Legacy players are really getting screwed over with this entire credit compensation fiasco where their credits were exchanged for Rosen Crystals. As I previously surmised (that it would not surprise me if they made Patron a one-time purchase), Kakao Games did just that after updating the Rosen Crystal shop with the 30-day Patron (ArcheLife) ticket that was not initially available in last weeks update. Unsurprisingly, legacy players aren’t happy (at this juncture, the company is telegraphing they really do not care, lip service notwithstanding).
On a side note, Easy Anti-cheat was swapped out with XIGNCODE3 (which has shown to be useless, and like EAC, able to be bypassed. I still remember the big uproar that happened when En Masse Entertainment (now defunct) had Bluehole implement XIGNCODE for the NA version of TERA in June 2018. By November 2018, they had to backtrack and had it removed since it was causing a small percentage of support related problems (while unsurprisingly not doing anything to stem the usual exploits and hacks that are a result of poor coding in the game client).
Kakao Games has provided no specifics regarding the change; a lot of us believe part of the rationale is to reduce conflicts with other games that also use EAC (like Lost Ark or Black Desert Online) so that players can at least AFK in-game. Later versions of EAC (when configured appropriately by the publisher) allow whitelisting of other games such that they can be run simultaneously. As it stood, you could not run ArcheAge (legacy and Unchained) along with Lost Ark or BDO. Xigncode has always been far more forgiving in this area (with other games that also use it). Since ArcheAge hasn’t had AFK kick implemented for awhile (Gamigo eventually disabled it once the queues disappeared after the initial Unchained launch), one metric booster were those “time played” events; Kakao Games has this Divine Key Timer button where you can claim 10 Timewinder tokens each day (at 30 minute intervals).
The change is definitely not licensing related (since after acquiring EAC in 2018, Epic Games has licensed it for free). Regardless, this is another change that has added to the pile of things that aren’t making the player base (what remains of it) happy. Myself, I’m like whatever since my time in the game is academic already (just enjoying my potato property tending while it lasts) since Kakao Games Europe has shown exactly what they are (and again, I felt this way back when Daum Europe rebranded itself to Kakao Games, and went back on some of their original “promises” for Black Desert Online at launch; which led me to not bothering playing it). So when a person or company shows you what they are the first time, believe them.
