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A note of thanks to our ArcheAge Founders & Alpha Testers
Hi, everyone --
I wanted to send a personal thank you for all of your support in bringing ArcheAge to the West. We hope you've been having as much fun as we have seeing the Alpha go from a downright tranquil place to a world teeming with life - farming and building, trade and crime, justice and piracy, loyalty and betrayal - in such an incredibly short amount of time.
It's been an amazing experience watching the sandbox come to life, and we're all extremely thankful to you for being a part of it.
A quick update on the testing process: Since releasing the Founders' Packs, we've had a lot more of you come on board than expected, and we're happy to report that the servers have been able to keep up with it pretty well!
The massive number of Archeum Founders has really helped us stress test the way we do things: We've already had to expand the capacity of the server to three times the number of characters that one world is expected to have. That you've propelled ArcheAge as high up as the #2 game on all of Twitch.tv has really been humbling for all of us. It makes us want to work even harder to deliver the best release that we possibly can. You're an incredibly active bunch, too! While we were expecting a good turnout, you really blew the doors off: After the first Alpha weekend, we immediately doubled the amount of server hardware. After the first week, we saw that more than 80% of you were still playing every day and we upgraded it again. We're going to hold it here for now while we focus on an imminent new Alpha update and on the Beta and launch buildouts in our US and EU datacenters, which we're happy to report are well underway.
Your Alpha play and feedback absolutely help shape the game. They directly inform our ongoing conversations with XLGames as to how to best deliver this western version of ArcheAge and where we should collectively take it in the future. We thank you for the feedback so far, and ask that you keep up the great job in further testing, all the way through launch later this year, and beyond!
Warmest regards,
Scott Hartsman
CEO, Trion Worlds
Good times. Hopefully one day, we'll see a list of what changes trion went and asked xl for and came through with. While we wait on that though, here's a list of hiccups along the way:
- No unbuilt housing/farm limits at launch; not like this wasn't obvious though. During alpha, omega server was released and a bunch of alpha players went to hoard land for laughs. Also had beta to see, but guess that wasn't enough to put two and two together.
- Segmenting actual players because of land hoarders and queue times (offline lp regen was brought up in alpha, so something like afking in game wouldn't be necessary). Great idea, this did not have any adverse effect on player pops and content. It's not like archeage requires an active competitive player base to manage resources, economy, land, pve, and pretty much everything else.
- Segmenting actual player population across multiple servers for bots and gold sellers, which were around since alpha. (offline lp regen was brought up in alpha, so something like afking in game wouldn't be necessary)
- Linking ah servers, where it's simply better to do gold-generating content on a dead server and have it transferred to another server.
- Acknowledging that hasla (the non rng version) would hinder a crafting economy, hasla weapons were supposed to stop at the first tier (150 tokens). Then realized an immediate patch somehow included T3 hasla weapons (basically epherium) and couldnt stop it lol. Crafters got sad and new players get rolled in pvp (lots of players were still in quest armor or weren't even 50 or barely gemmed out illustrious sets, getting blown up by epherium weapons hue). Although there was some good news, scapes apologized.
- Remember pre 1.0? Easy to get mats (salvageable dungeon weapon/armors for archeum, no forced stabilizer runs, and elongating the game with more unfun, non-sandbox element grinding). The stabilizer runs were a good idea to increase player interactions (diplomacy, pvp, etc.), but of course it was implemented poorly, so players went to farm dead servers or had opposite faction alts to make content non-interactive. Anyways, crafting was easy pre 1.0 because the limiting factor was labor and not gold/archeum so it didn't feel like a horrendous crapshoot
- Yes int-based healing was overpowered because of the inevitability and not because of overpowered damage + heals. Sorcery/Vit/x builds were pretty garbage and Occult/Vit/Aura or Witch were the fotm off healing classes. So, it'd be pretty obvious that offhealing Battlerage/Vit would get pretty cancerous because of Battlerage's cc/damage mitigation, self-synergy, and decent "non-setup" damage.
Probably missed a lot of things, feel free to chime in folks.