I’ve spent the better part of my recent spare time leveling a ranger in Age of Conan, for the most part as a solo player running through quest content or grinding in instances.

Nearly every element of the game has been broken or is broken, even if only in three or four places:

• Pets told to attack will continue to aggro any other enemy in the area, out of control
• Harvestables are bugged, like rough leather
• Quests are really busted with missing spawns or missing updates
• Crossbow skills aren’t all working as intended
• Disconnecting from the game means quitting the program because the character server cannot otherwise determine what build you’re running
• Logging into your guild city instance eradicates guild messaging until you zone elsewhere
• You will occasionally lose coppers you earn on the Trader because of some intermittent glitch
• Z-fighting and plain ol’ misaligned geo make it very, very easy to become stuck in the background sky
• Your second death at a rez point is a zone, fer cripe’s sake, you’re dead before the loading screen fades
• Collision mesh is sticky stuff indeed
• You can hide, but your collision mesh gives you away no matter how low someone’s perception
• If you play it, you have your own, long list.

Yet…and this is a huge yet…players love it. One of the reasons may very well be that its alpha condition has set expectations on the lowest rung of its evolutionary ladder so that anything and everything it does will be an improvement of leaps and bounds - without ever being innovative, without ever campaigning against its competition.

So what does this say about the release of MMOs that polish their butts off and go through painful QA processes to bring slick, close-to-perfect products to market? Is this as critical an issue in this decade as it was in the last? Does AoC signal a subtle yet important shift in the way current and potential MMO players view their online experience? Will the acronym MMO shift to MMPKO or MMPVPO?

Age of Conan sold out of their roughly 800,000 initial boxes, sold out their early launch promotion, and cannot bring more copies to shelves quick enough to satisfy demand. It’s quite reminiscent of World of Warcraft (which had its share of difficulties at launch). It’s quite reminiscent of Star Wars Galaxies, too, though I will argue that the Star Wars franchise did a lot more for SWG than Warcraft did for WoW.

Considering that the next highly anticipated title is EA/Mythic’s Warhammer Online, it’s not a stretch to posit that PvP games are the big money makers in the MMO industry. Whatever else may have gone wrong/will go wrong with any of these launches, their player bases have looked at only one critical component when choosing to stick with these games: combat. Of course they appreciate the beauty of the art, and of course they enjoy the few thousand quests offered, but they don’t embrace these features nearly as dearly as a solid, well-animated, combat system.

Which leads me to believe that you could release a badass original combat system in a series of paper bags FTW.

Yes, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

Part of me knows that the response to AoC has a lot to do with the lack of competitors for WoW. Much of the OOC channel on my PvP server is devoted to thanking God for an alternative to the endless high-end raids in the Outlands. Part of me knows that FFA PvP (with minimal kill rules) in an MMO satisfies a huge sector of combatants in a way no console game can. And the rest of me believes we aren’t turning out enough titles to capture this market and are therefore missing out on huge chunks of dollars.

What do I think AoC is doing right? It’s a PvP game where all the crafting and all the questing supports PvP. The fact that it supports PvE is coincidental; it’s the PvP that drives everything. Their singular focus on combat and how it affects players is the reason AoC succeeds in spite of the fact that there are enough holes in everything else to sink the Titanic. Once the novelty of missing armor and the nakedness it causes have worn off, it’s the combat that will keep players hooked for hours and hours on end.

The five-year MMO? There will always be a place for a good MMORPG. But for now, for the millions of people yearning to release their inner hunter/gatherer, get your PvP game on and bring it to market fast. When Warhammer Online goes the way of pre-NGE SWG, you’ll be right there to snatch up some diehard, dedicated, player-killin’ coin. QA and polish be damned, even!

Oh, one more thing.  Don’t be afraid of that “M” rating.