I’ll be out of the country for a few days, which means no blog posts for a bit.
In other news (is me not posting news…?) it sounds like AoC is improving rapidly, which is good to hear. As an MMO gamer, having more options is always a good thing right? I’m still not going to pre-order or buy it anytime soon. If anything I’ll wait for a trail account to be offered and perhaps try it then, depending on what else is going on (WAR basically). Should still be an interesting launch to watch however.
Hardcore Casual 
AoC is getting so much attention from players due to WoW burnout and the lack of anything both new and high quality on the market for the last year or so. I want AoC to do well, I hope it’s a smash hit. Anything to shake up the monolithic drudgery that WoW has turned into.
So, here’s hoping Funcom pulls it together and recovers from the bad mistakes they’ve made so far. The gamer population is generally seeming very forgiving, so Funcom is going to get every opportunity to make gamers (with good computers) happy to have their game.
From what I’ve seen today alone (two patches so far, and they just shut down for another) they’re doing some *serious* optimization of the engine, so I suspect more players than originally anticipated will be able to play the game.
I have a decent system, only a year old, but my bottleneck (well, as far as AoC is concerned, nothing else) is my 7950GT card. I intentionally got it last year because at the time the only thing better was the original 8600. I wanted to wait until there was more than a single DX10 card on the market for competition to drive prices down. I haven’t downgraded to Vista either, so DX10 itself is lost on me.
In the past 12 hours, my framerate has doubled (occasionally more) *and* I’m now able to turn up more graphical options than I could last night.
AoC PWNS!
WAR > all