Ahead of todays maintenance, Kakao Games provided an update regarding the credit removal (several days ago) in what can now be considered a futile attempt at trying to salvage what little trust and goodwill remains with the ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained communities in the NA/EU region.
I know for myself, I had none of these Lucky Hiram Infusions. The credits I was compensated (in both legacy and Unchained) were for the missing items as calculated in their December 7th global item changes listing. I did inquire back in December whether the compensation was correct since I did note that it seemed excessive (I was referred back to this listing so the premise back then was that it was correct, and I left it at that).
The problem with this entire ordeal is the lack of real transparency by not providing each player an actual itemized breakdown of how they came to the credit balance after the prior weeks maintenance. Kakao Games account platform lacks any sort of player facing transaction history unlike Trion’s old Glyph platform (Gamigo still uses it for the remaining Trion titles and some of the newer properties like Fractal Online) which has that functionality (it still has transactions dating back to 2015 for all of my Devilian purchases, for code redemptions from website and Trion live stream giveaways).
So players are left guessing as to what happened to their credits and how everything was calculated. It’s also clear why this new Rosen Crystal currency was created; they are character bound and not account wide like credits. 100 credits = 1 Rosen Crystal and the credit costs were rounded up in the process. Additionally, many items have purchase limits on them (adding insult to injury) like the 7-day Salon Certificate which is just 1 per account (this is the current Rosen Crystal shop list they posted today).. Additionally over on legacy (which I haven’t played since 2018), some image items are far more expensive than what they had originally been as cosmetic items. For legacy, no one should be surprised if they place a one-time limit on the 30-day Patron “Archelife” ticket (I suppose this will depend on the average Rosen Crystal compensation).
I’m just chalking all of this up to further obfuscation in an attempt to perform damage control, and to restrict the new currency from impeding actual credit sales going forward. So I expect there to be an onslaught of new credit marketplace items in an attempt to juice those credit sales (especially for players who lost the bulk of their credits, and/or had these Rosen Crystals applied to a different character they normally play).
Myself, my Rosen Crystal compensation was as follows: on my main account for AAU, my main character received 639, and my alt received 320. Over on legacy, my main character received 172 while a low level alt got 13 (I remember it’s original costume was missing and is now in the Rosen Crystal shop as an image item). On my second AAU alt account (which never purchased any credits and only had the 630 that Gamigo had provided as compensation somewhere in the post-launch window), the amounts were 151 and 153. I know these were compensation for several ArchePass costumes that had been removed in the transfer (and possibly for items in the original pack purchases).
At face value, the compensation still seems to be a lot. But we’re talking about these crystals being character bound, purchase limits on some items, and only a fraction of items that can be purchased. Sure, there are currently some items that are only available in this new shop (like the “sleepy” cosmetic image items). They of course needed to do this to make it look like there is some perceived value for these crystals but make no mistake, those items will all eventually be made available in the credit shop (FS players for example have no crystals since this is applicable to only transferred characters).
As for the claimable compensation, I received only the global compensation package and not the credit return one (these folks can’t seem to get anything right). In the grander scheme of things, it doesn’t matter since my access (to Unchained) will be over once my game time expires (I’ll just enjoy what I can in that remaining time). Little of this changes my overall view of Kakao Games Europe as an INCOMPETENT and ETHICALLY CHALLENGED publisher though. The earlier goodwill I afforded them is gone as is the trust. The only way to send any sort of message to companies like this is to not spend any money with those that breach that customer trust. Thus ArcheAge 2 is already DOA for myself (and it doesn’t matter if they try to create a new subsidiary or do a rebranding to try to publish it in the west).
