Most everyone that I knew who played ArcheAge (as a consequence of also playing Devilian) had stopped playing it after the latter was shutdown back in March. Only a few including myself took advantage of the welcome pack to another game.
While I moved my remaining credits over and had 30 days of Patron from the ArcheAge welcome package, I never really made use of it (except to login for those 30 days to get the loyalty tokens) and to pick the fruits off the trees I planted on a secret farm.
And once those 30 days was up, I left those fruit trees and continued to login every other day (before the time expired on them) to see if anyone else had come across it (normally they would get chopped down since there are some paying players who do feel strongly about these secret farms which they refer to as “illegal”). The reason I did this was to get a pulse of the state of activity on the server (Thunderwing most of the time showed “high” activity compared to the rest of the legacy servers).
I went all the way through April and the beginning of May (much longer than I anticipated since originally, I wasn’t even planning on logging in anymore after Devilian was closed) without issues which reminded me of the time on Morpheus (well before the server mergers were mentioned) when the population loss was extremely noticeable. Little did I know though that on the fresh start side (which had been launched at the beginning of April when 4.5 went live), players there had already burnt through the available content (the fresh start there is running on a progression server format where the level cap was 50).
There’s an old adage I keep bringing up; “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”. This here is part of the problem with a portion of ArcheAge’s player base. These are the folks who ask for fresh starts, pay for the overpriced fresh start packs, and go through the cycle of putting even more of their money into Patron subs, Apex, and the cash shop on those fresh start servers. And Trion obliges them by stringing these players along to milk them all over again. The question in the subject of this post is strictly rhetorical…. I’ll just be blunt…. these folks who sink large sums of money into this game and then complain about Trion’s handling of things are suckers and gluttons for being abused.
It seems this time around, Trion had layed out a road map of the phases for this fresh start progression server as to what content would be released with the caveat that the content of those phases and their release dates would be subject to change (thus getting around the sticking point of false advertisement).
Once I began “hearing” complaints about “fresh start being dead” along with forum threads like this one (an outcome of Trion’s ArcheAge livestream this past Friday where they covered what was not coming in the next content phase which is about 90% of what had been previously noted in a roadmap infographic that someone annotated which I’ve copied below).
While Trion’s ArcheAge team conveniently lays part of this on XLGAMES, that excuse is done often times out of convenience since they know how far they can get away with their captive audience of whales (they’ve done it before including the infamous rampage car cash grab with 3.5 but also by the fact that this portion of their player base empowers Trion by going through this cycle of fresh starts and now what is the flavor of the month with MMO’s recycling the game in the form of the latest catchphrase, “progression servers”). They are used to seeing the complaints from their various communities but know very well how only a few actually quit playing/cancel their Patron.
Veteran ArcheAge players should know by now that Trion makes decisions based on how much they can milk their players. Quality of said product (especially 3rd party published titles which they have no development control over) is not a primary consideration. Stringing out content like the above is primarily a Trion business decision. If they can force a player into another month of Patron, they will do it (while at the same time, re-introducing items into the cash shop and promoting the next pack deal). It also doesn’t help that ArcheAge has had tools as part of their community management team perpetuating this drek (first Celestrata who is now the associate producer and now Muzzy) using the “production shifts” excuse.
Reminder: the bulk of the actual game systems are already in play in Korea (and this game is already multiple versions in where those system changes for Trion are going to be in its own code base). Localization happens on Trion’s side (and since the bulk of this work has already been done for the content available on the progression server, that isn’t a valid excuse for delays). So Trion will do what they are good at; stringing out the content as long as the CCU’s and revenues from the whales continue hitting the metrics that make both them and XLGAMES happy.
There’s only one surefire way to invoke change and that is drying up the revenues via ArcheAge players voting with their wallets. That will never really happen though with their core player base who are “in far too deep” with being able to give up their properties, the structures built on top of them, and all of the furnishings that are inside of them. The above linked forum thread also shows some of those long time players in utter denial with believing that it was an XLGAMES decision to not deliver the bulk of that content. Trion knows all of this and will farm these players for their money for as long as they can.
