I spent the week trying to play the AOC open beta from fileplanet. I was having crashes and bad performance with frame rates and such untill they made a new patch on Friday. Then I was able to play the game without much hassle.
Yesterday though, (Saturday) they bumped everyone who already had a character at at least level 2 to level 20 for a pvp free for all event in the higher level area. I logged into that character and it was laggy as hell. Not sure if they're code is working right to have so many people in one place or not. I tried different tweaks to my system that they had suggested on their forums tech help to no avail. Then I just started messing with the video options and attempted to set everything on high and somehow my framerate jumped up to the highest it had been. I was barely seeing any lag spikes or framerate spikes from that point on.
I didn't really play the level 20 guy for long though as I didn't feel like getting ganked by a group of people camping spawn locations. I did group up with some people for about 15 minutes though before the group fell apart. They kept trying to kill creatures at about level 27 and kept getting killed. I did get attacked by some fool once when we were starting out though. I was pretty much owning him and then the rest of my group jumped on him and finished him off lol. He had friends who just stood there watching. They were just looking for people that were alone, they didn't want a fair fight lol. I'm not much into pvp, but if I was able to kill people here and there it wouldn't be so bad I guess.
Anyway, I've preordered the game and will be playing it at least untill Warhammer comes out. I'm not big on the pvp aspect of warhammer or any other game, but since everyone plans to play it I guess that's where I'll end up too. I happend to talk to Wiley Cyote (SP?) aka. Donkeypuncher in swg, yesterday. He jumped on teamspeak. Hadn't talked to him in years, but he was playing the AOC open beta too on server 4 and I had created a new character on that server too. He said he's been in the Warhammer closed beta for about 5 months and he said the game is basicaly all about pvp. He also said it was nothing like Wow. That's about all he's said about it so far. So when that game comes out we'll have to find out what server he's on.
I also ran into another couple people I hadn't heard from in a long assed time yesterday. Rapture and Hama! Rapture saw me say something in global chat and sent me a tell. I was like, yep it's me lol. So I plan to find out what server they're playing AOC on when the game is released so I can group with them and stuff. They'll probably level faster than me though, but at least I'll have someone to shoot the shit with while I play.
Overall I'd have to say I had a fun time yesterday and Friday night playing the game. I hope to have enough fun to have it last untill Warhammer's launch. Which Wile did say that game was more ready to be released than AOC is. Probably alot more stable and such since the graphics aren't as intense which need a good system to run it. Anyway, if you'd like to try the game sometime it's not too bad if your system is capable of running it.