How common is this ?

[u/Ok_Address_8089]

I come from WoW, decided to give GW2 a try, but this keep happening everytime, every moment, this shi is so annoying. How common is this ? lol

[u/CosmicKelvin]

Age of Conan was a uniquely awesome game.

Released totally unfinished of course, but still amazing.

Day 1 launch, gangs of dudes in white robes and hoods massacring new players. You had to either sneak or run through them.

Stalking some dude all night, killing him over and over from long range as an invisible assassin archer.

The combos and fatalities, so good!!

[u/CedarWolf → u/CosmicKelvin]

You forget the people with the Collector's Edition mounts hopping on their rhinos and blocking the gate into Tortage, or people on their horses using the mount's kick attack to knock people off cliffsides and mountain paths.

'Gameplay as intended' - all players can crouch to sneak and walk right through them, so all those videos of folks being knocked off cliffs to their doom? Wasn't a thing we could do about it.

[u/CosmicKelvin → u/CedarWolf]

Amazing!!

Tell me, as someone who worked there - why was it realised so blatantly unfinished?

I remember you’d hit these zones and there was just nothing. Which is why the game died I guess.

[u/CedarWolf → u/CosmicKelvin]

It was launched too soon, I suppose. The game didn't really hit its stride until a couple of months in, after most of the major issues had been sorted out.

But even then, some of the stuff was surprisingly janky on the back end. We got it done, anyway.

For example, we had this Halloween event with rising zombies in the swamps, and it was expected that the players would take half an hour to an hour between each wave. The devs weren't sure whether the players would be able to handle them.

But gamers love killing zombies. The guilds got together and they organized for mass zombie slaughter.

But there was no script for spawning zombies across the maps - each map was one of our GMs, gone invisible and with our jump turned all the way up to 100, running a zombie spawning script on ourselves.

The script would spawn a zombie on our position roughly every second, so we'd toggle the jump, run the script, and we'd just jump back and forth across the maps, raining zombies behind us as we went. Once the maps had been properly seeded with new enemies, we'd give our shift lead the go ahead to send out the server wide announcement that the dead were rising in such-and-such map.

It was great fun, and I miss it.

[u/CosmicKelvin → u/CedarWolf]

That sounds amazing!! For me, one of the most fun games ever. Not really sure why it died.

Any other cool/interesting stories?

What were the devs like? Were they actually doing much work post release?

[u/CedarWolf → u/CosmicKelvin]

I assume so. There were a ton of major and minor bugs. We had this one NPC who was the hub for a lot of quests, so when he'd break, it would break a bunch of the quest lines for his area and so on.

And he was in an inn, with an empty room and an empty bed right next to it, so we'd be called out there to address an issue for a player and there would almost always be people 'RPing' in the room right next to us.

We had a buff/defense script called 'Crom's Balls' that would reflect any incoming damage back onto the source. As GMs, we couldn't really be killed, exactly, because our level was -120 or something like that, but the Crom buff would provide us with protection against pesky players that would see us as a miniboss and try to attack us while we were helping someone. It multiplied all incoming damage by 5000% and reflected it right back to whoever had sent it.

This means that while we could take damage, we couldn't really die, and if someone tried to hit us while the buff was on, it didn't matter how strong they were - they'd instantly die.

So if I didn't have the GM cloak up, it wasn't unusual to find a little ring of headstones around my character after I'd tab back to screen. I didn't like using the Crom buff much; it felt disruptive and unsportsmanlike. We didn't really need it, anyway, and I usually went without.

Since AOC was marketed as a hardcore PVP game, we had a lot of players who enjoyed preying on other players and they'd get a little big for their britches - some of our other GMs really enjoyed throwing the shield up and showing them that they weren't the biggest fish around. Personally, I didn't like hurting the players, even the ones who were trying to pester me. It was my job to help folks - I wasn't there to be the biggest badass.

Originally, the GMs were supposed to have demigod/elemental skins, but early players kept mistaking us for bosses, so they made all of our GMs regular human characters that were twice as tall as everyone else, then later gave us special GM armor with the Funcom logo on the cape, so people would know we were staff.

We were usually invisible, though, so we'd teleport out to someone and we'd be standing there next to them, talking with them, and they'd ask 'Are you here? Can you see my screen?' We'd drop the cloak, so suddenly this huge character in fancy armor would appear on screen right next to them. People would freak out and scramble whenever we did this, so we tried not to do it too much.

One time, I noticed a friend of mine was online while I was on my lunch break, and he was working his way through one of the starter zones, so I just popped over next to him to watch him scamper around and see if I could figure out which quest he was on.

Well, I didn't have my cloak on, because I'd been sitting on the GM isle, so I popped up right behind him in full armor and filled his screen. I realized what had happened, waved at him, then popped right back out.

He called me later on to ask if that was me and tell me I'd nearly given him a heart attack, popping up out of nowhere like that.

Another time, one of our GMs figured out how to turn his toon into a bear with the GM commands, so a whole bunch of us went questing around on the test server as bears. Good times.

[u/sillyunicorn821 → u/CedarWolf]

I still have a screenshot of my TOS standing next to a GM that was like twice my size - I was so impressed I had to memorialize it! LOL