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Athelan: "We may release more "official" guide type movies but we also believe heavily in our player community and machinima (sp) so don't want to inundate the community with "official" stuff that players might be able to taper a better guide for."

Athelan: "Architects are needed to build guild cities, there is no reason why they could not be paid for their services, but it is obvious they are not a consumer good oriented trade, they are more akin to their real counterparts."

Athelan: "You are not going to get the specifics as everything is not the same in each location or area. The area's as demo'd at GDC are quite large and are static, and the total number of structures is quite sizable. The "profession" nodes are the ones that have building options and you can spread them out to get different types based on your needs.

This is one of those areas where players want to know everything, but knowing even a little bit just spawns more questions, but we can't just database dump everything in the game out there or people get upset when it changes."

Athelan: "That simply does not work as it breaks so many other aspects of the game. Like grouping, guild recruiting etc. Besides you could still identify the "level" of a person in UO based on their title. Just did not know if it was 1x GM or 7x GM you were facing, and once you faced them once you had a pretty good idea the next time."

Athelan: "The Controller still works and can be used to play the game."

Athelan: "Quests are not race specific, but location specific. If your Stygian friend wants to come join you in Cimmeria and quest together you can."

Athelan: "This is a sticky situation as it often can lead to issues of power abuse, or accusations of favoritism. This is something Customer Service will have to address and create policies for and is not really a design oriented question I can answer."

Athelan: "There will be a "mostly open" beta but it will not be completely open. This is because it will be open to the public but we will have to cap the number of users.

When you die you receive a debuff that stacks lowering your attack and defense rating nothing is "lost" item or money wise."

Athelan: "While this may change I do not believe that character creation will be up early since it is all done on the servers and actually online. Character creation is an actual "zone" or play area essentially, rather than it being all client side and then the data is simply sent to the server with what you chose."

Athelan: "We have successfully played Age of Conan in laggy convention centers sharing bandwidth on international servers in Norway from the West Coast. So the game is playable. Of course there are limits to how much lag a game can compensate for, but with the use of localized servers I think gamers in general will find their experience to be good. Lag issues are more noticeable in PvP when everyone moves as much as possible to be evasive, in PvE since mobs tend to be more stationary once they have engaged you it's hardly noticed."

Athelan: "There are no plans for flying mounts in Age of Conan, it's very not fitting with the lore... While flying mounts existed in Hyborea they would be very out of place as player mounts or something seen in anything but some sort of quest IE no griffin taxi's either. This is why there will be no flying mounts in Age of Conan."

Athelan: "The demon spawned varies on the spell cast. The Incubus (male) and Succubus (female) have some slightly different abilities. And there are various levels of the different pets with different secondary bonuses."

Athelan: "You have in combat and out of combat regeneration, out of combat it goes pretty quick but you can also train skills called bandaging and renew mana respectively that let you sit and heal much faster by using the skill."

Athelan: "I am not entirely positive, it may be somewhat quest driven, but it could also be gear differential driven which means that if you had enough people who were equipped for such and such raid you might be able to squeak some new people in without a problem."

Athelan: "It is possible but not planned at this time for launch."

Athelan: "In an open PvP area you cannot attack your group, guild, or raid. Since we support raid groups of up to 4 parties this should be rather easy to accomplish. Beyond that we also have the mercenary system which would allow members of other guilds to go under contract to gain tickets for another guild. Thus making it possible for them to assist the other guild without taking tickets away from them. In addition the mechanic for acquiring tickets is surrounding a very small area and easily other groups could be assisting by defending approach areas or walls etc without interfering.

If you stand multiple groups of 24 people ontop of eachother and blast away, yes you will be AOEing your own people but that would be a tactical thing that the players themselves should be in control of."

Athelan: "The Oceanic Issue is definitely an interesting one both from location and time zone related issues. Pending launch we would have to see how many fans we get in the Oceanic region and if we can find a hosting partner who we will would do a good job running the servers then we could evaluate another server as an option. However Conan does play pretty good even with some latency as I answered in another question."

Athelan: "Crafting requires the use of equipment that will be found in the Guild Cities. I do not believe you can craft a sword in the middle of the wild on a campfire."

Athelan: "You can't cast offensive magic from horseback, so I do not expect you can use ranged mounted combat at all. This is because ranged combined with the mobility of horseback would become an exploitation issue with kiting in both PvE and PvP. However everyone has access to melee combat and could engage from their mounts in that way."

Athelan: "Just make a new character on the other server. Otherwise there may be character transfers available as a pay option at some point but I would expect PvE to PvP may be limited."

Athelan: "No everything in a city will be of the same style. At this time for launch I believe their will only be one style. However all of the buildings have been made so that they can be changed individually different components. IE the frame, the walls, etc. So you should see more variety post launch."

Athelan: "I believe so, however it may not be available to the Bear Shaman as he is more of a melee oriented character."

Athelan: "We are going to try to make sure we have servers to support the demand at launch of all types. I know this sounds vague but we cannot commit to the number of servers until we gauge better the interest. If the demand is seen enough to populate a server for RP PvE then we will likely have it, but so far the demand for that has been much lower than the demand seen for RP-PvP, PVP, and PvE... The problem is we are not talking about enough RP PVE'ers to warrant one server we are talking about servers in each region. So the demand has to be there in the different areas."

Athelan: "There is no PvP toggling on PvE servers. You have the Drunken Brawling, the Mini game, and Border Kingdoms PvP on PvE servers but there is no "I wanna flag myself for world PvP" option.

The final decisions on the PvP ruleset mechanics including the bounty system are still being worked on in the beta."

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