A little over a week has passed since the service merge took place for ArcheAge Legacy and ArcheAge Unchained (with the land rush taking place a weekend ago), where the past week for me was about reorganizing inventory (getting stuff that couldn’t be stored in warehouse and characters out of mail) and re-decorating properties.
Pre-merger, I recorded an overhead video of the huge expanse of connected properties I had the week before the merge. Besides the wall surrounding the majority of the properties, I had already picked up/stored the decor, and chopped down the trees I normally had as part of the landscaping (I removed the wall after recording this). The only parts I did not continue the wall were the two white mansions and the raised mushroom/farms next to them (since I placed those around the time when the merger announcement was made).
When Kakao Games Europe took over the publishing back in December 2021, that initial land rush went off without a hitch; I ended up getting back the area I previously had plus a little bit more (but it was only a fraction of the above since I didn’t have the area closer to the bay where the beanstalk and christmas house are, nor did I have the area along the road where the other beanstalk, christmas house, two white mansions, and raised mushroom house are located; it just grew to that size over the past two years).
As I noted in the above (first link), this post-service merger land rush was a bit more chaotic (and I wasn’t getting back the western part I have had since 2019 since the area was already being camped when I logged in). The following is part of the land rush opening (where I placed most of the full kits I prioritized) where I’m occasionally just blindly trying to place the smaller kits. I later (not captured in the following) filled in some of the 8×8 spots in between and grabbed a few 16×16’s next to my properties that still weren’t claimed after 2+ hours had passed.
The end result is I ended up reclaiming the northeast portion where I had the two white mansions (pre-merger). The following is an overhead view after I had swapped some of the properties around, placed walls around the connected/partially re-decorated properties. All things considering, it turned out well and was a much-needed downsizing (as noted in the other posting, most of my characters had their own mushroom house; that is no longer the case and will likely be that way for a long time). I also decided not to place my advanced fellowship plaza (28×28), putting down the Winter Maiden (christmas) house for the time being (it’s also 28×28 so I can swap it in the future) so that I have extra planting space.
Going forward, land may not become as easily available due to the large amount of property designs that don’t require Patron for placing/paying taxes. Kakao Games Europe has said previously that XLGAMES doesn’t have any plans to open up new housing areas (a mistake IMHO). The housing areas made sense prior to the introduction of the high-tax exempt designs. The original system constrained how much properties you could reasonably have before the weekly taxes for each became cost prohibitive. With so many high-tax exempt designs (just on a single character) and no restrictions as to how much property could be placed during land rush, this “artificially increased scarcity” situation was created for the original housing zone design (where even the two large “overflow” housing areas that were added in 2016, are nearly full with this merger).
As I mentioned before, Unchained depopulated/land opened up significantly under Kakao Games Europe because of the subscription business model they implemented (this sub was required to even login). When I checked legacy housing zones pre-merge, they were packed by comparison. The decision makers at Kakao Games Europe aren’t even competent enough to have understood this (that potentially a lot of Unchained accounts that stopped subscribing, might end up returning with this merger). Part of this is playing out now (easy to see in the hero halls of both factions, and at the Christmas event).
Originally, there were around 4 16×16 plots that were unclaimed next to the full kits I had placed that I wasn’t going to claim. When they remained unclaimed after over 2 hours had passed, I decided to grab them (because I kept thinking about the above). As the first week passed, previously open 16×16’s have filled up (I ended up claiming 3 spots for my East alts this past weekend in Mahadevi). My old legacy Harani main, I do plan on using the free exile voucher to exile to West though.
Unlike the past couple of mergers where both Gamigo and Kakao Games Europe ran a fresh start server shortly after (splitting the population early on), there being none of that this time, has each regions single server popping with activity. Fresh starts were always a short term bandaid (increasing CCU, MAU, other in-game metrics temporarily) that did longer term damage to the overall population retention. The proof in the pudding is the original 2014 launch servers (and every fresh start introduced after) and all of the original 2019 Unchained launch servers (plus their fresh start servers), are now down to a singular merged service with ONE server for each region. And I am glad that this finally registered with someone (since there are no current plans for a fresh start server). And if there is one that coincides with the release of the fairy race (tentatively in 2024), this IMHO should never be merged (it should be forced transfer only).
