The reason why Archeage died

[wyrethefury]

I player Archeage extensively and without fail from its first inception until a bit after it's change over to Kakao Games.

The game had ALOT of problems, to say the least, but many of them where simple issues to fix. The nails in the coffin for Archeage as a whole come down to greed and bias. Allow me to explain -

1: The Greed

Developers need to make money.. That is a given. Production of a product such as an MMORPG not only takes time, skill and work to produce, but much more to maintain and run. We get it. Nothing is free. The REAL greed, however- was the absolute shut-out of free to play members of the Archeage community. I do not speak of the changes in currency in game, or mechanics of any sort. I mean that the free-to-play players had absolutely zero chance to "close the gap" between themselves and players who did pay for the upgrades on their accounts.

For example -

I held a gear score of 1200-1600 when 3k was the cap. That cap was lifted up to 5k, and us free-to-play players got a little drop of free gear to get up to 2600 Gear Score. That was nice and all, but still nowhere near enough to make us relevant or let alone competitive in PVP. Fast forward to the dying days and the Gear score cap raised up to 10k and above. My gear score by comparison never reached above 5k still, even with the new Ancestral levels or Hiram gear. It was absolutely shameful to see max level characters running around with 4200 gear score versus people who where able to peak above 1100 gear score.

The
Gap
Could
Never
Be
Closed

Unless you dropped about $5000 USD every time the Cap for gear score was lifted up.



Now comes 2: The Bias


Obviously, your biggest payers are going to be your focus... We get that, but also you leave behind and alienate the heart and sould of the community as you continually pander to one specific group instead of keeping the magic of the experience where it was at it's greatest. Black pearls used to spawn in the wilds and where able to be sold for 1200 gold per pearl. People made a living off of that and where able to fund their gear upgrades easily. Once the big wallet warriors felt threatened by ankle biters - developers raised the gear score cap and nullified the black pearls worth. The door was shut in the faces of players that, who could have been convinced to contribute to the game financially over time- chose to leave.

The land distribution of Archeage was also HEAVILY contested and designed to be purposefully frustrating. Limiting the players that ALREADY PAID a subscription from being able to build their homes based on who paid property taxes and did not was probably the dirtiest, longest ongoing and most insulting slap in the face of Archeage. Had you simply allowed players to build their homes anywhere in any open field outside of cities, or even limited plots inside cities - you could have easily kept so many subscriptions going endlessly and never ran out of money. Instead, developers gave themselves the longest shot in the foot by not allowing players to do any of these things.


Let's break this down logically -

To build a house you need to pay for the subscription
but you cant build a house if the land is limited
so why would anyone pay for a subscription?

Why would developers resort to a model that intentionally denies them the prospect of having more money spent on their system? Make it make sense...


Anyway - Those issues killed the game. I was happy to play, I'm sad to see it gone, and I hope that if it DOES get resurrected that someone on the team running it reads this..

[Ferret]

AAC (archeage classic private server) is ok, not perfect but does a lot better job at helping new players catch up. only allowed one account, they actually ban for rmt/alting. no sub needed

[Rave Pathfinder.]

Moment I watched both company and community greed get better of themseleves I knew this game was gonna die, Sadly I wanted to live and prosper, Only way I see this coming back is if they Gut entire game, But pulling off an apocalypse type event and start anew. DO better then be greedy corpo.