AoC Noobish Musings

I'm relatively new to the game. I played from early beta to near release but was not impressed with what I saw (despite being really excited about AoC prior to joining beta) so I didn't buy or continue playing the game. It's been a long time since then and the game seems to have improved greatly since that time. By and large I have been enjoying the game even though I only play part-time. I don't have extensive experience playing at this point and no max level characters but so far it's been pretty fun. I think the free to play policy for Tortage is a great idea for bringing in players (got me playing) and I like the fact that Funcom is taking the time to focus on classes with revamps. Even though I have no idea how well they are doing it or how happy people are with the results..I have to at least give them credit for focusing on classes in a tangible way. Sony could learn a thing or two about that.

All that being said I have noticed some striking things that are missing or askew in the game that makes little sense for an MMO in this day and age. Maybe others can explain why these things are like this or if it's been addressed already and coming at a later time or whatever.

Like I mentioned before I don't have a max level character and I have no experience raiding or pvp'ing so I'm sure this is far from extensive.. however, some of this is pretty obvious at any level.

*/who commands- /who <guild name> /who <class> etc.. Why is there no command to see "who" of a certain class/guild/level is online? Every MMO I have played for 10 years has this. I don't understand.

*dressing room- No dressing room to see what weapons/armor looks like before equipping or from linked items? If you have 2 items with similar stats but one looks awesome and the other looks like a dirty rag..it would be nice to know that before you bind it to yourself or pay for it off the broker. Games have had this for years..this is not new technology or anything. /boggle

*appearance armor- This also seems like a no-brainer. Other games have this and/or armor dying or whatever to allow customization of character looks. In a visual game such as this it seems especially strange that this is not available.

*bruised body- Injured after falling a mere 3 feet off a mound of dirt? Not very epic and in fact gives an overall gimpy feeling. Why this?

*mouse button 4&5- Can't have actions bound to them. Ok seriously wtf? Is this an Apple product or something?

*hiding- It seems pretty worthless. It would be nice if maxing out hide every single level as a rogue would make it more useful. I get that you have to be in the dark or whatever and that might be ok for most classes but not for a rogue. The way it's set up makes it so situational to be almost a non-factor most of the time which takes away the feel of a "rogue" class IMO. If a rogue can't sneak around *mostly* undetected why even have the ability in the first place? Especially if sinking all your ability points into it does almost nothing to improve it.

*crashing- This game crashes WAY too much for being out as long as it has been. That being said..EQ2 crashes almost as much but that's not the bar I would shoot for at this point (if I wanted customers). I will give FC credit for smoothness of play when not crashing. I can run the game maxed out on everything with solid FPS which is not possible in EQ2.

*jumping- Why does my character jump like a retarded kangaroo? It not only looks like total FAIL but it makes simple things like getting out of a river onto a 1 foot embankment frustrating. Epic heroes should jump like athletes not retarded marsupials!

*chat windows- why is there no way to lock the chat windows in place? Every time I log in (and probably from errant mouse clicks) my chat windows are always getting resized and moving around because I can't lock down my chat windows. Seems like a basic UI 101 option to me.

*auction/broker- the method of putting things up for sale seems pretty weaksauce. Searching filters are very restrictive and you can't drag and drop items into the search box to search for items..forcing you to type out the name of everything which makes using the broker pretty cumbersome if you have multiple items to sell and want to search for what they sell for. Again, other games that have been out longer have much more robust broker options so not sure why this seems so dated. Don't have to copy other games exactly but why not incorporate obvious tools? I kind of like the way the bank and broker are merged into one entity but the broker tools leave a lot to be desired.

*targeting at distance- not sure if this is by design or what but why can't I target things in the distance? Players or mobs..have to run fairly close before you can target them. I would think if you can see it you should at least be able to get a target on it.

*corrupt files error- every time I log in it says there might be corrupt files and needs to do a file scan. I end up waiting 15+ minutes for it to do a file scan almost every time I log in (though recently I have just been saying "no" and hoping there aren't actual corrupt files). This happens when I exit immediately or if I let it camp out fully with the timer. I suspect there is some event that is incorrectly flagging the game as having crashed..even though it hasn't but it would be nice to know if this is a known issue or being fixed or what because it's pretty annoying.

*voice chat- some may view this as a fluff feature or unnecessary but coming from a string of games with integrated VC it's striking how dated the game feels without some basic in-game VC feature. Typing is so slow and cumbersome and even though for guild groups/raids Vent works fine..for PUGS and quick communication..it's just not feasible to dole out Vent info to people or expect that everyone has Vent installed. If LOTRO and EQ2 can integrate very solid in-game VC I don't see why AoC couldn't.

So that's pretty much it. Nothing too major or game breaking but definitely cause for some head scratching as to what is going on with some of this. I'm sure some of these have been addressed and I did find some info on the corrupt files error but nothing very conclusive or official.