Hell Froze Over: An Interview with Funcom’s Erling Ellingsen
Hi, I’m Daedren. You might remember me from other interviews like “Mark Jacobs: He Didn’t Call Me Back” and “Richard Garriott: Corp Por or In Vas Mani?” I write this not with a gun to my head, or a sharp weapon to my balls, but because I’m an advocate of objective journalism in the MMO industry. That means when I strike up a dialogue with someone as unlikely as even Erling Ellingsen, of Age of Conan interview fame, I must adhere to my own code. I think I’m saying that because I’ve been watching Dexter too much.
A short synopsis of the background leading to this interview: I recently wrote an article titled “Age of Conan: A Post Mortem Analysis” that was, by MMO industry standards, famous enough to have Massively’s chief editor send me a couple hookers and a bucket of KFC for my troubles. Some of my readers summed it up as “The harshest review ever done on a game - but mostly true” or “inane babble by a crazed man, obviously driven insane by his socialist European overlords” - in any case, it got the attention of Funcom, probably because I emailed it to all of them.
I eventually came to discussing the article with one Erling Ellignsen. After he realized I was not all fire and brimstone, he lightened up to the fact that reaching out to MMO player base might be a good idea. No one is perfect, of course, and it’s only fair to give someone the chance to explain. With that said, I’ve given Erling 5 questions to answer, and here are his responses:
Daedren: In an interview with Jon Wood of MMORPG.com, you state that “No big features didn’t make it in to launch”. However, Age of Conan was marketed as a PVP-Oriented MMO. As the game was launched without a PVP system, how is this possible? We understand the need for testing and ironing bugs out, but it really does seem like the PVP system should have been there at launch and wasn’t. What gives?
Erling Ellingsen: I disagree with you that the game launched without a PvP system. You could PvP players from day one, both in mini-games, in the open world and in sieges. One of the things we received the most positive feedback on was actually PvP, and Age of Conan is unique in regards to the fact that the majority of our players actually play on PvP servers. We even launched with a PvP cultural server ruleset. However, we know that we need to develop PvP further and that’s what we’re doing when we’re now rolling out PvP experience, levels, armor and the consequence system. Saying that Age of Conan launched without a PvP system would, however, be incorrect in my opinion.
Daedren: In the same interview, you mentioned that “We know better than anyone what issues we are facing with the game”. That said, how can you then justify the recent gem changes, the horrible gem balance from before, the past and current in-game itemization, and lastly, failure to fix game breaking problems like gems and epic item farming (effectively ruining the economy) in a reasonable amount of time? What sort of assurance do players have that mistakes like this won’t be done again in the future?
EE: I certainly understand your concern, but rest assured that we are doing the best we can at the moment. We would like to fix everything right away, but that’s simply not the way it works. These changes take time to develop and implement, and we need to work from a list of priorities. We have done a tremendous amount of improvements since launch, just look at the various patch notes. That being said we know there are still many issues that needs to be corrected, and we are working relentlessly on that. The gem system is being worked on as we speak, and the recent change we did was a temporary one to offer an intermediate improvement until we get it right. We will address all the issues we can, we just need to work from a list of priorities, and that means some issues will be ironed out before others. I know it’s hard to be patient about these things.
Daedren: There has been a lot of criticism about Funcom already announcing a pay-for expansion for Age of Conan. A hefty portion of people have been allocated for this project. How can you justify spending time on paid content when basic features (like PVP) are missing from the game, and how can you try and compete with other games like Lord of the Rings Online who provide these content updates at no cost?
EE: I have absolutely no idea where you have “a hefty portion of people” from. Right now the expansion team is very, very small. Our main focus now is, of course, the live game. It would make no sense whatsoever for us to not prioritize the live game — we need players to be happy with the game or else there isn’t much point even making an expansion, so improving on the game that’s there is priority number one. We wanted to drop some news on the expansion now because we wanted to show our playerbase that we are making long-term commitments to the game. Again, addressing the concerns the players have about the live game is alpha omega to us. The expansion is far, far away from release and we merely wanted to announce that we are indeed committing ourselves to delivering that sometime in the future. Until then, the live game is top priority.
Daedren: With the release of Warhammer Online and the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, how do you plan to retain players? What is the focus in the next 6 months of Age of Conan to either keep players playing or get them back from other games?
EE: That’s a good question, and I’m sure it will be a challenge! Right now what we want to do is work with our players on addressing the concerns they have and making the necessary changes and improvements that both we feel is needed and that the players feel is needed. We’re definitely getting there, and I think you will see us picking up speed in the time ahead as more and more good stuff is coming out. The first part of the PvP update is leaving the test servers now, and I can’t wait to hear the player’s feedback on it. Then we need to get the consequence system out, and I think we have definitely made a heavy improvement to PvP. We’re also rolling out a whole new outdoor area for level 55+ players, a whole new dungeon for level 60+ players, Tarantia Commons for mid-level players, as we have at least two level 80 dungeons in production. Then there is epic raid gear coming for all the classes, and we will continue to revamp content similar to what we did with the Black Castle. We are also looking into loot distribution, making the items more meaningful and making raiding more rewarding. We are committed to improving on Age of Conan and a large number of the changes you’re seeing is a direct reaction on player feedback.We will also work towards improving communication with our playerbase, and we want to keep everyone more in the loop on what we are doing with the game.
Daedren: How are the current subscription and server numbers? We’ve hear rumors of server merges and severe population declines on some servers. Any plans for these?
EE: I’m not at the liberty to discuss subscription numbers due to the fact that we are a publicly traded company. The latest number we announced was the 415.000 customers per August 14th. We will certainly do what is necessary to entertain a healthy community of players on the servers, and if we decide on doing anything such as server merges we will make sure to notify the playerbase when we can. Right now I can not give you any definite plans on this, though. We do, of course, register the feedback we’re getting on the forums and we’re taking it into consideration.
*
And there we have it, folks. I’m a bit disappointed with the answers, of course, but that’s not surprising. If you call “able to attack another player” a “PVP System” then I guess that’s your call. Perhaps I should have said “No meaningful PVP System” or perhaps “A PVP System different than Bruce Lee on the Commodore 64.” Not releasing subscriber numbers might not be Erling’s decision, but I think it’s safe to say with Warhammer launching this week and WotLK out in November, Age of Conan is going to have a bit of a difficult time not only retaining players but getting new ones as well. From how Erling talks, Age of Conan is being patched constantly and fixing problems, not introducing new ones. How accurate is that?
I’ll be honest: I haven’t played Conan since June. That said, I’m not the most informed on the current game status: though word on the street is that the PVP patch still hasn’t launched and there are still some glaring performance problems. I’ve heard from a couple MMO hobos that still play AoC that a real patch hasn’t been introduced since July or early August, and that the PVP patch (the one promised in June) is hyped up every week, only to be let down come patch day.
That said, I ask my readers to come up with some questions to bring to Funcom. Of course, I’d like to know peoples response to these answers. I’ll be compiling what I consider the “best” questions from readers around and giving them back to Erling in a week or two - that is, if he doesn’t put a restraining order out for my vivid pictorial references above.
Consider this an open dialog with “the Funcom”. I’d like to hear from both ex-customers like myself and also some current subscribers that still enjoy the game.
Oh, on a last note, here is the three month trend for Funcom Stock. If you’re too lazy to click, it’s gone from $55 per share to $8 per share in just over 90 days. I’m no market analyst, so I ask for help on this as well. Is that healthy?
Special thanks to Paragus for that last picture. That’s good stuff there!
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Would have liked to see some follow up questions based on some of his responses, but if this wasnt a real-time interview I can understand how that might have been a little difficult.
My only question for Funcom (at least right now) would be: How can you justify having classes whose abilities still dont work months after launch (rangers and pitch pots are a prime example)?
Hello. I’m the main tank of the only successful raiding guild on my server (Hyrkania, europe), not because we’re so great, but just because the server cunts around 150 people on primetime when we’re lucky. Funcom is obviously firghtened to even starting talking about mergers. it’s quite obvious that for them the bad press server merges so early after release would bring is more damaging that leaving a good portion of their playerbase to *rot* on servers that are most similar to an absolute ghost town than to anything that could be defined “massive”. They’re so frightened about their abysmal population numbers to be shown to the public, than when I published some data i gathered (with a lot of effort) on the european server population at primetime here: http://classygamer.blogspot.com/2008/07/some-data-on-age-of-conan-european.html The week after they removed the “next” button from player search, effectively wasting development time to impair the ability to check a server population’s health. If they want anyone that’s actually playing in the live server to believe that they have 415000 ACTIVE players, they’ll have to come up with a much better lie.
Also, I’m one of the many Guardians that, having to tank for their whole guild, took the blunt of farming gems to increase their resistance. Such effort took hundreds of hours of mindless and boring farming. Hours that have been rendered completely useless not once (with the nerfing of inviolate and immutable gems), but TWICE, with the upcoming nerf of the single element resistence gems, that, just to be clear, are absolutely useless in PvP (making their nerf 100% not justified). This shows an astonishing lack of respect for the time of their playerbase, and I’m debaffled that Mr Ellingsen can dismiss the question with such ease.
In conclusion, the current situation of the game is shameful (to use a gentle euphemism). I’m entirely doubtful that anything funcom can do in the near future will be able to correct it. In the far future it’ll be way too late.
[...] then, Daedren was able to grab the attention of Funcom, and hence an interview with Product Manager Erling Ellingsen. In true Daedren style, he doesn’t beat around the bush and asks the questions plaguing the [...]
I would like you to ask them why they are hiring thugs for their “customer support”. I have had many emails sent to me from Funcom’s GMs saying negative and rude things. Here is one examples:
I got banned about 14 days after the game came out for posting “trojans” on their forum. I filed a complaint with the BBB and eventually got my account back. When they unbanned it, they never unbanned my email address. I have contacted moderators, admins on their official community forums with no success. I even emailed Funcom on a few of my alternative email addresses. Here is a response they sent back to me:
“Your account and forum access have been closed. They will not be opened
and our support representatives will no longer assist you, as you are
not a customer of ours nor do we wish you to be.
–
Best Regards,
GM Odum
Senior Funcom Support”
a few minutes later, they sent me this email:
“Okay, I see that your account is reopened. I will see what can be done
about your email. Please do not send any more emails in. This will be
the ticket that we handle the issue on. if you send any other emails in
it will be considered spam and customer service abuse and I will be
forced to re-ban the account.
–
Best Regards,
GM Odum
Senior Funcom Support”
After the second email, they updated their email services to where I can no longer contact them unless I have a current account with them. I have an active AOC account with them, but they still have my email from that account blocked. Why is their customer service so pathetic? Its the worst customer service I have ever seen from a company. They treat you like crap, they are rude and mean. Worst MMO company I have ever been in contact with. Thats even a high ranking customer service employee treating a customer like crap. Pathetic…
I honestly don’t care if they see this email as I will not resubscribe to their game. I would have kept playing it, even with the bugs, but their customer support is so pathetic that my friends and I refuse to even purchase anything from their company in the future.
Thanks for reading my comment,
-David
Hello,
“If you’re too lazy to click, it’s gone from $55 per share to $8 per share in just over 90 days.”
That’s not 100% correct. It’s 55 NOK per share to 8 NOK per share. In other words 9.4 USD per share to 1.4 USD.
=)
LotD officially pulled the plug on our AOC efforts on Sept 14th, and in all their blunders cost them 150 accounts right there. Our server, Deathwhisper, is a ghost town what what’s left are small groups of players who are trying to figure out how to merge what’s left of the population into 3-5 guilds to keep competition going.
LotD was the only guild on the Deathwhisper Server to have a full Tier 3 city AND a full Tier 3 battle keep. It cost us 480k resources, 4 full months, and several thousand gold to build it all. Its not something you abandon lightly, but at some point you just can’t keep playing a game being run by a bunch of incompetent people who are out of touch with their community. Erling is like Bagdad Bob, he’ll say anything but no one believes him anymore. His credibility is an absolute joke, and I don’t know of a single guild that has moved on that would bother ever coming back to this dung heap of a game.
The community told them what needed to be fixed asap, and they didn’t listen. Instead they increased the exp needed to get to level 80, made guild city building entirely too painful, shut out the smaller guilds, and the list goes on and on to infinity.
In games where you require guilds to participate in the high end stuff like city building, crafting, sieging, etc you don’t just lose a single customer………you lose the whole friggin guild.
The last man in AOC please unplug the servers on your way out.
I am reading all this and I am just amazed that no one has learned from SWG \’s release. Frakking idiots.
Add Swagger, the leading and largest guild on scourge to the list of AoC abandonment! Who’s still playing this game? Has to be almost at 0 players by now. Out of the 40 or so people I played with, none are playing anymore now, there where 2 hold outs but even they quit recently, but apparently Funcom is treading down the path of shadowbane at an unprecedented rate, but what else would you expect from the people who brought us AO…
Here’s a question for him. How come they still haven’t added the features on the back of the box to the game?
@Bjorn: You got me. I thought 55 USD per share was a bit high anyway.
Viking currencies is clearly a weakness of mine.
Great article, and I’m actually baffled he took the time to do this. Some people just don’t get it. And unfortunately, Funcom is one of those ‘people’.
I wrote about this on the 29th of may. Good to see some things don’t change
http://www.stefson.com/212/why-age-of-conan-is-not-my-cup-of-thea/
I played Closed Beta since February. I did see a vast improvement from that time up until release. Although the only improvement was performance related. This meant I could actually play the game without crashing in Field of the Dead ever 5 minutes (literally).
I was so confident that Funcom (didnt know much about them from UO) would release a fairly solid game with content. This was not true! I took the first week off work to powerlevel to 80 within 7 days (this is before powerlevel groups at DMC in Kheshatta were popular and I was way above the level of anyone else anyway). Once I hit 80 I had nothing to do. I made several groups for the 1 group dungeons such as the ones in Kheshatta. We cleared most of it only to get NO LOOT! Infact, I was getting better loot off soloing lvl 71 bosses at an instance in Aztels Approach. I was pretty pissed off that Itemisation was that bad at release (and still is really bad).
Now for the PVP. This is the reason I bought the game. I owned pretty hard once I hit 80 since there was nothing else to do in PVE until my guild could Raid (more on this soon). Some of my skills would not work at all or just not as intended. Guardians went from being crap to really overpowered, then moderate again only to be buffed next patch to be really OP again! I was playing a Demonologist and a Priest of Mitra. Playing a Guardian with my priest It would stalemate since I could just heal through most of it and kite. My demo had troubles getting past 50% after blowing all my cooldowns and then i was screwed. The PVP system was promised inside the first month of release. Then again 2 months after, then 3 and now its still not release. What gives?
PVE - I heard about the Demon Beguilier boss mob being easy to farm purples off but I didnt believe it until it was patched and put in the notes. For weeks after I was a bucket load of Purples coming up on the Traders. Economy was already stuffed!
Raids - I ventured into all the Tier 1 raids as soon as my guild had enough people. We decided to stop killing Vistrix since it was bugged and we didnt want to exploit and get banned. Even though several other guilds exploited it and got their whole raid everything they wanted (thats 24 people that dont ever need to raid that boss again effectively letting them get about 50 hours+ of raid loot within 5 hours of farming. Just so you know, the bug made the boss not attack anyone and just sit there and die. It was very easy to do.
Most other raid bosses were being nerfed weekly in the patches only to be really overpowered again the next week. This constantly changed so we had a NEW fight every since raid. This is extremely frustrating to have to learn a new boss fight every week with alot of wipes.
Gem changes were the final straw. Well it was mainly the fact that it was really easy to duplicate any gem you wanted and make full item sets within minutes! I done this as a final f*** you to funcom before I left
(as i had avoided exploiting before this).
So, Theres still ALOT of performance issues, alot of bugs, no pvp system, itemisation is still shit and there is barely any players left on the server. I quit over a month ago. I’m now powerleveling my Warhammer Bright Wizard and already I see the game is alot better. They have PVP, they have PVE, they have items, they have Raids, they have content. Enough said - Its time to sleep while the War servers are having downtime
@Ult:
I feel your pain. Thanks for the feedback.
I left AoC a long time ago and won’t be going back.
At the end of the day that’s all that matters, they had their chance and they blew it.
Hmm….with recent stock woes it would be interesting to see that number compared to other public game companies. BoA just bought Merrill Lynch, I wouldn’t be suprised to see a few aggresive buyouts among game companies, maybe NCsoft and Blizzard eating up everyone else.
As for questions for FC, I want to know about The Secret World.
Damn double post.
Also strke NCsoft from my last comment, they’re laying people off, probably closer to a buyee than a buyer.
Maybe it’s been a while since I was in Journalism, but your interview seemed a bit biased and uninformed. We’ll strike the fact that you plainly say you haven’t played in months. Here’s my problems with it.
-You talk about a PVP system not being in at launch, but don’t give any details on what kind of PVP system you assumed would be in, and didn’t seem to accept his answer of there actually being player vs. player combat in the game.
-Your obsession with gems and no details to back up your questions. I quote-”recent gem changes, the horrible gem balance from before, the past and current in-game itemization, and lastly, failure to fix game breaking problems like gems .” What gem problem? What was wrong with the balance before? What needs to be done? To someone who doesn’t play Conan or never got into the gem portion of it this seems like baseless attacks and accusations to merely put someone in the “hot seat.”
-Who is being critical of the upcoming expansion release? Give examples! Otherwise it’s another case of accusations to be more dramatic. It’s like saying “Everyone hates this game.” First, that’s impossible, and two, it’s baseless and without hard facts it’s without merit.
-Where have you heard rumors of server mergers from? Is this based in any kind of fact or whining around forums by people who feel they’re owed something by Funcom? Again, no facts.
I’m not saying Conan should be defended or that it doesn’t have it’s problems. But if we’re going to throw stones, let’s at least have some real reasons why and not a mob mentality of torching the place because of rumors and emotions.
I’m convinced Erling really is a cyborg. Unfortunately for him, his AI is poorly programmed. Observe….
“I’m not at the liberty to discuss subscription numbers due to the fact that we are a publicly traded company. The latest number we announced was the 415.000 customers per August 14th.”
I’m not at liberty to discuss numbers, but here’s some numbers that make us look good. …. …. …. ….
Any question I think of will be useless without a Void Kampf test when answered by EE-bot.
Seriously, I wouldn’t trust them with a potato cannon.
oh yeah, and the pictures were a nice touch, it’s like you know I have a hard time paying attention, especially through EE’s longass auto-responses.
<3
I disagree with TuxedoSLY on his analisys of your article.. To me it feels more like a gamers view of what we want to know.. And the areas where you are asking for “Facts” TuxedoSLY he clearly says “We have heard rumors. Wich is true and a legitimate way to bring up a question.. Who better to answer directly if a rummor is true or not.
Anyway.. Mr. Ellignsen basically sounds like a clueless frontman every interview anyway.. He trys to spin the issues the public has with AoC and either switch the focus of them or make them sound minor.. Its his job of course. He doesn’t want his game to die.. But this kind of reterick and distraction tactic only works for so long and I think that time is over.. They need to put up or shut up and get the game fixed.. I heard that the PvP patch is posponed AGAIN! Just sad..
Question to ask:
With your slogan “AoC is steak, WoW is hamburger”. What was your intended subscriber base on the long term plan, such as for example 2 years after release. Where you planning to have around 5 million subscribers?
And a followup question:
Aand is that why there are 50 servers and why the game is setup to create new instances so that there are never more than 100 players in the same virtual world?
He will likely answer that he may not talk about it, eventhough it is data from past plans and expectations, just like the 415k number is data from the past, wich he does talk about.
@Tuxedo: I also disagree with your analysis of my questions.
You ask where I got my information from? My sources? Well, I was the co-guildleader of one of the biggest PVP guilds on an EU server. I still have friends that play. I talk to them. I read the AoC forums.
You want me to have sources and references for my questions, yet you ignore the fact that they were mainly correct, and most importantly, exactly what most gamers wanted to be asked.
I speak for the people because I’m like them. I work a day job, I have kids, I’m what some would call a normal “casual gamer”. People like my questioning because it’s not candy-coated and it tries to get to the bottom of the real issues.
Anyway, I appreciate your feedback, but my questions are of sound reason.
@TalRasha: Hmm… great questions! Glad to finally have something to use.
The Steak question would be best directed at Gaute Godager, I guess, but he doesn’t seem like a very communicative chap.
In regards to instancing… oo, bit of a sore subject there. It might be a bit uncouth to say “So, instancing sucks. Everyone hates it. Any chance you might change that?”
Couple things:
Guate Godager resigned after 16 years in the Biz. He was apparently one of Funcoms founder. My guess is you will find him in the ports of Oslo drinking Norweigian moonshine from some hapless customers skull. Not that I mind, though. That turd couldn’t look you in the eye unless he was getting ready to poke it out with his stubby little fingers.
Second check out the ‘faith’ of the CEO in teh game. On august 15th the CEO, Trond Aas, sold 400,000 shares of the company stock to cover expenses. Stock is trading now at less than half that. Ya, covering expenses. Like hiring a lawyer to defend the company after pissed off shareholders decide to sue them for willfull ignorance.
Just to give these guys a lesson in communication take a look at how the WAR developers are answering their customers concerns. They actually admit the problems and explain what they are trying to do to fix them. (Trying to find the link but lost it). Well its there if you look for it.
I actually find Ellingstons responses to be rude. He’s like a used car salesman trying to get people on board. Hes like the Black Knight from Monty Pythons the Holy Grail.
“HAHAQ ELINGSTON, WE PROVED OUR POINT AND CHOPPED YOUR ARMS OFF.”
“No you didn’t. Thats just a fleshwound.”
[...] then, Daedren was able to grab the attention of Funcom, and hence an interview with Product Manager Erling Ellingsen. In true Daedren style, he doesn’t beat around the bush and asks the questions plaguing the [...]
@Draeden: “The Steak question would be best directed at Gaute Godager, I guess, but he doesn’t seem like a very communicative chap.”
Probably because Gaute doesn’t work at Funcom anymore, as of yesterday.
Source: Funcom appoints new Producer and Game Director for Age of Conan
About time, I say.
Bought the game about one week after launch and like everyone found it bugged (and frankly rather boring at low levels), made a Tempest of Set but got rather bored with it after Tortage, wanted to try another class but could not imagine going through Tortage AGAIN!
When I left I always felt that the game had definite potential and was planing on revisiting it a couple of months later, but hearing the news coming out from players that, somehow, managed to stay around longer has made me cancel those plans.
Loving WAR at them moment and planing to stay there a long time.
LMAO at the pictures you inserted.. hilarious
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