Up until the actual launch, I gave Kakao Games and XLGAMES a pass with the delays (the 24 hour one, and then the subsequent two on December 3rd) because we all know that crap happens.
What is far less forgiving however are the multitude of issues that could’ve been avoided with far better planning and communication. For some players, they were running into issues logging into their account because they were receiving an error message about their account transfer being in progress. What XL eventually discovered was that one of the reasons why players were running into that issue, was because they already had a character created on that account prior to completing the transfer process.
Yes, some players did not perform the transfer during the last two weeks when the service was opened (and before Kakao Games launched yesterday on the 3rd). Instead, they jumped into the fresh start server first before performing the transfer, which resulted in the transfer process failing (since it detected a character already on the account). One thing I learned during my time in IT when dealing with data was to think of every conceivable scenario and to test them out. Something like this was completely avoidable because it’s not like it was such a rare scenario. A failure condition should have had an actual handler that didn’t put the transfer code OR that account, into a completely unusable state.
Yes, XL will have to code a solution to this because the one use transfer code prevents a player from even creating a new account, and attempting the transfer again. In the mean time, for players who are currently locked out, it has already marred their experience ESPECIALLY if they were planning on playing the fresh start server.
UPDATE: according to one of the CM’s, engineers are manually fixing accounts (the ole Trion method) that are stuck in transfer limbo.
Now if you are the rest of us who have been able to login to your existing characters, that itself is a plethora of missing stuff; cosmetics, furniture, gliders, mounts, titles, achievement rewards, prior event coins are completely missing. Some of these items were simply removed from the this build with compensation given in the form of credits, replacement items, or nothing at all (as was the case with the event tokens). Many items were removed because as part of moving to a global build, there were items in the builds previously used for NA/EU that simply haven’t been introduced (the item ID’s aren’t in the database) in this global version.
Something as critical as this should’ve been highlighted between Gamigo, Kakao and XL once the decision was made to transfer the publishing rights from Gamigo to Kakao. There is absolutely no excuse for something like this where players learn after the fact, that items they may have put in time to acquire, was simply removed, and then compensated without any sort of transparency. Some items that were removed for example needed be be crafted (requiring materials that took effort to acquire). The same goes for those who lost a lot of rewards from having completed achievements. Every single title from previous ArchePasses is completely missing, as are the special titles and icon from the original Archeum pack from the Unchained launch. Even the event coins was something that should’ve been simply communicated before the final data transfer date so that players could spend them beforehand.
This is yet another case of trying to do too many things simultaneously versus keeping it simple, while getting the most important thing done (the transfer). Instead, they had to deal with: 1) Taking over the publishing with the transfer happening on such short notice, 2) Changing the build of the server and client while performing this migration, 3) Merging the existing servers into one, 4) Launching a fresh start server while 1, 2, and 3 are also part of the process.
Kakao and XL need to remember they are under the microscope of trying to make a good impression during the free period existing players are receiving. The verdict as far as I am concerned, is below average when it comes to clear communication regarding these issues. It’s all over the place in their Discord (their primary means of community interaction for feedback). Discord threads are not a decent replacement for an actual forum to have dialog and feedback. And while they have an interim “known issues” posting on their website, readability could be better (outline format with bullet points).
So far, the post launch experience has been below average which is sort of par for the course with this franchise. Trion, Gamigo, and now Kakao have found their own ways to botch their respective launches. There is less excuse for Kakao because they now own a majority stake in XL; there is no excuse for the usual management and communication issues that often times exists between a Korean design studio and their publishing partner (it gets tiring hearing the same lip service).
I’m lucky in that my accounts transferred over fine and I can login. But logging in to a lot of missing stuff, having to learn after the fact this was intentional, and having almost zero clue as to how they were compensated for, does not provide any long term confidence in either Kakao or XL that they’ll be handling ArcheAge and Unchained any better than the first two publishers. I still just see this as a final cash grab to tide the company over until ArcheAge 2 is ready.
UPDATE: I just realized Kakao ended up OVERCOMPENSATING the amount of credits for some of not very difficult to acquire stuff (while folks who lost a lot of crafted or achievement stuff, got far less) on Unchained. I really wasn’t paying attention when I collected the mail; I only noticed when I hovered over it in my character inventory to see what it was and noticed the amount on one of the vouchers I received (I had another voucher that was 22K credits).
The total amount of credits I ended up receiving on just this ONE character was over $1200 worth of credits. My other character on this same account was compensated over $300 worth of credits (that amounted to less than 10 missing/removed items). While this ends up benefiting me, this does Kakao little good because that’s a crap load of lost revenue when it comes to credit sales. 180 days of sub time is just $52. This means they aren’t going to make up the lost revenues from this credit compensation. I’m just shaking my head because this is a major miscalculation with whatever method they ended up using to value items.
UPDATE 2: I checked on my legacy account and ended up being compensated 17K credits (which is hilarious because the only credits I had on that account was the 12K balance that I had transferred over from Devilian when Trion shut that down).
