If Archlord drops PAYplus, and no one is around to care, does it make a sound?

[damijin]

The Archlord PAYplus system made some decent waves on the blogs a month or two back (I think it was a slow news week). Anyway, for those who don't know, PAYplus was a system by which you could pay one of three different subscription prices, ranging $10 to $30, each month for the game. Depending on which subscription you paid, you would receive a different amount of in-game credits that can be used to buy things like exp potions, buff potions, and death penalty removing amulets. It was Codemasters attempt to westernize the micro-transaction system used by NHN in Korea.

Shockingly, as it turns out, the players don't want to be westernized.

Codemasters Online Gaming anounces end of PLAYplus
ArchLord™, the MMORPG where one player will rule the world, [will ship to stores in North America on October 3rd] will launch on Friday 6th October, Codemasters Online Gaming confirmed today. It is also announced that the game’s subscription package will now follow the traditional standard monthly MMO payment model rather than the proposed PLAYplus system, which was tested within the game’s beta phase.

The PLAYplus payment system allowed players to choose from a range of monthly subscription packages, each offering different levels of in-game incentives at varying price points. Following experimentation with the system within the beta test and monitoring the feedback from thousands of ArchLord community members, the PLAYplus system will not be implemented for the game’s release.

ArchLord will now launch with a standard monthly subscription of UK £8.99, US $14.99, Europe €12.99 (plus applicable taxes). The single monthly subscription will also include free credits for all players to redeem against in-game enhancements. All players will receive the same amount of credits as part of the single monthly subscription, providing a level playing field for all subscribers.

Ed Relf, Director of Marketing, Codemasters Online Gaming, commented:
"We have listened to our community and delivered. From the start of the test of the PLAYplus system, we had an open dialogue with players to monitor reactions to the system. Thanks to their feedback and continued support, we are pleased to confirm that ArchLord will now launch with a single standard subscription package.
"Here at Codemasters Online Gaming we place great importance on our open dialogue with players and our ability to react positively to their constructive feedback. We wish to thank all players that spent time testing PLAYplus and the detailed feedback they provided us, which assisted in reaching the final subscription decision."

Codemasters Online Gaming is currently evaluating a series of other additional in-game benefits to reward the games most loyal players with more details to follow soon. There are still places left in the ArchLord beta for the final week, to join the beta test pre-order ArchLord now by visiting http://www.archlordgame.com/preorder

Oh and also, no one really wants to play an L2 clone, crazy subscription system or not.

[Der Helm]

Oh and also, no one really wants to play an L2 clone, crazy subscription system or not.

If the box is not too expensive, I think I will try this out.

I need to find out how high my pain threshold really is.

[Yoshimaru]

They couldn't even implement WASD correctly, sadly this is just another half-assed KMMO. 

[damijin]

I must confess I was somewhat interested in Archlord until I played the beta with 2 friends. I started as a human warrior, they played a moon elf archer and moon elf wizard. Well, of course, the first thing I tried to do was find out how I could get from my town to their town so that we could play together.

Unfortunately, our starting locations were literally on opposite ends of the world. For whatever reason, instead of making areas ramp-up in level as you travel from east to west or west to east or north to south... or whatever... they made the game get higher level as you traveled toward the center of the map.

No problem though, I figured I'd just save some money and level up and I'd eventually be able to travel there with teleports or something. I got to about level 18 and began trying to teleport... but... well.. most of the teleport locations weren't shown on the map, so I had no idea where the teleport would take me, and worse still, each one seemed to cost about 5-10% of my total money. So there wasn't much room for error.

I eventually resolved to simple hoof it across the entire world. I figured I would stick to the roads and if I died, I'd just respawn at the closest town and continue my journey. This is where the game died for me: I traveled over the entire world in less than an hour, and the whole time I was not killed. Every monster was slower than my unbuffed warrior, and the entire world that I traveled through was uninteresting and bland. Lots of open areas with random shit spawned in them. I didn't see a single dungeon, a single boss, nothing. Just lots of boring monsters who were too slow and weak (despite being 50 levels higher at times) to kill me.

So.. yeah. Gonna pass on that one. If you're thinking about playing an L2 clone.. well.. play L2!

Edit: Related info:
NCsoft NA recently re-boxed L2 for it's Epic Collection. Interesting choice of words there, considering that it is not a collector's edition of any sort, it has very few extras. By all accounts, it is simply a repackaging of the game. It does, however, include all 5 chronicles in the box. NCsoft calls them "expansions", but of course, L2's chronicles are free, and expansions are generally not, so they're clearly trying to make the buyer seem like he's getting more of a deal than he actually is. I'm no fan of game stores these days, do all my game buying via the interwebs, but I must say the box looks NICE. Very nice color and detail, even if it is a bit misleading ("OVER 14 MILLION SUBSCRIBERS" proudly displayed at the top of the box, except... there's kind of only around 100,000 active ones on the North American servers, and less than 1.5 million in Korea if memory serves me correctly.)

[Falconeer]

Out of masochism I recently started playing Lineage 2 with some of my rl friends.
We were looking for some evil PvP action and checked Shadowbane. Uh.. no.. my eyes... (did they downgraded the engine and the UI since 2002?)

So we derailed on L2 with the "excuse" of the new server.

Falconeer's short-range perspective on Lineage 2 in September 2006 - Chronicle 5 era:

The CONS:

- The grind is as bad as you think
- The grind is actually way badder than you think
- The grind is insane
- Quests are a joke
- The colour palette, except for player characters, is a little too medieval (green, brown, gray. That's it)
- The world could use some more points of interest. Or just some without the more.
- You move so slowly. Oh soooo slowly. And there are no mounts for players with a life. Although you could get one if you are a cultist of the Lineage 2 church and live your life along. To meet your friends or go to dungeons and so on you have to walk for hours or pay some VERY expensive (at least at lower levels) teleports. You are "invited" to explore the world in a first generation of mmorpg fashion. Actually I like that, but I am pretty sure no one else does.
- Point and click could be bearable, while targeting is an electronic nightmare, especially during raids or when mobs chase your healer.
- The interface is close to useless. Another joke.
- TO get your "final" class you have to level to 40 (forty). That will take you between 15 and 60 days. Before that you are a close to a generic dummy. Sword, dagger or cast. Not much more than that, no matter the 16 subclasses. That hurt replayabilty. Who in hell would reroll a char when you have to play for more than a month just to get to the first level of your true class? (and that's where the grind gets REALLY evil...)
- There's close to no loot. Mobs drop money and some crafting materials. Anything else is as rare as Magnolia-like frograin.
- Money are EVERYTHING. THey are actually more important than level to a certain degree. And that means BOTS and lots of ubertwinked players that you know bought money on eBay.
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Bots
- Farmers
- FarmerBots
- more Bots
- more Bots
- ok stop Bots...

The PROS:

- It's PvP oriented, definitely. When you die you lose XP and CAN LOSE one of your item. Equipped too, uber super fabled epic too. There's no insurance here. And you can loot that stuff too, of course.
- The character visuals are still unbeaten in my opinion. Gorgeous. Little stiff, a bit robotic, but you'll get great screenshots :)
- The world, although bland and empty for the most part, sports some nice vistas and the whole thing really looks medieval, not fantasy. Cities, shops, buildings and everything it's not bland empty forest looks great. Score for me.
- Sieges look fun (too soon for me tho)
- 31 classes are the higher number in any mmorpg for all I know, and they fill their roles very well. Plus all the classes got some rebalancing after Chronicle 5 so now they "are supposed" to beat each other according to a Rock-Paper-Scissor mechanic. Has to be verified. Oh, you can't walk through players and mobs. They are all, mmh, very solid. Griefers love to corner you.
- Servers are always full, in a positive way. The world, actally all of them, feels alive. And I especially love the no-auction house policy. That's not user friendly but it's fun. You have to browse the market stalls and looks for the best deals. Again, UO nostalgia. VENDOR BUY!
- Clan structure has just been revamped. The Clan management is fascinating and the whole "politics" part of the game is apparently well served by the clan system, clan wars mechanics and new alliance rules.
- Fighting other guilds over a (unique) Guild Hall can't be boring.
- The interface is useless, as stated before, but elegant.
- The mechanic surrounding the "enchantment" of weapons and armours is EVIL to the core (everytime you try an enchantment your weapon could get stronger and gain a glow, or get broken and trashed), but addictive. It's like Russian Roulette in a videogame. Too bad people who buy eBay money screw this.
- That "old mean feeling" from preTrammel UO. You go out, you watch your shoulders, you get chased, you get ganked, you gank back.. you lose your uber Armor, you loot back a Super Staff of looting. All that eclosed in a "political setting" where you can wage war on opposing guilds, threaten them to give your mercenary support to their enemies on the next siege, exact tributes from nearby villages and things like that. Some of us love that.
- Franz, a new server, just started. We are there, and we get into this just for that. a "new world" with castles still to be taken and economy still to be screwed.

Bottom line:

This game requires friends. RL friends are even better.
If you manage to play with Teamspeak, chatting and joking while doing the grind part, then you can survive L2 to the point where things *can get* interesting. Another good tip is to use the phone. I recently discovered that I love to grind while I am on the phone. It's just like drawing mindlessly or simply dangling my slippers... it's so automatic and catatonic that it's a perfect subconscious activity. So whenever you pick up the phone, start L2 and grind. It works, really.

It helps the fact that about 6 "expansions" are out for this game. Every chronicle added lots of things and they are definitely there. Lots of "minigames" and other special mechanics introduced with every update (the Manor syste, although often exploited, is a very interesting and unique one) definitely add to the content side of Lineage 2. So maybe they are not so honest when they say "6 expansions", but those 6 chronicles could count easily as 3 EQ2 retail ones.

But that said, Lineage 2 is too grindy and too money driven (meaning too bot infested and eBay friendly) for being seriously considered as fun. It has "aspects" that are unique and very fun. I am just not sure that there's actually room to see those if you are not really into it with a bunch of friends to ease the pain.

[Falconeer]

Oh darn, I forgot it was about Archlord.
Well, take L2... subtract 6 chronicles worth of content, 31 classes and some visual quality.
There's Archlord.

[damijin]

Oh darn, I forgot it was about Archlord.
Well, take L2... subtract 6 chronicles worth of content, 31 classes and some visual quality.
There's Archlord.

Sounds about right.

Btw, in response to some of your L2 stuff, I've been an on-again off-again player of L2 since beta. Even when I don't actively play I stay in touch with my clan through ventrilo and I usually show up every 2 weeks for castle sieges where I play someone else's character. I have to say most of what you said is pretty accurate, which surprises me because usually when lower level people pass their judgement it's filled with wild inaccuracies.

I agree, it's hard to get into the game. The low levels are boring, and most of the time the only people you will meet are bots, which would turn me off if I was a new player. In fact, for the most part, a high percentage of the end-game players are people who have been around since beta/prelude. We were there when, like Franz, the world was open for domination. But once the world has been dominated... it can be very hard to find out where you fit in the giant mold.


About bots, farmers, and money: Lineage 2 was actually the game that turned RMT into an industry. It existed before, but trust me, 9/10 farmers who I talked to back when L2 was fresh and new told me that L2 was the first game they had ever farmed and that they did other jobs before that. It seems to me that L2 a very well designed and DIFFICULT game. Unfortunately, not very many people enjoy difficult games, and so these bots and farmers were developed. If you've ever seen an L2 bot, you would be quite amazed at the detail of these programs. They are not the simple macros that exist for other games, they are industrial tools.

[Der Helm]

They are not the simple macros that exist for other games, they are industrial tools.

Are they hard to kill ?

[Falconeer]

They are not the simple macros that exist for other games, they are industrial tools.

Are they hard to kill ?

Honestly, killing army of bots is one of the VERY funny things of L2 :)
No they aren't hard to kill at all.
Problem is most of them simply doesn't counter-attack... so when you kill them you become criminal-flagged (red).
Being red, everyone alive on sight will try to hunt you down. First, because they want to and they won't be penalized for killing you.
Second, because you drop an item more easily when you are red.

So the point is, should I kill those bots (and if I am lucky I could loot something useful out of their corpses) but risking to be hunted down the second after the killing blow lands, or should I leave them be and accept the fact that the world is theirs?

[schild]

Is Archlord a game or the new Vanguard billing system?

[Soln]

this is my favorite thread on the Interweb TODAY

[Sky]

Death penalty-removing amulets? 

Maybe the next gen of mmo can just say "We're sorry. You seem to have died. Press the 'accept' button and your account will be charged $5 for resurrection. Thank you for playing Massive Money Online."

[brian]

Death penalty-removing amulets? 

Maybe the next gen of mmo can just say "We're sorry. You seem to have died. Press the 'accept' button and your account will be charged $5 for resurrection. Thank you for playing Massive Money Online."

I suppose such dreams are why no one has cut out hit points and the silly death "penalties", and just had the monsters directly remove experience points when they hit you.

- Brian

[Sky]

I keep a car battery connected to my nuts and juice it up when I die in mmo. I should work for Sigil.

[tazelbain]

Ya, $5 for a rez is bad.  But 5 cents a rez with would be pretty great if the there were no other fees.  You could die 299 times before reaching the average subscription fee.  Its not RMT aspect that makes it bad, its the large sticker price that makes it bad like MTGO.

I think where developers get into trouble with RMT is they price the RMT so players have to pay at least a subscription fees worth to play.  Developers should be looking at a per server basis. Calculate how a server costs to run. Calculate how much you want each server to contribute back to further developer.  Calculate how much profit you can reasonably expect each server to make.  Add those together and adjust you prices so that as a whole a server meets those goals.  It doesn't matter if your servers are filled 99% with freeloaders if the other 1% are meeting your goals.  In fact thats the ideal situstion because a) freeloaders are probably giving you great word of mouth, b) the longer a freeloader plays the better chance you have to convert them, c) freeloading can provide a great demo of the game. and d) freeloaders can enrich the game for the paying players.

[Sky]

Calculate how much profit you can reasonably expect each server to make.

What is the mathematical equivalent of 'shitloads'? Companies want to make as much profit as possible, period. Not to mention the fucking stockmarket needing growth every goddamned year.

Safari's built-in spell checker actually tells me the proper word is 'shit-loads'. :)

[DataGod]

Now your assuming most developers are proactive rather than reactive creatures...

[tazelbain]

Ya, they are going to want as much as possible.  I was talking about setting a baseline goal. Afterwords you can try to lower your costs and increase your revenue to maximize your profits.  Golf ball makers want to make shitloads of cash also but they don't charge a million dollars for a golf ball.

[Sunbury]

I'm disappointed by this change to Archlord billing.

I figured in a couple of month's they'd switch to the 'free download 1 month trial' thing.

Then they'd switch to 'OK the base rate with no credits is now - $0'

Then I was going to play it.

I did the same run acoss the world, except I accidentally clicked on a giant tree when trying to click on the ground to move.

The funniest thing I ever saw in any game:   Mob spawns in Archlord are tiny areas and densly packed.  So for with pigs or wolves or worms or moths - ok, isn't not totally bad.   Then I came on a spawn of mobs with 'theif' over their head!   In the middle of an open field, there was a big blob of 'theif' mobs, each humanoid with a 'sneaky' pose.   I just burst out laughing, it was just so stupid looking.  Was this a 'thief' meeting?  Did the 'thief' mother just give birth to them?  Who are they sneaking up do in an open field?

[damijin]

Then I came on a spawn of mobs with 'theif' over their head!   In the middle of an open field, there was a big blob of 'theif' mobs, each humanoid with a 'sneaky' pose.   I just burst out laughing, it was just so stupid looking.  Was this a 'thief' meeting?  Did the 'thief' mother just give birth to them?  Who are they sneaking up do in an open field?

ThiefCon 2006. Panels kind of sucked, but the workshops were awesome.

Oh and more about them L2 bots. No they're not really easy to kill. You see, end game L2 players have noticed that bots rarely get banned. You have to do it pretty blatantly to get reported and get banned, so many of the people who I play with have tried their luck at leveling a full party from level 1 right up to end-game level (76-80). They do this over the course of months, while untagged, so that they look like farmers. The reason why this is so important is because people have pretty much given up on killing farmers. It's just too hard. If you attack a farmer, the bot has sound alerts which will make loud noises, so even if the farmer is sleeping, or if there is 1 farmer taking care of 5+ groups, they can quickly see which one is in trouble and press the "Log Out" button. This button will make the characters go link dead and they will disconnect in 15 seconds no matter what is going on around them.

Unfortunately, Falconeer, you don't have much of a shot at getting their gear by PKing them. In fact, some would argue you have 0% of a shot (I've never seen a person who was PKed drop anything). To make the farmers drop equipment you would have to get mobs to kill them with a train. There are a few ways to make this easier, such as using certain classes to paralyze their healer or certain end-game equipment to cancel their buffs or silence their healer's magic. But usually the group will log out before it dies to mobs, this is because they also can have sound alerts for "If mobs in my area > x". It's actually been relatively common lately for endgame players to run their own bot groups to make adena for themselves, rather than purchase it from farmers, since it is more cost effective. This trend is why L2 is actually going down in players, even while it goes up in subscriptions. Farmers and non-farmer botters have made that game pretty... uh... special. It's amazing the lack of action taken against people who are widely known on their server and post on un-official (yet more popular) forums saying things like

"So fucking what? I bot. The GMs can't do shit. I get reported 3000 times a day and no one gives a fuck. If you want to PvP you're gonna need to PvP the buffer and healer that follow my ass 24/7 bitch."

These kind of people also use bots on the Public Test Server when new patches are out. It really amazes me to see someone with 8  bots following him on a temporary test server, all of the characters with titles over their heads like "100% LEGIT".

What's actually funny is that L2 private servers do a much better job at keeping their servers clean because they stand nothing to lose for banning botters. It's not like botters are paying them anything. Meanwhile, on the official servers I know at least 3 or 4 people on my server who have had their bans overturned by either visiting Austin to plead their case, or threatening things like suicide and relationship destruction (one girl claimed she was pregnant and said that the only time she can play with her husband is when she's in L2, because he lives overseas, and this was destroying their relationship. it was a total bullshit lie. she got her account back.) In one case where a friend of mine visited Austin, he was allegedly told exactly how many times his account had been logged in using an out-of-game bot. The theory is that they know when you log in using these bots because it looks different to the server for some reason since it doesn't use the official client. So... yeah. They know a lot of the server has been on bots, and they just cant afford to ban all of them.

[LC]

Just things that came to mind while playing:

- Grind from hell
- blurry textures
- little customization
- Very few skills to use
- Everyone looks just like me.
- I'm tired of falling through the ground randomly.
- I'm tired of lagging into a bush and getting stuck.
- I have no chance if the player is even a few levels higher than me.
- I hate potion spamming games.
- The world is pretty boring.
- The monsters are lined up by increasing level along the road.
- Lineage had more content.
- Same boring quests you come to expect from a mmorpg.

[DataGod]

My pal Paul tried playing it, he says its worse than watching old animatronic pirates at disney land (askaninja.com 4tw!)

[Rhonstet]

The review of the game is out on 1up.com

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3154848

Short review: Manga-fied DAOC with potionfighting.  4/10, and that's generous.

[Falconeer]

Archlord is now free to play!

uh, whatever...



(New Guinness World Record for fastest game to drop its pants?)

[Nonentity]

Codemasters Online Gaming is pleased to announce that ArchLord is moving to Free To Play. Every ArchLord player will now be able to enjoy the excitement and danger of Chantra for free; all you need to do is buy the game.

Alert - this is still a bad deal.

[raydeen]

The review of the game is out on 1up.com

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3154848

Short review: Manga-fied DAOC with potionfighting.  4/10, and that's generous.

With hot AND cold running elves though. That's something.

[geldonyetich]

Personally, I found Hero Online to be a better version of Archlord, both on the gameplay and style aspects.

This is not to say that I think everybody here should go play Hero Online.  Like many Eastern-made online RPGs, its gameplay received less focus than your average Western-made MMORPG, and this is evident in the lack of character progression features and a long grind.  I presume that the lost gameplay focus was spent instead on the technical capacity to accommodate thousands of players, as the greater tendency towards socializing in the inhabitants of many Eastern nations might more than compensate for weaker gameplay in the social platform MMOGs are.  No, it's not racist to say a tendency exists in a people if it's provably true: the Eastern mindset is generally more collective than the Western one, or so the cultural anthropologists tell us.  Not that there's anything wrong with differing social values, though culture shock may cause us to think otherwise.  My point is that, given limited time and the presence of more than zero entertainment dollars, there's choices available to the Western audience that will prove much more pleasing to them than either Archlord or Hero Online.  Codemasters has been learning this lesson the hard way as of late.

The scary thing is only that a certain demographic, say the 6 to 16-year-olds without a credit card but a whole lot of time, may be raised with a taste for Eastern grinds thanks to all the free offerings out there to accommodate them.  I shudder to think of how much Western developer effort is going to be spent accommodating them when they come of age to own their own credit cards.

[Sunbury]

One positive thing about my ArchLord beta, which the prior post reminded me.

It ran really well on my feeble old PC (1.7gh, 512mb, GeTi4-400 256mb), even in VERY busy towns, lots of players an mobs around, and crowded server (beta)!

Also the Gfx looked fine to me, I didn't have any problems with the mobs, landscape, combat motions, etc.   

Unlike most other newish/upcoming MMOG games that I have to turn down to the lowest possible setting every Gfx feature, so everything looks like blurry blobs, and it STILL RUNS LIKE CRAP when there are 6 other ppl around. 

I know I have an old machine, but how does ArchLord do it?   I mean the newbie town was PACKED and I could still move around smoothly (after loading), unlike WoW cities.

Why doesn't someone by the ArchLord engine and art and make a good game out of it ?!?!?!

[Nonentity]

One positive thing about my ArchLord beta, which the prior post reminded me.

It ran really well on my feeble old PC (1.7gh, 512mb, GeTi4-400 256mb), even in VERY busy towns, lots of players an mobs around, and crowded server (beta)!

Also the Gfx looked fine to me, I didn't have any problems with the mobs, landscape, combat motions, etc.   

Unlike most other newish/upcoming MMOG games that I have to turn down to the lowest possible setting every Gfx feature, so everything looks like blurry blobs, and it STILL RUNS LIKE CRAP when there are 6 other ppl around. 

I know I have an old machine, but how does ArchLord do it?   I mean the newbie town was PACKED and I could still move around smoothly (after loading), unlike WoW cities.

Why doesn't someone by the ArchLord engine and art and make a good game out of it ?!?!?!

Because every time a Western MMO is made with a click to move engine, I want to slap someone.

UO is the only allowable greivance. Shadowbane should have been twitch/WASD-based. I know, I know - on a technical level it wasn't really feasible for Shadowbane, considering it was in development since the age of man, but I digress.

[Sunbury]

Oh yeah, I forgot about click-to-move.   I actually kinda got used to it, even the fact it had NO autorouting logic (just click in tiny increments to get aruond stuff).

 It had a semi-WASD, but you had to manually adjust the camera every time you turned, which is why I learned to click on the ground.

But I can't see just having click to move makes a smooth running decent GFx game, vs uber-computer required one.

I kinda liked the world in ArchLord, not the mob camps.   Just like Horizons, which had a great world (truly 3D, not just 3D things layed on a mesh that can't fold back on itself).   But Horizons was the opposite problem of ArchLord, they kinda forgot to put mobs in most of that landscape.  Horizons had the GFx lag problem in busy areas, unlike ArchLord.

[Venkman]

It takes a very special form of masochism to try and compare Archlord and Horizons as a positive thing.

But I'm glad somebody is :)