Archeage

Meh, I'm just bad at MMOs and making friends these days. The common theme to your stories are all [doing x with friends] and none of my friends play AA and I don't feel like making new ones. I can solo WoW to a certain degree and plan to do just that come WoD release, but when I want to 'pwn some newbs' I log into LoL and that makes me feel better than killing someone in an MMO that didn't even want to fight.

I understand that the carebears getting ganked are losing SOME degree of time/effort -- but maybe what frustrates me is that theattacker risks nothing. Eve PVP made me genuinely tense -- especially when I was obvious the target of the enemy group and needed to maneuver to stay alive. I wasn't even risking all THAT much, but the very visceral feeling of "I'm going to lose my ship if I don't do something" just isn't there for me in Archeage and, in retrospect, it is mandatory for me to enjoy MMO PVP.

You know, until you mentioned this I hadn't really thought about it but I think I agree. The problem being is you don't lose your ship. I go pay 3 maybe 10g max for the bigger ones and my ship is repaired. In that situation who really gives a fuck if I lose that boat? I get way more satisfaction when I out play someone in league vs killing people in this. Maybe I am bad (or because I haven't put the time in) but melee classes just melt me as a daggerspell if I don't get the jump on them and blow them up. Either I CC them and try to run or I am just fucked. Maybe it is a gear gap like WoW (I played frost mage in arena and I remember getting blown up until I got a bunch of pvp gear) but I really don't know. Aside from me trying to ruin someone else's shit or helping the guild I generally try to avoid PVP.

You are absolutely correct. The instigator of an attack almost always has nothing to lose. Same faction players can gain infamy but most don't care enough to worry about it and the game gives you ways to reduce infamy. Opposing faction might, at best, lose honor assuming they lose the fight but the instigator of a fight has one of the largest advantages I've ever seen in a game. If you're not the right class, you can easily be taken down before you even get a chance to respond, especially if the person is better geared. Plus if they lose, assuming it's not wartime, they get sent to a nearby nui shrine and can get going again because PvP death has no sting.

moontayle_sl said:

This is where having a populated server comes into play. There's all sorts of shit going down on Kyrios if you take the time to look.

I maintain fishing has the best random PvP. Hit a sailfin spot last night and two minutes into it a west guild shows up with a Junker. We spent the next twenty minutes chasing them down, killing them, then destroying the Junker. Just because.

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Did you chase them down because you had a greater number of people? I get what you're saying but you are also speaking from the perspective of a player who's in one of the top guilds on the most populated server. Also most of the stuff that's getting posted as far about PvP sounds more like newbs/players not knowing what their doing. Like I said from what I've seen, the average player never puts themselves in a situation where they are getting their trade packs swiped. Even if they do, what's the end result? A few gold lost? In guild chat last night one of our guildie clippers got ganked (he was going solo) and basically just stood there and took it because, why not if you know you can't win anyway.

Just face it guys this game isn't meant for you. By you I mean americans.

Leveling up you should have realized the game isn't a normal mmo by anyone standards, it's more like my kids toy box with thousands of toys thrown in there, maybe something is in there worth playing with but you'll have to dig down to the bottom to find it and get bored of it within 30 seconds, when you do.

We crave wow and EQ gameplay. Progression with carrots along the way.

Archeage is a giant wall you need to climb with no trophy at the top, you can make climbing the wall the prize but doing it over and over isn't an accomplishment after the first time.

Basically, level up, get a boat, run the instances once, get some land, do a few different trade packs, do some PvP and call it beat.

I see most people here have played long enough to have seen the content and want more things to do but it's just not there.

Jackdaddio_sl said:

DAoC, Darkfall, EvE, Shadowbane, etc. What did all of those games have in common that ArcheAge does not? The fact that the vast majority of people looking to play those were actively seeking PvP at all levels asap from launch, where in AAge the vast majority of people seek to avoid PvP at all levels and to build peaceful communities of harmony.

Now I'm not talking about the PRXs of the community; guilds who's entire existence revolves around PvP and as much conflict as possible. I remember reading various forums before this game had a NA publisher announcement and all I kept reading was the huge amount of players wanting to fish, fly, sail boats, play flutes and pianos, go to the shopping malls, ride the cutesy mounts, all that typical mmo stuff and they went nuts waiting for the game. Then word slowly leaked out to those people that there was PvP in it, but people didn't think it was as huge a factor... "Surely, they have safe zones and peace times so no need to worry".

Fast forward to now, and all those people who thought it was a PvE world with fringes of PvP are waking up to the shock they've spent $150 to what probably seems like Darkfall to them (kill me and take my stuff? no way!), and they are trying to do everything they can to avoid the PvP and play it like they thought they hoped it was; farming, playing lutes, dancing in towns.

I think PvPers can login, take 15-30 mins of prep time to go to run packs/organize battles and be cool with dying 5 minutes into that and then repeating, whereas PvEers would look at all that time as wasted and would instantly log out or wait until it was safe to come out of the hidey holes.

That's the flaw of AAge as I see it; it had the wrong community playing it from the start that was destined to either play it not as intended (it's really meant to be feudal-based PvP, not some ATITD sandbox) or to leave it in a few months.

edit: Oh, and this what Paste said:

"Re: post above me- if you swipe someone's fish that's 100 (nearly 1 hour) of their labor, maybe a gold or two of lure,and easily 15-20 mins of their time wasted. And you ask who gives a fuck about that? If that happened to me a few times I'd be pretty goddamn pissed. Especially with how labor starved I usually am"

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That may be the case but atleast on my server still running into a good bit of Pvp and the thing that I enjoy about it is - its not 'I'm bored let me go search out some Pvp' it's just shit that kind of happens while I play the game and do other things. Like getting ganked by a pirate while trying to score some fins from underwater jars, then playing a game of cat and mouse with him to try to keep going. Or doing a trade pack run and then sticking around in ynestere because some reds are camping the port and we head out to try and hunt em down (which led to the fish score I mentioned earlier). That's the beauty of this game - I don't have to force myself into Pvp, it just happens as part of my gameplay experience.

The 15-20 min thing was misconstrued - I meant that was just the travel time with the fish. The big hit is the 100 labor cost. Add that to the total opportunity cost and you're looking at over an hours time gone. Can't really yawn at that anymore , I don't think?

Edit - one thing worth mentioning is we don't have a single dominant force on my server. We have a large group of chuckleheads (DVS gaming) and another large guild that seems largely pve focused (xen of onslaught), and a pretty diorganized enemy faction. I suppose I could see the game becoming very stale if things were always very safe, or , from the opponents point of view, not worth even going for because its hopeless. As of now it is very chaotic with small groups of people ganking other small groups for fish and merchant shipfulls of trade packs and it happens at all hours of the day

DVS well known in the Planetside 2 community as a bunch of chuckleheads - spot on. XoO used to be pretty decent pre getting their ass stomped in Aion. They've gone down in apptitude over the years.

Pasteton_sl said:

That may be the case but atleast on my server...

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As people keep saying in this thread, this game dependsentirelyon three things in order for someone (who wants PvP) to have a good time:
1. Server choice
2. Guild choice/size
3. Adequate competition

That's not to say every guild needs to be big but if there are any plans on doing endgame and this new castle content, yeah... big guild. By repeatedly saying "On MY server" and "In MY guild" just gives that myopic view, but my comments are mainly addressing the totality of the game's servers and guilds as a whole.

The guilds aren't the same quality/caliber as the PvP games I mentioned like Darkfall, Shadowbane, DAoC, etc simply because (no citation) I believe the vast majority of guilds in ArcheAge wanted to playA Tale In The Desertinstead of this game except for features-wise whereas the vast majority of the other games guilds actively sought out PvP from launch.

Personal anecdotes will always be that. If I were just to follow Tuco's comments about server and guild, this game is on an extremely strong footing. But overall I know what I've been reading from the forums where people have 'spot' fun and in a highly restrictive resource driven game/economy such as this, it's not really about smelling the roses and seeing what's over the next hill. I mean, when someone says"Have you tried fishing?"as a reply to someone they say is bored with a sandboxy mmo, you know it's a problem somewhere.

When the two worlds collide of established PvP guilds needing constant daily competition from each other and the PvEer's desire to be left alone while they do stuff, the potential for players and opportunities begin to shrink on the servers. I saw it in Aion with the Abyss and ability to travel through portals to opposing factions as a 39/40 and kill anyone on the other side doing PvE... even 50s if you were geared enough +10. Few roaming gank squads port through, kill a few ppl, logout when the help comes, log back in 10mins later.

PvP is like the opposite of nature. When lions can no longer find easy prey, they take the chance to hunt larger more dangerous ones to survive. In PvP MMOs when lions can no longer find worthy competition, they soon begin to feed on the chipmunks to survive; any red name will do. In this game, those lions can even eat their own cubs (faction) if times get lean so I really don't see the largess of this game's base (PvEers) sticking around longer than a few months or so.

Basically trion purchased a time bomb.

it's hard to comment on such broad sweeping strokes so I can only go on what my daily gameplay experience is like. I guess if the forum bitching and some nebulous assessment of what guilds and player types gravitated towards this game is a stronger indicator of the game's outlook than actually playing the game then I stand corrected

Pasteton_sl said:

The 15-20 min thing was misconstrued - I meant that was just the travel time with the fish. The big hit is the 100 labor cost. Add that to the total opportunity cost and you're looking at over an hours time gone. Can't really yawn at that anymore , I don't think?

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I think moontayle brought it up, but the lopsided PVP here is that an instigator of PVP has absolutely nothing at stake. I think this is a fundamental problem with the PVP in Archeage.

An example I can think of was PVP on Rallos Zek. If you go trying to gank someone you think is weaker than you but you've misjudged the situation, they end up killing you and taking a piece of your gear plus your money. In Archeage...you respawn 300 feet away and carry on your day. This leads to people outright avoiding PVP for trade runs because they literally have everything to lose. The gain from cross-continent runs isn't sufficient to make up for that.

Vandyn_sl said:

Did you chase them down because you had a greater number of people? I get what you're saying but you are also speaking from the perspective of a player who's in one of the top guilds on the most populated server. Also most of the stuff that's getting posted as far about PvP sounds more like newbs/players not knowing what their doing. Like I said from what I've seen, the average player never puts themselves in a situation where they are getting their trade packs swiped. Even if they do, what's the end result? A few gold lost? In guild chat last night one of our guildie clippers got ganked (he was going solo) and basically just stood there and took it because, why not if you know you can't win anyway.

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Not sure on the numbers. We had about twenty people overall but the primary driver wasn't that we outnumbered them, they had the advantage of being on the Junker as a defender versus us chasing them and trying to get on board, but because PRX firmly holds to "red = dead". It took us a good while to clear them out and it came close to being futile as they were right on the edge of being in protected territory before one of our guys rushed on board and lowered the anchor. At any rate, my point was that I've yet to have night out at sea, with the primary focus being to fish, that didn't also include some sort of PvP.

Rhuma_sl said:

Basically trion purchased a time bomb.

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With the structural problems that people and decent guilds like Tuco's have noted (incentives), I'm curious to see what happens when Trion refuses to consolidate servers in a timely manner.

In Aion when all the Westerners complained to NCSoft about the ganking/PvP (akin to PvEers I've been talking about in ArcheAge) and wanted them to do something, NCSoft wouldn't because they told them that was an integral part of the game... non-consensual PvP. Westerners being Westerners refused to take that as a valid answer and begin to quit, servers got empty and the remaining players asked for merges. Took them almost a year or so I think to do it but by that time, most Westerners left and guilds were decimated.

The game is still going and I think by all accounts doing okay in Asia, but there simply isn't anymore real PvP elements to it anymore for Westerners. The large scale Abyss battles that used to happen after launch don't anymore with people even caring about who controls what there last time I looked it up... kind of how in Rift no one does rifts anymore or in WAR when people stopped doing PQs and sieges.

Random question aside from the topics at hand: has anyone found any good open world named spawns for dropping archeum shards? I'd rather not resort to finding salvage fodder or rustling through who knows how many coinpurses.

Morsakin_sl said:

Random question aside from the topics at hand: has anyone found any good open world named spawns for dropping archeum shards? I'd rather not resort to finding salvage fodder or rustling through who knows how many coinpurses.

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Iirc each zone has 2 star elites. They will have a blue "elite" tag on their nameplate. Not sure how they are spawned(Timed, mobs killed, random chance etc) though. But for example, I was killing the two in Halcyona(2 star griffon and 2 star cockatrice) and each time they dropped 4 shards. I never really bothered to see how to spawn them or try other zones. So maybe higher zone elites will drop crystals dunno.

Tuco_sl said:

I heard this rumor. Have you seen any proof?

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How to profit in archeage, with minimum effort!

Choose your hack I guess. I hope that for the sake of this game (which has some really stunning features), most of these don't exist but... the future doesn't look bright.

After I started on the whole farming, blue salt stuff, I got the impression that lots of ocean crossing was needed to make stuff. But since then I've figured out how trading works and got some more land and whatnot, and yea there's zero incentive for me to ever risk a contested area.

I did one ocean crossing to get my large farm, from which I returned unscathed, and another peacetime ynywhatever pack back to my own side to get some charcoal. The second time we got harpooned but made it into safe waters. I'll likely never go back into a contested area again, I just don't need to.

So really all the "feeding" the gankers are going to get is new people doing the large farm quest, impatient people wanting some extra starry stars, or really stupid people. Eventually all of that will dry up.

Jackdaddio_sl said:

How to profit in archeage, with minimum effort!

Choose your hack I guess. I hope that for the sake of this game (which has some really stunning features), most of these don't exist but... the future doesn't look bright.

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Wouldn't shock me. Those types of communities literally thrive on hacking/cheating in every game that comes out. Hell I clicked on one of those images randomly and it was a guy offering $200 for a hack that bypasses the RNG aspect of regrading/socketing, I mean jesus lord, $200 just to cheat one feature of a video game, it's mind boggling.

The joys of the world we live in, the players themselves destroying the very things they enjoy.

Cinge_sl said:

The joys of the world we live in, the players themselves destroying the very things they enjoy.

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This is kind of like blaming the dog for getting into the garbage when you forgot to close the lid. Trion has a pretty weird track history with hacks and server code. XL Games isn't much better with their Lineage titles.

I wouldn't necessarily jump immediately to blaming the players on this one. Trion/XL left the garbage out for the dog to eat (for months now).