Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has just moved from "early access" to official "live" status in the US - but not without problems. The downtime prior to launch was extended several times, and when servers finally went live, it turns out that the new build that went up has a rather nasty bug.

Many people with dual core AMD CPUs are reporting that the client is doing spectacular crashes within a few minutes of login with pretty blue screen and 0x00000101 exception - "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval.". As the client didn't do this during "early access", this is something new introduced in today's build.

And that is not all...

Official Forums Go Ban Happy

The Age of Conan forum drama also continues - Funcom is still blocking read access to forums for those who are not in the early access, and additionally everyone who registered into the forums with a preorder key but did not fit into the sold out early access were met with extremely unfriendly "you are banned" messages this morning.

The official explanation is as follows;

I don't know about you, but greeting some your preorder customers, more specifically those who got left out of the early access program, on the morning of launch day with "You are banned. No reason was specified. Date the ban will be lifted: Never" as they head to the official forums is not the way I would've broken the news. Funnily, the only official place where you can find out the actual reason for this "ban" is the official forums - those that won't let you in as your account is "banned". That, or by scourging through unofficial forums. No word on the latest "PR coup" on the community.ageofconan.com page as of yet.

On the upside, Funcom has also stated that read access to the forum for everyone will be available "soon".

No Buddy Keys For You - Yet

The "unexpected" popularity of Age of Conan has also claimed yet another casualty - the buddy keys. Those who were waiting to get a 10-day trial from one of his friends who bought the game, don't hold your breath;

At least the game is providing constant amusement even when you can't log in - in addition to these funny bits, there is a word going around that some major exploits are also making rounds involving item duplication and greatly accelerated leveling by abusing a very easy quest that is infinitely re-doable. While I must say that Funcom hasn't managed to top the fiasco that was Anarchy Online launch, and the servers have been up more than down, with many people being able to actually play without too many problems, it seems that launching MMOs is still considered Difficult, and handling the PR during the launch chaos even more so.

We'll get to more details on the gameplay and technology with a proper "initial impressions" article on Age of Conan later this week, and a full review is coming later as the launch dust settles and enough playtime is accumulated so that a proper analysis is possible - right here at YouGamers.

Comments

	snowcrash512 2008-05-20 #1 Still quite a few people are in and playing... more than I can say for the WoW launch, I think I spent more time looking at a logon screen or cursing the minute long loot lag in that game the first month or two than i did playing.
	VvoOKasH 2008-05-20 #2 I'm more and more excited about the game :P even tho there are still some serious bugs and ****. About blocking access to forums, well bit weird, but i rather like it this way than see people spamming posts about some bullpoo. Game's shipping to me today. I'm going to play (try at least) for one month wich is included in prise. If i'll see that they realy trying to fix stuff, i'm gonna buy more time. If not, well. We will see.
	RainWind 2008-05-20 #3 That bites. I've got an Opty 170. :( Oh well, hopefully its all sorted by the time I get my copy in 3-5 days. No MMO launch has ever been trouble free. From the sounds of it its still leaps and bounds ahead of HellGate: London in terms of launch quality. Now that game was a joke...
	Unregistered 2008-05-20 #4 Hmm I have an amd 4400x2 & I haven't experienced a single crash & that includes an 8 hours continues session, really enjoying AoC & glad I pre-ordered, each to our own I guess...
	locherbread 2008-05-20 #5 Bizarre I thought I was logged in, above post was from me, just wanted to add there are no flaming of Funcom going on in the EU forums, guess just you yankies that are getting spanked :)
	Jarnis 2008-05-20 #6 They got the bug fixed in record time. Thankfully.
	P_Dub_S 2008-05-20 #7 Well here's my take. I got my preorder and full retail game from Gamestop. On friday i entered my Pre order key and Retail key one after the other and now my account is CLOSED/FROZEN and when i reenter my retail key it does nothing still states CLOSED/FROZEN. So WTF do i do now cant call there tech support cuz get this there is none they must not of heard about telephones since the entire company can only be contacted by Email how retarded is that. Well i figured it out after you enter your retail key there are a few more steps i was just getting impatient and not reading that i had to click what payment type i wanted and stuff. Still they didnt make it easy for us.
	Unregistered 2008-05-20 #8 NO. They have not fixed the bug yet. I continue to get this error 1-2 minutes into playing the game. On the first day of early access I was able to level up to lvl 10. The second day these crashes started. It has still not been fixed and my patience is ******* wearing thin.
	Jarnis 2008-05-20 #9 Quote: Originally Posted by Unregistered NO. They have not fixed the bug yet. I continue to get this error 1-2 minutes into playing the game. On the first day of early access I was able to level up to lvl 10. The second day these crashes started. It has still not been fixed and my patience is ******* wearing thin. Well, then there seems to be conflicting reports about it... I experienced it myself earlier, but could not reproduce it later after a downtime.
	Unregistered 2008-05-21 #10 Just wanted to thank the author for this article. I was working myself up into a rage since I couldn't get into the early access. When I bought the game it appeared like my pre-ordered account was banned. Thanks to this article I was able to fix the problem. Found it by Googling "Age of Conan "ban"" I can try to calm down now. :P Thank you.
	Unregistered 2008-05-22 #11 Pretty screwed up the banned frozen thing.. REALLY bad PR.. I contacted support and had no response. My understanding was early access was part of the preorder... shutting it off is pretty much a violation of the TOS. (Im sure that they have a loophole but I dont recall seeing one in the preorder advertisement) Can you say bait and switch?
	Unregistered 2008-05-22 #12 I got no response either from my support email in the 20th regarding my forum ban, and now I can't even email in anymore since I get a error message every time I try (and as a prior poster mentioned, there seems to be no phone support). The game play itself seems very smooth to me, no problems and servers have been up, but the way the company has handled the early access (no I didn't manage to getin :P ) snd now this forum crap and bad communication leave a lot to be desired.
	Unregistered 2008-05-25 #13 "Buddy Key The buddy key program will open as soon as server capacity allows. Please check back later." if they sold 10 copies of the game their servers should manage 10 users+10 friends, too bad! instead: http://www.ageofconan.com/order_UK.html they advertize as "Buddy card (for one friend)" that "friend" is not happy at all!!!