ArcheAge’s producer Khrolan (Merv Lee Kwai) posted the following to the ArcheAge forums in order to throw some water onto the fire regarding the recent departures of members of that team.
Source: http://forums.archeagegame.com/showthread.php?344092-Assurance-from-Khrolan-about-Recent-Events
I’ll cut to the chase here. I heard this exact same song and dance from the Devilian team well before that team got picked apart into a 1.5 year downwards spiral. The biggest difference here is the much larger player base (compared to Devilian) that ArcheAge has been able to rely upon when it comes to the percentage of large spenders that have continued to pump money into it.
Trion’s continued fleecing/disregard of that player base is naturally eroding it little by little though but so long as the hardest core of those players continue feeding the poor business practices, Trion will take those folks all the way to the bank and milk/farm them as much as possible just like they did with those Devilian players who continued spending money even throughout 2017 (and just to say, I know first hand how Trion’s community interaction with the Devilian community went completely downhill after July 2016).
I have their entire Devilian forum archived (22GB uncompressed and 5.5GB compressed since the software I used had to create files and relink them for every single post) to serve as documentation as to how poorly they handled community relations. While they’ve always done a much better job with interacting with the ArcheAge community (in order to placate and give the appearance of caring), it’s now heading down that same slippery slope.
Some ArcheAge players have simply moved on to playing the ArcheRage private server (which I briefly talked about in this posting). Obviously, Trion and XLGame have not been successful at getting the service shutdown. And it is only natural for the producer to attempt to calm the waters given the amount of personnel who were let go from the ArcheAge team (localization editor and ArcheAge lore expert Quillodon was also a casualty).
So as I mentioned before, you have to read between the lines in terms of what has not been said, the timeline of their existing publishing contract which is nearly into its 4th year (and the lead time to renegotiate that contract before it nears the end of its term which is probably year 5), what Trion’s higher level intention may be (when it comes to third party publishing), the fact that their chief third party publishing manager (Victoria Voss) was no longer a Trion employee as of early November 2017.
I will say it right now as well; a sub only version of ArcheAge will not save the NA/EU version; that would only be a short term bandaid fix (I’ll expand on that in another post). But that is likely one of the things they will end up bringing up (again) to try and convince XLGames to make (which means undoing all the systems and mechanics that were created for how Trion has chosen to monetize the game).
