ArcheAge – Page 6 – MMO Fallout

[Community] Let’s Call A Merger A Merger

Originally I intended this week’s Community column to be speculation about how Trion Worlds would handle ArcheAge’s upcoming server merge, given that the plans are still in the conceptual stage and any real action that will be taken is still months down the line. To fuel speculation, I looked at how server mergers were handled in Korea and Russia under XLGames and Mail.ru respectively, and hoped to get a comment from each party.

While Mail.ru and XLGames didn’t respond to my request, I was told by Trion Worlds that an FAQ was in the works. It isn’t out as of this publishing (approximately 2pm EST on Monday, June 1st), so I’m going ahead with my original plan.

It’s safe to say that the term “server merger” has such a negative connotation attached to it because, in the eyes of the ever-rational internet mob, developers might as well post an announcement that they’ve failed at business. Couple that with a media in love with negative headlines, and you’ve got a recipe for PR disaster. Because of this, Trion Worlds isn’t the first to treat the phrase like they’ve been accused of having lice, and have joined the growing list of developers shuffling players away from low population servers (before closing them usually) without actually using the term “merger.” Even Blizzard opted to develop its engine to support cross-realm play rather than merge its list of low population servers.

There tends to be an even more negative response to this tactic, since if there’s one thing people hate more than being lied to, it’s when companies talk to them like they are lawyers in a courtroom dodging a guilty plea by questioning the definition of the term “murder.” To go back to the previous analogy, they are the kid in school trying to explain that while their head has been buzzed and their hair smells of medical shampoo, there is no way you can prove that they were responsible for the lice sighting that the school warned about over the morning announcements.

This isn’t the first time Trion Worlds merged without ever using the term. In Rift, Trion would convert low population servers to “trial servers” in order to force players off of them without actually calling it a merger. Designating a server as “trial” would result in character creation being disabled (for subscribers) and would limit players to the two main cities, forcing players to transfer off once they had finished the content available in the free trial.

We won’t know what Trion plans on doing with ArcheAge until they release more information, but we did grab this soundbite from their latest Twitch stream:

“It’s basically taking lower population servers and then creating an entirely new server and allowing players to migrate from that server to the new evolved servers.”

If their approach to merging servers in ArcheAge is anything close to what they did in Rift, it is likely that players will be not so gently coerced into transferring over to these “evolved servers,” through various limitations on these legacy servers. This way, once the population has sufficiently dwindled, the servers can be logically shut down due to lack of activity, with any characters remaining forced to transfer off.

So the notion that the servers were never merged is technically correct, and as I have said before technically correct is my favorite kind of correct.

[ArcheAge] Trion Worlds Unveils Non-Traditional Server Mergers

Ask Trion Worlds if they are merging servers and the answer is absolutely not, in the traditional sense at least. According to Trion’s community manager Scapes, server transfers are inhibited by the fact that the process currently needs to be done manually. An automated version is currently in development and will hopefully be available later this year, allowing characters and even entire servers to be transferred.

More details will become available at some point, just don’t call it a merger.

We do not currently have plans to merge servers in the traditional sense. Instead, we plan something altogether different and look forward to revealing the plan as soon as we work out the details.

Linda “Brasse” Carlson has also been making the rounds on ArcheAge’s forums to remind players that the merger will be “non-traditional.”

Those are the other obvious questions. I also realize that it’s hard to pose questions before we put up at least a bare-bones FAQ on our plans. Bear with us. We’ll be talking about this with all our fellow players for MONTHS before it comes to pass, and your input is important.

(Source: ArcheAge)

ArcheAge “Reap What You Sow” Event

ArcheAge’s next big update, Omen of Dread Prophecies, is set for an April 28th launch, introducing new zones, ship customization, and improved ship designs, and more. To get players ready, Trion Worlds is hosting a series of events beginning last week and running through the 28th.

The Reap What You Sow event runs until tomorrow afternoon, rewarding players with 500 labor points for every 1000 that they spend. From the 24th through the 28th, players will be challenged to turn in trade packs in return for loyalty points, with rewards going to those that trade in the most.

After the update launches, there will be a further event that doubles all honor gained in PvP

(Source: ArcheAge)

Trion Worlds Offering “Community Appreciation” Package

Trion Worlds recently found itself in a bit of controversy following the company’s attempt to win back ex-customers by doling out gift packages. The packages were considered far too generous by members of the community, including expensive gift packages and items that previously required heavy investment into the game’s lockboxes. In response, community manager Scapes announced that a plan would be announced today once it was finalized in internal meetings.

At their Livestream today, Trion announced the details of the plan. Paying patrons (paid real money) will receive a cyanfin mount, starlight glider, 30 Golden Library Index items, 10 Tyrenos index items, 10 experience potions, 7 day passes to the library floors, 5 worker’s comp potions, 2 vocation tonics, and 1 of each lucky point and archeum essence. Non-paying accounts will receive the index items (only one Tyrenos), 4 lockboxes, 2 worker’s comp potions, and 1 vocation tonic.

Players who bought the cash shop lockbox will receive tokens for each box that they purchased that can be used to buy any of the lockboxes that have been released to date.

(Source: Trion Worlds Livestream)

ArcheAge Welcome Back Package Turns Sour

Update: Trion has laid out its plans here.

Trion Worlds is a company that we see a lot of complaints about here at MMO Fallout, but being too generous is a new one. The developer recently tried to bring back ArcheAge players with lapsed subscriptions by sending emails offering free stuff. Many players received about what you’d expect from such a program: RNG boxes, cosmetic mounts, some resources, etc. Others, however, found themselves the new owners of rare materials, and even gift packages that normally sell for $100 on the cash shop.

Needless to say players are livid, a phrase that seems all too common when talking about ArcheAge. Trion, for their part, have acknowledged that they went too far in what constitutes an acceptable gift and will be addressing the matter further.

We need to ensure our existing loyal patrons and players never feel slighted when we implement programs like this. It’s important for us to treat our community fairly and to do this we are designing a giveaway for all active ArcheAge players. We will have more details tomorrow after internal discussions occur around development of the program.

(Source: ArcheAge)

Trion Worlds Offers Refunds To Bug Abusers

Trion Worlds is offering loyalty token refunds for players who purchased the Mirage Donkey mount with the purpose of exploiting a bug, after said bug was fixed. The exploit allowed the donkey to run faster while strafing or going backward than it did moving forward.

Community manager Scapes posted the following on the Trion Worlds forum:

We are offering Loyalty Token refunds for Mirage Donkeys due to the upcoming Secrets of Ayanad update fixing a bug that grants the mount unintended speed bonuses. If you want to trade in your Mirage Donkey for its purchase price of 300 Loyalty Tokens, contact our Support Team with the subject “Mirage Donkey Refund”. Please make sure to remove all equipment prior to submitting your ticket. No Companion Crusts used on existing Mirage Donkeys will be refunded.

Players have until Tuesday March 17th to get their refund request in.

(Source: Trion Worlds)

ArcheAge Lifts Prohibition On AFK Players

ARCHEAGE 2014-10-10 12-02-23-78

AFK players are the scourge of ArcheAge, or at least they were up until this week’s update. Today’s scheduled downtime brought with it the removal of ArcheAge’s AFK timer. Now players can log in and sit still to their heart’s content.

We decided to perform this week’s scheduled downtime earlier rather than later to deliver improvements like the removal of the in-game AFK kick time and a couple adjustments to further discourage in-game spam.

An AFK timer isn’t at all uncommon for MMOs, although ArcheAge saw some controversy at launch with Trion Worlds providing contradicting statements about their policy on circumventing the mechanic.

(Source: ArcheAge)

ArcheAge Details 2015 Updates

Merv Lee Kwai over at Trion Worlds today posted a producer’s letter detailing ArcheAge’s plans for 2015. Foremost, Kwai promises to be more transparent with the community in the months to come, providing more insight on what is to come.

The letter also discusses changes to certain aspects of the game, such as tweaking siege mechanics and altering drops to react to the economy.

A main focus for the future of the product is improving the daily quality of life for ArcheAge players. We are shifting priorities to deliver game mechanics that some of the veteran players will recognize like the PvP Arena and Fishing Tournaments. We have a challenge here to ensure that the rewards for these systems are congruent with the way the game has evolved, but that obstacle should be solved in the near term and we will deliver these events as soon as they’re finalized.

You can find the entire producer’s letter at the link below.

(Source: ArcheAge)

10% Discount Was Never Advertised, Says Trion Worlds

The ongoing saga of ArcheAge, Trion Worlds, and the fabled 10% discount has reached another bend, as Trion Worlds is now flat out denying that the discount was ever a part of the game’s advertising. A user on the ArcheAge forums submitted a complaint to the San Francisco Bay Area Better Business Bureau, to have his complaint addressed by Trion Worlds. Trion Worlds first pulled out the EULA and pointed to the “we can change whatever we want” clause, before denying that the 10% discount was ever officially promoted.

Trion sincerely regrets any inconvenience experienced by the customer. The 10% Marketplace discount was not officially promoted as a benefit as it was never advertised in the ArcheAge purchase flow.

For the record, here is a screenshot of the 10% discount being advertised on Trion World’s own website. Update 12/16/14: This page has since been deleted. See its archive here.

(Source: BBB)

Top 5: Most Disappointing Moments of the Year

With the year coming to an end, it’s time to start taking stories and sticking them into categories. Since I’m a well known optimist, I decided to start this month’s lists off with a look at the year’s greatest disappointments. Since a lot of what constitutes a “disappointment” is subjective, I ignored specific news pieces and tried to stick with general events.

This article is in no particular order.

1. ArcheAge… Just ArcheAge.

Where do you even start with a story like this? The rampant gold farming, exploits, dupes, and hacks that make it more newsworthy to simply report on when something isn’t going wrong in ArcheAge? How about Trion Worlds misleading their customers with false promises of discounts that would later be recanted because they apparently couldn’t be bothered waiting? Or the server instability? Or the economic turmoil caused by Trion’s greedy obsession with lock boxes?

Or the problem with housing being overrun by exploits? Or the unexplained downtime recently of nearly seventy two hours that still hasn’t been properly discussed by Trion Worlds? Or the fact that you had to have been a patron to receive the full compensation package? How about the forums being so poorly moderated that gold spam, thread spam, and pornography can be found appearing for hours at a time?

It would be a lot harder to lay the blame on Trion as mere publisher were this not the same strategy that caused the Defiance community to leave in droves, with Trion ignoring major game problems to focus on subtly altering core game mechanics to nerf in-game progress and hopefully divert players to cash shop lock boxes. The end result in Defiance was that the game could be found at the bottom of the bargain bin long before it ever went free to play, and ArcheAge would be sitting right next to it if the game had ever seen a box release.

2. That Unlicensed Harry Potter MMO

The string of high profile disasters has lowered my opinion of licensed MMOs considerably, but my disappointment in the unlicensed Harry Potter MMO from earlier this year wasn’t the fact that it was canned barely a week after it was announced, but the idea that the developer thought they could get away with it.

Here’s the story: At the beginning of the year, this group called Bio-Hazard Entertainment popped up and claimed that Warner Bros had given them permission to create a Harry Potter MMO, at least up until beta, and then would decide whether or not to fully greenlight the project. This claim, as it turned out, wasn’t so true. The website went down less than a week later and Bio-Hazard announced that they would be working on a different wizard MMO, one not related to Harry Potter, but encouraged gamers to contact Warner Bros and demand a Harry Potter MMO.

You have to admire the confidence of some no-name team thinking that they could just start working on a Harry Potter MMO and that Warner Bros. would be so impressed that they’d happily license the property. Forgetting of course, or ignoring, the numerous developers Warner Bros. had no doubt turned away, with larger budgets, bigger teams, and the experience to guarantee that such a large project could be seen through to the end.

3.DDOS Attacks

As I said back in 2013:

If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have only gotten worse in 2014, and it looks like 2015 is going to be just as bad. We’ve hit a point where the act has become as casual as racists commenting on the news. RuneScape players DDoS the servers for advantages in PvP, Minecraft players DDoS “competing” servers, almost every MMO to launch or release a major update/expansion has been DDoS’d this year, the console servers were attacked, Xbox Live is under attack currently, and so on and so forth.

I suppose the only upside to this is that eventually these kids tend to get caught because their ego gets the best of them and they do something stupid like trying to hack the CIA, or sending a bomb threat to an airline, and it is pretty fun to read about them crying in court before they’re sentenced to a few years in prison.

4. PMB Kills From Beyond The Grave

Pando Media Booster is so toxic of a piece of malware that it can’t even be dead and buried without poisoning the land around it. After a life spent sapping bandwidth, slowing computers, crashing programs, and being a general nuisance that plagued MMOs and frustrated gamers, we were happy to see the service finally die in August 2013. Like any good plague, however, it didn’t stay dead for long. Pando Media Booster was revived by some digital necromancer back in February to continue spreading its bile, this time distributing viruses and browser hijacks.

The program sent out update notices to users who had forgotten to uninstall it, or were unaware that it was still on their system, infecting computers with the Sweet Page browser hijacker. Can I get one last joke in about Pando Media Booster? When PMB turned into a distribution platform for malware, how did anyone notice?

5. Long Term Cancellations

While the MMO industry is no stranger to sudden cancellations, the long development cycle and a practice of announcing titles long before they are even considered viable to launch, it’s possible to spend a lot of time waiting for a game that just never comes out. World of Darkness was announced eight years ago only to be confirmed as cancelled earlier this year. Blizzard first hinted at Project Titan back in 2007 when they started hiring for a next-gen MMO, only to come out and say that the game has been scrapped seven years later.

Gamers don’t like being strung along, especially when it later becomes obvious that the developer’s outward enthusiasm was a veil covering their real sentiment, that the game wasn’t fun, wasn’t being competently developed or wasn’t coming close to development roadmaps, didn’t have a snowball’s chance of being funded to completion, or would be the first thing to thrown under the bus should profits dip even a little on the developer’s live services. At the very least, and this is more than we can say about certain other games, developers like Blizzard, CCP, and Jagex never asked their community to donate to fund these lost causes, which they likely could have done and recuperated quite a bit.

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