If you were on the fence, get off of it and just run (don’t walk) the other way as soon as possible. It’s best to just wait until the population naturally stabilizes as opposed to putting up with the server locks and queues. On average, I’m in a queue for at least 3 hours (on Wynn) and normally end up playing far less than that (because of client crashes). Since this is the first Sunday, the weekend queues are naturally longer; as of this writing, it is 4 hours and counting.
As I mentioned, I decided to give this the benefit of the doubt. I’m very familiar with Trion (having played both ArcheAge and Devilian). I know that Gamigo picked up Trion’s assets after their insolvency last year (and also know that the same Trion personnel for ArcheAge, were retained and some, hired back later). I rarely have buyers remorse but I really am now (since this is funding incompetence which is something I battled with all the way until I clicked the purchase button).
All I can say is “shame on me” for believing that Gamigo (and the ex-Trion personnel still handling ArcheAge in general) could really handle the launch of Unchained properly. They are trying yes… but the try is a repeat of the insanity that has accompanied how they handle their PTS into launch (not enough time to actually properly deal with the laundry list of issues that ends up being communicated back to them). Besides the business model, it’s still ArcheAge (and they’ve launched this several times; original + 3 fresh starts). Again, the business model is buy to play; that means they have far more data for capacity planning at launch.
I’m part of the group of players who have spent more time in queue than actually connected to the game server and playing. As I noted before, that was the expectation for launch. A couple of days in though (where they have the data for purchases), they still haven’t dialed things in yet. The worst is the client instability which has a domino effect due to the lack of any disconnect protocol (something they failed to deliver for launch and still haven’t implemented). The lack of priority in this area is a good indicator of the “business as usual” mentality that I was hoping would not be the case.
It’s worse for those communities/guilds that wanted to be playing on one server; you know, to be together. But due to the poor handling of faction balancing (resulting in locking/unlocking servers during character name reservation), they just made things worse. Faction balancing is already hosed because everyone could create two characters on the same server. Myself, I created a Dwarf (East) and Harani (West) on Wynn. And what is going to happen when transfers are allowed and there will be the inevitable mess of restrictions that accompany it. If this balance (along with not reaching the soft population cap in order to have some reserve space for post launch) was important, we should have been originally restricted to creating only one character per server. Again, the ex-Trion folks have done these launches (original + fresh starts) several times to know better.
In-game wise, the same issues that plagued the PTS for two weeks, aren’t even addressed in the production build. There was supposed to be a build on PTS with modified pricing for items that Khrolan said he wanted the players to see and leave feedback on; that never happened and from what I can see, no difference. He also said for launch, they would be going with an in-game mount meta; yet the same WRAPPED mounts are in the Diligence coin shop.
The variable @PC_NAME(0) is still shown in place of where your character name is supposed to be (I know it is low priority for XLGAMES but this is something that should not even take long to fix; and also presents a really low quality presentation of the game to newer players). It’s the same with the low level Harani quest where the NPC at the beginning of the Tigerspine Mountains, fails to register your entry into the zone and doesn’t trigger it’s quest marker. That was also present in the PTS, reported, but not even addressed for release (the workaround is hit or miss; it took me standing in different places and spending up to 30 seconds not moving before it finally triggered).
The ArchePass system is a mess right now as well (unlocks that occasionally need to be repeated if you happen to complete all of the daily missions, eating up your Gilda Stars in the process where you are basically netting zero gains in the process) along with progress not being properly registered for some folks. And then there is a gold abuse going on (mainly by level 50+ players) with the ArchePass system where they are repeatedly getting the world boss missions (and getting 50 gold per) by abusing the change mission button. They are aware of it (lowering the reward to 10 gold); we shall see just how good their internal process is with dealing with the offenders since in the past, they said they had a “zero tolerance” policy, but often times let things slide when they didn’t have the time to actually look into exploits (something they did a half-assed job with the original ArcheAge and after a certain point, failed to do anything in Devilian).
Prior to launch, the community management team was barely able to tread water (having to constantly repeat on stream that they aren’t ignoring feedback and trying to read everything). Unfortunately, a lot of feedback is going to fall through the cracks now that it is going to be coming in much larger piles. Also like what a lot of other publishers are now doing, they are primarily focused on using Discord (which is a really poor way to deal with any type of organized feedback from the players). It’s why I no longer bother with formulating actionable feedback for a lot of the games that I spend time in because their own forums end up being lower priority (or none at all like for example, En Masse Entertainment) for their staff. When publishers begin to de-prioritize community engagement in this manner, it’s only going to accelerate their own eventual failure (witness Trion not listening to feedback across all of their games when players would spend time posting constructive feedback on their forums).
Some of these in-game issues are what internal Q&A should have caught well before they publicly announced Unchained anyway. The problem is that Q&A at publishers that have been focused on the free to play style of monetization, tend to focus on that portion (the backend payment flow) as the priority (given the issues in the production client, I would say that focus hasn’t changed with Unchained). While they did postpone the initial launch date, the delayed date was still way too aggressive given the still limited PTS time and the logistics involved with getting all of the issues addressed by XLGAMES, and then having the new builds validated. The point is they don’t care; they are just going to handle things like it was a free to play as opposed to putting effort into a more polished experience (more so now that it is live).
As noted up top, the game also launched without any disconnect protection on the server side and no queue grace period on the login frontend. On top of all of this, they tack on two additional servers (for the twice delayed Steam release) to try to alleviate the queues on the existing servers, but fail to have any process in place for those willing to move off of those higher pop ones (this includes being able to reclaim the Founder’s pack items). It’s not like this wasn’t anticipated (plus this again is buy to play where they have that data on hand to plan accordingly). As of Sunday (20th), they are opening a 6th server for NA (still missing the forest for the trees that there are folks willing to move off the high population servers if they offered transfers, ways to move the Founder’s pack stuff to another character if they delete one and not have it subject to the current deletion restrictions on the high population server). At this point, I would gladly transfer both characters off of Wynn so long as I can take everything I have with me.
Not having that queue reconnect grace period in place only adds to the problem since the game client is highly unstable (CTD’s are pretty much not if but when) and those who disconnect, end up adding back into the queue again (creating unnecessary load). They went ahead with the land rush on the 19th for the original launch servers (and are staggering the rest based on when those servers were opened). These Trion folks who were retained by Gamigo have learned little on the logistics side and continue to choose the “hair on fire” approach rather than trying to run it professionally top to bottom; to at least try to put out a higher quality/more polished product. Again, their mentality is still treating it like it’s a free to play game. XLGAMES is no better on their end; I get it, it’s a business contract and they’ll be getting their share of the revenue from this new business model (quality be damned though).
Even the items granted from the Founders edition are for a single character only (not account wide). What adds insult to injury is that for the glider wings in the Archeum Chainbreaker pack, you need to spend 675 credits for an item that allows you to apply the skin. Similarly, the badge requires spending 20 gold with an NPC to get the item that allows applying that. These things were cleverly not mentioned (and no one really dug deeper into these beforehand – so yes, shame on us for not ask thinking about asking these type of questions).
The point is that when you have a lot of these ex-Trion folks still associated with ArcheAge Unchained, the thought processes and approaches they have, cannot be easily changed (so the same mistakes kept being repeated – where not enough time is provided for dealing with feedback from the PTS). Sure, lot of the blatant P2W has been removed from the cash shop and you don’t have to continue maintaining a monthly subscription in order to own land. The servicing of the game however is still going to be constrained by the people running it though with many ex-Trion folks handling the production, technical, and business backend operations while having to fulfill Gamigo’s leaderships desires to eventually run this as lean as possible.
Basically, I cannot recommend anyone buying ArcheAge Unchained at this juncture unless you are a glutton for punishment.
