Things are looking up for FunCom with an announcement today that its MMO 'Age of Conan' has launched in Russia and Poland.

1C and CD Projekt will make the game available in Polish and Russian respectively. AoC looks to be doing well now, not only are players spending more time in-game, the company has also seen a significant improvement in subscription retention, something that was severely lacking when the game first launched
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Funcom has reported its financial results for the fourth quarter, revealing an operating loss of USD 23.3 million, caused by a depreciation of USD 22.8 million due to the lagging performance of Age of Conan.

The poor performance is compounded by the announcement that the company's chief financial officer, Olav Sandnes, has resigned from the position.
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Via Massively: "The fantasy MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a game that's notable for its score, and this aspect of the title has drawn accolades from gamers and music critics alike. Composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen was even nominated for Best Original Score in a Video Game in the Hollywood Music Awards. While ultimately that honor went to Wataru Hokoyama for Afrika, Haugen now has cause to celebrate his big win at the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) awards."
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Age of Conan is being updated with patch 1.4 today, which is expected to include the long-awaited DX10 and some new instances.

Funcom have taken measures to ensure this patch goes smoothly by including code that corrects any corrupt data as it's installing. This may mean longer patching time for some players, but it will result in less down-time later due to client crashes.
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One of the most hyped up games to come out in 2008 was Age of Conan. Sadly, the launch of the game was a different story. Stellar reviews and problems with the game itself caused a major downfall in popularity of the game.
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AoC:HA server transfers, LotRO leveling guide, WoW patch problems, and Mythic layoffs
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Russel Ritchey writes "Best Buy is the sole deliverer of deals this week. Again, the focus is on PC games: Fallout 3 is $40, staying strong as the most-often discounted 'new' title ever, while Age of Conan: Hyborian Online is $30. Both Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir and Mass Effect are $20 - the downloadable content for Mass Effect is free on the PC, by the way (Live users gotta pay for it). Best Buy actually has a decent selection of action games on sale as well.

The PSP remake Star Ocean: First Departure is $30 this week at Best Buy as well, and a good way to get prepared for a Star Ocean love-a-thon* starting this month and going through March"
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Funcom has published the list of planned server mergers for its fantasy MMO Age of Conan, revealing that it will be cutting the total number of servers from 49 to just 18.

The reduction is more dramatic in North America and the Oceanic regions, where 24 servers are being merged into just six. In the US, only one player-versus-player server and two player-versus-environment servers will remain, with each combining the populations of six or seven existing servers.
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Welcome to the very first MMO Report. This week on the report TGR talks about Age of Conan and EverQuest server mergers, soloing in Lord of the Rings Online to level 20, server lag fixes for World of Warcraft zones, and the announcement of a new Eve Online expansion.
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When news of impending server merges in Age of Conan broke in December, it caused a bit of a stir -- particularly in the post's comments. Age of Conan Producer Craig Morrison later said the merges would take place in stages, but then technical issues arose, postponing these changes for roughly a month before Funcom was confident it could go off without a hitch.
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TVGB: "I bet everyone is feeling pretty good during this holiday season, so I wanted to take some time to rain on the parade a bit by taking a look back at 2008 and revisit some of the major disappointments gamers had to deal with in the PC gaming world.."
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Age of Conan Community Site Director Craig Morrison said:

"With the announced start of the server merge process not quite having gone as planned I wanted to take the time today to speak to you all explain where we are at with the merge process and what the schedule looks like.

Basically, on Wednesday when we came to do the first live merges we encountered an issue with the structure of our data that we hadn't found or experienced during testing. This issue caused there to be a risk, on some servers, under specific circumstances, of items having non-unique identifiers in our database. This in turn might have lead to some cases of player's items not surviving the merge. It didn't happen at all during our testing, and may have been (in the scale of all players and all items in the game) a possibly rare occurrence. However this was not an area where the team and I were willing to take any risks with whatsoever.

This is also exactly why we decided not to announce all the merge schedules in advance and to ensure we could do them in a live environment first before we went ahead with all the merges. While it is never 'nice' to have your contingency plans called into action, this approach has meant we caught a potential issue before it could possibly affect people's actual game experience."
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Massively: "We've been following the efforts of Age of Conan director Craig Morrison to keep the player community more 'in the loop' since he took on the role a few months ago. Now the community team is laying out the details of one of the projects he headlined when he first stepped up: server merges. Community Manager Famine has put up a post in the official forums laying out details on the procedure. Which is good, because it's a little complicated."
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Rumor has it that Funcom fired about 70% of their U.S. Workforce today. Sources say that they were released this morning, the cuts are mostly in the Customer Service and Quality Assurance departments. What this means for Age of Conan and the rest of Funcom is uncertain, but Ten Ton Hammer will keep you updated as this story unfolds.
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If you're one of the four people who still play Age of Conan and you've been anxiously awaiting the DX10 graphics (you know, the ones they say the game has on the back of the box since launch but never quite made the cut?) then good news! In the next major update you'll (probably) get DX10 graphics!

In his November letter to the community, Age of Conan Game Director Craig Morrison revealed that with the new PVP system and Ymir's Pass now in place, in the next major AoC update Funcom plans on adding the highly-desired DirectX 10 graphics.
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Hoping to resurrect Age of Conan in the hearts of the hordes of gamers leaving to play World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online, Funcom brings us the largest content update ever in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures: new area, tons of quests, characters and monsters, as well as a new dungeon.
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CVG reports that police in Bradford are on the hunt for a gang of game thieves who made off with 4000 copies of Age of Conan on PC.

Two pallets of games went missing from the back of a lorry some time between 10pm on Tuesday, October 28, and 7am on Wednesday. With an RRP of £39.99 each, we make that out as £159,960 worth of goods. Ouch.
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Massively: "Players have been asking for new Age of Conan content for a while now, and one of the biggest content gaps had been the mid-50s. That's the levelling range the new Ymir's Pass zone (previewed some time ago) seeks to fill, and it's now opened on Testlive. The developers want to make it clear that Ymir's Pass is a work in progress, and as such is not complete. We're keen to see what it's like when it's done, because currently it's gorgeous. It's far from being the only new AoC content; we've still to see the Tarantia Commons and the House of Crom yet.

No sooner do you enter the zone than an inhuman bellow echoes through the air and the ground shakes. Something huge is making that sound, and the story of what it is (and why it's suffering) is played out through the zone. The first thing you'll probably be doing is looking for footprints. Colossal ones."
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This week's episode of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory prominently featured Age of Conan, and its A-story dealt in a light-hearted way with online gaming addiction. If you're unfamiliar with the show, the premise is as follows: two extremely geeky twenty-something males -- both scientists at Caltech -- move in across the hall from a pretty but not-too-terribly sophisticated blonde woman. Commence unlikely friendship and all the humor that comes with it!

In this week's episode, one of the two geeks is playing Age of Conan when the girl comes over. She starts playing the game and becomes addicted, rejecting responsibilities and basic hygiene for the remainder of the episode. The premise sounds typical, but the episode has a certain wink-like-quality to it. It's all in good humor, and there are a lot of inside jokes that only players of the game could get.
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TTH: "The recently released Age of Conan soundtrack album contains two CDs: The first CD in the box is the original soundtrack CD. It's a selection of tracks with a total playing time of about 72 minutes. The bonus CD contains an additional 20 minutes of music from the game as well as three songs by rock group Turbonegro – one written specifically for this soundtrack album.

The game score has a total length of approximately 3 ½ hours, which means there's still a lot of music from the game that's not on the CD. Since there were so many varied musical pieces to pick between, a representative collection of songs could easily become too eclectic. Thus my main ambition for this soundtrack album has been to make it work as an independent musical entity outside the context of the game. The approach to this has been to organize the tracks in the analogy of a journey. An important criterium for choosing the songs has been that each one would constitute a meaningful part of this musical journey."
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