I have an INCOMPETENCE tag here that used to be solely dedicated to Gamigo (and by extension, Trion) when it came to their management of the ArcheAge IP for NA/EU). 22 days in, Kakao is proving they are just as bad as Gamigo was (and in some parts, actually worse). Over the weekend, Kakao decided to have a retweet challenge where they would provide codes that could be redeemed for rewards. The rewards were mainly labor rechargers and manastorm crystals.
That wasn’t necessarily the problem though. With free to play ArcheAge, something like this would be par for the course with its fresh start server (where some players would create multiple accounts to find a way to exploit this). The problem however goes up with Unchained where the premise is to not have any buyable power with real money (unlike the cash shop in legacy ArcheAge). With Unchained, anyone can get 30 days of free trial access (with just a handful of limitations).
With the landrush happening on Saturday, the code giveaway happened at the most opportune time for the exact same people who always complain about not wanting ANY pay to win elements, but always exploit bugs or any opening that provides an advantage. What ended up happening over the weekend was an explosion of new accounts on Unchained (that is why the starting zones on the fresh start servers were busy once again this weekend) with these new accounts redeeming the codes for labor boosts and manastorm crystals; crystals that were used to purchase majestic trees and mining drills which could be placed on the newly placed farms. On the merged evolution server, none of this matters since it’s not a new economy. On the fresh start servers though, we’re talking about a lot of normally scarce resources early on in the server economy, to be suddenly flooded with a ton of logs, stones, and ores. The large amounts of labor rechargers is self-explanatory; usable for processing or upgrading gear.
Basically, the economy and progress (at least temporary since there is still a progression gate) on the fresh start servers got blown up over the weekend. Kakao acknowledged this issue and are looking into it:
The real issue is the 30 day trial accounts in terms of the lack of restrictions and the length (IMHO, the trial period should be shortened to 7 days). As it currently stands, there aren’t much restrictions on trial accounts. They can use Global chat for example (spamming it for hours on end), they can freely use farms and storage set to family or guild (so a trial account could buy a majestic tree or drill, and place it on a farm set to family or guild as an example). Kakao tried to manage some of this on the fresh start servers by level restricting access to the auction house, to mail, to trading, to being able to access warehouse storage. While I don’t believe that trial account characters should restricted from families or guilds, they should not be allowed to place property, or to place items and gather from properties. And trial accounts should definitely be restricted from using global chat. Furthermore, codes should not be redeemable to fresh start characters until much later down the road (definitely not within the first 90 days of a fresh start server).
Again, issues like this wouldn’t be a problem if the game had been designed this way from the start; it was never designed to to have a trial access system (where restrictions are implemented correctly). This decision to move to a subscription business model should have been better thought through, including trial accounts. Gamigo went with a much shorter 3-day trial where the character could not even generate labor. And that made sense for a 3-day trial (since it was clearly meant to give a small flavor of the game). The 30 day trial with Kakao was probably meant to get players hooked and invested in the game (hoping it would compel the trial player to continue subscribing). Instead, the usual part of this player community has found ways to exploit it.
This is why I believe they are eventually going to end up finding a way to merge the two versions of the game (because it’s essentially redundant given how the same players who are vocal about not paying for power, are the same ones who exploit and RMT to high hell, defeating the purpose of Unchained). The original buy once aspect (Gamigo’s business model) for Unchained was attractive since it was one price for permanent Patron. Moving to the subscription model with a restricted cash shop (but with a player base that whines about any paid advantage, but yet exploits wherever possible), makes most of Unchained redundant. If I had a choice, I’d have no problems having my characters transferred to legacy where I at least can have full access to the cash shop. And if I stop paying for Patron, then I can at least still login to access my characters (versus being completely locked out as it is with Unchained).
As for Kakao, their first month (coming up on it as of this writing) of handling the ArcheAge franchise has been sadly as incompetent as the two prior publishers. Besides just banning the accounts (both alt and main ones), they really do need to consider extending the progression gating (like by a month at minimum) on the fresh start servers to address the edge cases that don’t seem to fall within the exploit (because there are a few players that do a better job at evading detection). Tracking gold transactions in ArcheAge has always proven to be futile (it doesn’t seem to have a robust transaction tracking system on the backend), and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how easy it is to exchange small amounts of gold, where it changes hands exponentially when it comes to just one character on a single account. Without a proper logging system that allows querying that can cross reference every other transaction, it’s an exploding parts problem.
Some players are calling for just restarting the fresh start servers from scratch (since Kakao has stated they don’t intend to do rollbacks; that’s difficult anyway because this game just does not have that sort of robust snapshots of its database) given the damage done to the economy already. Since I’m not playing the fresh start servers, I have no skin there. However, at only 22 days in, it might be worth it for Kakao to do just that. Refunding credits spent on the fresh start is much easier to deal with (since that system is normally robust for most publishers with tracking that flow). Sure, players who played legitimately may feel slighted BUT considering the premise of a fresh start is self-described, it is also what players signed up for (to start fresh). And with the current progression gating, 22 days loss of progress is an easier pill to swallow now, than waiting and trying to fix the mess (which banning accounts, will not completely fix).
