https://comingsoon.trionworlds.com/
With a countdown timer and a balance of positive and negative quotes complaining about some issues that are related to ArcheAge. I stand by my age old adage; fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Trion Worlds leadership along with the product management team for ArcheAge, made decisions that directly impacted how the game launched (including its overall business model and monetization). Merv Lee Kwai who eventually took over the executive producers spot (from Victoria Voss who was the original executive producer and the person also in charge of Trion’s third party publishing which focused mostly on attracting Korean MMO design studios), also managed to perpetuate a lot of those cash shop mechanics before Trion Worlds imploded and had its assets purchased by Gamigo (in what was a firesale for them). Voss herself was directly responsible for coming up with a lot of the models that Trion ended up deploying across all of their games.
Kwai managed to survive the personnel cuts and is now an executive at Gamigo (mainly still overseeing ArcheAge). To say that the game has not been doing well since the transition to Gamigo, would be an understatement. The whales are keeping the revenues flowing but Gamigo naturally wants to milk its potential (and get some return from renegotiating the publishing contract).
Tying land ownership to a monthly sub (which one can still grind gold for so that they can purchase APEX that another player is selling, to then use to purchase Patron with) really limits what a F2P player can do though like setting up their own scarecrow farm or building an actual structure which then affords the player to place other things like workbenches, extra storage, or novelty items (which for casual players, would represent a huge draw). Making open world housing freely available comes with challenges though like available land. ArcheAge doesn’t utilize channels or shards though (where the open world can be spun up into their own separate instance as a means of load balancing). Ascent: Infinite Realm uses this aspect to allow for a lot of premium (open world) housing (since a plot is per channel) and requires players to pay a tax to continue to maintain that property (instance housing is still free though but has inherent limits). MapleStory 2 also provides for free instance housing but players can choose any available open world spot and pay the initial fee that is listed (and then a percentage of that fee each week) to have a publicly accessible entry way.
But it remains to be seen if this would be on the table for ArcheAge (even though one of the quotes on the site mentions a player who quit because they weren’t able to build one). What likely will see a major overhaul is labor (since it was another quote noted BUT has been a far larger sticking point). Labor as a resource is everything in ArcheAge. A lot of non-combat action consumes it and each account has a cap. The cap and regeneration rate currently differs from free players versus Patron subscribers (where it regens faster even when they are online). Regardless, many hardcore players feel compelled to use up their labor pool so that they don’t cap out from the regeneration (rinse and repeat to an ad nauseum cycle of being tied to the game where some folks go as far as to calculate the best way to spend that labor in order to maximize their silver to labor ratio). For free players, naturally regenerating it is a slower process (so for the most part, once they use up their smaller pool, there’s some actions they won’t be able to do unless they use a labor potion either from some login reward/achievement or from the cash shop).
Myself, I played mostly free and the only time I had Patron was from the pack that we could redeem for a specific game when Devilian was shut down. I took the ArcheAge pack and resumed playing for a little over a month until that Patron expired. I still did not take advantage of the land ownership aspect though since I knew I wasn’t going to stick around long. Prior to that, I merely set up secret farms in nook/crannies up in the mountains (some which required gliding off an airship) in locations I found from a lot of exploration; there was one point early on when I leveled from level forty-something to 50 by just burning labor from gathering crops on those secret farms (and then selling those goods on the broker).
Basically, the non-combat (definitely not a fan of the games tabbed-targeting) parts of the game is what I enjoyed; the truly open world that allowed exploration if you could find ways to get there, the verticality of that environment and how the overall physics of gliding (along with a gliders specific properties) plays into that verticality, the diversity of that environment (Villanelle still being one of my favorite places in any game). With that said, I’m under no illusion that this countdown timer will lead to some massive changes that will fix a lot of the damage done by Trion’s earlier decisions (taken together with some of XLGAMES own designs where it was a P2W mess in South Korea). The changes being made would have to be decent enough to steal time away from TERA (yes, I write about its issues but the parts of the game I do enjoy outweigh those problems) and Guild Wars 2 (which has been scratching that exploration itch really well).
P.S. As for the Trion Worlds domain and branding still being alive 10 months later, I’m taking this to mean that Gamigo has decided it’s too much trouble (read – too costly) to rebrand and integrate the Glyph platform games (well, I don’t believe that Gamigo has their own singular launcher for their titles) and vBulletin forums (the Trion sites including the forums and Glyph launcher all tie into their account/business backend) into their own systems even though there is still a lot of negativity/animosity towards the Trion name.
