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Posts
Without a fight - Romeos aborted his baby too.
Anyone want to do this thing? Because I'm thinking about doing this thing. But from what I hear you 100% need a guild/peoples.
Well it began right at the start, promising things that would be in the game, that ended up being held back for many months. Castles for example. Major patches always ended up with way more downtime that announced. Part of the problem is that Trion themselves cannot change the code themselves, they have to request/interpret what XL games is going to do. PR would say one thing, and what we end up getting was something different.
Back when I played you'd have lots of people trolling/blocking bridges/planting saplings to stop you getting around, most people hated it, but Trion called this 'immersive behaviour'. Went on for many months, until a GM account gets effected by this and suddenly it gets banned. The whole game just feels like a cash grab and I just got sick of giving Trion any more money so that's when I quit.
And I am totally biased against Trion because of this, but even so, the game is fun, And with a good guild its better. Just don't give them too much money, they should not be rewarded for running the game like this.
This link might say it better.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lessons-mmos-can-learn-archeages-mistakes/
The thing is, they never learnt from any of their mistakes, and every new patch the same things would happen again and again.
The whole concept of the game was pretty fun, one of those rare times I actually hit max level in an MMO too which is amusing. Sort of brought out the bloodthirsty nature in me too as I was playing essentially a very bursty rogue-warrior, so people on the other faction creeping into my questing areas tended to be taught to get the hell away.
On the other hand the farming/package delivering system was really fun and gave a real use to getting people to help you out. Whether that's guildies or someone acting as a merc.
Land isn't really a concern anymore on most servers :twisted: in 3.0 they added 2 really massive new housing zones though.
Most servers are very dead, including the one that Merchwater was on. Ollo is probably in the worst shape of all the servers. Good news is there is character transfers available if you don't feel like starting over.
Good news is that there is a new 'fresh start' server. Bad news is it has a queue. To play on the fresh start server you need a new account.
Positive changes:
Obsidian weapons were introduced a while back and now its possible to get decent gear while not paying any money (besides patron).
You can regrade gear to celestial without it breaking.
Gear no longer downgrades during regrade with one exception (celestial -> divine, but that replaces destruction chance so its a win/win).
Negative changes:
Fishing is more of a solo activity now
I played it like a second job for over a year, and I would probably still be playing except I believe it has two fatal flaws:
1. The game is fundamentally insecure. Hacks/cheats were a problem from day 1 and were never really adequately addressed. Cheaters prospered, got ahead of the curve, and overpowered the rest of the playerbase from very early on. There are a lot of contributing factors for why this happened: too much client-side game data processing, far too little GM presence in game, and the fact that the game was already years old and its weaknesses fully probed in Korea and Russia before our version came out. But it doesn't really matter why - what matters is that customers who didn't cheat ended up at a disadvantage for their entire game life, unless #2:
2. Pay2Win. This is the biggie. I've read that ArcheAge cost nearly $200 million to develop, and apparently in order to recoup that investment the business minds of the Korean developers/publishers resorted to the very worst of the f2p-game style bag of tricks to milk their playerbase. Don't believe the rationalizations that you might see on reddit or the offical forums - "It's not P2W, it's pay to progress faster!" Bullshit. Archeage is in-arguably the most p2w AAA MMO ever released. Spending dollars (in some cases a lot of dollars - I heard really shocking numbers from some of the people I played with) bought you an immediate advantage over other players. And because of the way gear/stats work that advantage could be huge. A $1k cash outlay could bring a brand new player up to power parity with a 2,000-hours played character overnight. $10k spent made you essentially un-killable. $30k made you a god, and there are people who actually did that. It wasn't just the whales either, nearly every aspect of the game had a cash shop element to it. Just dropping $10/week on labor potions meant that you were able to grow more crops, open more coinpurses, and ultimately generate more gold than anyone who didn't pay. It was infuriating that they built this incredibly well-designed, competitive world based on economic specialization, teamwork, and luck and then immediately undercut that delicate balance from day 1 by selling labor potions for cash. The intrusion of real money into the game world was also a major reason for the overall toxic attitude of the community by attracting the type of players willing to spend cash for virtual power (in my experience typically more immature, poorly behaved and aggressive young men) and allowing them to thrive in game at the expense of everyone else, and by generating a ton of miss-trust between players with constant accusations of being a wallet-warrior or whatever.
I've given up on the game and even the new "fresh-start" servers can't really do much to change these two facts in the long term. They should have released the game with no cash shop or p2w elements at all, and a $50/mo. subscription fee. It would have been worth it, and AA would probably have received the attention and admiration it really deserved.
I will disagree with the point that it wouldn't be p2w without a cash shop. As the best stuff is exceedingly rare, and thus expensive - without a doubt it would be for sale on a 3rd party website/forum for real cash and gold sellers would still prosper.
I will disagree with a 50$ a month subscription, that seems a bit excessive? Did you mean 50/yr?
As far as your #1 and fs, that's pretty much been addressed. I haven't heard of any real exploits that haven't been addressed quickly on fs besides unproven speculation.
#2 is still very true.
I have yet to purchase my way into the game, but plan to do so after the 1st of November.
Do you have the will to dedicate maximum free time to playing this one game?
It’s definitely a very fun game, as long as you can provide tons of time and get in a guild that has other people doing the stuff you like to do.
I don’t have the time, so I won’t be getting back in.
My advice is if you are buying the game, buy on steam. Integrated steam features are a nice touch when playing the game.
I pre-ordered Unchained before I realized it was on Steam.
What server are you guys on? I'm on Wynn. Also West 4 lyf
Im on Kaylin. Made it to level 50 a few days ago, just unlocked Hiram gear level.
but I'm gonna assume fake gameplay until I see some more substantial videos of it in action
The game is ArcheAge Chronicles now.
As to the game play I can believe it. It really doesn't look all that dissimilar to BDO. Prettier and improved as BDO is 10 years old now, but not that far off.