Age of Conan - Launch Editorial @ MMORPG

Mathew Reuther writes about the early days of AoC, part 1 & part 2. Some of which is already out of date info such as the forums being totally open now I believe.

The current state of communication is pretty abysmal. The only thing the playerbase hears from Funcom are server downtime announcements, reports of banning exploiters, a short list (which accounts for a fraction of the problems in the game) of known issues, (incomplete) patch notes, and what amount to seemingly canned, PR-approved statements.

If Funcom took the time to properly document patches the notes would be three times as long as they are currently and the playerbase would not feel as if they were being stealth nerfed. If company representatives took two minutes to post when a topic on the forums was obviously of great interest to the userbase the players would feel as if they were at least not being shoved into a corner and ignored. A single line posted from the Senior Community Manager on the European forums was sufficient to reassure the players that one of the hottest post-launch issues (Early Access expiration) was being taken seriously. Unfortunately the general rule is silence, and only rare exceptions give the players any hope of being treated appropriately. Not to mention that the two distinct regions (North America/Oceania and Europe) are unable to even view the other region's forums. This means that the customers of the game cannot share information or assist each other, and it means that issues addressed by Funcom employees remain segregated by region. At this time Funom has not confirmed the lessening of restrictions on forum reading, thus it appears that or the moment the two markets will remain artificially divided.

As if the main medium for mass communication (the forums) being underutilized were not enough, the situation with account support and in-game support is perhaps even more dire. Using the mail ticket system to contact Funcom's accounting department is futile. The vast majority of tickets go completely unanswered. Though in-game petitions are handled eventually the wait time for assistance is exceptionally long. In fact during American “night” petition handing slows to an absolute crawl, not resuming any speed at all until morning. It seems as if Funcom has staffed the support department with the majority of coverage outside of night in the US. When petition lines are hundreds of issues long and advancement is at most five petitions in an hour there is a serious problem with the amount of support being dedicated to the title.