During Friday’s live stream, Khrolan mentioned they were looking into distributing Diligence coins to players in the marketplace (a proposal made by XLGAMES) while the ArchePass is down. He did mention there were some of the team (probably XLGAMES) that preferred distributing it all at once while he was more in favor of granting small amounts over time (similar to how you would earn them by completing the pass so that it follows a standard rate of progression).
Having gone the weekend with the ArchePass offline, a lot of players (who did not abuse the buggy kill missions last week) are finding themselves labor starved (needing to curtail activities requiring labor).
And it seems like they are going with an upfront grant per the above (no official announcement made yet). With each passing day the ArchePass is offline, this upfront grant makes sense because XLGAMES would need to code something (and would need additional testing) that would allow Gamigo to manage and keep track of a lower parceled out approach. They are barely treading water at this time to have to manage something like that plus players need an interim solution now (considering that much of what is needed for progression, ended up being moved into the free basic track of the ArchePass).
By taking a core feature (which has progression tied to it in the form of labor recharges and Diligence coins that are needed to acquire more recharges as well as inventory expansion) offline, players are more so constrained especially if they had not taken advantage of the missions bugs.
While Khrolan tried to downplay the long term damage from the gold (but not necessarily the labor pool), it misses the point about a buy to play restart (to start off from a clean slate without all of the pay to <insert favorite description>). Tax certificates are limited by ones labor pool so just having that extra recharges (where you can utilize around two of them before the diminishing returns start kicking in), means a whole lot more certificates to lock in any plot for a long while. And there is a lot of wasted land on Wynn (some folks can just pre-pay and lockout land for months even if they quit).
The bigger issue however with the upfront grant is the fact that unless Gamigo restricts this compensation to accounts purchased before a certain date, then anyone can purchase an account today, and know that it will include 300 Diligence coins. The Diligence shop has a number of tradable items including expansion scrolls and wrapped mounts. Part of me actually believes this is their ulterior motive to lock in additional sales.
So how has all of this affected the game? Well one thing I noticed today is that the queues dropped into a chasm… the first queue I got was only 300 on Wynn. Later in the evening, no queue at all. So yes, there’s a large number of players that are starting to leave the game already as a result of numerous issues (and for those utilizing customer support, are looking at 2 weeks of no response to their tickets). Khrolan and his team really dropped the bomb on this because they knew very well that there were many who gave them a second chance (only to screw it up again).
