Since I’ve given Gamigo the benefit of the doubt by deciding to purchase ArcheAge Unchained, I will be documenting my entire experience now that it has officially launched.
The login queue is not surprising. The addition of a 4th server (Kaylin for NA and Tinnereph on EU) is not surprising. The delay of the Steam launch is not surprising. And for players who managed to actually beat the queue boss, the disconnects some experienced is not surprising. I was surprised that I was able to eventually login (after being in the above queue for 2.5 hours) and got to play all of 5 minutes to level 3 before my client CTD’ed (resulting in being in another 1+ hour queue). I wasn’t really expecting to get any playtime on the first day. This was the realistic launch day experience that I expected.
The addition of the 4th servers on both regions won’t do anything for those who already created characters on the first three servers though. We’re limited to two character slots at launch and therefore, cannot take advantage of this unless an existing character is deleted. So even though there is a grace period for Founder’s for character creation and name reservations, most won’t be able to take advantage of this unless they happened to only create one character this past weekend or have been able to get past the queue, and do a character deletion (though the name associated with it will be locked for a period of time). Basically, the idea made sense BUT the implementation is very poor.
The promised reconnect capability for the login queue and game server (touched on in their October 4th live stream) is also non-existent. The feature was left off due to issues with their “new” login servers; it will be hotfixed but they have no ETA (this was mentioned during their launch live stream this morning). That deserves a ding since Khrolan made it sound like it was going to be a done deal during their October 4th stream. Not having this in place only adds to the frontend load.
Players who got in early on both EU and NA noted issues with labor regen (none). This happened on both the media PTS and the first week for Founders where Patron was not active. XLGAMES took the lazy way out by not just stripping that out and making that buff permanent on the backend. As for the fix, the “solution” is for players to login to account management and apply the pack items to the character they are logged in with (or done beforehand) since that is supposed to also grant Patron. From what I’ve read, it has not worked for all players. I applied my pack once I logged into a character and after a few minutes, saw I had 10 labor (so it is working for me at least). Again, this is a huge ding since this should not have been an issue at all.
The queue, client instability, and disconnects does not portend well for this coming weekends land rush (for those who are going hard this week in preparation for that). I’m not going to be rushing for any land myself since I am playing this casually and will only find a plot once I’ve leveled up both of my initial characters since having a conveniently located one is not a priority for me. But for those harder core players, it is going to be the usual shit show in between the queues and the client instability with the crashes and/or disconnections.
