Conan's Age of Downtime

I bought Age of Conan last week and this weekend I finally got to play it. By that I mean that I managed to log on while the servers weren't down. The servers are taken down for maintenance and updates that lasts for five hours every morning at 7am Eastern Time. That just happens to be 7pm to Midnight here in Perth.

When I picked a server I picked an Oceanic server and I expected they would also make the server downtimes suit those regions. Obviously not.

I found a thread in their general forum posted by Athelan a Funcom employee. It is filled with people yelling at each other with stuff like

"You Aussies do know that the world is ROUND? The Devs choose to work on this game in the middle of THEIR day so THEY are not inconvinenced. If you do not like this, then play an Aussie MMOG and not a European one."

I'll go ahead and mention that Fury, an Australian MMO, has some of its own problems, being off line isn't one of them. Oh by the way they are running a $25,000 free to play tournament at the moment if you want to check that out while waiting for Conan to come back online.

Back to the topic at hand, here is my addition to the thread:

QUOTE Originally Posted by Athelan:
"I have forward your concerns on to the dev team and inquired about the starting of region specific downtime cycles."

Well, its just shy of 70 pages later; whats the word from the devs? Anything or should we just continue on for another 70 pages of people slagging off each other for having the audacity of living in a different country?

Me personally, I finally got to play yesterday for the FIRST TIME since buying the game. But here it is right now 8:00 PM in Perth Australia and the servers are down for another 5 hours.

I also don't want to hear that there isn't anything that can be done about this because at the end of the day there is. Funcom could not start charging my credit card until 30 days after they get their act together. Says right there on the front of the box that I get "30 days of free play." Kinda hard to play when the servers down right smack in the middle of the prime time. It doesn't say "30 days of free play if you are unemployed, ditching school, or an insomniac."

Thanks for listening.

I have also seen complaints about the game itself and have a number myself, but what really gets me is that so many people are leaping to their defense. This isn't Funcom's first MMO, though compared to the launch of Anarchy Online this is a major improvement. I think AO's launch was the second worse in MMO history behind World War II Online. But I've no sympathy for a company that should have already learned their lessons.