When I checked for an update on the Possible Misbalancing of the Sexes (referred to as PMS herewith), I was almost disappointed not to have something more exciting to report, but then I found this thread.

DarlingOne found an odd problem with guild creation:

Why in the name of all that is Hyboria is the word Drunk forbidden in guild names??? Is my version somehow censored?

This is ridiculous!

[More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

This week was the long-awaited response to the question of melee damage by female characters, which had only been peripherally acknowledged up until last week.

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to see the Voice of Crom on the US forums. Also, the devtracker tab results claims there are no matches and right-clicking Sharum’s name to find further posts from him only works on the European servers. So I have been limited to the Euro forums for my information except where someone has given a direct link to a post on the US forums. I hope this is a blip and not intentional!

Sharum cross-posted the details of the Male vs Female attack-speed issue to the Euro and US forums on Monday afternoon. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The murmurs started early in beta - female characters were sluggish and slow at melee. They seemed to do less damage. Some claimed that it was intentional - women should be priestesses and slaves but not fighters. Most dismissed it as nonsense or at most, a visual trick. Then the rumor started gaining speed - girls were penalised in Age of Conan, the big tits were getting in the way, female characters swing slower and do less damage.

Could it be true? The owner of a female Herald of Xotli decided to test it. Jssa27 took two characters, both level 61 and naked, using the same sword and attacking the same mob. The result was clear - specific attacks varied as much as 11 seconds between the male and the female character doing the identical move. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Your character traits define your character and can help you customise your character beyond the ability to choose your race and class.

In Age of Conan, your primary statistics are Health, Mana and Stamina.

Your attributes help to define your primary statistics, as follows:

• Strength impacts melee damage (except daggers), resistance to melee attacks and affects stamina regen
• Dexterity impacts melee damage with dagger and ranged damage, ability to evade and the chance to perform offhand attack. It also affects the maximum stamina pool and stamina regen
• Constitution affects health pool as well as both stamina pool and stamina regen
• Intelligence impacts spell damage for mages and affects mana pool and mana regen rate. It also defines the ability to resist fire, cold and electrical damage.
• Wisdom impacts spell damage for priests and affects mana pool and mana regen rate. It also defines the ability to resist holy and unholy damage

You start the game with these attributes preset and they will increase automatically as you level up. You can also increase attributes through equipment.

You can see the affect of the attributes on secondary traits by hovering over your combat ratings:

• Defense rating is affected by your strength.
• Attack rating is affected by your strength for most melee weapons and by dexterity for daggers and ranged weapons.
• Magic Rating is affected by intelligence for mages and wisdom for priests.
• Evade Chance is affected by dexterity.

Protection is your ability to mitigate magical damage as opposed to physical damage which is mitigated by your combat ratings. Magical resist is a general resistance and is in addition to the specific resist type which is applied. That is to say, if you receive fire damage, your resistance will be based on your fire resist added to your magical resist.

• Magical resist is affected by your Magic Rating.

  Theoretically, mages can increase their magical damage and thus their magic rating through intelligence and priests can increase their magical rating through wisdom. Fighters and scouts may use a combination of the two.

• Fire, Cold and Electrical resists are affected by intelligence.
• Holy and Unholy resists are affected by wisdom.

Note: this information was collated using the manual, the in-game documentation and some simple tests. There have been reports that secondary effects (for example spell and combo damage and magical rating) are not being affected by the primary stats as expected. As of writing, there is no official response to this issue.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

I’ve already complained about Turbine but I expected more from Funcom, if I’m honest. I thought that perhaps the management there would have seen the issues resulting from regionalization first hand and maybe, just maybe, decide that it was not the best option for the players.

Actually, I’m pretty sure they are aware of this - I don’t think anyone in the game industry actually believes that these Chinese walls are for the benefit of the players. Funcom has disappointed me twice: first by forcibly separating Europe from the US and then by coming up with a ludicrous explanation as to why: [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Oh I know, I really shouldn’t laugh. He’s clearly going after innocents who aren’t paying attention which is not big and not clever. And it’s easy for someone who has only ever played on PvE servers to snigger at the brave souls who submit to all-out PvP.

But I have to admit, I did laugh. And then I watched it a second time and laughed some more. So here you go: Good Times with a Horse on AoC!

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Races

The race you choose has two game-play effects: it determines your basic appearance options and restricts the classes you can choose.

[More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

My son reminded me that I promised a quick overview of my experience with Age of Conan on the PvP weekend! I’d like to reiterate that this was a cut-down version of the client and that we were limited to the tutorial (levels 1-5) and PvP instances (beta-buffed to 20). This means that I (and the others who took part in this PvP weekend) did not get a full view of the game.

Starting Up

Accepting that it was not the real game but simply a cut-down version, my initial response was good. The character creation process allowed for a fair amount of customisation - you could go for basic choices (tall broad woman with a “resolute” face) or you could dive into the advanced character creation and twiddle with the details, such as mouth width and eye angle. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

I’ll write some preliminary comments about the weekend beta but it’s difficult to say a lot - the client was a cut-down version and apparently also out of date. PvE was limited to the tutorial. PvP involved insta-boosting to level 20 (so most people hadn’t a clue how to play their class) and you had to cope with a laggy PvP lobby and quick instances. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t enough for me to feel I can make sweeping statements about the game.

At least two balance-breaking issues were found so from that point of view it was a success. And I finally got off the fence and pre-ordered … and I know I’m not the only one. From the slice of the game that I saw, I think it has serious potential.

But do remember that it was just a slice, not the game. I’m amazed at some of the reviews out there and some of the conclusions they are drawing from a relatively minor view of the game - especially those judging the PvE aspect from a tutorial aimed at taking you through basic gameplay.

Meanwhile, I collected some screenshots so you can have a peek. :) [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Wednesday:

Two of my friends confirmed that they got into the weekend beta - I guess I would have heard by now if I was in. Oh well.

Friday Afternoon:

Just got home to find a mail saying I’m in! OH! It says in a few days but the beta has already started. I better grab the client quick.

Friday Evening:

Gamespot web page still says that I failed to get into the beta which means there’s no route to the client download. Looking at the beta forums, this is affecting a lot of people - I suspect all the people that got late keys on Friday. Someone else has posted a link to a set of four .rar files so I’m downloading the first two parts. It’s estimating 50 hours. This isn’t good. [More...]

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.