Sunday, October 16, 2011

Subscription based singleplayer

So I have attended a wedding recently. I love weddings because one: it is a celebration of love and love is to be shared, and second: I am an excellent, eager dancer and I can go wild on this occasion (the magic ingredient is vodka). Turns out I have been seated next to a guy that, apart from running his own business and being a dad, was an avid MMO gamer. His fatal flaw was not being able to settle for one game, one character and he was constantly shifting from one MMO to another without being able to, in most cases, even leave the starter zones. Seriously, at one point he had 8 subscriptions running to a major MMOs with gaming time available to him being less than 1-2h per day. Having learned that my play style was "one MMO, one character - go" he got really interested in Age of Conan since he never have tried it before, but he has been Conan fan for a quite a while (mainly due to comics and paper&dice RPG). Our chat went something along these lines:

- I always roll on RP servers when I can, Hyborian setting must be incredible on AOC RP servers right?

- um....we don't really have RP servers. I mean anymore..we used to.

- ok, so how is raiding in AOC? The combat system is bound to be making raiding something more than button mashing,

- yeah...well I don't raid so I wouldn't know really.

- fine, so what do you do then?

- I pvp,

- what is pvp like in AOC?

- it is mostly instanced, it is called minigames.

- oh nice, I do like those in WoW

- well, not really like in WoW, think smaller, like 6 man

- right, so arena based pvp then

- no no, like 6 vs 6, something like capture the flag in FPS,

- WoW has that too. I have really enjoyed those BGs with my team from PVP guild I used to be in.

- well in AOC you can't sign up with a team, it is random.

- WHAT? What do you mean random?

- you sign up and kinda get a set of people for your team,

- but you can still join with a friend or two?
- no

- what? why the hell not?

- I don't know.

- so if you don't pvp with a group what do you do?

- mostly when I log on I do instance runs or minis,

- instances are cool, does AOC has that classic tank-healer-DPS stuff?

- yeah, but I don't do group PVE, I run solo instances,

- solo instances? What are those?

- like regular instances, but only you and mobs, and smaller rewards in a form of tokens. You can still get epics for those tokens,

- and you are paying for it?

- I do, but you don't have to. To be honest you have to stay subed to be competitive in pvp

- so let me get this straight: you are JUST doing those "minigames" with random people or doing solo instances alone?

- kinda am, yes,

- you are not playing an MMO then,

- what do you mean?

- sounds more like subscription based single player

- :X

true story...

9 comments:

Tenofas said...

LOL
Did this talk happen for true? Because it was hilarious! But you did a mistake at the beginning: although we don't have RP servers anymore, there are many RP events still going on, so if someone wants to RP he can do it. Well, almost. :D

Anonymous said...

You mean ... you didn't realized before and it took a mariage, some vodka and chat for you to face the cruel truth ? :)

Anonymous said...

Wait for pvp bosses you will be able to group up with some friends maybe :D no matter if its fail or not you can still dig together in Bori yay? :D I am so tired of pug minis I can barely do them nowadays

Anonymous said...

Hilarious! I only have time for minis and solo instance, too. But I still enjoy it.

AoC gets my vote for best "Subscription based singleplayer" ever!

Anonymous said...

I really play only minigames, sometimes gank in khitai, sometimes - 1-2x/week refuge of apostate. I d really like to pay for pvp content. They can make a lot of pve contents but I m not going to buy it. Pve content is boring - the same as bori;(

Unknown said...

Hope that AOC devs read this SAD BUT TRUE (Mettalica will say) post

Unknown said...

But at leats you was lukcy Slith.
What you will say if he asked something about crafting?

Slith said...

@Seminola

Right, I couldn't talk myself out of crafting disaster ;p

Anonymous said...

you could say more about raids if you were doing them but this game is full of players like us - I even dont know the names of t2 bossess and I play aoc since early 2009. Aoc could be really good pvp+pve game but pvpers are stuck here only because of Howards books. Which guilds at fury play group pvp? 3 of them? maybe 4? only random minis, broken sieges, k/d whoring all day long. I feel really like playing single player game - I dont really need to be in guild to do things that game offers me. If there will be an alternative without sugar-pink universum (like GW2) I will be first guy to leave aoc. Or just leave because im bored more and more.