Age of Conan - Interview & Media @ New AoC Vault

IGN has launched a new Age of Conan Vault. In order to help the launch Funcom employee, Jason "Athelan" Stone, has been interviewed about his work on Age of Conan but also about his personal life. But let's stick to something relevant:

Jube: Do you have separate teams for Age of Conan and The Secret World, or are AoC's developers starting to pull double duty?

Jason Stone: Separate teams but some crossover is necessary for those who need to be familiar with tech before moving on to Secret World etc.

Jube: Several Funcom developers appear to spend some time in the official AoC forums. Do the posts there carry any weight at all, do you ever take fan suggestions from there and think "Hey, let's run with that!"?

Jason Stone: It really depends on what it is. Everything has weight but you have to look at where you are in the process and how easy an idea can be accomplished. The ideas are easy to come up with, the methods of implementation are the hard part.
Jube: What feature of Age of Conan have you been most impressed with the development of so far?

Jason Stone: I am biased in loving the combat system because I spent so much time during the past 3+ years working on it.

Age of Conan Vault also offers some screenshots. I'm supposed to be objective and more importantly professional in my coverage, but I'd like to point you in direction of this screenshot. I don't know what he is holding.
More information.

LOL, its a beer stein, or beer mug.

Originally Posted by Ammon777
LOL, its a beer stein, or beer mug.

But isn't he supposed to be holding something different taking his current action into consideration?

Oh yeah. Probably, lol.