Most important point noted by Khrolan (Merv Lee Kwai) is that the release date is being pushed back to October 15th (the patch for the existing free to play version will also be delayed). That IMHO is a good move because I believe they made their public announcement prematurely while not having all their ducks lined up. A lot of the feedback that ensued are things that both Khrolan and Tinen (Brian Kenny who was an associate producer at Trion working on ArcheAge and was retained by Gamigo) should’ve proactively dealt with as they have years with ArcheAge and know those game systems enough.
This is especially relevant (given the promise of removing the most blatant pay to <insert your favorite description> by not having a concrete decision on the soulbinding status of cosmetics; where if cash shop cosmetics weren’t at least soul or account bound, could be used as an avenue to list on the auction house for gold. This probably also includes the workaround (which Khrolan acknowledged in the first stream) where the image of the cosmetic item could be fused onto a canvas which could then be traded.
He also acknowledged how the length of the PTS during the Trion days weren’t enough time (I used to refer to all of their PTS as “public trial servers” since all meaningful feedback was always useless; they were mostly used to reveal the most egregious bugs/exploits that QA failed to catch since QA’s priority was making sure the cash shop and payment flow systems worked) and that weighed on the longer delay (which would allow players at least 10 days of PTS time to provide feedback). There will be separate PTS for the existing free to play version and Unchained (and those will run from October 1st to the 13th). The Steam version of Unchained will also launch on the 15th. For the non-Steam version, those who pre-order will be able to download the client in order to do their character name reservation on October 1st. Land will also be locked until October 19.
The full version of the marketplace for Unchained will also be available on the PTS (Khrolan mentioned in the conference call to XLGAMES that it was “mandatory” that the full version be available; this is also a very good decision since that is core to the feedback). A key change in the Unchained cash shop is the removal of the Loyalty shop; this is being replaced by the Diligence coin system (which players earn by playing; these coins cannot be acquired in any roundabout fashion with credits). Labor potions (which are being called Labor Restore in Unchained) will only be available through this Diligence shop (and not be sold for credits). The same is true for inventory expansion scrolls; those will only be via the Diligence shop. The legacy free version will remain the same (or as Khrolan accidentally meme’d himself with; ArcheAge Unchanged). There will also be no login tracker in Unchained (at least at the start as this is still being discussed; myself, they should just leave it out since it’s an artificial way to juice engagement numbers).
The biggest “backpedal” is in regards to alt accounts and more specifically, multi-clienting. ArcheAge is known as “AltAge” for a reason because in the existing free to play version, some of the most hardcore players (and a lot of whales) would have alt accounts as a means to increase their production output (labor to gold ratio) including running trade pack trains (macroing a lot of it). The 3 accounts per person policy that was stated before will remain. Khrolan however explained the multi-client situation where ultimately, it is something that is hard to police. I also concur that it’s not easy (you can have different physical machines, running virtual machines on the same system, or have multiple people in the same household playing their own separate legally purchased game licenses as examples. Third party “game protection” software like Gameguard or XIGNCODE could be used to deal with virtual machines BUT from my experience, there are often times too much false positives depending on the settings dictated by the publisher (and most of those software are useless as an anti-hack/anti-cheat).
Khrolan’s main concern is that the person is actually playing the character (not automated via macroing or set to auto-follow which is against their terms of service). So his stance is that they will be looking for more egregious cases (like maybe seeing a lot of multiple client activity which may trigger some false positives and further action/investigation than those cases where it is maybe 3-4 accounts from the same IP). Unfortunately, I know the extent that some folks will go to so unless the labor restriction pool becomes less important, any number of additional game clients that anyone purchases, will give them a serious leg up in terms of gold production capability (and so some folks will call alts/multi-boxing as pay to win). Myself, I know it’s not something is easy to police without resorting to some obnoxious client side shenanigans (at which point, I would not bother running that piece of software; especially if it is a game).
As for the ArchePass, it costs 1500 credits (which is around $10) and there are three different versions of them (tailored to different styles of play; i.e. PvE, PvP, etc) which can be purchased individually or all at once. With this pass, you perform quests/tasks and earn experience. Regardless of tier level of the pass, players earn rewards at each level. Everyone has the free track and some of the reward items provides a “decent amount of power” (like labor for example). The premium version rewards cosmetic items (no additional power).
There’s other topics that were covered in the stream including the guild member cap of 50, how they will be keeping a hands off approach to land ownership (noting that unlike the free to play version, tax certificates to maintain that land will require players to login and do activities in order to craft them), quest removal rationale for Delphinad Ghost Ships, zero tolerance to gold selling and purchasing, and their current stance on mods (none will be tolerated even though they understand the QoL aspects of some of them).
Overall, the delay is a good thing since it will allow players to check out a build of Unchained for nearly two weeks before it goes live. Khrolan mentioned he will also be answering questions on the next live stream(s); or as he put it, they are “highly engaged” now. My take is that there are way too many people still sitting on the fence where they haven’t hit key milestones on the pre-orders. Why do I say that? Because during the other stream, they basically said they would be starting with two servers per region (with room to scale upwards if needed). This little tidbit of information telegraphs the current numbers being in the 5 digit range (which is of course far below the numbers the game saw during its initial launch back in 2014 when they hit 2 million registered users which also accounted for removing “six figures” worth of bad actors). The key word here is registered users (thus a lot of these were also alt accounts). But it helps with extrapolation of the approximate max number of players per server (which they spun up 21 of them across NA and EU) which means just under 100K players per server (though you can divide that by a third to factor in some alt accounts which puts the number closer to the 30-40K range that most game servers tend to support).
I think Khrolan himself realizes a lot of goodwill will depend on those who buy in and actually experience a version of ArcheAge that has in good faith effort, attempted to remove most of the blatant pay to <insert your favorite description> aspects that were introduced in the existing free to play version at launch, and then over the course of the past 5 years.
