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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