Anyone who thought that Kakao Games would be able to handle the ArcheAge IP any better (owning a majority stake in XLGAMES does not automatically equate to the actual development process magically becoming better, or the customer/player/publisher facing side improving), were just setting themselves up for continued disappointment and more of the same old same old.
Every single NA/EU publisher (Trion Worlds, Gamigo, and now Kakao Games) has proven themselves to be incompetent launching/re-launching this game. Kakao has been having to deal with a basic account transfer issue that as I’ve mentioned before, was easily preventable (both Kakao and XL should’ve foreseen that). They also failed to properly communicate beforehand, that not all of your items would be transferred intact or unmodified.
The latest oversight was something that Gamigo actually managed to do right, and that was to have the gifting option disabled in the Unchained credit shop for the fresh start server, and to have all of the tradable items untradable in Unchained. I’m not playing the fresh start so this doesn’t affect me. But it turns out players discovered they could gift items (using their compensated credits) to alts or other accounts. Additionally, there are a lot of items that can be bough from the credit shop, and then sold on the auction house. A pet peeve of fresh start players is a “so called” level playing field. And in most every fresh start, players have found various ways to abuse in-game mechanics to gain an advantage. Basically, that has long been a pipe dream for this game (an actual level playing field). Kakao’s rushed move to the global build meant they overlooked all of the items that needed to be changed for the Unchained version. Again, Gamigo (one of the worst publishers) actually got that part mostly right.
One specific item that some were purchasing and gifting was the Crest Trade Pack Storage. This can be equipped on boats, schooners, ships… meaning you can carry extra trade packs which for early game, gives that early advantage in the economy. Many are also now listed in the fresh start auction house. Kakao’s response to this with todays maintenance is that the item will be moved from the credit shop, to the Manastorm shop (fresh start players will need to acquire enough crystals to purchase them).
Razer ran a promotional event this weekend for a Griffin mount (where you could claim redeemable keys for both legacy and Unchained). The promotion itself was not necessarily widely advertised (I managed to snag a code before they all disappeared; Razer had around 5000 keys). The mount could be sent from your Kakao web inventory to the fresh start servers which again given that we’re only the first week into the fresh start, means players who have them now have a small flight advantage (the base ground movement speed is slow at 9m/sec but is around the same speed as normal mounts with the included armor). These giveaways also tend to have the key bot army come out in force which is why lot of the codes are up for sale on player auction sites or eBay.
Finally (the last one at least as of today) is that Kakao decided to delay the land rush by a week (to December 18th). Again for fresh start, this will give players an added week to farm up more Gilda in order to get the larger designs (which allows grabbing larger plots that normally would’ve been constrained to say a 24×24 thatched house). More will use the 30 day free trial to create additional alt characters so they just drop designs down to grab even more plots of land. The delay itself is mainly due to the account transfer issue which naturally puts those players at a disadvantage. But they are already behind if they haven’t just created a new account because they’ll be limited in the largest design they can get. For those (like myself) who are only looking to claim land on the evolved server, it amounts to just another week of waiting. But for everyone in general, the delay messes up whatever pre-planning people had done with their schedules (this is nothing new with this game unfortunately because its design requires players to do that).
To put it more concisely, Kakao Games is proving in just this first week, they are no better than Trion or Gamigo at handling this game. I did allude to earlier that keeping it simple would’ve been better. That is, they should have just run the same publisher specific client that Gamigo was using to get player accounts transferred over first (rather than moving to the global build from the start), proceeding with the land rush, and then once players had settled in, transition to the global build, informing players ahead of time of the things they need to take care of. Then once that was accomplished, roll out the first fresh start server. Kakao tried to rush and implement all of these things in a short time span including launching the fresh start servers from the beginning of their service transition.
This isn’t me being unrealistic about expectations. Kakao isn’t some rookie in this area; they had years of experience dealing with Pearl Abyss with Black Desert Online. They also had a very long windup rolling out Elyon where at the last minute, decided to change the business model to free to play. The ArcheAge franchise isn’t some new things with a lot of unknowns; it’s 7 years old (Unchained 2 years old). The brutal blunt truth is this relaunch of ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained, was just poorly executed due to poor planning and trying to rush out way too many changes. They knew they had to at least make a decent first impression (not the usual mess that exists when launching a service) especially when making the decision to move Unchained to a subscription business model. And in the subsequent days over this first week, are proving to be no different than Trion or Gamigo.
Basically, it’s just differing levels of incompetence and lip service on the publishing side; the jury is still out on the customer support and service side but as of now, they are buried under tickets in just the first week where their response time is on par with what Gamigo experienced early on after launching Unchained. Kakao really has their work cut out for them if they want to retain subs for Unchained once players free time expires.
