Age of Conan: Unrated and Server Merge

Hi fellow HoXes.

A lot has been announced lately, lot of stuff that will change the future of this game and that hopefully will allow us to enjoy it a lot more thanks to a wider player base.

The Savage Coast of Turan will be an add-pack that will be released at fall 2011, it will allow players to access the zones that are related to the film which will come out in the theaters during the summer (August 2011 afaik), it will bring new contents for both solo playing in terms of ACG instances as well as group and raid instances, new armors and I dare to say also probably new factions to deal with.

This has been the first announcement made by FunCom and although I think it's good to know they'll release stuff I'm disappointed. There's lack of PvP content and still no word about the B&G ruleset that was announced for May and after postponed to a more generic "Summer". Also, B&G won't be a solution, we don't know how they will handle the character progress, the AA gain, how they'll prevent the Bori farming and how they will allow players to make us of PvE content without guards, allowing then gankers to stay there and kill you over and over and over.

If it has to be a real PvP Hardcore server, every single PvE component of it should be removed (PvE AA as well I dare to say) unfortunately it won't be so, cause as it has been said already "Core System won't be modified".

The second huge announcement is the Age of Conan:Unrated.
What the hell is it? Simple, Age of Conan is going Free 2 Play on a hybrid model, which means that starting from this summer, all the customers with an active subscription (or with ROTG) will be considered premium members, having access to the full content of the game, new players will be able to play the early parts of the game for free with:

1) Limitation on Class, only 4 classes out of 12 will be available;
2) Limitation on instance content, major raid won't be allowed.

A store will be created in which you would be able to buy armor (good but not at pair level with raid armor apparently), special passes to allow you to join instances as a F2P member and whatsoever.

No word has bee given about how and if the PvP will be affected by restrictions too.

Related to this announcement there's a close up activity, on June the 1st at 09:00 GMT all the European server will be taken down for a merge.

All the PvE server will be merged into 1 server and all the PvP server will be merged into 1 server, they will activate 1 free transfer to move to the other ruleset so PvE --> PvP and vice-versa for the lenght of 30 days.

Last but not least FunCom declared that next on the schedule there's the beginning of the works for the server optimization and the introduction of the cross-server functionality which will probably affect also the minigame mechanics, a good new.

There has been also a shy announcement about possible tweaks and fixes to the classes ingame.

There's a lot of stuff to read and verify, and my intention was just to give you a quick overview, for there will be really a lot of stuff on the horizon.


As usual I reccomend you to go and give a check at the official forums and at the site www.ageofconan.com for further details on the matter.


So stay tuned.


Special Mention:

I'd like to say Goodbye to Aquilonia, it has been my first and only server and I'm going to "leave" it only because of the merge.
It has been a lot of fun to be there, I saw many guilds come and Go, but everyting comes to an end at last.

So... See you AQ server, it has been a pleasure!



Arcalimon