14 DAY TRIAL // When Age of Conan was launched, after the release of a sold out Collector's Edition and with initial impressive sales, the developers at Funcom declared that they planned to offer the best support ever seen in a MMO.
At least, until now they have kept up with the self imposed schedule, releasing minor fixes twice a week and steadily adding small new content enhancements. Some of the updates were badly received by the community and Funcom promptly offered the rollbacks requested and, recently, one of the updates refused to get off the ground and all the game servers were unreachable for around a day, prompting a massive rollback.
The problem with two patches a week is that the development team might be introducing bugs as far as they have solved them, so Funcom has decided to change the approach from now on. More testing is to be done on each individual change so that gamers will have a smoother experience.
A new set of servers, called the TestLive servers, will be opened up so there will be some live testing of the changes to the popular MMO. Funcom will only release one patch a week, on Wednesday. It plans to extend the policy of offering free days of play in case of a server crash caused by the company.
It also seems that Funcom are starting to look into the future, with plans to cut back on the bug hunting and to concentrate more on the content that is necessary to keep people interested in the game as they hit higher levels and complete most of the quests.
It looks like the primary focus will be adding new instanced dungeons, mainly in the starting areas, and they also plan to re-construct the player versus player mechanics to make the game fairer to new comers.