ArcheAge is a game I have been following for a few months now, reading about, purchasing my way into the beta tests, joining guilds and chatting about it with friends, this felt like my first experience with an MMO, it was truly amazing. Sandbox gameplay, interesting character progression via multiclassing, player owned farming and houses and a huge open sea for faction vs faction combat, alongside the mighty Kraken! Nothing was more fun for the beta weekends I played. Then it was released.
No MMO release ever goes smooth, thats understandable, even most multiplayer games will have big problems upon release, but never has anything been this bad. I’m a big fan of playing MMO style games, working my way through the quests and exploring new areas, and with this game having player owned housing, I could grow my own materials to farm to construction instead of finding everything around the world. But as I was running along, merrily questing, I see the location where I put my house in beta. It was 100% covered in houses and farms, in the first day, not just this one location. Every single farming area was filled because certain guilds would just grind quests, delete characters after trading the farms, and then try and sell the land on at extortionate prices. Leaving unfavourable and hard to get to land for any casual players like me. But ok, I could deal with this, It was still a fun game with questing and fighti… “The gods have disconnected you”
The next big problem, disconnection and lag. Now again, this is understandable at launch of MMO games, release can be a big stress on servers, but some players were receiving this every 5 minutes of gameplay, only to reboot the game, try login again and then just get disconnected. Now this may not have been Trions fault 100%, since they did claim to get DDOS’d, but with the early head start of the game and many beta/alpha tests before this they did not anticipate just how popular the game would be. During my first day, I was lucky to only disconnect about 5 times a day when the whole servers were going down. But the second day of head start was very different, the game had garnered so much popularity, servers were getting queues, A lot of MMO games did have queues, World of Warcraft had queues on its most popular servers years after release, but these would often move quite quickly. ArcheAge was quite different, the queues started out quite low, maybe 100 people, a reasonable wait to play a newly released game, later in the day, 500, maybe 40 minutes to get in the game (only to get disconnected with no grace period to reconnect). Day 3 the queues were in the thousands, it was nearly 2 hours for most people to be able to play (I am playing on EU servers, which have much heavier queues than NA). So Trion stepped up, and made more servers, which is reasonable, only the same thing happened to these servers, every problem I just discussed, farming, lag, disconnects, queues, they all just went to other servers.
So why didn’t I just move to one of these new, slightly less populated, but still queueing servers? ArcheAge had a limit on how many character you could create, which is common among MMO games to stop people flooding all the servers. 2 over all the servers. Two. Two characters. When I started I joined my old beta server with a new character, only to find out my guild had moved to another, so I logged out, and back in on the other server, that’s both my characters created. “But why didn’t you delete your old one”. Here is the problem with that, queues. Why should anyone be forced to queue to delete a character, then be forced to queue once again to create a new character.
As I am writing this at 8:30 in the morning I thought to myself, there wouldn’t be a queue now, would there? There is, 2 hours long. While this is nothing compared to evenings (start queue at 5pm, still wouldn’t be on the server at midnight when I turned off my PC). This was going to be one of the games I could really play and get into along with many other people. I was partially right, other people got in the servers leaving everyone else to queue for hours. Yes it’s the release of a new MMO, but with no words from Trion about the situation, my and many other faith will have been lost, no one should be forced to create a new character on a new server with no one they know because of server limits, and player actions within the game.
As a final word, this game was going to be brilliant for me and many others, but we were let down buy a company we had paid money to who failed to fulfil the demand from players. For anyone thinking about trying this game, wait a month or two, or just play other games, it currently not worth it.