Executive producer Merv Lee Kwai (Khrolan) was once again unavailable since he was sick which left the two community managers as human meat shields (I don’t hold any ill will towards the CM’s because none of this is their fault; they are just the messengers for the incompetence that exists above their pay grade courtesy of the former Trion staff for project mismanagement and general incompetence).
If Khrolan couldn’t make the stream due to illness, then the assistant producer (Brian Kinney aka Tinen) should step in to directly answer some of these questions. Two weeks ago, it was #NO ETA and Carendash admitted he said that way too much (again, not his fault when his incompetent bosses are leaving them to hang like that). This stream was no better though because it was just a twist on #NO ETA where they are “aware of <insert issue> and looking into/investigating it” (just a wordier way of saying no timeline/no ETA).
One of the most ridiculous moments in this stream however was regarding gold sellers/buyers and “banning them forever”…. “if they could track them” message. Just how successful were the same Trion folks (now at Gamigo) with this from 2014-2018 as far as backend solutions? Lots of talk but little action. You need a automated system for the data end as well as staffing and a robust set of standard operating procedures to verify that data (none of which exists especially now).
The game as it is has different ways to move gold around; the auction house is one of the methods (like when you see some common item listed for a couple hundred gold), direct trade, the in-game mail system. That is a lot of transaction logs (and tens of thousands of transactions) to go through when you are talking about tracking that gold. I mean these clowns cannot even deal with the data from physical bots sitting on top of mining nodes so how the hell are they going to deal with tracking illegitimate gold transactions? So they banned around a hundred of those mining bots (which will be like playing wack-a-mole) across two regions which is just a drop in the bucket when you are talking about these large scale Chinese operations. And it was done reactively after several weeks of complaints across all of their channels including clogging up their customer support system.
This clusterf*ck of the first month is a direct result of their incompetent bosses who have proven from their Trion days until today, their “NCAA” (no clue at all) decision making and have no sense of project management where they signed off and pushed out this buggy and semi-functional product to where they are now having to scramble trying to band-aid fix things in a live production environment (and handling it with little professionalism or basic pride).
It also blows my mind that their instance servers (for instanced content like Ayanad Library, Halcyon and Fall of Hiram City) are having such a major impact on the actual world server (unless they are still trying to run all of this in a cloud environment instead of dedicated physical servers with hardware load balancers). And so now, they plan to disable Ayanad Library (removing another piece of content) while XLGAMES looks into that (and while they didn’t mention “NO ETA”, they have no idea how long it will remain unavailable).
Similarly is the disappearing larders after maintenance/downtime issue. They even mentioned they were aware of the problem for at least an year (so basically, since the time the Trion asset acquisition; but was internally known by the same Trion team before the insolvency). I can’t say I have experienced this since I never subbed on free-to-play ArcheAge so I had no property to place them plus I rarely played when these were introduced. This is yet more proof that shows Khrolan and his teams thought processes are no different with how they are handling this buy to play business model. They should have been committed internally (before even announcing ArcheAge Unchained publicly) to having these major known problems addressed first by XLGAMES.
The KR ArchePass system (recently revealed in their 6.3 preview on November 21 Korean local time) ended up being bankrolled and beta tested by the ArcheAge Unchained release (it was initially made to seem like this system was something being done specifically for Unchained when the reality is far from that). And right now, Khrolan is laying low (there will be no live stream this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US) and likely wants to have a revised ArchePass build for PTS available to help deflect this ongoing criticism about the state of the game.
