Conan's Tree of Woe
by Britton LaRoche · 12/02/2008 (3:02 am) · 21 comments
The game Age of Conan, is very much breathing its last breath. I suppose there is hope, just as much hope as conan had when he was tied to his tree of woe (in the books and movie). This article sums it up pretty well. Maximum PC's the beginning of the end of Conan
After they released the patch, requiring the latest DirectX video drivers in the game, I could not play it. I knew it was going to take some work to get everything upgraded. None the less, I upgraded my video drivers and logged in one last time before uninstalling the game. Like any good game developer I always play a game with the Frames Per Second (FPS) displayed. The FPS before was 11 - 20 on my PC with high activity. Now its 39-77 FPS. So we see a nice boost with the upgrades, and the effects look more crisp than ever... but... well, with a subscription based game you need players.
The server known as "Set" (always the most popular) had about 40 players online. The Bane server only had 3 online players. No one is playing AoC anymore. AoC Was losing subscribers at a fairly rapid rate a few months after launch. In my opinion the mandatory video upgrade to the latest direct x drivers slaughtered the remaining subscriber population. Let that be a lesson to all you game developers. Do not use direct x. (Good joke!) Actually the message is never force a video upgrade. (Using Open GL is just common sense... ) Lats time I checked, the Bane server had 40 online players before the upgrade. I found that number (40) to be a ghost town. Today after the forced directX upgrade, the only server to have more than 3 players is Set, the most popular server of all. It used to have hundreds... endless fields of lowbies for me to gank. Plenty of newbie heads to collect! Now its like the US calvary and "Buffalo Bill" have come through and wiped out all the AoC Subscribers the same way they did with the Buffalo back in the 1800s.
Lets look at why this DirectX driver update was probably so terribly traumatic to the average AoC subscriber.
It took about two hours to jump through hoops and upgrade my video drivers and direct x. It was not easy and I like to think I have more than the average ability to do such a thing. I figure half the subscribers didn't event try.
Why would the average subscriber give up? The current direct x downloader from Microsoft does not work. The smarter than average cat will search about for a way to download the drivers with out using the Microsoft direct x down loader. But this step probably wiped out 75% or more of the remaining AOC subscribers.
I found the November updates and pulled them down. Then I spent 15 minutes poking about trying to figure out why I could not extract the files, then to find where I stuck the files after I fat fingered the temporary extract location.
After locating the temporary folder and running the setup.exe, I finally upgraded to the latest version of DirectX. I logged back into AoC. Ah success. And well... emptiness. No one to play with. I looked around. Did player searches and found I was just about the only one playing. Now, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist.... But... I do have a theory. This was planned. Not by the accountants, but by the developers. The accountants rush things... but they don't even know what a video driver update is. The developers do. And ... they know what effect it will have.
I think the developers are pulling the plug on the game. For what reason? Not sure, but I think they have a plan... Will Conan survive the tree of woe? Only time will tell. But the game looks "wicked dead" to me.
Previous Posts
The Demise of Age of Conan
Combat in the Age of Conan
Exploring the Age of Conan
After they released the patch, requiring the latest DirectX video drivers in the game, I could not play it. I knew it was going to take some work to get everything upgraded. None the less, I upgraded my video drivers and logged in one last time before uninstalling the game. Like any good game developer I always play a game with the Frames Per Second (FPS) displayed. The FPS before was 11 - 20 on my PC with high activity. Now its 39-77 FPS. So we see a nice boost with the upgrades, and the effects look more crisp than ever... but... well, with a subscription based game you need players.
The server known as "Set" (always the most popular) had about 40 players online. The Bane server only had 3 online players. No one is playing AoC anymore. AoC Was losing subscribers at a fairly rapid rate a few months after launch. In my opinion the mandatory video upgrade to the latest direct x drivers slaughtered the remaining subscriber population. Let that be a lesson to all you game developers. Do not use direct x. (Good joke!) Actually the message is never force a video upgrade. (Using Open GL is just common sense... ) Lats time I checked, the Bane server had 40 online players before the upgrade. I found that number (40) to be a ghost town. Today after the forced directX upgrade, the only server to have more than 3 players is Set, the most popular server of all. It used to have hundreds... endless fields of lowbies for me to gank. Plenty of newbie heads to collect! Now its like the US calvary and "Buffalo Bill" have come through and wiped out all the AoC Subscribers the same way they did with the Buffalo back in the 1800s.
Lets look at why this DirectX driver update was probably so terribly traumatic to the average AoC subscriber.
It took about two hours to jump through hoops and upgrade my video drivers and direct x. It was not easy and I like to think I have more than the average ability to do such a thing. I figure half the subscribers didn't event try.
Why would the average subscriber give up? The current direct x downloader from Microsoft does not work. The smarter than average cat will search about for a way to download the drivers with out using the Microsoft direct x down loader. But this step probably wiped out 75% or more of the remaining AOC subscribers.
I found the November updates and pulled them down. Then I spent 15 minutes poking about trying to figure out why I could not extract the files, then to find where I stuck the files after I fat fingered the temporary extract location.
After locating the temporary folder and running the setup.exe, I finally upgraded to the latest version of DirectX. I logged back into AoC. Ah success. And well... emptiness. No one to play with. I looked around. Did player searches and found I was just about the only one playing. Now, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist.... But... I do have a theory. This was planned. Not by the accountants, but by the developers. The accountants rush things... but they don't even know what a video driver update is. The developers do. And ... they know what effect it will have.
I think the developers are pulling the plug on the game. For what reason? Not sure, but I think they have a plan... Will Conan survive the tree of woe? Only time will tell. But the game looks "wicked dead" to me.
Previous Posts
The Demise of Age of Conan
Combat in the Age of Conan
Exploring the Age of Conan
Employee Michael Perry
I'm very happy to hear common terms, classes, and game talk from another GS player. I feel like I've met up with an old war buddy =)