Funcom is working hard to make sure that its Age of Conan players stay with the game while also trying to attract new gamers to its MMO title. Part of the effort is a fresh overall direction for the Player versus Players aspect of the game and a new crafting system which should be coming via a patch.

All the recipes required to make items such as armor and weapons will not be available in three flavors. Some of them, the simplest to create but also the ones less worthy, will be of the base variety, meaning that any player can create and then use them. The next tier will be the city recipes, which are tied to having a guild city and the most important will be the culture items, which are “high-level lore-related” items that can only be created by high level players. The changes should provide an incentive for players to band together in guilds and to earn more lore in order to gain access to the most interesting items.

Alchemy resources are also said to be streamlined while new recipes related to the skinning and the weaving skills will be introduced; a bigger number of drops related to crafting will be available for players.

By looking at the forum threads which have popped up after the announcements coming from Funcom, one can see that the general reaction of players has been positive. The developers are not stating a clear release date for the next update, but it's a safe bet that it will be available sometime during late October or in early November.

Age of Conan was pretty successful at launch and it sold well in its first week, but most of the sales failed to translate into long time subscriptions. The game is also facing a lot of competition in the MMO field, from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and from World of Warcraft.