I read through the LOTRO dev chat log posted on MMeOw (also on the official site), plus Tony's followup notes.

Some highlights for me:

• Pet Pathing fixes - Yay, I'm pleased to see Turbine is working on this. As a new player, I have no idea how long it's been a problem, but I've gone through the same thing with pet classes over and over through multiple MMORPGs. Hopefully this means mob pathing will improve as well.
• 3man Instances - This is the feature from the expansion that caught my eye in the first place and got me trying the game. I haven't actually reached those 3man instances yet, but I'd love to see them make as many as possible. Glad to hear they're popular.
• Raiding - I'm glad with the raiding that they have, they're currently concentrating on 12man. I'm really not interested in larger raids anymore, I don't feel that the content improves by throwing more players at it. 12 is plenty.
• No Housing changes - I'd like to see housing improve. It's pretty good, but it doesn't have the same high attention to detail as the rest of the game. A shame it's not much of a priority. An address book for neighbourhood locations is a good idea though, I hope they implement that suggestion.
• Fellowship Maneuvers - I'm not super fond of the 'Conjunction' system, mostly because it doesn't flow with the combat, it's more of an interruption. It must be a nightmare for their designers to balance encounters around. So less emphasis on it is actually something I welcome.

I hope they have an ETA for this soon. I was really hoping we'd get a release date. It's the first Book patch for me, so what can I say, I'm curious and eager to see it.

I'm a big fan of patching often, especially when players need to download the patches to continue playing. I'd much rather get this stuff in small bite-sized nibblets than that gargantuan 1.2 gig patch for WoW this week. Ouch.

Granted, I think Blizzard is packing in a lot of their WotLK stuff prior to the actual expansion release. That's not a bad idea, get it on the servers and live-tested before the deluge of returning players. I won't be one of those by the way.

WAR's 1.03 patch today took less than a minute to download and apply on my PC. It doesn't have nearly as much, but it hasn't been a long wait for it either.

Following much criticism over their twice-weekly patching schedule and quality assurance issues, Funcom has moved to a weekly patching schedule and is now providing a test server hosting the next upcoming patch.

Details for downloading and installing the Testlive client are listed in this AoC Forums thread. An existing and current Age of Conan account is required.

Hopefully this helps them hit that threshold where a significant amount of bugs get squashed and the new content begins to outweigh the issues.

I've also noticed that today's patch contains mostly bugfixes.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.

I've just realized my error on my previous post about player patience.

What's changed lately is that I've jumped into a game at launch, that's skewed my perception of the playerbase, I apologize for roasting them. There are likely many patient players that are under the radar right now.

Ever since Ultima Online, I've recommended players wait for stability before playing a new MMORPG.

It's a wait for three important ingredients:

• Stability.
• Fixes for bugs.
• Patching content holes or balancing issues.

It became obvious very early on that these 'massive' online games involve a score of complexities not found in other games. Every ounce of content (and the content tends to be vast) has to deal with latency, security and all of the issues involved when multiple members of the human race approach that content all at once on the same playing field.

I don't think most players realize what it takes to make bullet-proof content. It's astounding to me that these games achieve stability at all over time, but they do.

I know the hardcore among us won't follow this advice and I don't expect them to. I try to myself, but I usually fail and jump into these games sooner than I plan, but rarely on launch day. I've always been witness to the carnage, it's been my job at times to do so, but I've withheld my own deep involvement until further down the road, after the patches of sanity come in.

I don't think these industry problems are going to be solved anytime soon. The next game that has a full range of content (notably Endgame) and is also stable with few bugs-- That will be the first game in this genre to claim that milestone. When it happens, I'll shower accolades, because I will be beyond impressed.

Meanwhile, if you are going to play, then the previous post does apply, it requires patience.

Myself and my guildmates, we'll be exercising this patience.

Age of Conan hit its first real day of server-instability today and if you go by the forums you'd think the Titanic sunk or something. Openedge1 has quit the game over it.

I find myself boggled, given that AoC's launch has been more stable than most MMOs by far. Ultima Online went down for 3 days immediately from launch and players were made to disperse any time they collected in one location. Everquest had servers bounce up and down for months, plus lag issues to the extreme. Blizzard stopped selling copies of World of Warcraft for 6 weeks due to server instability and Penny Arcade revoked their game-of-the-year award from WoW for the same reason.

During all of those, there were players freaking out, for sure. For UO there was even a class-action suit, which led to the EULA-disclaimer-heaviness of today's MMOs.

Everyone's entitled to their complaints. They are paying for a service and when it's not there, they get upset. I get upset when my power goes out, it drives me nuts that it happens in a big city. But I lived in a small town for awhile where the power wasn't exactly-- consistent. Whenever there was an outtage, we'd just shrug.

In MMORPG land, expect troubles in the first 6 months, that's just pragmatic.

It feels like there's some new kind of intolerance. Maybe players have had enough, maybe more than a decade of stability issues being 'normal' for MMOs in the first year is just too much for players to take anymore? Maybe it's a generational gap?

I suspect the complaints are more noticeable now that blogging your MMO experience has hit its stride, not to mention the wealth of established MMORPGs that are stable now that you can choose from.

Whatever it is, I think people should be ready for more disappointments, because this sort of thing isn't going to magically disappear anytime soon.

My advice: Don't take it personally, the bugs and downtime aren't tailor made for your frustration. Take a break now and then, have backup plans if your nite of gaming is disrupted.

Or don't play a new MMORPG unless you have a lot of patience, because it's either going to have issues or it's going to be delayed heavily for a cleaner launch (even then it's a crap shoot). Either way, there's waiting involved.

Update: Discussion on the Wiccana forums seems a lot more reasonable than the general Age of Conan forums, as usual. Most players there seem to also be suggesting patience.

Update: It looks like there's another patch before launch, so they've pushed the official launch time back to ~1pm Pacific (8pm GMT).

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Age of Conan launches today and so far the 'early access' client has already received a number of patches over the past few days. This is actually how I prefer it, I'd rather a lot of frequent small patches than the less often monolithic patch.

I know most people hate the delays, regardless of how small, but it seems far less problematic. I hope Funcom keeps it going this way, although for them it will probably be easier to wait for the larger content patches and do it all at once. That's what most players expect anyway.