Did I ever mention how incompetent the team managing ArcheAge (and by extension, ArcheAge Unchained) has been ever since it launched in the west in 2014? I need to think about that one for a hot minute if I ever did (of course I have; the incompetence tag is synonymous with these folks). While the game is now published by Gamigo for NA and EU (due to Trion Worlds insolvency where Gamigo acquired Trion’s assets including the sole remaining 3rd party published title which they had to quickly re-negotiate the publishing contract with XLGAMES; the Trion and Trion Worlds brand remains associated with the Glyph platform that all of the acquired properties utilize for account management, support, launcher, and cash shop services).
To rehash, a large portion of the ArcheAge team that managed the game at Trion, were retained (so little changed in that area; it’s just that over the past 2 years, more of those people have left either on their own or via staffing reduction especially in 2020 due to the pandemic). What little competence there was in the actual technical backend support, is now gone. And it shows. Those backend connections are literally failing as time goes on. The most recent updates have seen numerous failures especially with the latest major update with the gunslinger DLC (delivery failures with purchases from the Glyph web store) where a month later, many players have still not received their purchases (and have had dismal response times to their customer support tickets).
A major exploit also occurred on the Unchained fresh start servers where some players were able to access the server transfer API, and transfer characters (including items and gold) from the established servers. While Gamigo claimed only one character on EU and less than twenty on NA were able to transfer over, that was obviously not entirely truthful. Since they also haven’t been keeping any backups (absolute negligent operational practice) since the mergers, they also could not rollback the fresh start (and took down NA Godfrey for around 3 days to “try to remove characters, items, and gold”. Furthermore, they decided not to action accounts that took advantage of the exploit. Make no mistake, there was no “Transfer” button on the Glyph site; a player had to know the URL and plug in specific information in the crafted URL to execute the transfer.
Basically, they took the easiest way out since they don’t have the staffing (to parse the transaction logs which can turn into the exploding parts problem once gold and items start making a lot of moves), don’t have the technical competence to write code to automate part of the process, don’t maintain backups or likely also lack snapshots where they can rollback in narrower increments. The problem is that a lot of illicit items and golds are still in both fresh start servers (they just don’t care).
Furthermore, another exploit had been happening recently (within the last few weeks) where some players were purchasing a gold bag from the community center (CC) NPC merchant and selling it back in order to raise the CC’s gold contribution to high amounts (such that players would see a larger payout once rank 3 was achieved for the CC). The problem with the gold bag is that the vendor cost was the same as the purchase cost (1 gold). So some players were buying and selling this over and over again. Gamigo’s solution to that was to move the Thursday maintenance to Tuesday (April 20th) in order to reduce the sell price of the gold bag to 10 silver. And instead of dealing with the actual perpetrators which they claim to have taken action against for abusing this (again, not enough staffing to spend the time to track down and remove just the gold that abuse caused), they screwed everyone else by removing the gold income contributions from the CC as well as castle income.
What they should have done was refund players bond contributions. Unfortunately, while it is a relatively straightforward database query when you have COMPETENT people managing the game, that isn’t the case here. Trion used to have several data management and DB admins who could perform those sort of tasks across all their games. That mostly disappeared after Gamigo acquired Trion’s assets and retained effectively one data focused tech who continued with the ArcheAge team until this past year (he’s no longer with Gamigo).
And it shows. Backend processes are failing (the purchasing issues from the web site) and tasks that normally went off without a hitch in the past (like having to manually send players back tradable decor one by one and not having them character bound after the recent server mergers unlike the past where it was mostly automated and the items themselves, unchanged). They couldn’t even handle the server transfer exploit properly because they no longer have any core competency in this area. Stating the obvious, but this is no way to manage and operate a gaming service where you are taking customers (the players) money.
Trion (prior to their insolvency) was already near the bottom of being one of the worst game publishers out there. And even then, I knew there was worse like Gamigo. Gamigo retaining the Trion folks managing ArcheAge, meant it would end up turning into this ongoing comedy of incompetence. That was partly what drove me to sit on the fence until the very last minute with Unchained. It was never about the cost (inexpensive) as opposed to giving any money to a poorly run business. From an entertainment point of view, the money has been well spent. And the side drama entertainment by Gamigo’s show of incompetence, has honestly been priceless. My earlier PSA still stands though; don’t waste your money since it only serves as encouragement for this company and its lousy business practices.
Operationally, Gamigo is not up to the task of handling a subscription based game (like free to play ArcheAge with a Patron sub) nor a buy to play title like ArcheAge Unchained. Their customer support team is spread out across their entire library of graveyard games with only a handful assigned specifically to ArcheAge (this is based on recent tickets where other players have consistently mentioned the two same CSR’s eventually responding to those tickets). This leads to unacceptable response times for anything that isn’t directly related to billing (since those tickets get routed to a very specific group that handles those problems).
Gamigo executives likely know they are on borrowed time with being the publisher for ArcheAge and ArcheAge Unchained once Kakao Games ended up acquiring a majority stake in XLGAMES (so their main objective has been to cash grab as much as possible). Kakao can cut out the middleman and eventually publish it themselves (like they did with the SEA version of ArcheAge). And as much as I personally despise Kakao, that would be a major step up from the current arrangement with Gamigo (so long as NONE of the leadership from producer on up, aren’t retained). Note that I’m not saying this will happen anytime soon. It’s just a very likely possibility once ArcheAge 2 is ready and the focus shifts mostly to that game.
