Ok, one last post about AoC and I'll move on to something else next week. I promise. Really.

The game has been out for two days and every geek in the universe is running around saying "by Crom!" But really, being one of the most anticipated games of the year means everyone is talking about the joys and virtues of this game.

Forget that, I've got a bit of bitching to do.

Now, before I get started, I have to say - the game is fun. It is not a "WoW killer" nor was it meant to be a WoW clone. It is a bit different and some people will hate it for that. The combat system is fun, and lag isn't as detrimental as I thought it would be. It is also gorgeous.

But - and this is the unfortunate part - the launch was very weak. Here is a company that has been developing this game for years, who has released other games before, who should know how this stuff works, behaving like this was their first launch ever.

Funcom's official stance when dealing with all of this seems to be, mostly to give a quick one liner buried in a thread on a message board post, or just to ignore it completely. You read about my frustrations with open beta already, and frankly, I feel those are understandable.  But there were a lot more issues than that. I will only address the ones that I think are real issues - not just some person on a  forum post whining because life isn't fair.

If you preordered the game online, one of the perks was you could get early access to the game starting on the 17th instead of the 20th. While Gamestop broke time and space to deliver my game to me on the 16th, I could do no such thing. This was the whole point of the preorder campaign, from the consumer perspective. You were to register your game and get an option to pay an extra $5 to get in early. The money was supposedly to cover the bandwidth for the download. Some companies chose to send out game keys, mine just shipped the game. I needed no download, but I still couldn't add a pre-launch code because, and here's the kicker, they sold out by Thursday night.

The official story is quite plausible - based on the sheer volume of people registering, the number of servers they had available for early access could not support any more users. Ok, I can accept that. But to find that out you had to register the game and get into the forum. No word was sent out, and up until the 20th you could still buy the pre-order version running that same BS line about "early access." Stop selling it if you can't support it!

Well, by Saturday I had my game installed and patched. On Sunday I finally figured out how to register my game. See, I had an old FunCom account for Anarchy Online. So I logged in to the registration portion of their 1998 website and was presented with Conan icons for game registration, etc. Except every area was broken and hitting "back" took me to Anarchy Online pages. I finally realized (on my own, because there is no help on the site) that I need to create a whole new user account for the Conan registration - though somehow the AO and AoC accounts are now linked. Grr - document when you have an obscure or ridiculous process!

Tuesday, game day, killing, death, decapitations, bloody gore, boobies and attitude galore. No, this is not World of Warcraft.

With the Collectors edition came 5 "guest passes" as many games are doing these days. Though they were originally advertised as 15 day trials, they are actually printed as 7 day trials. Oh, and they are blank, with instructions to login to the registration site for instructions on how to get a key. Oh hell, like that place is ever of use. Since I found nothing of the sort I started looking on the forums. The unofficial word from FunCom is that they will release those keys when they are good and ready. Well, my friend who wanted to play found a copy of the game and started the install process...

Wednesday and he's still trying to patch. It is going verrrrry slowly. Because he just registered his game, his login credentials haven't propagated to the forum to let him in, so I do some digging. This is a common problem that seems to be fixed by turning off any anti virus software. No word from funcom about that, just a helpful user community. I'm pretty sick of applications that make you disable security to install their product. It's not like we are talking about a driver upgrade here. Just sloppy programming.

Funcom, in general, is laying low, thanking people who love their game and then clamming up. I can understand this in a way - acknowledging your wrongs opens up a whole can of worms and a bunch of people asking for compensation. But when you screw up? When you launch without your rollout plan solid? In today's times transparency is the key to good customer service. People will love you for being up front about the problems and what you can, or are doing to fix them. If you shut down it is assumed to be a conspiracy. Even if it is in a closed thread, or via news postings on your website, keep your customers in the know.

The ones who aren't happy after that were probably all going to jump ship and go back to WoW anyway. 

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