 of my hard earned cash to at least give it a go.

    At the end of the day I think its a little unfair to judge a game so harshly based on the beta tests. My only experience of beta testing so far is the Warhammer Online closed beta and all I can say is i’m glad they decided to put the release date back again. Admittedly I haven’t tried it for about a month but last time I was on the combat system was in need of some pretty major improvements, Keen would have had a field day regarding button bashing.

    Basically as far as AoC goes i’m going to try and keep an open mind and see what its like at release, hopefully it’ll keep me entertained until Warhammer gets released, if it blows what have I really lost? Nothing that i’m going to lose any sleep over thats for sure.

  • To be honest, a 7950GT and 7900GS don’t perform the same at all, it’s like comparing a 8800M GT and 8800 GTS, and the 8800GTS is completely outperforming the 8800M GT.

    There are huge performance differences between the mobile graphic cards and the desktop cards. You can’t simply think that the 8800M and the 8800 is performing about the same, because that’s far from the truth..

    Also the mobiles CPU’s are not performing as good as the desktop ones. So saying that Graev’s mobile CPU is almost the same as Keen’s Core 2 Duo is also far from the truth.

    So when Keen got a much better graphic card, also a quite a lot better CPU it’s not that wired that Graev got much poorer performance than Keen.

    And I can’t really agree with Graev’s laptop being average.
    First of all, laptops aren’t build for gaming, yeah some might perform rather good, and you got these Dell XPS M1730’s which I won’t call a laptop at all..

    But in the end a laptop isn’t build for gaming, a mobile graphic card and CPU is performing quite a lot worse then it’s desktop brother, so you have to pay almost twice the prize for the same performance on a laptop as you would get with a desktop.

    And the 7900GS isn’t a good performing graphic card at all, you can’t really compare it to anything. It perform worse than the 7900GT which was a average graphic card 1.5 years ago.. So what did you really expect?

    Did Graev’s computer have a decent dual-core CPU at all?

    Having a decent dual-core CPU is like night and day in Age of Conan, my friend got a 8800GTS 320MB, 2GiB RAM etc.. And should be able to run the game on high settings, but because of his bad performing AMD Athlon 64 single-core he can barley play on low settings.

  • Someone in this thread said they hitting 30 – 50 keys per mob they kill?

    Are you sure your playing AoC? Because I hit on average of about 10 per mob as a melee. 3 – 4 as a caster. Which compared to a WoW warrior/rogue for melee is about the same, and also the same for a caster.

  • @Thomas

    Dual cores aren’t even working right now. I’ve shut off and turned on the affinity of my second core a few times and it had no impact on gameplay whatsoever, some people are even finding they are gaining stability by turning off the second cores affinity.

    Last nights patch seemed to smooth out the game and quicken the load times. There are still bugs and I still crashed but not as much. The one problem that keeps occuring for me is whether my graphics are set on high/medium the bump mapping for my character models just randomly turns off and makes them look flat and boring with traditional textures.

    Asked many times in the forums but have not recieved an answer.

  • Well I am basing that from a Guardian who doesn’t even have frenzy stance at the OB’s low levels. I am pretty sure its one of the lowest damage classes and I’m deffinately not hitting 30 – 50 keys per mob. Anyone who has played AoC OB should be able to confirm that.

  • I just have to say, that combat is DEFINITELY NOT button-mashing.

    It may seem like such at first, especially as you get used to the idea of combat as AoC wants you to play it, but by level 15 or 20 there are so many options to take into consideration, including the active blocked, dodging attacks, and positioning of your own shields… it only becomes button-mashing when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing and then just presses a bunch of crap.

    You know, like when my father in law plays that nunchuk wielding guy in Soul Caliber against me and marvels at how “good” he is.

    Take your button mashing strategy in AoC up against later mobs or worse seasoned PvP-ers in the game, and you’ll soon realize that you may be mashing buttons… but the others are PLAYING and skillfully at that.

  • People are mostly misunderstanding my usage of button mashing. It’s not randomly pushing buttons. You would be correct in saying that AoC is NOT like that.

    BUT

    AoC DOES require MORE button presses and MORE activity from the player than any other mmorpg. TO ME it’s a bit much and TO ME it will get old. TO ME it feels less like a RPG and more like an action game.

    It’s that feeling of apprehension toward the system getting very old quick that leads me to feel as though it were or could be soon button mashing in nature.

    Button Mashing? Okay maybe not.

    Excessive button pressing when compared to other mmorpgs? Yes, in my opinion it is.

  • ‘button mashing’ as a term means ‘to randomly hit action keys’. thus your useage of the term ‘button mashing’ is wrong. knowing the combo hit sequences by heart will give you the upper hand in combat. randomly mashing action keys won’t get you far. this is the main proposition of their combat system.

    tho i believe, that having to ‘announce’ a combo before hitting the directional attack key sequence, instead of going for the directional attack sequence right away, to trigger combos, sounds kinda dumb to me. how do you, who actually have hands-on time with age of conan, feel about that?

    i strongly suggest to simplify the combat system to match gamepad needs. defenitly, if they nail gamepad controls, age of conan will be a winner.

    anyone of you know the ps2 capcom game ‘shadow of rome’? that’s how combat should feel in age of conan. if you dont’t, go pick it up right away! it’s my PS2 ‘insider tip’ for people in need of brutal melee combat. great game. if ‘age of conans’ combat feels anything like that game, it’s awesome!

  • Yeah! ‘Shadow of Rome’! Sweetest limb chopping action ever! Barbeque sauce anyone?

    P.S. 84. was me… sry for not tipping in my name.

  • There’s 1.5 second Global Cooldown in WoW but warriors, rogues, hunters, feral druids for example are still hitting an ability every single time the cooldown is up. In Aoc between weapon swings is sometimes longer then 1.5 seconds which means if you pressing buttons that much your more then likely needlessly doing so.

    It’d be like in WoW, if your a healer and your GCD is cooling down but your targetting a tank and hammering the heal key so that it pops off immediately when the GCD ends, it needless but you don’t waste any time.

    In Aoc there is actually a 1 action queue ahead of time that prevents the need of doing this at all. So although because people are new and don’t understand the combat, and are mashing the keys in succession thinking its this heavy button presser, it really isn’t any different then previous.

    You do have to pay more attention as your pressing the buttons to focus on the targets weakness, which causes a lot more concentration and “concious” button pressing. That can be a lot more mentally demanding then just spamming sinister strike while your waiting for another cooldown sure, but its not “more” button pressing, its a lack of understanding of the game and improper playing.

    Once you get to the point where you know whats happening, hitting combo buttons and sword slashes in succession, its a lot more relaxed. I found this happened to me after level 10 when as a guardian soloing it became difficult to take 2 mobs my level at the same time. I had to be more careful and use less stamina so I could sprint away to break aggro and come back to beat the second mob once I was full on health again.

    Those are just a few examples, but really, play the game more and you’ll find the way your playing will change. As you get more comfortable with your combos and it becomes less mentally demanding to focus on what your doing it starts to actually feel pretty traditional. Which I assume at higher levels will integrate the use of the system more making it more inovative, having to actually make more crucial decisions and what not.

  • Just wanted to say that I have been playing the closed beta client today for about 9-10 hours. With only two times I had to ctrl+alt+del and close it down. There was ZERO memory leaks and my fps was a steady 40-50 on my crappy geforce 8600 card (AMD x2 3ghz and 5gb ram) at low settings. On medium it was around 20-30 but the game looks better than any other mmo ever already at low settings so I keep it at that. I think with something cheap like a geforce 9600 or 8800 I could probably run it just fine in medium or high also for a small investment.

    As for the gameplay it is far far away from the button mashing in previous mmo. You get tons of combos as you level up and as you get skilled at the game just like a fighter game on a console you get into a “flow” of playing. Hard to describe but anyone who was good at street fighter and mortal kombat probably knows what I mean.

    I want to answer this nonsense about casters being imba also 🙂

    “Casters are imba they just run away from you and kill you. /cry the combo will not work.”

    ok first there are very very few instant cast spells for casters, secondly your combos does not disapear as they run away it stays available for you for say 2-4sec so you can run after and execute/continue the combo. I know at low level like people are playing the open beta the casters are truly imba. simply because the game (just like wow) is NOT balanced much at all below level 80 and the casters do insane crazy damage already at level one. Trust me though once you get to endgame the best pvp classes are meele ones such as bear shaman (I shit you not, crap at 20), assasin, barbarian etc.

  • Yah I don’t really know where this opinion that games like street fighter are mashers. Back in the SF Alpha days I used to play competatively in tournaments and out of 60 people in the regular season nobody mashed their buttons. If you ran into a person like that (somebodies little sister for instance) They were probably going to get owned with a flawless victory. That type of gameplay is reserved for the people that thought throwing fireballs over and over was thought out strategy. *roll eyes*

  • btw, yah I know flawless victory is from MK, but the lame voice shouting “Pur-FECT!” in the background of SF doesn’t make for good quotable material 😛

  • how is a bear shaman going to be one of the best? It’s a primary healer with some offhand dammage abilities.

  • NDA has been lifted I beleive, and im confused once again… TOS is still failing in pvp at 13, all green gear and 2 blue pieces. Now I need to figure out what melee class seems fun. Thinking barb or dark templar, have no clue if dark templar can even fish out dmg in pvp.

  • kmxs: not sure this info can be found all over the net. that said I did talk to one of the gm if I could post some pictures on my guild website with a bit of info etc and he said they had no problem with that.

    galo: about bear shaman at higher levels

    In PvP, the Bear Shaman is a nasty class to run into. Their buffs, their healing, and their medium armor all gives the class high survivability. Add in some excellent melee damage and you have a top contender for the best solo PvP class. Everyone knows that when you run into a compitent Bear Shaman, you had better bring your A-Game.

    Against other Priest classes, the Bear Shaman will usually win out. For the most part Priest Classes are difficult to kill as a Bear Shaman because all the priest classes deal just low enough damage that a Crit, potion, or client freeze will usually determine the match. Skill > button smashing when fighting eachother.

    Against Soldier classes, Bear Shamans can shine. Being a melee class itself, the Bear Shaman does not have to worry about kiting, and can sit in combat against a soldier and heal out alot of the incoming damage. Though not always a sure bet, the Bear Shaman will usually win if they know what they are doing.

    Against Rogue classes, the Bear Shaman can experience some difficulty. Assassins are a nasty class with quite a bit of caster-killing abilities. Though the armor helps, I have seen Bear Shamans fall to a skilled assassin. Barbarians have a rough time against the bear shaman, but usually the fights will come down to who directs the momentum of the fight. Bear shamans can ruin the day of not only Rangers, but many rogue classes if they get a crit off with one of their heavy damage dealing attacks.

    PVE- Bear Shaman are an excellent class for PvE, yet they are NOT a tank. Though the early levels can be a bit rough, after getting a buff or two and adequate access to heals, the Bear Shaman can easily solo its way to freedom. Medium Armor is more than adequate in most situations, and players can often accomplish what most other classes can not in terms of damage mitigation.

    On Teams the Bear Shaman is about as good as any other healing class. HoT and a spike heal can keep teams alive in some very dire situations. Often picked up due to their diverse abilities on a team, the Bear Shaman usually only finds itself in trouble when it forgets to heal and begins “tanking”. Teams will have to determine afore hand what they want this class to focus on.

  • the NDA is lifted for lvl 13 and under, and I find it hard to believe anyone who works for Funcom would allow it, but thats just my opinion. Also I was just giving you a hard time, I would like to see more from the NDA section of CB :O

  • awesome, bear shaman was what I was orginially going to be the second I saw the classes, but all I heard was healer healer healer, I played a paladin in WOW and im over with being a dedicated healer, but looks like the bear shaman will be a class im looking into now that i’ve heard it can do some dammage.

  • @galo

    Well Tempest of Set is a super difficuly class to play. They have tons of cool abilities and if you are a really really good player I would give it a go. They are super squishy though with really low HP so most should probably try an easier class.

    Barbarian is a really really cool class. I would rank them in the top 4-5 in terms of pvp abilities.

    Dark Templar hmm not played that much. They seem cool but the others in beta say the dps is only so so. Though the combo of warlock/warrior is quite cool 🙂

  • If you mean the cool demonic form it is an ability called:

    Desecrating Benediction for HoX

    “The Herald becomes infused with the demonic essence of Xotli increasing attack rating, health, magical fire damage and fire magic rating.”

  • Nice podcast guys. My only criticism was that you did belabor points a bit too much for my liking, on button mashing as well as the hitching and hardware issues…i got it the first couple times. 😉

    I’m surpised by the number of people willing to give funcom the benefit of the doubt. Anarchy Online’s launch was an absolute nightmare – argueably the worst ever. Frankly I’ll wait and see what the community is saying in July about AoC. Thanks for the head’s up guys.

  • Anyone know a good video for a bear shaman? Everyone I look at they get dominated, also been looking at HOX, looks squishy but good burst dammage

  • Wait? What? By Keen’s definition every single fighter ever concieved is just a buttonmasher, seeing as combos don’t change. I wholeheartedly disagree with this sort of definition of the word.

    I dont quite see the sense behind Funcom releasing an older, less complete client, but I just have to live in the hope that they had their reasons, and additionally that more systems will be able to run it in the future. But the game does look great, and aside from stability/performance issues I’m in love with my first impressions of the core gameplay itself.

  • Keen meant buttonmashing in the most strick, literal sense of the word.

    Fact: In any random, mindless Age of Conan encounter, you will press more buttons when compared to any other, average MMO. Hence, the word buttonmasher. Having the DDR like combos memorized could be called a skill, sure, but it all boils down to a very basic knowledge of buttonmashing. All Keen was saying was that Age of Conan is an awfully heavy, buttonmashing game (for an mmo.)

    In DDR or fighting games, its understandable. In MMOs, it stands out as different.

    Lets use a crude example to illustrate my point.

    In WoW you could use several skills in any fighting. Lets say I was a warrior: I would charge, use a few melee attacks and kill the mob.

    1,3,4,2,4,3, enemy dies. A few skills, a handful of chops and random enemy mob dies.

    In Age of Conan it is different.

    1,2,2,1,1,2,4,1,2,3,5,1,3,2,4,2,1,2,3, death. Age of Conan is different and it is buttonmashing. Controlled buttonmashing is buttonmashing, its just wearing an ill fitting coat of “Tactical and action packed combat.”

  • @Prancey
    by “fighter” you mean fighting-game..
    Yea, Keen mixed up the definition of button mashing.
    But his idea is right: there is much rapid-button-pressing in AoC.

  • As someone who has played wow for 3+ years both pvp and raiding mc/bwl/aq20/aq40/zg/kara/ssc/tk/hyjal/bt and sunwell. And also played Age of Conan for more than a year in the closed beta this what I think.

    1. The fact that wow will queuee up your spells means that you are not waiting for your next spell to be ready instead you are constantly smashing (often same button) over and over and over and over as you raid at top level.

    2. Wow classes uses very very very few abilities. As a hunter just one (auto/steady shot macro), two as a fire mage, two as a healing pally etc etc. While in AoC often use more than those just for different directions and then add in 10-20 good combos to consider every fight and we have a completely different ball game.

    3. Because AoC does NOT have an autoattack or a queueing of abilities and also a slight delay on combos/attacks means that unlike wow there is NO point to smashing your keyboard like a crazy person. It will not do more damage at all. I understand that when you start the game and before you reach any higher levels yes it feels like randomly hitting buttons but trust me if you continue playing AoC this way (like some do with a normal fighting game) people will quite literally chop your head off.

    4. Add to this character collision system, active shield system for both yourself and the people you fight, add the ability to dodge/jump to the sides by doubletapping the movement keyes, add the stamina system/running add active blocking with the X key.

    Now also add spell weaving for casters and tons of combos for melee, add in fatalities that boost you and your group to speed up combat in instances and change the pacing of the game. Also add in different cc abilities for all classes in different ways for pvp (who has not played shaman in wow and cursed the lack of cc) and you have a game that is far far beyond that of any other mmo I have ever played.

    There are probably more things but these are just from the top of my head 🙂

  • Do I need to record a video to prove you don’t need to hit a mob 1,2,2,1,1,2,4,1,2,3,5,1,3,2,4,2,1,2,3, many times to kill it? Unless you found some uber lvl 13 raid bosses this is completely false.

    And it is not a fact that you press more buttons. I already explained it above that in WoW on a melee char your basically using an ability every 1.5 seconds based on your global cooldown. In Conan there is no set GCD as far as I can tell but then you do have to wait for your weapon swings to end.

    By level 13 on any melee character you have enough combos to not need to use regular sword slashes, mobs die faster and there is no such thing as an example that is 1,2,1,3,2,1.

    And to say it again, in AoC it will Queue attacks so there is no need to be mashing a button while waiting for a global cooldown like in WoW, thus resulting in actual less button pressing. Maybe your a conservative player and you watch your CD’s and only hit your button once in a game like WoW, alright so they are basically the same at that point. I do know for myself, when I played a combat rogue in WoW, I would generally be spamming sinister strike between other abilities resulting in pressing the same key 3 – 5 times every 1.5 seconds. This was for 2 reasons: a) I wanted to watch the combat not my GCD cooldowns. b) I wanted to make sure the ability popped as soon as it was available to use because there is no queuing of abilities in WoW.

    It seriously seems like some folks haven’t played either one of the games. Either that, or your confused about how you actually achieve effective melee combat in AoC. This is really a lame argument based on a gross misreprisentation of the game mechanics. It feels like your hitting more keys because you have to pay attention to the keys your hitting now. Play WoW then load up AoC. Count the button presses for your average combat while taking advantage of the abilities in WoW, and the combos in AoC. Its the same, but it plays differently.

    Yes you can have a preference to which one you like, and nobody can tell you that your wrong, as it is your preference. It is not fact that you mash, or press more buttons in AoC just because you do not prefer the system of combat.

  • Verus, abilities do not queue in WoW, they queue in AoC up to “1” ahead. I have no idea how a guy who claims to have such experienced credentials couldn’t possibly know this.

  • One of the main differences as far as I can see is whether you are doing PvE or PvP at that point in time. For PvE, you would memorized the mob’s tactics, so you could keep pressing buttons away. However against a good PvPer, expect to change your tactics frequently, since the standard combination of button presses for a PvE mob is not gonna work well. Still, you will have to press a lot of buttons, but different ones, as each set is catered to suit the tactics you employ.

    The terminology for button mashing from WoW happens to precipitate around combination of PvE and PvP (also due to the availability of auto-attack). So people tend to get confused with a vague term called button mashing. It can meant differently in different contexts.

  • Btw, curious to know the stability right now. (If I start seeing fewer posts, it could meant that most of you guys are online smoothly).

  • it’s running much smoother, but, it still has its’ moments. Enjoying the bear shaman as of now, when I hit 13 i’ll test it out in pvp. Also good to hear from keen that the rangers arn’t horrible anymore. From the ranger video I thought they sucked now.

  • for anyone that is running vista, and possibly XP im not sure if this works for XP, if you hate the loading times like I do, get in a pvp match and by the time your loaded theres 30 seconds left, you could get 4 gigs of ram, or save 150 bucks and right click your c-drive, hit properties, and uncheck the 2 boxes at the bottom, hit apply and OK, it will take a while, 10 minutes maybe for it to take affect, but I went from 10 minute load times to about 30-45 seconds

  • Well, i was thinking that a combo would be more like an attack that will matter when executed.On average mob some tomes i had to chain 2-3 of them to kill it and when i was facing 3 at the same time i was just spaming combos one after other without much of a thought.I was thinking that a)u need some sort of skill to execute a combo to get 100% of it b)some sort of strategy to execute at the right time/place.But now at lvl 10 i got about 5/6 combos already and it seems that all do the same thing, damage.I mean i am surrounded by mobs and i havent any tool to help my self, ether i die or i ll start running till i ll lose aggro!

  • @kmxs

    I am not talking about level 13. Neither do I think anyone seriously give a crap about that level. I was talking about endgame raiding something I have done extensively in wow for years. And in AoC I got a chance to do that on my level 80 conqueror (closed beta) and what I am telling you is that in wow as almost any class you are smashing buttons at a much much faster pace.

  • i’m running my Radeon 3870 512MB + 2gigs of 800Mhz RAM + AM2 4800+

    i’m disapointed cause i have like 10-15 fps. thought my machine is quite ok… is there any possibility it’s Windows XP fault? Should i install Vista?

  • not noticing the bear shaman doing much, can take quite a bit more dammage then the TOS, but the combos always miss or do almost 0 dammage.

  • “TO ME it feels less like a RPG and more like an action game.”

    Well, Keen… they have been calling it an Action-MMORPG for years now. 😉

  • To quote you from Darren’s place: “/facepalm”

    I really do love that… I wish every MMOG had it as an actual emote.

    Well, at least now you know… and KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

  • So, would the game resemble Warcraft if you are to macro all your combos? Just hit this and that, and the button mashing would be similar to WoW’s?

  • Similar, yes. The combo would still have to execute there is still the factor of shielding on the enemy and on yourself.

  • When listening to the podcast I noticed that Graev has a very similar system to mine (a Dell XPS M1710 with the 7900GS, 2GB of RAM and a Core2Duo @ 2ghz). And boy do i experience the same kind of problems as he does.

    But! yes there’s a but!

    When I started AoC OB the first time I got a warning that my video card driver was known to be causing issues, and was recommended to download a newer driver. This newer driver does not support the 7900 GS and the driver im using is the latest driver from Nvidia for the 7900GS. Ive also tried some of the older drivers from Dell but they all give the same result.
    This can very well be the explanation to why he/we are experiencing poorer performance than others with seemingly poorer computers.

    Just a thought. 🙂

  • I just wanted to leave a note, I have tried to setup a controller to play AoC, it worked decent. I’m sure if I dedicated more time to actually setting it up I’m sure I could of got it working almost flawless.

    The main hurtle I ran into was looting, outside of that it worked quite well.

    The game does feel like it is being made for a console and not a PC, I feel it’s a mistake. It’s really hard to manage everything with a keyboard and mouse. Hopefully in the release client they let you map mouse buttons, because it’s quite annoying not being able to.

  • You can map mouse buttons. There are many programs that will allow you to set your mouse buttons to keyboard keystrokes. If you have a logitech mouse you can get the drivers right off their site for your specific mouse. I’ve always done this even in games I can use regular mouse buttons just because I get used to which keys on my keyboard are mouse mapped. So for instance I am currently using a logitech 10 button mouse. I leave the left and right regular clicks alone then map all other buttons to p o i l k j m n for abilities. Then that still leaves the keys close to W A S D open for even more keystrokes and I haven’t found a game yet that takes more then that. Generally it allows me to have around 24 easy to reach macros before any ctrl/alt is involved.

    Probably included a bunch of stuff in there you already know but I’ve seen this mentioned a few times and it doesn’t have to be a stumbling block, get the software for keystrokes and you basically supercede any game that has lousy mouse support by making the game think your mouseclicks are keyboard keys. Hope some of that helped.

  • @Sws: Thanks for the info! I was going to try this myself today to see how it works. I’ll see if I can find a way to get looting to work. Conan really does feel like it’s built for a console.

  • I would have to disagree with this being the most button mashing intensive mmo. Ever played Rogue in WoW at lvl 70 in a raid environment. (Hunter pulls boss) >>> (Tank grabs agro) >>> (rogue keystrokes) 22222222222232222222222232222222222221322222222222223
    22222222222232222222222232222222222221322222222222223

    Repeat for 5-10 minutes. Now that is button mashing.

  • I have to disagree with alot of this, Keen kinda has a Negitive outlook on things, while Greys look kinda reminds me of giving things a chance..

    Keen seems to be “trying” to convince people this game isnt worth playing because “he” cant afford to spend 300-500 bucks on new upgrades to run the game good..
    Just because “you” cant play the game on the highest settings Smoothly as ever. doesnt mean this game is going to fail, going to be a bad game..

    You need to maybe look outside the box and maybe realize that this game is taking a HUGE jump from the “Normal” boring shit that Daoc. WoW, WAR when it comes out, and every other MMO, and realize that in order to make a DIFFERENT game, you need to do big steps, ie, Wicked graphics, New combat system..

    Im not meaning no disrespect against you, everyone has there own opinions on everything

    but DONT try and bring other people down with this game because your computer sucks balls, get a new one, and have some fun.. THEN make a new podcast on how this game gets u hard, how this game made u lose your job because you play it way to much “bascially me in the future :P” jk haha

    but just give up smashing on something you cant run well..

    Grey props to you man for having a defence to “every single point” keen talked about

    And by the sounds of it, ur a hib Lurikeen in Daoc.. HELL no. i hope your on devon cluster so i can smash you 🙂

    Peace guys

  • Why do people bring up my comp? 😛 I’m getting 60frames per second now and the game looks better than any other mmo out there. Yeah, there are stability issues but those are 100% completely Funcom’s problem. You guys sound silly when you keep saying it’s my comps fault.

    I’m not trying to convince ANYONE that this game isn’t worth playing. Can you please link to or quote any source where I have ever once said anything of the sort? I knock the combat system because it’s absolutely not what Funcom set out to create. I knock the performance because it’s not optimized at all – FACT (Check the long list of known issues from Funcom themselves.)

    You guys really need to stop, take a deep breath, and realize that I am simply giving my opinion on a handful of issues. Thanks.

  • the game runs fine for me, it’s just the loading times, and the second I get into an area I need to bear with the 1 spf ? dunno what that is, and the 1-4 FPS till everything in the zone loads, running at 80-95% physical memory with 2 gigs ram, if I get 4 gigs ram, with the 8600 gts I should be able to do things MUCH better.

  • lol i do like all the complaints about the gfx being to high.

    If this game lasts 3 years then you going to thank them for putting the bar nice and high

  • I think maybe you should script your podcasts before recording.
    Ever heard of objective analysis? Your opinions don’t seem to hold any real substance. There needs to be some solid foundation to your statements!
    e.g
    “Your video card probably has double the RAM of mine” .
    As passionate as you both sound, I would recommend a more structured approach, especially when trying to argue a point.

    P.S perhaps designing the game requirements is a little more difficult than you think. Maybe predicting the hardware years in advance is hard to cater for. Also, did you consider that lowering the graphics requirements to attract a higher subscription base, wields the risk of losing the ‘wow’ factor that attracts people in the first place?

  • The whole idea behind our podcast is that we sit down, pick a few topics, and talk about the as though wer were having a discussion. We’re trying to avoid the structured and scripted podcasts. But thanks for the advice. 🙂

  • Your computers are not average and your video cards are one generation from current hardware on retail shelves. I bought my computer last summer and I have 8800 gts with 320 meg and you guys are still running 7900’s? What’s that about? If your going to try to talk intelligent about what the average is you should do some research.

  • “Button Mashing” – Here’s what it means: It’s when you can succeed in a game (usually a fighting game) by just furiously hammering random buttons because you don’t know the combinations. Remember how you played Streetfighter at first? You didn’t know what any of the buttons did, so you just “mashed buttons”.

    In a bad fighting game, this is all you ever need to do to succeed. All you need to do is mindlessly and RANDOMLY mash any/all buttons.

    In a GOOD fighting game you cannot win with this approach.

    Button Mashing is NOT a game that requires pressing a lot of buttons. Lots of games necessitate non-stop button pressing, but if you don’t press the RIGHT buttons at the RIGHT time you’ll lose. That type of gameplay is NOT button-mashing.