Originally posted by dreamscaper Why I don't like the phrase, 'haters gonna hate', that's basically what it boils down to. People on this site love to bash games, and it's usually the same people who were hyping the game the most pre-launch.
Nah, it is more likely people who were hyping the game pre-launch are still oblivious to most game flaws and put all the blame on Trion :-P
OP, yes highly underated title, with the original veterabn MMORPG community of the golden age 1997 - 2005 it would be an even more fantastic experience. Now we have to live with the poor playerbase of todays MMORPG's.
Of course it would. They'd be too stunned by the shiny graphics and fancy animations compared to other MMOs of that era. :P
Unfortunately for AA, it actually has modern day competitors. With more being added all the time.
When you add in the fact that Archeage also wasn't new, but just the third iteration of the game, following on from the original and the russian versions, which by the sound of it, also tanked badly, then its hard to see how the game could possibly be 'underrated' if anything, its the reverse, has the game been improved over the previous versions after all, all evidence suggests this is far from the case, this was always going to be a game that would struggle with a western audience who have plenty of alternatives available to them.
Its not the "third iteration".
In fact EU/NA publish is the "first version" (lower game patch version) with other regions having newer patch levels.
Thinking before posting, do you ever played or even informed yourself about the western release before , i have to wonder about that.
well, the first version didn't do all that well either, and the first version for the 'second time' also failed to gather all that many fans in Russia, so now we have the first version for the third time, aaaand.. its doing really well here
.. oh wait.. not it isnt. SURPRISE!
I had to laugh
It's not looking good on them if uninformed people laugh. On the contrary if uninformed people laugh they look like...
Don't want to get in to a discussion about numbers but i doubt any of you jokers have any valid officiall numbers.
You even demonstrated that you even don't know much about the game.
I was informed enough to recognize you were playing semantics and he called you out on it.
Learn to talk facts and not semantics or stay away if you dont have anything usefull to contribute.
Facts? What for? His joke was funny. You didn't like it. That's all there is to this. You are trying to throw terms like "uninformed" and "Valid official numbers" to confuse a very simple issue. With regard to Phry's post, I'm laughing at the way he accommodated your perspective. Nothing more. You are having a difficult time with that.
Why I don't like the phrase, 'haters gonna hate', that's basically what it boils down to. People on this site love to bash games, and it's usually the same people who were hyping the game the most pre-launch.
Nah, it is more likely people who were hyping the game pre-launch are still oblivious to most game flaws and put all the blame on Trion :-P
That and they want to justify having spent $150 pre-release to play an F2P game.
AA is not a bad game, but it fails because of the cash shop funneling / business model, and the crappy game management by Trion / XL.
I played AA all the way to 50. Like a person stated on a previous post, it definitely hits you HARD when you realize that you are essentially SCREWED once you hit the cap and realize you are nothing but FODDER for anyone else that has either PAID their way to 'win' with weapons that will SHRED you to pieces in a few seconds, or they have been playing since it released and have made all the gear/weps that you simply cannot compete against. Unless you are willing to invest/wait/sit on your ass waiting for all the LABOR POINTS you will need to even compete with the 'paying' or veteran types, you are going to get quite pissed in all the 50th 'PVP zones'. There are no PVE zones that I recall at 50th, so you have no choice, pay or be destroyed at cap in any of those zones.
I played AA all the way to 50. Like a person stated on a previous post, it definitely hits you HARD when you realize that you are essentially SCREWED once you hit the cap and realize you are nothing but FODDER for anyone else that has either PAID their way to 'win' with weapons that will SHRED you to pieces in a few seconds, or they have been playing since it released and have made all the gear/weps that you simply cannot compete against. Unless you are willing to invest/wait/sit on your ass waiting for all the LABOR POINTS you will need to even compete with the 'paying' or veteran types, you are going to get quite pissed in all the 50th 'PVP zones'. There are no PVE zones that I recall at 50th, so you have no choice, pay or be destroyed at cap in any of those zones.
getting to lvl 50 isn't any big achievement (in fact some people get there in few hours - i dont say i support that )
The veteran players did invest their time to have collected that gear.
On the contrary it is absolutely unfair to the verteran players that they had to collect stellar amounts of gold and for you now the divine gifts floating in with the former expensive moon/starpoints for free. You have a unfair advantage already at this point.
And something else, I hope by "paid their way to win" you mean they payed gold for their gear because its actually wrong if you meant they "bought gear in the cash shop" which isn't possible.
The veteran players invested much more, time, gold, labour and therefore deserve to be ahead of you in equipment and also fresh players have it lots easier now to equip themselves then veterans had.
You also should know by now that there is a PvE way to get quite good gear that doesn't justify your verdict "pay or be destroyed at cap ". A few hours in Hasla and GHA/Serpentis gets you quite good gear without "pay" a dime.
There are a few people that paid $1000+ or got insanely lucky with crafting or used the dupe exploit. They'll probably shred you 1v1, but they also represent maybe 10% of the population.
The other 90% is using a weapon that they had to grind for for maybe 12-15 hours, and which you can do too today. Easier even, because there's less competition in those spots now. And I'd say 50% are still using dungeon armor that you can also grind to in maybe 25-30 hours of pickup groups or any semi-active guild dungeon runs.
So without spending a cent, you can grind to the same level of gear as 50% of the server in under 50 hours.
This is on Lucius sever. Granted, it's a late server so it's behind the early start servers who were filled with hard-cores from day 0, and on those you may be more than 50 hours behind.
The other thing is, Trion recently banned something like 17K gold farmers, so prices dropped in half. So for honest players, things became much more affordable than they've been in a long time.
Honestly, the only thing still broken with this game is the siege system, since the defender's advantage there is too much to overcome. But apparently there's an attempt at a fix coming for that as well.
Originally posted by LordDevil Yeah and that's exactly what i don't understand... I wonder if those people have even seriously played this game or if they just listened to a few haters
Read my Sig to find out what is wrong with them.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Archage is the first game I have ever quit do to poor management. I was not in a guild, but the whole expansion area launch was a total joke. Servers were down and people could not log in, while people in the game did not get booted. Guilds who spent months preparing were screwed. They should have shut the game down rerolled a few hours and relaunched, but they said "oh well..." If you ever read official responses on the forums they make you want to jump through the screen at someone. After running around for hours trying to find a 16x16 plot after swimming across to the other continent to complete the quest and having not a single piece of land was ridiculous. Then you watch for expired plots and they are grabbed up by people nowhere in site. The hacks / dupes / etc that were in beta were not fixed and Trion basically says "oh well again..." The company just does not care. Whether its XL or Trion it does not matter whoever is in charge is worse than terrible, The OP probably was able to get land because everyone is quitting. I dropped my sub and have not logged in since.
I guess if you are skipping the leveling the game does have some nice ideas however...
The linear questing is just awful an even worse throw down to dumbed down xp'ing.Well idk have they removed the flashing arrows that are so realistic and immersive?What sadist decided ,we need MORE hand holding in our games?
I cannot play another game with yellow markers over npc heads and adding in flashing arrows or any other ridiculous idea like that is a complete turn off,no matter how good the game is ,i won't play it.
I had high hopes for AA,i actually thought i was going to be playing it,a few ideas just turned me the other way,linear questing,pvp and Trion.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well, just knowing that it's heavily p2w completely rules out the game for me. It's as if you say "staying in that hotel is awesome, it's the best hotel there is!", while I know that the hotel is build on the remains of an exploded nuclear power plant. It might be nice and have good service, but there is still no way I will spend my time there, because, in my opinion, the fundamentals are flawed.
Originally posted by LordDevil Yeah and that's exactly what i don't understand... I wonder if those people have even seriously played this game or if they just listened to a few haters
I leveled to 45 or so.
Was bored the majority of the time through it. The only thing that made it interesting was when my friends and I messed about on boats... In particular the best part was harpooning our boat to the bottom of the ocean and sling-shotting it into the stratosphere.
Other than that it's clunky, not well optimized, and a boring game. I genuinely could not tell you a thing about the story. That's how little I cared and how uninteresting it was.
And that's fine for some... But then you have to wonder why you're playing the game if all you're there for is to grind away text windows for xp numbers and gold. Grind grind grind to get a boat... to grind grind grind some more and join a guild... to either trade and grind that gold... or loot others and grind that gold...
There's nothing to do after the initial appeal fades. And if you start messing about on ships early, it fades fast.
I'm still a bit mad at myself for not seeing through, back when Trion started offering a few years old game as an alpha for 150$.
Looking back it's now clear they went in to explore the limits of acceptable greed, in other words they have made no boundries to how much advantage one can buy. As others have pointed, if you are willing to drop in hundreds/thousands of dollars, you can gain months and years of advantage over someone who only pays for subscription (patron).
Even if we are ok with this (I played for almost 3 months) I couldn't look past the absolutely disgusting ammount of exploiting and cheating(using hacks) going on. About 2 months after release a big wave of bans came out which got lifted after 2 days. In those 2 days I had a number of players who couldn't log (mostly in guild, on comms) admited they exploited the apex cash dupe, 2 guys admited the use of auction house sniper bot and a scripter land lord. All of them had something else in common. They all made credit card transactions to Trion (I don't know the ammounts).
After 2 days all these people got unbanned and there they were laughing their asses off in in-game chats linking all the delphinads they had.
I was dissapointed to say the least. I announced I would quit in about 14 days if Trion wouldn't fix the situation properly and after a month when all those cheaters still happily played and all I seen was legit players quiting left and right, I quit too.
I guess I could say I didn't quit Archeage as much as I've quit Trion and XLGames.
I'm still a bit mad at myself for not seeing through, back when Trion started offering a few years old game as an alpha for 150$.
I felt like the version of the game I played in alpha before the major release patch was worth the $150.
Like you say in the end of your post. Trion/XL was the major problem with AA, not the game itself.
I agree with you 150%. The game I played before the major patch was like night and day. The atmosphere in the game world turned from one of fun and enjoyment to a very downcast and miserable experience for many.
Its funny you say the game is "Highly underrated", since it was hyped to the extreme. Its more like the game was highly over-rated; part of the community backlash against it was probably due to extreme over expectations.
It also has one of the most repulsive monetization systems of any big mmo I have ever played (basically a sub-based game with a full blown p2w cash shop and systems such as LP and extreme crafting rng designed to suck as much money as possible out of players).
The game itself has average graphics and combat, fairly boring pve, mediocre pvp (almost totally gear-dependant, only really relevant at level cap, even so you can play the game with next to no danger of being ganked- or conversely the opportunities to gank are severely limited); on the plus side great housing, trade, and farming system and really seamless open world, gliders.
I played the game for its trade/housing/farming (can't do that in other fantasy mmos) and had a really good time, but if I want to do various forms of pve pretty much any other mmo is better and for pvp there are much better titles.
I think its good you are playing now though after the hype for AA has died down, just enjoy it. Probably better not to ask why so many people hate it - you are unlikely to win any converts and our negativity toward the game may rub off on you.
Its funny you say the game is "Highly underrated", since it was hyped to the extreme. Its more like the game was highly over-rated; part of the community backlash against it was probably due to extreme over expectations.
It also has one of the most repulsive monetization systems of any big mmo I have ever played (basically a sub-based game with a full blown p2w cash shop and systems such as LP and extreme crafting rng designed to suck as much money as possible out of players).
The game itself has average graphics and combat, fairly boring pve, mediocre pvp (almost totally gear-dependant, only really relevant at level cap, even so you can play the game with next to no danger of being ganked- or conversely the opportunities to gank are severely limited); on the plus side great housing, trade, and farming system and really seamless open world, gliders.
I played the game for its trade/housing/farming (can't do that in other fantasy mmos) and had a really good time, but if I want to do various forms of pve pretty much any other mmo is better and for pvp there are much better titles.
I think its good you are playing now though after the hype for AA has died down, just enjoy it. Probably better not to ask why so many people hate it - you are unlikely to win any converts and our negativity toward the game may rub off on you.
I know it's old but I think you'd be able to have a house, farm and trade in UO
Originally posted by LordDevil Yeah and that's exactly what i don't understand... I wonder if those people have even seriously played this game or if they just listened to a few haters
I played AA through Alpha and Beta and up until about a month and a half ago, from launch.
As has been said in the thread already, we've all been where you are. There was most certainly a time where AA blew my mind. The game was built on an extremely strong conceptual foundation. Class flexibility, housing, crafting, resource production and trade....and the absolute freedom to try to rob, murder and kill your fellow digital man.
I'd say for about a year, I was thoroughly enjoying what this game had to offer.
I did leave, but I don't exactly share the vitriol the majority of the community that left did. For me, it was strictly a numbers game.
Housing was a great idea, conceptually. Until you divide the number of available plots by players on a server and add in the 5 cheaters on your server who seemed to manage to grab every single land grab with magical efficiency. If you didn't have a problem getting yourself land, your server is dying. Crafting was a great idea conceptually, until you started coming up against the absolutely brutal RnG AA has to offer you. Trade runs are great conceptually, until you start smacking into that crafting/upgrading RnG and the return on investment of time just really amounts to nothing. Affording people the option of PvEing OR crafting for useful equipment was great conceptually, but once again, the brutal RnG and Loot tables completely remove the ability stay competitive against people willing to dump thousands of dollars into AA to P2W. There was the Hasla grind....and if you aren't considering blowing your brains out to get the lvl 50 gear you need to run the first set of dungeons to get a set of gear you can maybe spend 10k gold to upgrade to a competitive level, then your server is either dying or you're a masochist. Then there is the constant artificial influence of the in game market by the out of game market; IE - XLGames/Trion putting whatever they can in buyable chests (subject to the brutal RnG) to make a buck. Inflation is a bitch.
When I think back to standing on a Galleon at sea purple-ing up with my guild to go steal a tradeship's packs, I think of AA fondly. When I think of after months and months and months and months of trying, finally saving up enough to get my own land (at the expense of essentially going naked in game), I think of AA fondly (if I ignore the months of frustration to get there). When I think of Hasla, I want to cut myself for how many hours I unwisely wasted there. When I think of GHA, I regret not being able to drown myself at the bottom of the flooded room where you fight the bugged boss. When I think of how many hours I toiled to build up the gold to trying to upgrade to useful/competitive gear only for it to fail or break, I think of why I quit.
I don't hate AA, Trion or XLGames. I don't begrudge them for essentially not giving a fuck about player enjoyment to get their money. There are and were people willing and able to dump enough money into this game that they really only have to keep enough people on their servers to make sure those rich, spendy folks feel like the game is alive. This is a business, after all.
I never felt like I was completely lied to (okay there were a couple moments), and I will always look back on AA fondly.
But essentially, for me (and many others), in the end the numbers just don't add up.
Unless you want to pump exorbitant amounts of RL cash into it, the RnG will become the biggest grind you could ever imagine. That alone might not have been enough to break AA for so many people, but when you add in all the rest of the math, it just can never balance out. Add to that a toxic community (let's face it, the era of MMORPG "communities" is long gone, can't blame this game for that), and well, you're just left with a bunch of great concepts that were terribly implemented.
I'm glad you are enjoying this game. I hope that continues. But I will leave you with this cautionary advice:
Don't think of AA as something you'll play forever. Don't spend your cash on it. Just get out of it what you're getting out of it while you can. Eventually, the math says that your probability of hitting the wall is more than likely.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
I'm still a bit mad at myself for not seeing through, back when Trion started offering a few years old game as an alpha for 150$.
I felt like the version of the game I played in alpha before the major release patch was worth the $150.
Like you say in the end of your post. Trion/XL was the major problem with AA, not the game itself.
I would have to agree 100% with this sentiment.
I enjoyed every second I played in Alpha.
It was all downhill since launch.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
Comments
Nah, it is more likely people who were hyping the game pre-launch are still oblivious to most game flaws and put all the blame on Trion :-P
Facts? What for? His joke was funny. You didn't like it. That's all there is to this. You are trying to throw terms like "uninformed" and "Valid official numbers" to confuse a very simple issue. With regard to Phry's post, I'm laughing at the way he accommodated your perspective. Nothing more. You are having a difficult time with that.
That and they want to justify having spent $150 pre-release to play an F2P game.
AA is not a bad game, but it fails because of the cash shop funneling / business model, and the crappy game management by Trion / XL.
I played AA all the way to 50. Like a person stated on a previous post, it definitely hits you HARD when you realize that you are essentially SCREWED once you hit the cap and realize you are nothing but FODDER for anyone else that has either PAID their way to 'win' with weapons that will SHRED you to pieces in a few seconds, or they have been playing since it released and have made all the gear/weps that you simply cannot compete against. Unless you are willing to invest/wait/sit on your ass waiting for all the LABOR POINTS you will need to even compete with the 'paying' or veteran types, you are going to get quite pissed in all the 50th 'PVP zones'. There are no PVE zones that I recall at 50th, so you have no choice, pay or be destroyed at cap in any of those zones.
play it for more then a month or 2 then come back say how refreshing it is
there is absolutely nothing "deep" about AA cept how deep they expect your pockets to be
Underrated Indeed. Haters gonna Hate. It's hard to obtain high end gear , well guys let it go and play something else.
Piece!
getting to lvl 50 isn't any big achievement (in fact some people get there in few hours - i dont say i support that )
The veteran players did invest their time to have collected that gear.
On the contrary it is absolutely unfair to the verteran players that they had to collect stellar amounts of gold and for you now the divine gifts floating in with the former expensive moon/starpoints for free. You have a unfair advantage already at this point.
And something else, I hope by "paid their way to win" you mean they payed gold for their gear because its actually wrong if you meant they "bought gear in the cash shop" which isn't possible.
The veteran players invested much more, time, gold, labour and therefore deserve to be ahead of you in equipment and also fresh players have it lots easier now to equip themselves then veterans had.
You also should know by now that there is a PvE way to get quite good gear that doesn't justify your verdict "pay or be destroyed at cap ". A few hours in Hasla and GHA/Serpentis gets you quite good gear without "pay" a dime.
yes because opening your wallet and droping a few grand is hard right.
seriously when trion and XL stop treating it like a mobile phone game it might be worth coming back to.
There are a few people that paid $1000+ or got insanely lucky with crafting or used the dupe exploit. They'll probably shred you 1v1, but they also represent maybe 10% of the population.
The other 90% is using a weapon that they had to grind for for maybe 12-15 hours, and which you can do too today. Easier even, because there's less competition in those spots now. And I'd say 50% are still using dungeon armor that you can also grind to in maybe 25-30 hours of pickup groups or any semi-active guild dungeon runs.
So without spending a cent, you can grind to the same level of gear as 50% of the server in under 50 hours.
This is on Lucius sever. Granted, it's a late server so it's behind the early start servers who were filled with hard-cores from day 0, and on those you may be more than 50 hours behind.
The other thing is, Trion recently banned something like 17K gold farmers, so prices dropped in half. So for honest players, things became much more affordable than they've been in a long time.
Honestly, the only thing still broken with this game is the siege system, since the defender's advantage there is too much to overcome. But apparently there's an attempt at a fix coming for that as well.
Read my Sig to find out what is wrong with them.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I guess if you are skipping the leveling the game does have some nice ideas however...
The linear questing is just awful an even worse throw down to dumbed down xp'ing.Well idk have they removed the flashing arrows that are so realistic and immersive?What sadist decided ,we need MORE hand holding in our games?
I cannot play another game with yellow markers over npc heads and adding in flashing arrows or any other ridiculous idea like that is a complete turn off,no matter how good the game is ,i won't play it.
I had high hopes for AA,i actually thought i was going to be playing it,a few ideas just turned me the other way,linear questing,pvp and Trion.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
I leveled to 45 or so.
Was bored the majority of the time through it. The only thing that made it interesting was when my friends and I messed about on boats... In particular the best part was harpooning our boat to the bottom of the ocean and sling-shotting it into the stratosphere.
Other than that it's clunky, not well optimized, and a boring game. I genuinely could not tell you a thing about the story. That's how little I cared and how uninteresting it was.
And that's fine for some... But then you have to wonder why you're playing the game if all you're there for is to grind away text windows for xp numbers and gold. Grind grind grind to get a boat... to grind grind grind some more and join a guild... to either trade and grind that gold... or loot others and grind that gold...
There's nothing to do after the initial appeal fades. And if you start messing about on ships early, it fades fast.
I'm still a bit mad at myself for not seeing through, back when Trion started offering a few years old game as an alpha for 150$.
Looking back it's now clear they went in to explore the limits of acceptable greed, in other words they have made no boundries to how much advantage one can buy. As others have pointed, if you are willing to drop in hundreds/thousands of dollars, you can gain months and years of advantage over someone who only pays for subscription (patron).
Even if we are ok with this (I played for almost 3 months) I couldn't look past the absolutely disgusting ammount of exploiting and cheating(using hacks) going on. About 2 months after release a big wave of bans came out which got lifted after 2 days. In those 2 days I had a number of players who couldn't log (mostly in guild, on comms) admited they exploited the apex cash dupe, 2 guys admited the use of auction house sniper bot and a scripter land lord. All of them had something else in common. They all made credit card transactions to Trion (I don't know the ammounts).
After 2 days all these people got unbanned and there they were laughing their asses off in in-game chats linking all the delphinads they had.
I was dissapointed to say the least. I announced I would quit in about 14 days if Trion wouldn't fix the situation properly and after a month when all those cheaters still happily played and all I seen was legit players quiting left and right, I quit too.
I guess I could say I didn't quit Archeage as much as I've quit Trion and XLGames.
I felt like the version of the game I played in alpha before the major release patch was worth the $150.
Like you say in the end of your post. Trion/XL was the major problem with AA, not the game itself.
I agree with you 150%. The game I played before the major patch was like night and day. The atmosphere in the game world turned from one of fun and enjoyment to a very downcast and miserable experience for many.
Its funny you say the game is "Highly underrated", since it was hyped to the extreme. Its more like the game was highly over-rated; part of the community backlash against it was probably due to extreme over expectations.
It also has one of the most repulsive monetization systems of any big mmo I have ever played (basically a sub-based game with a full blown p2w cash shop and systems such as LP and extreme crafting rng designed to suck as much money as possible out of players).
The game itself has average graphics and combat, fairly boring pve, mediocre pvp (almost totally gear-dependant, only really relevant at level cap, even so you can play the game with next to no danger of being ganked- or conversely the opportunities to gank are severely limited); on the plus side great housing, trade, and farming system and really seamless open world, gliders.
I played the game for its trade/housing/farming (can't do that in other fantasy mmos) and had a really good time, but if I want to do various forms of pve pretty much any other mmo is better and for pvp there are much better titles.
I think its good you are playing now though after the hype for AA has died down, just enjoy it. Probably better not to ask why so many people hate it - you are unlikely to win any converts and our negativity toward the game may rub off on you.
I know it's old but I think you'd be able to have a house, farm and trade in UO
welcome to MMORPG.com forums xD
Wait till you get to endgame and realise its pay for labor or quit, or you could grind carts for 10 hours a day.
Great game ruined by utterly cancerous p2w cashshop.
If you're going to come on here acting like you're great and clever, then at least learn how to spell "peace" ok?
*Sigh
I played AA through Alpha and Beta and up until about a month and a half ago, from launch.
As has been said in the thread already, we've all been where you are. There was most certainly a time where AA blew my mind. The game was built on an extremely strong conceptual foundation. Class flexibility, housing, crafting, resource production and trade....and the absolute freedom to try to rob, murder and kill your fellow digital man.
I'd say for about a year, I was thoroughly enjoying what this game had to offer.
I did leave, but I don't exactly share the vitriol the majority of the community that left did. For me, it was strictly a numbers game.
Housing was a great idea, conceptually. Until you divide the number of available plots by players on a server and add in the 5 cheaters on your server who seemed to manage to grab every single land grab with magical efficiency. If you didn't have a problem getting yourself land, your server is dying. Crafting was a great idea conceptually, until you started coming up against the absolutely brutal RnG AA has to offer you. Trade runs are great conceptually, until you start smacking into that crafting/upgrading RnG and the return on investment of time just really amounts to nothing. Affording people the option of PvEing OR crafting for useful equipment was great conceptually, but once again, the brutal RnG and Loot tables completely remove the ability stay competitive against people willing to dump thousands of dollars into AA to P2W. There was the Hasla grind....and if you aren't considering blowing your brains out to get the lvl 50 gear you need to run the first set of dungeons to get a set of gear you can maybe spend 10k gold to upgrade to a competitive level, then your server is either dying or you're a masochist. Then there is the constant artificial influence of the in game market by the out of game market; IE - XLGames/Trion putting whatever they can in buyable chests (subject to the brutal RnG) to make a buck. Inflation is a bitch.
When I think back to standing on a Galleon at sea purple-ing up with my guild to go steal a tradeship's packs, I think of AA fondly. When I think of after months and months and months and months of trying, finally saving up enough to get my own land (at the expense of essentially going naked in game), I think of AA fondly (if I ignore the months of frustration to get there). When I think of Hasla, I want to cut myself for how many hours I unwisely wasted there. When I think of GHA, I regret not being able to drown myself at the bottom of the flooded room where you fight the bugged boss. When I think of how many hours I toiled to build up the gold to trying to upgrade to useful/competitive gear only for it to fail or break, I think of why I quit.
I don't hate AA, Trion or XLGames. I don't begrudge them for essentially not giving a fuck about player enjoyment to get their money. There are and were people willing and able to dump enough money into this game that they really only have to keep enough people on their servers to make sure those rich, spendy folks feel like the game is alive. This is a business, after all.
I never felt like I was completely lied to (okay there were a couple moments), and I will always look back on AA fondly.
But essentially, for me (and many others), in the end the numbers just don't add up.
Unless you want to pump exorbitant amounts of RL cash into it, the RnG will become the biggest grind you could ever imagine. That alone might not have been enough to break AA for so many people, but when you add in all the rest of the math, it just can never balance out. Add to that a toxic community (let's face it, the era of MMORPG "communities" is long gone, can't blame this game for that), and well, you're just left with a bunch of great concepts that were terribly implemented.
I'm glad you are enjoying this game. I hope that continues. But I will leave you with this cautionary advice:
Don't think of AA as something you'll play forever. Don't spend your cash on it. Just get out of it what you're getting out of it while you can. Eventually, the math says that your probability of hitting the wall is more than likely.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.
I would have to agree 100% with this sentiment.
I enjoyed every second I played in Alpha.
It was all downhill since launch.
I really hope that *insert game name here* will be the first game to ever live up to all of its pre-release promises, maintain a manageable hype level and have a clean release. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.