Extremely dissapointing news, item loot servers won't be included in Age of Conan from release. Instead the games designers have said they want to wait and poll "paying subscribers" in regards to this feature before they include it in the game. They won't take the word of 47% of people polled on their forums, even to make a single server with this option enabled.

Know what this tells me? It tells me they are bad game designers. They are going to poll the players of their game about what they want and then give it to them? Are they going to balance PVP by doing this type of poll too? Don't they understand surveying and sampling and how to do a real unbiased experiment? You can't SELL a non-looting game and then poll the people who purchase it to find out if looting is a good idea. This is simply a fact. The type of gamer that really wants a looting based MMO isn't going to buy a game without looting just to get a vote that may or may not lead to that purchase having been a complete waste of 60 bucks. The sample will be so biased by this that it's almost gauranteed to show a lack of interest in item looting. I guess they just decided what they want and they don't care if the players want it or not, they are not going to give it to us.

Know what else this tells me? It tells me they are carebears. Who wants a game where you have to grind out the best loot to stand a fair chance in pvp? Who wants a game where death is virtually meaningless and you can never punish someone adequately for annoying you? Who wants to play a game where my guild can't affect your guild seriously unless you want us to? It's mad noobish to prefer a non-loot MMO over a game with looting after PVP death. Picture this, World of Warcraft season 1 comes out, you grind honor and buy your pvp gear. Next world of warcraft season 2 comes out, you grind honor to get your PVP gear, guess what happens next? oh yeah, season 3 comes out.... and then season 4 comes out. After this the expansion WotLK comes out and your gear is all worthless, you are back to square one. You spend all your time doing battlegrounds that you don't realy enjoy just to keep upgrading your gear on an endless loot treadmill. In a loot game this can never take place.

If gear takes a long grind to attain in a looting MMO it will not be used. Players will instead use easy to aquire gear with a good cost / benefit ratio. They wear stuff they can afford to lose and they can get any piece of gear in the game simply by doing what they love to do best, world PVP. You run town to town to town and leveling spot to leveling spot raiding them all day. If you want to log on for 5 minutes, kill everyone in the dungeon where you logged out and then repeat this process 50 times a day it will be a very profitable and fun play style. It will also build a nasty reputation for you as a feared person on your server.

In non-loot games no one knows the name of the guilds on their server. No one fears you. In fact if you spend a lot of time raiding locations such as towns in a non-loot game you are basically just wasting your own time. That type of game revolves around upgrading your loot. If you could be out getting +5 stamina on your boots you HAVE to do it even if it takes 2 months of griding, because if you don't do it everyone else will. You could run around "having fun" for those 2 months, but then you will be behind the curve forever, so you must do it. You sign on to do that when you sign on to play a game without looting. Look at WOW. If you enjoy world PVP and you spend your time doing that you fall behind and eventually can not compete. It's complete and utter garbage.

The fact that the AOC devs talked about item loot being potentially in the game had me convinced it would be. I was super hype to be able to get away from the "you must go improve your character to the max" model of gameplay. Sure, you can get advancements from PVP in AOC, but who wants to HAVE to optimize their play lest they feel like they are wasting their time? Who wants this second job type of mentality where the game feels more like work than play? item loot ensures this can never happen in a game. You can choose a guild you hate and make it your mission in life to crush them, see them driven before you (very Conan) and cause them to lose their precious gear.

In a non-loot game they can feel free to trash talk you without reprecussion, on a loot server they are going to have to respect you if you deserve it and not respect you if you don't. Thus you will be able to TELL who is really the crazy gamer that needs to be feared, they will be the person everyone defers to and makes sure they don't piss off. On a non-loot server you will constantly have people trash talkin you no matter what you do, it's a kiddie land. It's a o.O game.

The combination of proving you are bad at game design, can't make a desicion based on your own convictions, and are just a flat out bad gamer is not something I look for in someone running an MMO. It's ridiculous how sad the loss of item loot in AOC makes me. It was like an angel reaching out her hand to pull me out of the muck of World of Warcraft, and now a boot just came slaming down on my head pushing me back under. If I'm going to play a non-loot o.O game I might as well stick with WoW, at least for the first 6-12 months of AOC when they will be working out the bugs. Chances are with a staff that doesn't know in their heart that they want to play on a loot server it's going to be a horrible pvp game anyway!