Former player of Age of Conan? Promised yourself you’d never go back to Funcom after they [insert reason here]? Well, even if you don’t hold a grudge against the company, they are willing to have you back. In fact, starting today Funcom has taken the liberty of reactivating your account for you, until the end of May. While current players are receiving a handful of potions and experience boosts, former players can return for the next week and a half and see what they’ve been missing in the land of Hyboria.
A growing trend in several MMOs ever since Eve Online popularized the mechanic, has been offline training: skills and abilities that level even though you are offline. Eve Online and Alganon are just two games to utilize this feature, with Age of Conan recently joining the fray:
In games like Eve Online, considering your character is not under a level system, the research done into your character can make a difference in what ships you can pilot, your weapon loadout, replacing the traditional leveling system. In Alganon, your offline research tree has more to do with small boosts to stats than anything else. Extra damage with certain weapons, extra defense against certain elements, and more. The offline progression doesn’t have a make-or-break impact on the game, but it is nice to have any advantage you can.
If Age Of Conan is one thing, it isn’t subtle. Rather than opt to give players simple stat increases in an alternate training tree, Funcom wants to give you levels while you are offline. Every four days you will receive a level in your account, in order to distribute to a character of your choice. Your account must be active, and the character receiving the level has to be at least level 30.
This should help casual players with hardcore players just seeing it as a small help. Despite some claims, there isn’t much danger of this “replacing” grinding for levels, as it only replaces one level every four days. For those who don’t want to take part, you are always free to leave the levels to accumulate, and use them on an alternate character one day, or just let them rot.
If you are reading this and have not heeded my own, Funcom’s, and other’s warnings to save your inactive, low level characters from deletion, you are too late. As of earlier this morning, Age of Conan’s servers went offline for what will be a twelve hour downtime. Characters that have been inactive for at least seven months prior to today, and are under level 20 (and still in the tutorial) will be deleted as part of an effort to consolidate data, and in preparation for upcoming server mergers.
Naturally there will be players who will complain over this idea, and I did mention in the past article that this would end up being perceived as a grab for money by some, and a threat to others. However, in Funcom’s defense, setting up a separate database with unused characters is not worth the resources it would take to port them back into the game at a future date, especially considering it would likely cost the user money, at a price not worth spending on a character that has yet to make way out of the tutorial. I also noted that a lot of the criticism was coming from players who had no intention of playing either way, a group I have noted several times in the past whose feedback should be ignored at all opportunities.
More on Age of Conan, such as the upcoming server mergers, as it appears.
MMO Fallout 