Try it, it is really not that bad. Maybe the pvp is not finished but the game got an fantastic atmopshere. And the first 30 days are not expensive. With about 20€ incl. game u are in. Ofc there are a punch of bugs left but hey, I still find bugs in AO which are there for many many years.I started to play AO 9 years ago, had some breaks but ALWAYS came back.
I played Age of Conan for almost 3 months, quit and never came back...
Few months ago I was sure that I would join TSW but the more revievs and posts on different forums I read the less I wanted to play it. Up to know I did not buy TSW and probably never will (at least for as long as AO will be online)
Everything I write below is my PERSONAL point of view so I do not expect other ppl to agree with me, just want to share what I think and feel.
AO is in a way unique and there is no other MMORPG that is as hard to learn in every possible way. For new players it has a lot of hurdles and brings a lot of frustration in every possible way:
When you start you are always gimped and poor, there are so many things you do not know or do not understand, the gap between gimped noob and experienced pvp twink is so huge that it looks like twinks were gods or exploiters, even after several months or few years there are still some things that you have never knew about ....
So what kind of player like AO and what kind of players think that AO is a piece of crap?
There is no point in explaing who/what kind of players like AO, but I am sure that this kind of player is for sure a minority compared to all players on the market.
FC wants to attract as many players as possible so they do not want to make another game like AO because as I explained above such game would attract only a small percentage of players.
Instead they want to make a game that would be : very good looking (excellent graphics, sound, animations) will have a popular and interesting main theme (thats why FC has choosen Conan or now modern world + conspiracy theories like "X files", will have very easy rules (so instead of lot of attributes, implants, huds, utils, armour, perks etc, will have no level and a huge flexibility = easy to play with.
Now for the worst part (the one that made me quit AoC) combat:
In AO a well built twink with auto target on and auto attack on will always kill a gimped char (as long as it is not NT)
In AoC there is no twinking at all and your equipment makes no more than 5%-10% of a difference, however all fight is based on speed of your fingers and reflexes, like in Counter Stike
When FC started to create TSW they wanted to attract a huge number of players so they decided to make a game that is a lot closer to AoC than to AO.
So for me it is not the type of game I want to spend my time on ...
One last thing I noticed about AO and AOC (possibly TSW as well):
AO had a relatively small number of players but majority of them were happy and loyal (at least for a very long time untill FC [selfedited to avoid infraction points]
AoC (and maybe TSW) had a lot more customers in the begining but very little of them became loyal paying customers.
From what I read TSW did not even attract so many customers at start ...
but the good thing for FC is that it looks like more of them will be loyal (compared to AoC)
Good luck FC and do not abandon AO PLEASE !!!