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Spradomatic
Member Posts: 10
So I'm currently playing on the Calleil server which I'm assuming has more F2Players than my original server, Naima. Whenever I'm going out red-hunting, sometimes near Ynystere or in the open seas, I'm lucky to find 1-2 red ships within an hour. In addition, you're lucky if Cinderstone/Ynystere goes to peace once a day. There is hardly ever any reds in Cinderstone (I'm playing west obviously), and whenever we head out to Ynystere to hopefully push the danger levels faster, there's hardly even reds in their own zone.
Did we really lose that many players during the Auroria screw-up? Is my server dying because it was mostly F2Players to begin with, or are other patron-friendly servers also experiencing a huge drop of activity?
It's ruining the fun for me, and I really liked this game; otherwise, I wouldn't have dealt with the developer's/publisher's BS for this long.
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Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
With this game it just seems like it is one more trick after the other. The latest being the rumbling trees in the cash shop. Rumor is the TS rate on them was dropped a few days after their release and supply/prices of TS trees is slowly moving up. I do have some fun in the game but who wants to support a company like Trion who does bait and switch crap like that?
Almost every step this game has taken has been fail. Auroria launch was terrible and now they moved up the siege timer when guilds thought they had 6 weeks. Do you know why they moved it up? Because Trion realized in their infinite wisdom that any guild that collects 10,000 gold per week in taxes for 6 weeks would be able to buy their own castle scroll and never get sieged. The castle/Auroria implementation was so bad that I predict only one castle per server will get sieged.
To make matters worse, prices are up and are only going to get higher. Trade runs create money into the system and now that Trion made it easy via rumbling trees for half the server population to have farm carts/wagons, more money is being pushed into the system each day. Apex and workers comp potions have been on a steady rise since the introduction of rumbling trees.
Whats left to do... Farm Hasla with half the server fighting for a mob spawn and hope it only takes 20 hours of grinding for the first tier weapon. Do GHA 10 times a day for a piece of the best armor set and hope you only have to do it for a month like that. Auroria was supposed to be the big pvp island but it is empty, you get no honor for kills there and the mob drops have been nerfed.
This game could have been the wow-killer. It had the potential but Trion allowed it to keep going as a money-grabbing sink-hole and people dont like it. Last night on Friday primetime only one server had a HIGH population. By January/February I am betting on server merges.
I guess it is possible but they are two quite different type of MMOs.
My gaming blog
I would understand server merges being implemented soon if I thought they would work, but to me, I believe servers that are dead are just screwed. How can they implement server merges in a game that has open-world land ownership. It just doesn't work here, and they shot themselves in the foot with that.
What I really wish they would implement (and why the hell do they not have this?!), is being able to at least "buy" a server transfer for your character. I have already started fresh (had a 50 on Naima) before I leveled a 50 on Calleil. This company is all about money-grabbing right? So this would seem like a no-brainer for them to have implemented already, letting people buy a server transfer...
Playing on a dead server just takes away any fun for a open-world PVP game, but unfortunately I'm done with WoW and have nothing else getting my attention. So I thought I'd stick it out, but it's just gettin' worse.
(Have they at least talked about the ability to server transfer?)
2 weeks ago 80% of EU servers were on High.
Past days they never reached that status anymore.
Reasons differ but i gues Trion shot their own legs off with the latest patch and the big disapointment of Auroria.
While it increased land with 30%, it dint offer anything new to the game.
People playing farmville for hours and doing traderuns for gold / gilda stars for months straight.
Even pvp is hard to find unless you gank fishermen who play with 2 frames per second.
Lets see were it ends and if Trion can turn it around, but players need something to do real fast as its becomming harder and harder to find fun activiy's for our guild.
Its no secret the game is bleeding players on a major scale
MAGA
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
This game is the poster child for what is wrong with the genre. Too many legit players and players who just wanted to put in their honest effort simply got burned by Trion, XL Games, cheaters, and whales. With so much stacked against them, it appears that many just simply gave up on trying to make it work. Even on these boards, it wasn't more than a couple weeks ago, that AA's forums covered 2-3 pages of new or updated threads per day. Now it's at 2-3 threads per day. My guess is that people are just done jumping through hoops with this particular circus act.
Even that new Sticky, consolidated monetization thread that was created a few days ago only hit 3 pages and hasn't been touched in 2 days. I'd say people just got tired of trying to wait for it to get better realizing it probably never will.
Over there -----> trying to log into WoW.
Unfortunately it doesn#t have any impact on my server regarding freeing up land yet.
Space is needed and nowhere to find.
Good post.
Now i'm waiting for the white knight to tell you that those legit players you describe did it wrong.
Unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Unlike most other MMOs, if you quit ArcheAge, your land wont just be waiting for you if you choose to come back. All your buildings get demolished and the land goes up for grabs for other players to claim. It's a big deterrent for anyone to actually return after giving all that up, especially people who know how difficult/expensive it is to obtain more land, especially in a suitable area, from the land barons and hackers.
Like the OP, I also play/played on Calleil. I own land, and my patron status is still active as of this post. I don't plan on continuing to play for a few different reasons.
That's because people can own more than one house per account (and, if taxes get too high, just start some new accounts and have them hold some of the land while also getting tax certs with loyalty points), which helps ensure that land is hard to get even if the population is low (which, obvously, doesn't really help with the population situation at all).
However, while people continue to hoard their land, it's rather clear there are a lot less land BUYERS because apparently land value has plummetted like a rock. What's really sad is you'd think that "Oh, land prices are low so it should be easy to get land", but it's only really easy to get gold in the first place for land if you have land. Many of the ways people tried to get money for land before like TS tree hunting no longer works well thanks to the economy crash, fishing has that insane FPS bug, and people are already struggling as it is with the higher APEX gold costs. So basically you have the worst of all worlds, apparently. The people with multiple plots keep holding on because no one likes giving up land thanks to how hard it is to get (and because they don't want to sell the land at such low prices), and getting land continues to be an issue for those who don't have it, driving them to quit as well as keeping new players from joining. And anyone who does quit loses their land which really really deters them from coming back.
And if the server population ever somehow gets low enough that everyone gets land, they'll probably just merge the servers like they did in other versions and we'd be at Square 1, AKA the Crapper, again.
When Auroria flipped, there was at least a dozen threads devoted to it on this forum. I have yet to see about castle taxes.
For those of you unaware because you quit Trion didn't stop screwing things up when you left. Back in Alpha land taxes were paid with gold, now they are paid with tax certificates. Well...Trino/XL forgot to switch over the auroria castles to the new tax certificate system so castle owners are receiving gold. They are receiving absolutely ridiculous amounts of gold, ranging from 20k to 60k, that is just being created out of thin. That gold has utterly destroyed the market.....again.
But alas, you don't see anyone complaining about it because there's no one left to complain about it.
Probably a combination of this, and people not caring about Auroria because there's no reason for anyone but the largest guilds to be there.
At least I fall under this category. I didn't even know about the tax thing until you mentioned it here because I've never had a reason to care about Auroria.
On a side note, tax certs are another good example of how pay-to-advantage (if you're so scared of the "W" word) has adversely affected the world. What should have been a gold sink became an easily abuseable (via loyalty points) system. And, as pointed out with this Auroria tax fiasco, has led to this situation where the system has a gold faucet but the gold sink that was supposed to correspond to it wasn't there.
Like I said in another thread, whether or not Archeage is pay-to-win, the monetization system is clearly hurting the game in all sorts of ways.
Also, you are playing the West faction. Its the most populated on every server, usually there's a 60/40 split at least. Your faction choice compounds the other problems related to population on your server. Not only is it thinly populated, but your pvp opponents are of the most thinly populated faction across servers.
So if you want more pvp targets then roll Eastern faction, of course you'll then see other problems like being locked out of Hasla grinding and being facerolled in the Halcyona war.
Its the most interesting mmo I've played since EQ2, but it does have its share of problems. Unfortunately XLGames is just not capable of outputting the level of code development needed to fix it. Trion's abysmal lack of customer interaction doesn't help, but even if they personally came to your house to soothe player's hurt feelings with hot cocoa and cookies it wouldn't matter because in the end XL can't deliver the goods. Hell, they can't even tell Trion what exactly is in their code dumps lol.
I can't help but wonder if this was Trion's plan from the start. If their purpose all along was to just grab as much cash in as little time as they could and let the game die as a result rather than making a steady, long-term profit by keeping the game successful.
If this isn't the case, it just means they're terrible at what they do.
If it is the case, it means they're terrible for what they do.
Exactly. I had a lot of fun in alpha. What Trino has done since then is just pathetic. Luckily I quit before Auroria, because I knew it would get screwed up. I'm really not surprised. The bait and switch BS is a terrible tactic to use in gaming. If people get pissed off, they stop playing the game. A lot of people like this game but can't stand the way Trino has handled it, which, in my opinion, is the biggest problem.
R2Games' business presentation explicitly shows and states that they (and thus, presumably, all F2P companies) are VERY aware that whaling practices reduce the lifespan of the game and player retention, but find it worth it because of higher overall profits from the whales.
Given that many (but not all) of AA's monetization is the same as what's in the presentation, it seems a safe enough bet that Trion was aware of this too. They even threw in some new strategies of their own for fast cash grabbing like the $150 founders packs. Odds are very good they've made back their investment and then some, IMHO.
.........weeeeeeeell, at least, if you don't include chargebacks, I suppose. Cause lots of people have perfectly valid legal standing to get a refund thanks to that 10% discount fiasco (regardless of whether you think they're crybabies or not, the law supports them in this case. Contract Law is VERY clear on this matter) and are finding their banks more than willing to reverse ALL charges to Trion because of it (both patron sub and credit purchases are affected by that discount, and thus founders are legally entitled to a refund for all subscription fees and credit purchases). Wonder how much that is costing them. Alas, though, most people don't know their legal rights and thus likely won't realize they're entitled to a refund.
Yep, and a lot of people play both. What's your point?
Think the point of the thread is totally missed..
Just saying, bye forums! =D