Age of Conan Lore (or lack thereof)

September 25th, 2008 hexsane Posted in Age of conan news, Conan Fiction |

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There have not been any Age of Conan Community Lore Library updates since May. In the ever growing world of AoC and the rich pool of resources available in the world of Conan fiction is there nothing more to be added to the lore of the realms? Although the frequency of updates to this library was slow at best and came mostly in spurts it is a great resource for new players interested in the history of AoC up to this point (or at least up to the 9th of May). If you read through it you might even learn something you didn’t already know about the places and people of the Hyborian Age.

Will the Age of Conan game content actually become a part of the Conan lore? There are already short fiction stories being written about adventures in the game. Will Conan, Inc allow it? Letting the people who enjoy the creation of Robert E. Howard control the path of the Hyborian Age might inject more interest in Conan and fresh talent should always be welcome. It remains to be seen if everything will need the stamp of approval from Conan, Inc. Time will tell.

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Craig Morrison talks MMO numbers (or the lack thereof)

by Jef Reahard Sep 23rd 2010 at 3:00PM

Filed under: Age of Conan, MMO industry, News items, Opinion

Ah, the numbers game. It's often quite comical when it comes to MMORPGs and their die-hard fans (or detractors, as the case may be). Aside from Blizzard, very few MMO development houses release real numbers relating to their playerbases, and forum jousters are thus relegated to citing guesstimates and, in most cases, pure supposition sprung from the likes of wildly inaccurate measuring tools such as Xfire or the late MMOGchart.

Funcom executive producer and Age of Conan game director Craig Morrison weighs in on the perplexing state of MMO number-crunching on his personal blog, offering a bit of insight as to why hard data is, well, hard to come by. He cites a lack of context for the near-universal reticence of developers when it comes to publicizing their community sizes. "Without standard definitions everything ends up in that vague, murky and entirely subjective middle ground... and a middle ground that very few could reasonably be expected to accept as being worthwhile exploring in a business sense," he writes.

So what's his solution? In broad terms, he mentions a rating system, citing television's Nielsen metrics as well as cinema box office figures as semi-comparable standards. While such a system probably wouldn't stop the endless fan bickering, it might at least provide an answer to the question of how each individual company defines success.

Tags: age-of-conan, blog, craig-morrison, forum-warriors, funcom, numbers, numbers-game, opinion, ratings, subscription-numbers, subscriptions, success, xfire-is-not-accurate

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