Arche Age

[Falconeer]

Not sure if anyone cares, but I love this sorry stories.

Hi,
My name is Mustarde, on the Aranzeb server. At the risk of embarassing myself by sharing this sad story, I feel that at the very least, I may be able to prevent some others from falling for the same scam.

I missed the alpha/beta period for this game but got caught up in the hype of head-start by some of my friends. I decided to become a founder and go for the land rush. Due to some incomplete research, server ques and this thing called "work", all I was able to walk away with was a small farm plot, and the blueprints to a thatched farmhouse with nowhere to put it.

After reading about it on the forums, I realize my experience was pretty par for the course. Determined to make the best of it, I started working that little farm, questing and getting to know the guys who had land next to me. I told them my situation and the leader of the guild made me what seemed like a great offer:
"How about you join us and we rip up our plots to put down that thatched farm house. We can work together and use it as a guild shared resource"
Awesome! I was pretty excited at the idea of working as a team to build this thing that we could all benefit from. I hopped in their teamspeak, and we worked together all weekend, harvesting resources, questing and escorting material packs. But I had made a critical mistake.

I gave my blueprints to the guild leader for him to put the thatched farmhouse down. It made sense at the time... he was going to be the guild builder. I had already offered to spec leatherworking and machinery. Well, after we finished building the house, to which I had no discreet ownership of, I was unceremoniously removed from the teamspeak server, banned, and removed from the guild.

So here i am, without my farm plot, out 50 guilda stars on that thatched house, and my entire headstart gone to waste. I never saw it coming. In fact, I am still somewhat dumbstruck that it happened. All my excitement about this game has evaporated and I am left with a sense of loss. But I am not a quitter, and know that I can get back on my feet somehow.

Why share my embarrassing internet story of being gullible and foolish? Well, I don't know if this particular guild does this often or not, but I hope that others don't share my fate - Be careful who you trust. And while teamwork is an essential part of the game, you shouldn't invest what you aren't willing to lose.

TL:DR - it apparently takes more than 3 days to have trusted internet friendships. Don't be a sucker, there are sharks in these waters.
Edit: Thanks for the PM's and encouragement - I have never been a quitter, and will not be leaving the server just because I got duped. The loss of guilda stars will serve as a reminder of the painful lesson I've learned.

In other news, I rerolled on the new EU server (sorry Palmer Eldritch, you screwed me bad with Kyprosa, the only server with a queue at 2.20AM on a weekday) and managed to get what is possibly the best land plot in the whole world. I literally placed down my plot while the other guy that has been racing to get there with me for the past thirty minutes was two steps behind and possibly one second away from taking it. Land rushing can be quite the experience.

[HaemishM]

I patched and logged in last night. Every server had a queue that was over 2000 long. Said fuck this and did a freight haul from Rotterdam to Lille instead. I'll have to check back on this thread to see when the queues die down. Also, fuck a land rush.

[angry.bob]

TL:DR - it apparently takes more than 3 days to have trusted internet [to make] friendships.

Fixed that for everyone online, in any situation, ever. Anybody who trusts anyone online in just about any situation where there is something of value to take is a fucking idiot. If you don't know a person in real life they are not your friend and can never be more than a friendly acquaintance at best. This retard didn't even wait the three days to trust them, the three days was after the weekend. He deserved to lose everything, and more. 

[Senses]

edit: I realize I really don't care that much.

[Falconeer]

The punishment for logging out is too big. First, it'll take you hours to get back in due to the enormous queues. Second, if you are not a patron you won't get any labor. As a result, no one EVER logs out and every player who is not a patron uses some macro to make sure to stay in the game and get labor. This is why the queue never moves, and whoever thought it was a good idea to put in a mechanic that rewards staying logged in AFK should probably consider different jobs.

Also, three months ago this interaction between the public and a Community Manager happened:



 

[angry.bob]

edit: I realize I really don't care that much.

No, please go ahead. I'm very eager to hear what you had to say.

[Abelian75]

Yeah, the labor point reward for staying logged in is really, really strange.  Hell, it's so goddamn bizarre that it's easier to understand why you would want it the OTHER way around (bonus labor when NOT logged in) than it is to understand the reasoning behind its actual implementation.

Very, very strange decision.  I would love to hear the reasoning.

[tmp]

Put a couple days into playing it in the F2P mode since it launched. Between the combat, the way you can put your class together, the way their client handles loading and the graphics in general, the floaty feel to characters, the awkward UI, the crafting systems, the quests and the overall feel it's half-polished but not quite there... I can't shake off the feeling I'm playing TESO reskin with some extra, thick frosting of catass. And minus random loot. I got literally one piece of gear off the probably few hundreds of mobs I killed on the way to level 10. That's with their supposedly increased drop rates, iirc.

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a bad game, but it's about as close to the proverbial "7/10" as they come.

[Hutch]

edit: I realize I really don't care that much.

No, please go ahead. I'm very eager to hear what you had to say.

Remedial Trolling 085, Lesson 1: when the mark spits out the hook, don't chase after him.

[tmp]

Yeah, the labor point reward for staying logged in is really, really strange.  Hell, it's so goddamn bizarre that it's easier to understand why you would want it the OTHER way around (bonus labor when NOT logged in) than it is to understand the reasoning behind its actual implementation.

Very, very strange decision.  I would love to hear the reasoning.

My guess would be it's a Korean thing -- the players there typically connect not from homes but from PC Cafes, so having mechanics which encourage staying logged on for long hours makes the game a better business from the point of view of these middle men (and consequently, for the game company as well since their game is more likely to be offered to the players)  It's a different story for the Western market, but it seems the devs have little interest in tweaking their game to account for such differences.

[angry.bob]

Remedial Trolling 085, Lesson 1: when the mark spits out the hook, don't chase after him.

I'm not trolling, for real. I'm eager to hear what twist of current human nature makes things on the internet different from when this sort of shit got sorted out 15 years ago in MMOs, or any anonymous dealings humans have had since we became humans.

[Morfiend]

Finally got in, created my character, ran about 100 yards to find some monster to kill. Horrible animations and 2006 mmo mechanics. Be still my beating heart.

[rk47]

I love this part of mmo the most.
Carry on, twats. Carry on.

[Falconeer]

One of the big problems they have is that they cannot do what EVERY other MMORPG has been doing for the past five years or so: they cannot spawn a copy istance of a zone when it gets too full. Due to the permanent housing, if they have 1000 people all hanging out in the starter zone, that's actually 1000 people hanging out in the same zone and I suspect their server population cap is not the problem, but their zone population cap. This could indicate that queues will get better as soon as the population will spread all across the world, which is quite big. Or maybe not, I don't know. They also have to be super conservative when it comes to opening new servers because they won't be able to do mergers in the future (again, due to permanent housing), but obviously this is what is creating the issues. Last night EVERY single server out of 7 in Europe had about 2 to 5 hours long queue.

Aside from the queue disaster, which will lose them lots of potential clients (some of my friends have already given up, especially considering the land situation makes you feel like you are "losing" the rush if you can't log in), game runs smooth and keeps being lots of fun ONCE and IF you can get over the backward combat and pathetic questing.

[rk47]

Competitive people whose winning is determined by 'logging in early' or 'be in the right timezone' needs to have a reality check and just calm the fuck down.
What is the goal of this game. Are you having fun or you just wanna win for the sake of winning?
Goddamn, the sob stories are just sad because they were so hurt by this shit. I recommend they punch out and take a break, ask a second outsider opinion over this instead of asking for pity from similar community.

[Falconeer]

Just to clarify (even though I don't think you were specifically calling me out), I am never gonna win anything. In two months I will have left the game due to my fickle nature and a lack of friends, but having switched server three times over four days, I am glad I got a nice spot for my house since housing is a big part of why I chose to care about Archeage. I am having fun because this game gently (as in: "not that well but still!") pushes the UO/SWG feels while at the same time promising a lawless world of open PvP, which has been missed for a long time. I am having more fun micromanaging my garden and coordinating my friends into the shared effort required to build a ship, so we can start PvP Pirate hunting, than killing foozles. Not saying it's awesome, but so far it offers enough variation on top of the usual DIKU formula to make it feel shiny.

Other people? Not sure, but I suppose it's the same as wanting to win in EVE, or UO, or -really- any other MMORPG: a personal sense of accomplishment garnished with bragging rights. This game has very little PvE value and a quite larger PvP value, so bragging rights -especially in a game with limited resources (housing space, and 4 castle)- make people go rabid.  

[Pennilenko]

I joined up with a large awesome guild on Kyrios. This shit is pretty awesome sauce. Getting hung up over stupid shit will make you miss out on some awesome player driven combat.

[satael]

I joined up with a large awesome guild on Kyrios. This shit is pretty awesome sauce. Getting hung up over stupid shit will make you miss out on some awesome player driven combat.

I'm in an awesome Kyrios queue and after 2 hours there are only 1231 people in front of me! 

[Falconeer]

I joined up with a large awesome guild on Kyrios. This shit is pretty awesome sauce. Getting hung up over stupid shit will make you miss out on some awesome player driven combat.

I'm in an awesome Kyrios queue and after 2 hours there are only 1231 people in front of me! 

You are doing it wrong Satael!!!

 

[amiable]

Honestly I never had any interest in playing this game but reading the rage posts here and on reddit have been thoroughly entertaining, so.... Thanks Trion!

[satael]

Honestly I never had any interest in playing this game but reading the rage posts here and on reddit have been thoroughly entertaining, so.... Thanks Trion!

I'm happy I knew I was going to be busy irl during the headstart weekend so I didn't buy any of the packs for the game (and so I don't feel invested enough to really rage). Since I'm spending far more time queuing for the game than playing it I'll probably just forget about it for some weeks and then see if the guild I play with is still active (once the worst queues have passed).

[Miasma]

I hear there is a bug where a lot of accounts aren't flagged as patron even though they paid.  There will be much drama if people who paid for the headstart for the landrush start to lose their homes because they can't pay their taxes, which requires patron.

Also, from the goon thread, the only innovative thing the game lets you do is import your own images on sails, capes:

[Falconeer]

That is not even innovative. As far as I know, it was in Lineage 1, which is the other Jake Song (lead Dev here) from 1998. It is one of the cool things though, for sure. And yes you can put that emblem on your ship sails and other pieces of gear, like thsirts (!) and shields.

For the record, not sure everyone here knows, but this is THE game that Jake Song wanted to make with Richard Garriott in the mid 20s when NC soft had them both working together (supposedly on Tabula Rasa). Song and Garriot both came out with a MMORPG in 1998, Ultima Online and Lineage, and Song has been fascinatged with UO since then. That's what led them to partner to create the ultimate sandbox. Unfortunately, legends say they couldn't really work together and their personalities were too big, so they split pretty early and Garriot went on to make the HORRIBLE Tabula Rasa that we remember, while Song left NC and decided to make a new game by itself, clearly inspired to UO and SWG, and that project eventually became ArcheAge.

This is an oversimplification and a dramatization of the story (you know who would tell it amazingly? Lum), but I just felt like filling you in on what's the long origin of this game. Its roots are legitimately in the 90s, and most of its innovation is actually stuff coming from the forgotten era of sandbox MMORPGs.

[Threash]

Aion let you use your own images on your cape too.

[tmp]

One of the big problems they have is that they cannot do what EVERY other MMORPG has been doing for the past five years or so: they cannot spawn a copy istance of a zone when it gets too full. Due to the permanent housing, if they have 1000 people all hanging out in the starter zone, that's actually 1000 people hanging out in the same zone and I suspect their server population cap is not the problem, but their zone population cap.

Permanent housing isn't really excuse when the housing areas can be their own, separate, non-instanced areas -- not to look very far but even Tera i.e. another Korean game does something like that, with seamless transitions between multi-instanced leveling zones and ones that have no instances and hold the major cities.

Having limit of 1000 people on server 'because cap' is one thing, but there's no reason at all why all these 1000 people have to then sit in one instance and compete for one mob spawn.

[Scold]

TL:DR - it apparently takes more than 3 days to have trusted internet [to make] friendships.

Fixed that for everyone online, in any situation, ever. Anybody who trusts anyone online in just about any situation where there is something of value to take is a fucking idiot. If you don't know a person in real life they are not your friend and can never be more than a friendly acquaintance at best. This retard didn't even wait the three days to trust them, the three days was after the weekend. He deserved to lose everything, and more. 

Dude, I play nothing but FFA PvP in MMOs and you're taking this way too far lol

[Scold]

Personally, I have a $100 pre-order account but I haven't logged in at all yet, waiting for new servers to open up so I can have some shot at getting land, I haven't done any betas and have no clue how the day-to-day of the game works.

[palmer_eldritch]

Tips for land, if they do open up a new server (or even for playing on existing servers as anyone will find land eventually) - the "story" quests, which come from NPCs with green exclamation marks over their heads, give Gilda stars. You need 15 gilda stars to get a plan for a small house. So make sure you do those green quests.

If you like, you can place your small house down to "reserve" land for a farm, as you probably want a farm more than you want a house. So place that cottage and just demolish it once you have your farm plan. You get the house plan back so you can always place the house again later.

You get your farm by doing trade quests, which come from NPCs with green leaves over their heads.

Are you going to join a guild? (I recommend you do). Note that house plans are tradeable! So a nice guildy may have a house plan in their bank to give you. Or they may have gilda stars spare to buy you one. They may also have all or some of the materials you need to do the farm quest nice and quickly.

[Ginaz]

I hear there is a bug where a lot of accounts aren't flagged as patron even though they paid.  There will be much drama if people who paid for the headstart for the landrush start to lose their homes because they can't pay their taxes, which requires patron.

Also, from the goon thread, the only innovative thing the game lets you do is import your own images on sails, capes:

I am SO putting Dickbutt on my sails and cloak.

[Falconeer]

Scott Hartsman to the rescue!

ArcheAge Launch Update: Capacities, Communication, and Where to Find Info
Hi everyone, we'd like to thank you all for being a part of this absolutely massive launch of ArcheAge.

We've heard from a lot of you that ArcheAge has stirred up excitement for an MMO in a way that many of you haven't felt in a long time. When people are in and playing, we hear a lot that the game's the great, exciting experience they were waiting for.

While it's been great for many, it's been uneven for others, most notably if you're stuck waiting. (We know, we wait in the same queues you do.)

Know that we haven't been, and won't be, resting until the experience is great for everyone. We've been talking to you a lot about this on Twitter and our forums, and we wanted to thank you for your patience -- which has been extreme in some cases for sure.

I'd like to talk about what we’re doing to make sure that all of you can have that same kind of experience.

SERVER CAPACITIES AND YOU

In an ideal world, we have all the hardware we need to host the ideal number of servers, in a way that works best for everyone. We'd strike the perfect balance between launch popularity, when everyone wants to be online 100% of the time, and the settled population of more normal play patterns that will naturally come over time.

In reality, we have to plan capacity months ahead of time, based on things like web site signups, numbers of people who play in alphas and betas, how long they play, and so on. There's a fair amount of science that goes into it, and in general it's pretty accurate. We then include extra for overflow, just in case we need more.

In this case, so many entirely new people showed up that we opened not just all of our launch hardware on the first day, but the overflow hardware soon after as well. Since Head Start, we've expanded both the number of servers and the capacity of all servers steadily. We try to let you know this both on the forums and on Twitter (@ArcheAge) whenever this occurs.

Inside the business you'll hear people call this "problems of success," but make no mistake - since it negatively affects you, we remain obsessively focused on the "problem" part, not the "success" part. We treat these as high priority problems that we need to solve, as rapidly as possible.

GREAT, THANKS. THAT'S SUPER. WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW?

Right. There are things going on both in and out of game to make things better:
1) Yes, more hardware is on its way to helping you! We're still aiming to strike the balance between short and long term and we know with certainty that more hardware is needed for both. We've heard both the "more servers" and "no more servers" crowds, and are certain we need to take steps toward more. I'm happy to share that the next round of hardware landed with our team in Texas this morning.

While I do wish that we could violate the laws of space and time to transport physical servers instantly, and help both NA and EU simultaneously, because of the way hardware is shipped out, and factors like "customs," there will be some delay between helping out the two regions. Do note that we're doing everything we can to make sure that delay is as minimal as possible. (We are aiming for days, not weeks, between.)

We'll be talking more about the details here over the coming days, in our Launch FAQ thread.
2) Note that we've been more aggressively sweeping AFKers, even manually when needed. For example, while we had said during beta that we were tentatively tolerant of AFK mount riding, we'd be keeping an eye out to see if it became a problem. Well, it's officially a problem when actual players who will be playing can't get in.

If you're not actively playing, please do be aware that you might not be there when you get back. Of course, while we do appreciate creative justifications such as "I am merely celebrating the excitement of launch by exercising my steed in a circular pattern for an extended period of time," those will still earn a quick trip to desktop.

We're also going to be setting up a more aggressive AFK timer as is suited to an over-popular launch, and ensuring that there are fewer ways to get around it. Again, this is all to create the greatest opportunity to get active human beings into the game.
3) As with any launch where you get massive numbers of new players, we need great people helping out with the typical things that happen as services scale up, which is why I wanted to talk Customer Service. You have wanted to talk with them. You've wanted to talk with them a lot. And they really do want to help.

Trion's CS team has already been expanded pretty massively, with scores of new people coming on board in the weeks leading up to ArcheAge's launch. There's a veritable dedicated army of people wanting to help. We're also happy to announce that we're ramping that up even more. As with all of our CS in the past, we're continuing down the path of natively fluent CS reps in each language we service.
4) Communication is critical during launches - We do get that. I've personally tweeted more during this launch than I think I have since Twitter existed. We're going to be redoubling our efforts, most notably on our forums, with even more people pitching in.

We had been trying to focus our updates into specific known locations, but that's not having the effect that we had hoped. We need to be in more places and threads that you're already discussing, so you can expect more of that beginning today, and in a more visibly 24/7 fashion than it might have appeared previously. We've been continuously working like crazy knocking down the types of launch issues one might expect, but if you don't see evidence of it, then it's not as helpful to you. We get that too.
Once again – Thank you all for your patience, and we have constant improvements that will continue to be rolled out. As always, to keep track of the latest details of what’s being worked on, you can find updates in the ongoing Launch FAQ update thread. We look forward to getting even more capacity up for you across the board, being more visible about it, and giving you all the great experience you deserve.

- Scott

[Threash]

The solution is to not make being logged in being better than logging out when you are not actively playing, "aggressive afk timers" my ass.

[Ginaz]

The solution is to not make being logged in being better than logging out when you are not actively playing, "aggressive afk timers" my ass.

Exactly, none of us sit in an internet cafe like they do in South Korea, so there's no real reason to keep us tied to the game 24/7.  I enjoy the game a lot (when I can play) but the labor system is stupidest thing I've ever seen in an MMO.

[tmp]

The solution is to not make being logged in being better than logging out when you are not actively playing, "aggressive afk timers" my ass.

Unfortunately there's more than just labour system that benefits from it -- e.g. as long as the game has mechanics like leveling up your mount based on how much it travels, which obv leads to people simply taping down two keys and leaving the mount run in circles all night long, i don't think they can make these parts offer more (or even just as much) if you instead log out.

[Venkman]

... and Garriot went on to make the HORRIBLE Tabula Rasa that we remember, while Song left NC and decided to make a new game by itself, clearly inspired to UO and SWG, and that project eventually became ArcheAge.

Actually, if I recall correctly, Garriot went on to make what could have been a cool fantasy-based Tabula Rasa, but was getting nowhere fast, went to Space instead, and Starr Long took over developing of TR while also turning it into sci-fi. I still remember playing that first version at, er, E3 2004 maybe? Also got the soundtrack, wrote a Triskelion translator in Shockwave, posted these to Stratics back when that was thing.

Goddamn, I'm old.

Also this thread is hilarious. I mean, yea, the TESO and Wildstar threads were fun because those were older-school-ish titles repeating most of the same problems, with the latter doing enough interesting things for a bit.

But this almost literally sounds like a find/replace all "SWG" with "ArcheAge". Shit, even the dev excuses are the same! Rgidly sharded worlds causing hardware based capacity issues? Getting up early to find a plot of land? Standing on line for mobs? Queues? Saving up just for deeds you may have a chance to place maybe? Open PvP that emphasizes time played?

We are so desperate for something new we'll* choose to relive the pain of what we've almost forgotten

* and when I say "we", I mean you psychos. I'm getting more f2p enjoyment out of this thread than any I'd get in the game.

[Threash]

* and when I say "we", I mean you psychos. I'm getting more f2p enjoyment out of this thread than any I'd get in the game.

Yeah, i just realized i haven't even looked at the Destiny thread and i am actually playing that.