On the 7th of February, those who attempted to visit http://www.aocgroup.com.ar to download some records, see what was new in the aoc world or just came to chat, encountered this message:
"This site is currently unavailable.
If you are the owner of this site, please contact us at 1-480-505-8855 at your earliest convenience"
Aocgroup.com.ar was down and nobody knew why. People were confused and wondering what could have brought such a popular website to its demise. The impact was significant as it also interrupted the successful Master of the Huns tournament in the process. Exactly what happened has been discussed on Legion Clan forums ever since.
It appears that the original idea was for aocgroup.com.ar to be sold because its owners (Jose and Marks) no longer wanted to host it. The new owner wanted a different server and so Jose and Marks decided to let the original hosting expire and transfer the whole website to the new, more suitable one. It was supposed to be up and running not more than a few days later, however, there seems to have been a bit of a misunderstanding when it came to the price. The aocgroup.com.ar owners wanted more than the buyer - Werreck - could provide:
„We made an offer of 500$ to take over the site, move it to Europe and host it as aocgroup.eu. We would let the community run it and let them recruit new ones if many left in the move. The response was that they required 2000$ for it so I can confirm that this is the amount they valued their site.“
Since then, there has not been a buyer willing to pay the required amount and so to this day, aocgroup.com.ar is still down. There have been numerous discussions as to the price and whether aocgroup.com.ar really is worth so much money. However, even if the price is adequate, the longer Jose and the others wait for the buyer, the slimmer chance there is they will ever find one.
The way Storm_Country put it: „You can't blame the guys for looking for that money, i dont, but at the end of the day AocG only serves one purpose in the entire world and if they stick to 2,000, soon a replacement will be found and that one purpose will no longer be available and the site will be worth zero dollars, if i were them i wouldn't hold out too long if they are gettin offers, you'd be surprised at how fast people at the centre of this can make things happen, like a totally new community site for instance...then its already too late..“
Now it has been almost two months and aocgroup.com.ar is still nowhere to be seen suggesting that no buyer has been found. With what appears to be the end of aocgroup, some people have suggested the aoc community would soon meet its maker as well. However, there were also those who teamed up and decided to build a new community website from scratch. Now what we have is not one, but two aoc websites – http://www.aoczone.net and http://www.aoc-games.com and their rapidly growing popularity suggests that aoc is still far from being dead.