Today's Age of Conan patch should be last one before new PvP system
This morning, the Age of Conan servers received a small patch, tagged as patch 1.5. There's not much in it: a fix to the charging issues (that's charging into battle, not charging a credit card), a change to the price of basic riding skills (to 25 silver) and a few other bits and bobs. Small though it is, it's already caused the servers to be brought down for another 5 hours for technical reasons.
The more interesting news is that patch 2.0, which apparently brings with it the long awaited PvP consequence system, is set to go live on September 3rd. The usual disclaimers apply: we can't say for certain that this will happen, what appears on Testlive may not make it to Live, and so on and so forth.
There's a lot more to that patch than just the PvP system, of course. It's not the whole system, either, just the basics of it, namely PvP XP and the Notoriety system, which marks you as a criminal or murderer depending on who you slay. PvP gear is not yet included, so it's impossible to tell how worthwhile it is.
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We're glad to see an apparent date set for the new system, which should revitalize open PvP. The question now, though, is how many departed players it will bring back, how many will have hung around to see it arrive, and how many will have left to find something else to do.
Age of Conan has a lot of good things coming to it, and the sooner they get here, the more players Funcom stand to retain; but it's obvious that some people are not willing to wait. The launch was an unarguable success, but that was in May, and it's not like there isn't serious competition just around the corner.
