Archeage

I'm not sure if this has been intentional, but the last major three issues (RNG Boxes/APEX Dupes/Server Crashes) have all happened on a Sunday. Part of me hopes that the folks releasing these exploits are doing it on purpose so the idiots Trion employs are forced to come in and do damage control on a weekend.

Cinge, this is as blatant a money grab as a game like Candy Crush is, it's just targeted at a different demographic. Regardless of contract with XL, Trion didn't remotely staff their AA team well enough and it's clear they're cutting corners in hopes to secure future VC funding by driving a good P/L sheet. One of the dudes in PRX (can't recall his name) mentioned he spent over $1500 on AA in guild chat a few weeks before I quit. Fucking insane.

aegdaien_sl said:

Cinge, this is as blatant a money grab as a game like Candy Crush is, it's just targeted at a different demographic. One of the dudes in PRX (can't recall his name) mentioned he spent over $1500 on AA in guild chat a few weeks before I quit. Fucking insane.

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Did you miss the D3 RMAH stuff where multiple posters on this board talked about the thousands upon thousands of dollars they made? Have you never seen any of the hundreds of posts talking about how much people used to sell their EQ accounts for? Their WoW accounts? The news article about the guy who sold a planet on some game for $600,000 and then the other article that beat it at over a million? How much money have people on this board (and all around the world) spent on League of Legends, Dota 2, etc.? People with money who enjoy video games will spend it on them. This is nothing new and $1500 from some guy is literally nothing special in the slightest.

News flash, every game is a fucking money grab. Hell, everybusinessis a money grab.


Valid points as to the possibilities of contracts and whatnot preventing Trion from shutting servers down to fix the issues with Auroria launch.

I wonder what they'll give the players as compensation for this? 25% off the RNG Christmas boxes perhaps?

aegdaien_sl said:

Cinge, this is as blatant a money grab as a game like Candy Crush is, it's just targeted at a different demographic. Regardless of contract with XL, Trion didn't remotely staff their AA team well enough and it's clear they're cutting corners in hopes to secure future VC funding by driving a good P/L sheet.

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You just described almost every single business ever.

this game still has more spontaneous fun than any mmo's in recent memory. A lot of competition for resources and occasionally meaningful pvp are not things i find in every mmo but just worried the cash shop, exploits, and shitty support are going to take this thing to an early grave. Not sure what will happen if the server becomes a ghost town. Already noticing a lot fewer people on - one thing for sure is theres no way they could ever do a server merge in this game - atleast not without losing huge swaths of their members.

Cinge_sl said:

You just described almost every single business ever.

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Most good businesses actually garner favor with their customers to make them repeat ones. There's a reason the people who have dropped $1500 on League don't regret it and want to give Riot more money. Trion has actively burned every bridge they had to 99% of customers, except the ones who apparently enjoy being abused.

Edit: This is the post I originally replied to:

Cinge_sl said:

Call me a optimist or w/e, but calling it a "Blatant scam"? I don't think Trion set out just to scam people.

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You're being scammed if you think Trion has had any goals other than to open up shop, get a cash infusion from people with self-control issues, and let the game die from day 1.

Second Edit: This was posted earlier in the tread but bears anotherlink. A GDC talk about "F2P" games and the Eastern market. It's uncanny how many things in this presentation are implemented in Archeage.

aegdaien_sl said:

I'm not sure if this has been intentional, but the last major three issues (RNG Boxes/APEX Dupes/Server Crashes) have all happened on a Sunday. Part of me hopes that the folks releasing these exploits are doing it on purpose so the idiots Trion employs are forced to come in and do damage control on a weekend.

Cinge, this is as blatant a money grab as a game like Candy Crush is, it's just targeted at a different demographic. Regardless of contract with XL, Trion didn't remotely staff their AA team well enough and it's clear they're cutting corners in hopes to secure future VC funding by driving a good P/L sheet. One of the dudes in PRX (can't recall his name) mentioned he spent over $1500 on AA in guild chat a few weeks before I quit. Fucking insane.

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There are definitely those that have invested a certain amount of money into this and they will defend it to the end. I gather if you are financially invested (beyond simply a patron account), you're more than willing to look beyond many of the game's faults (and this game has a shitload of them) because you are financially invested. But make no mistake, as the game continues to have issues, that group is going to become smaller and smaller as there is only so much bullshit you will put up with before you walk away. Better games than this have been tossed away for a fraction of the problems that this game has.

Vandyn_sl said:

There are definitely those that have invested a certain amount of money into this and they will defend it to the end. I gather if you are financially invested (beyond simply a patron account), you're more than willing to look beyond many of the game's faults (and this game has a shitload of them) because you are financially invested. But make no mistake, as the game continues to have issues, that group is going to become smaller and smaller as there is only so much bullshit you will put up with before you walk away. Better games than this have been tossed away for a fraction of the problems that this game has.

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I think this is spot on. I see a lot of behavior that's reminiscent of someone holding onto stock from a hemorrhaging company and saying "Oh, they'll turn it around." The problem is that there's no basis for that rationale in many cases, and it's typically an emotionally driven belief since they have a real financial stake in the company. People don't like it when regular games shut down their servers or support because of the time they sunk into it. It's so much worse when that person has also dropped hundreds of dollars in only a month or two.

Tuco_sl said:

Would be interesting to take a quick survey but I'm guessing people who spent $1k USD on this game won't speak up.

Those that are still playing AA and have no intention of stopping anytime soon, how much have you spent besides the initial account and whatever patron subscription?

I think for me I spent like $10 more buying some credits I needed to buy dumb crap like taxes or something when I didn't have gold or labor to get them.

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I spent Patron for one month now and an extra 10 ? for expansion scrolls / working pots. I dont invest much money in these games. I still having fun though. I dont bother with trade runs and just PvP /searaid most of the time or craft gear.

I can accept the fact, that people exploited / p2w and just move on, when I get my ass kicked by one of those. It doesnt bother me that much.

Valderen_sl said:

AA is a good games that had great potential. It's still in my opinion one of the better release of the last few years.

What killed it for me and my friends was the rampant hacking, it had too much of an impact on the game for us to continue.

What I hope we get out of AA, is developers look at it and realize not everything has to be a WoW type theme-park game, that there is a demand for something different. I think if AA didn't have all of these hacks, and few technical problems...it could have been pretty big. It needed a little more content, and a few changes in it's PVP, flagging system.

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I agree, but Trion made some pretty fucktarded decisions starting in alpha with the direction of the game. Had they ported over 1.7 immediately instead of whatever the fuck you want to call what they did, it could have been successful. That includes all the little changes they felt were necessary that wiped out the balance that the game has in the Korean and Russian versions.

I personally haven't spent more than the initial $50 from the launch of AA, with 1 patron account (paid for via in-game gold) and and a F2P account.

My personal limits with any Cash Shop type MMO are the old school limits...
- $50-60 for initial entry
- Up to $120 on anything within 1 year of release, typically pro-rated for the first 3,6,9 and exceedingly rare 12 months.

The only game that has made it to the 3-6 month category was GW2.
The only game that has made it to the 12+ month category was PS2 with less than $150 spent on 2 years of on/off playing.

aegdaien_sl said:

Most good businesses actually garner favor with their customers to make them repeat ones. There's a reason the people who have dropped $1500 on League don't regret it and want to give Riot more money. Trion has actively burned every bridge they had to 99% of customers, except the ones who apparently enjoy being abused.

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You have some sort of proof that the people spending this kind of money regret it? Proof that they're done and won't be repeat XL/Trion customers and/or won't spend more money on AA as time passes? Proof that they have to be in to S&M to do so?

Please don't just quote typical forum trolling retards for your proof because I can easily go on any forum I want and talk about how I spent $17,500 on AA and blah blah whine blah cry.


Vandyn, "better games" being tossed away for less is 100% relative. This is the only MMO i've enjoyed since vanilla WoW and the time I spent playing WAR with my brother. The rest of them I didn't even bother getting to max level because I burnt out so fast.

I pay for my own and my daughters accounts, and have spent about $200 not including the subs. Mostly on credits for her, she likes outfits, pets, those damn pink glider wings, the RNGboxes, although she did well with the rumbling acheum trees, she got some TS, built us some farm carts stuff that would have normally taken forever at our pace. To me if it's fun and like many of you I find AA alot of fun, relaxing maybe is a better word to beable to go out and just do stuff when I want. I'm an old SWG player and it reminds me of the good ol days of grinding Jedi and afking in houses... lol I think for her (a fairly new MMOer) she likes the openess and exploring, I can imgaine it's alot like SWG was for me, just kinda go in do whatever for a few hours and have some fun with it. Devs do need to fix it, stop the spoilts get content rolling and stop overdoing it when everytime there is some forum whining about somehting TS, bears etc. just stop giving in, let it make it's own way! gg

I got bored today so I decided to try to quantify the sinking ship that is Archeage. Let's look at the overall subreddit traffic for a few games. I threw this together and while Reddit certainly doesn't represent a game in it's entirety, I believe it's fair to say that among MMOs it is a good representative sample of the population. Outside of that, it's arguably the best data source we have to analyze sets of disparate data.

The plot simply shows the % change ofuniquedaily visitors to a given subreddit as compared to a 7-day average at the beginning of October. For established games, you expect to see a relatively constant line. For games with upcoming expansions or major announcements, you expect to see a spike in traffic.

I had to normalize the data so that League (Average 750k views/day) and Rift (Average 2100 views/day) didn't distort the scale too much. I annotated some spots that I thought were interesting.

Interactive Plot:Plotly
Traffic Source:traffic stats

I spent 20 on credits to buy patron, then started another account to play on kyrios with afterlife folk, and I think I payed the first bit with apex bought with gold, but then apex went through the roof so I think I bought another 20 dollars of credits. So I think I've spent 40 dollars.