Sorry if this one gets a litte ranty, some of this just has me worried for the future of the game. I was up late getting my thoughts out on this. But I am curious what you all think of the direction Kakao have taken.
My problem is Credits are equivelint to real life money, either gifted or purchased. Once given it belongs to the player, and taking them is a kin to theft. Even if were given new compensation (i.e. Rosens) if its not something that was agreed upon, its still theft! If they felt people were not spending the compensation credits quick enough, then that's on them for not putting items in the Credit shop that people actully wanted to buy. I'm already not sure I want to pay a subscription for a game I purchased as Buy to play (buy once, play forever). If I ever choose to return to AA I 'll be going back to the Legacy servers where my original characters are and playing on the Free to play servers. I'll also be looking in to the law suite to see if its a class action.
As a fan of most MMORPGs, and AA having a close place into my heart. This move is scammy, as in really scamy. There are multiple research papers, on adding more steps into the conversion of the currency to now know the exact value of what you've purchase to be able to "tag" an item price. Using the same system as AA's updates: Example: $1 = 100 credits, in that idea an item of 3500 credits, will be exactly $35(yeah I know the math is accurate as the crystals had a different price at the time) But now, you have another step into that conversion. Rosen Crystals, which can be 100/1 or anything in between. Which can get rather confusing as you convert more and more currency to that, Josh Strife Hayes explains it better into his worst MMO series( Neverwinter, for one). What we're seeing now is the infancy of that, and it doesn't look better. Now with AA going into the NFT world too... I am expecting the worst. Whatever Kakao's doing I am very wary. In reference to release... Kakao is fully at fault. They could've kept the servers down for a couple of months(if not more to iron stuff out) prior to release. There would've been some discontent, that is correct, but... well will have an overall better release. I for one, stopped playing AA:U and so did most of my friends after the 30/60 days have passed(I still think I have some left, however, why should I return even my guild dropped the game), and we all left with a sour taste.
I wasn't happy about a subscription, but I could understand it, you have to make money to keep the game running. I even bought more credits from Kakao to try and support them, I was also going to pay the subscription, but now? No, you took something I spent money on, I'm done with you. I lay underneath garbage trucks and trucks that clean sewers. I fix camera's that have to go into sewer lines that I need to pull little pieces of toilet paper and curly hairs off of. I spend the week away from my home for over a month straight because a road mechanic quit. I work damn hard to make my money, I have no problem spending on something that I enjoy, but when you decide you're going to take it away because you made a mistake? Piss off, I'm done with you, it's not worth the work I have to put in if I know you might just screw up again in the future and take it from me.
What surprised me is that they suddenly have an extra currency with a shop ready to go. We now have Divine Keys, Manastorm Crystals, Rosen Crystals and Loyalty added to the game since Kakao. 3 of these coins only obtainable by logging-in LMAO. Great way to spend resources. Kekwao. Not giving players double EXP&loot events till they have something to make up for and use as compensation.
I bought credits and never got them back I also lost a lot of things in the transfer that I spent years purchasing and questing for… none of that was compensated either…
The sub was the big killer - when subs run out the game will basically begin it’s final death. And that’s a shame. At this point - just merge us into legacy. As for the credits thing - people are basically never going to buy credits.
The maths problems were Kakao Games's way of explaining how they were trying to be as fair as possible about correcting their mistake. The first time I looked at them I didn't fully understand them because they do require some time to digest. But basically Kakao Games were trying to limit further damage that might be caused by their mistake because the Credit Shop has more flexibility than the Rosen Crystal shop. They have more products & gifting is allowed for a lot of items. In Legacy it can affect the economy as we now have to use Credits to purchase Majestic Trees, Drills, etc. whereas in Gamigo days we could purchase them with Gilda Stars. However, I do feel a bit bad for Kakao Games because there is no fair solution. I agree with you that they should have just let things be as it was their mistake but I can also understand that leaving things as they were would affect their income so they had to take action. I still feel they did not adequately compensate us in the first place for things like unwrapping wrapped items (eg. Moonsand Foxes & otherworld chests) or converting unbound items into bound ones (eg. unequipped costumes with images attached) or even converting an item into something that has the same function but another appearance (eg. bound parrot mailbox to bound owl mailbox) or the same appearance but without the attribute that made it special (eg. kitty & puppy onesies which allowed one to get extra labor when one slept or the naptime yata plushie which let one sleep a second time for labor. Most people did not get these items for their appearance but for their attribute.) I think getting so many credits did make players better able to accept this lack of compensation. So taking the credits away was upsetting because of the situation of inadequate compensation just mentioned. However it was also unfair because those who spent all or most of their credits got a lot more value for the mistakenly sent extra credits than the rest who spent some but saved most. I understand they are giving us Rosen Crystals to appease us & for that I am thankful but it can never make the situation fair. Making the Rosen Crystal shop have the same items as the Credit shop minus items that might affect the economy (eg. Drills, Majestics) & minus new Marketplace items (Kakao still needs to earn after all) would make the situation fairer in my opinion.
Just letting you know your video covers this the best out of everyone else that have covered it. I wrote about this on my personal game blog (this comment is condensed but still long here); my personal gauge (for Unchained) fromthe start since the change to the business model, was how they would handle things during everyones initial 90-day (minimum) free period (and then they'd have another 90 days for those who bought all of the DLC's). They proved in the first week after relaunching they weren't prepared (biting off more than they could chew with just the account transfer, moving to a global build and not being fully cognizant of the delta between the custom build being used which led to most of us seeing missing items), merging the prior servers, and trying to launch a fresh start at the same time. By the end of the month, my mind was made up about voting with the wallet (the UI issues were still unresolved by XL until after the new year, and there are still problems yet with some settings not saving). As for the credit compensation for missing items, it was incredibly off since on my legacy account, all of my original credits (from Trion) came from when they closed Devilian (as we had a choice of which game we wanted our credits moved to). Thus my original balance was 12K (never bought any credits specifically for AA with Trion). But Kakao Games ended up compensating around 17K; a lot of this was for items that were from Trion stream giveaways and some of the Trion specific compensated stuff. On AAU, it was a lot more; around 120K credits (my original AAU balance transferred from Gamigo was around 17K). None of the compensated credits was for the Lucky Hiram Infusions (I had none of those); it was however from the ton of missing items they had calculated in the listing they posted on December 7th. I even submitted an inquiry if they had overcompensated me and was pointed to that list. So I just shrugged and didn't think anything of it. Fortunately for me, they didn't remove those transferred credits on both my legacy and AAU accounts (unlike some other folks who logged in to zero credits) since I didn't buy much (the credit shop in AAU is underwhelming at best, legacy would've been easy to spend it all). Yes, they removed the overcompensated credits the other week (the same ones I had inquired about closer to launch and pretty much pointed back to the news posting implying it was correct). Like you, I get they were caught in a bind (red flag probably showed up at corporate due to little revenue for credit sales over these 3 months) but they really botched the handling of this (3 months later even after some of us inquired earlier, removing honored transferred credits for many, removing credits even purchased from Kakao for many, no itemized list of how all this is being done where some players said they in no way spent all of the overcompensated credits). This is what I liked about the Glyph platform; the transaction history. Kakao Games has no similar customer facing frontend so players are left to wonder a lot more about how all of this was handled without a proper accounting. As for the Rosen Crystals, my main character was compensated 639 while my other character got 320. On my alt AAU account where I never bought any credits (and only had the 630 that Gamigo gave out for some sort of compensation), I received 151 on one character, and 153 on the other. I presume this was for some of the cosmetic items from the first few ArchePasses. On legacy, my main character received 172 while a low level alt got 13 (for the costume is it missing). I can see why they created this new currency; to lock them specifically to a character instead of being account wide (like credits), and having purchase limits (like 1 per account) on items. They originally had some mistakes in the pricing like the salon certificate costing 3 crystals and the dye 11 (they corrected this within a couple of hours); I managed to snag it at the lower cost. Anyway on the publisher side, Kakao Game Europe (an already smaller subsidiary of Kakao Games KR) burned through what little goodwill and trust they had during what was this initial 3-month period where they should've pulled out all the stops. On the development side, XL has released shoddy after shoddy client build to each of their publishing partners (all of whom only mainly validated them to make sure it plugged into their platform API's and payment flow before greenlighting the rest of the actual buggy mess for production); don't see that changing with AA2 where they are probably learning and working through a new production pipeline on the fly (CryEngine versus UE5) meaning a whole bunch of new holes for the "exploit early, exploit often" crowd. Over on NA Kraken, lot of land opened up over the past two weeks. It's actually mindboggling when you consider how it's one evo server per region that was merged down from the multitude at AAU launch (and it's even more so over on legacy). For myself, as stated near the top, I'm pretty much a "vote with your wallet" type, and will be tapping out once my game time is over on AAU. It's not the cost of the sub (it's trivial AFAIK though I'll admit I really liked the buy to play model); it's how they are conducting themselves as a company where they don't even deserve that pittance. Likewise, AA2 (or anything Kakao Games Europe ends up publishing in the west is going to be a no thank you for me).
problem was really alt age for newer players. Players were prioritizing getting their alts into daily/weekly raids, there were times we couldn't even finish an event because half of the raid was afk alt accounts, the game certainly felt dead and probably still is when you consider that half of the playerbase is alts.
they remove some outfits wich costs 30+ euros they compensate with credits they dont add the costumes to the store to repurchase they remove the credits... Something dont add up
Sorry to hear things are going so poorly on the live servers. We do not have any problems like this on the ArcheRage private server. Fast labor regen, no alts, improved commerce rates and nobody to steal our credits. All Kakao refugees are welcome. Hope to see some of you there o/
Also the new shop has many of the items lost during transfer in which I was told no longer existed on this version of the game? So they want us to repurchase these items to replace what we lost to get items we already had? SMH 🤦🏽♀️
The game is basically dead at this point. I play legacy and before they yeeted my credits to the shadow realm I bought 3 years of patron with it so I can ride out the storm and not pay a dime, but for everyone else they're just quitting over this. There was drastic drops in reset raid attendance and less people showing up to pvp at content over the credit theft. On top of all that they AREN'T doing a good job with the bans like you said. This last ban wave was the nail in the coffin. Keep in mind if you ban 1 person and he has 3 friends he plays the game with, that whole group is going to quit so it's not just the individual bans chopping the playerbase down, people are quitting because all their friends and guilds are getting banned. Banning cargo teleport hackers and speedhackers is one thing and that's fine. I was so thankful to hear they were finally doing that when I reported so many teleport hackers to gamigo and they did nothing. The problem is they're banning a lot of innocent people because they don't understand the game whatsoever. There's fancy new lunagems that came out with the CR/GR update that give 1% skill damage in the helmet gem slots. Very rare drop and worth a lot of money. The gems aren't tradable so the only way to trade them is to socket them into a tradable helmet and sell that. A guy got banned for RMT from selling a helmet with one of those gems for 30k. The email he got notifying him of his ban said some BS like "a low level heroic grade helmet would not sell for 30,000 gold so this was obviously RMT which resulted in your ban". People are getting banned just for selling things on the AH for too much money which now has everyone afraid to sell things. I usually craft eternal erenor infusions to sell for a shit ton of gold and now I'm afraid to sell high priced items for getting flagged as RMT and banned. When kakao bans you for RMT they ban your ENTIRE account so you can't even log into the website and appeal the ban. The only way to try and get your case looked at is by crying to the CMs in discord and none of them even know what's going on so it gets nowhere. Kakao is shooting first and closing their ask questions later box when it comes to banning people. There's not enough people left to maintain a healthy game population and I'm foreseeing a legacy/AAU merge soon to "save" it after this fiasco.
It is still very frightening and unfathomable to me that you need aprox 10.000.000 gold to get your gear to high tiers. That is about TEN MILLION GOLD, people got these amounts by nolifing, or more often, by p2w and buying gold, and fck if i can do any of that.
KakaoMeme can't understand the game. Whole FS was "how to skip fresh start" server. We got all broken catch up mechanism, some broken events, dumb 0 effort -high reward (ex p2w) items in shop instead of IN GAME CRAFTING. We got random "failed transfer" event in main account (but time of subscription were active). We lost log in rights to our b2p accounts and we should trust in company and buy subscription to check what is in our account and AAU is better or not. Kakao cut out returning players option. We got same artificial bottlenecks (labor) and multiaccount support. We use same resource to upgrade gear and to prining money = you have to buy more subscriptions. Additional accounts are additional resources without any real limitation. This is not "non p2w". This is same old p2w in hidden form. (and the biggest problem: forced to use multiple accounts IS NOT FUN). AA is : how to afk farm coinpurses with your alts, how to semi-AFK farm honors with many alts, how to print money in mass production with many alts. We got cosmetic fix of the less relevant problem. And... yeah. AA is killed by incompetent publisher... again... and again and again.
Seriously since what they did has left most people with a decision to keep going or stop.. I have been playing since 2015 and never seen so many not playing or playing but with very low self esteem and just had enough of being treated by each Company that takes on AA. I feel if the game lasts another year it will be a miracle the players have had enough. Theft is theft and that is what happened. Even though they were sorry I feel its a bit too late. I have a few months left on my unchained accounts but have given all my gold and possessions including buildings away to players as i wont be returning there another mistake to add the type of subscription I think they should of just added Patron as the credit compensation was totally useless to me i gave that game away as a huge financial loss .. Now with AA and a Patron till 2023 I have a year but with this happening even the return of credits after they took it away and it was my own money I cant trust them ... So have joined Arche Rage NA Private Server I dont use any credits just play its been wonderful and a breath of fresh air ... so AA well I dont know yet still there but for how long not sure....very disappointed player....
yes it been bad form start of kakao the miss up UI seetting fuk up and size seetting form start or log in is stilll miss up. lost of a lot of archpass item and credits miss up did't help. can't see any new player's will join :( and + solo gone free to play so im off to...
I completely forgot to mention the UI being broken for a whole month. I've at least got Lost Ark keeping me occupied at the moment but I'll keep giving updates until my final decision on the game when my free sub runs out.
These people see the game as a cash grab and they manage it poorly if at all. They are at least trying with banning cheaters and exploiters but the content is too expedited with the introduction of Hiram. At 16:00 you said exactly what needs to happen, change the progressions and remove Hiram from FS. For a subscription to do anything they need to slow down the gear progression by bringing back the old gear crafting, keep the gemming and no gear breaks.. bring back all old world bosses ,change boss mechanics and update HP on everything by 20% bosses 50%.. introduce new world bosses in old areas.
SSorry for all of us, that brought DLC's brought items with credits and real money, and wee have a lot of credits refound, and now they reemove all of it... ? enought is enough i am playing till the days end after the days end, no credits no subs, i am basicly making my grief and death of my dear characther. And Zan i will neveer forget you my sweet neighbor!!!
the reset raid was at 22 player's at 6pm and not all are welcome to the raids so why try any more. top gs ranks don't help out new players main focus is on there alts :(
I have love hate relationship with archeage and been playing for a very long time and I totally agree that the community is toxic and selfish and the very reason the archeage is dying, not just the game, the devs but also the community.
due to the ban waves, the game has also lost a lot of players, including many innocent players. for example: I started AAU with a friend the first time at fresh start. Now he is permanently banned on suspicion of RMT. My friend denies that. I believe him. The only one who gave him gold was me. Since then I've been worried that I'll be classified as a gold seller and also banned, so i quit the game.
