My take on ArcheAge as I depart for greener pastures.
Labor
Labor is a resource used for crafting, that was eventually expanded to pretty much every aspect of the game. There aren’t many ways to get labor, mainly you gain some over time while logged in, subscribers get more than free players, and also gain half as much while logged out. You’ll need labor to pick plants from your farm, refine them, and use them in recipes. You’ll need labor to make tax certificates to pay for your land. You’ll need labor to open the loot you get from killing monsters.
There are ways to run out of labor just logging in for 30 min a day, which means a lot of folks feel it’s necessary to buy potions for labor every 12 hours on each of your characters, which only come from the cash shop (but can be sold on the auction house).
On paper, labor seems like a good mechanism for keeping the economy stable, but it always felt like an annoyance that I’m struggling to get past. As a subscriber, this mechanic should’ve been balanced around being able to play a reasonable amount per day without spending more money. That never felt like it was the case.
Land
Land for player farms in ArcheAge is finite. I owned several plots (I paid to play during the head start), but it was very hard for newer players to secure land. To keep your land you must pay taxes with tax certificates. These can be produced with labor, or bought on the cash shop.
In order to safely buy or sell land, an appraisal certificate is required for every 100 gold of your asking price. These are only created by the cash shop.
It’s clear that many plots of land on any populated server were claimed by hackers, Trion has claimed to be trying to stop this, but many remain unconvinced.
Crafting
Crafting in ArcheAge had one redeeming quality: lower level gear is continuously upgraded to create higher level gear. Each upgrade has a chance to improve the quality of the item. The system turns to RNG-hell at level 44, when you start having only a 25% chance you’ll be able to progress at each stage going forward.
As a 90k tailor, I basically gave up on this. It took an awful lot of labor and resources to gamble on making something decent, and the fact that level 44 Stone Cloth can’t become level 50 Stone Cloth just made my head hurt.
Hasla
If you can’t afford to buy a decent weapon, your only option is to grind for endless hours in Hasla to get tokens for a weapon. If you have to ask if you can afford a decent weapon, you can’t afford one.
Hasla weapons were originally meant to be a catch-up item for folks who joined the game later, but Trion/XL released the 2nd and third tiers rather abruptly with Auroria. Since we don’t have armor that scaled up as dramatically as our weapons, 1v1 PvP has become even more of a game where whoever gets the initial stun and combo can win before the other player can react.
Greater Howling Abyss
THE endgame dungeon. If you can’t afford good armor (probable), run this over and over. People without at least tier1 Hasla weapon need not apply. The randomness is slightly better here, getting a full set of low quality gear won’t take you more than a week, and will be enough to let you enter Serpentis (THE endgame raid currently).
If you want better than green quality gear, you can keep running the dungeon, or buy upgrade items (that don’t always work), which happen to be available on the cash shop.
Auroria
Auroria was the promised land for those who were unable to claim land on their home continents. The release was a complete debacle, while all the major guilds tried to log in and claim the first castles, many couldn’t even connect or play through the lag when they did connect. Many also believe that large portions of the land were gobbled up by the land hackers that plagued the old continents.
The utter lag-fest of this release is a strong indication that the advertised large-scale PvP is more than their servers can handle.
I was on the East faction, and the only East guild to claim a castle on my server was strictly allied with the West. It had been pretty clear from the get-go that the factions were imbalanced (no concrete data, but there are twice as many West guild listings than East on the official forum), but this probably lead to more folks leaving.
APEX
APEX is an item that can be bought with real money and turned in to cash shop credit/game time, or sold to other players on the in-game auction house. I mean, if they already have your credit card, why not have a subscription, a cash shop, and a way to turn real money in to in-game gold?
Thunderstruck Trees
What used to be one of the most rare crafting items, essential to constructing many large vehicles, became common place from a new lockbox on the cash shop recently. The lockbox dropped saplings that grew in an hour and had a 10% chance of being struck, instead of our old trees that had a < 1% chance and took much longer to grow.
The market has crashed, 3000 gold to 200 gold. Anyone who had been stockpiling them, thinking the price would go up as new recipes became available, was basically screwed.
Trion claims they didn’t know that XL Games had cashed out this hard, which fills me with confidence for the future of the game. These boxes will eventually be removed (at their usual scheduled date), but the saplings that crashed the market will likely be directly added to the cash shop in the future (if the other regions are any indication).
Bots
While Trion/XL Games claim to have it under control, I haven’t walked 50 meters in-game without seeing a bot in months. A free-to-play game will always play whack-a-mole with bots, because there’s no investment for creating an account. Something as small as forcing a credit card transaction for $20 of store credit would’ve been enough to slow this down.
I strongly believe the bot farming have impacted the game’s economy, and as of my departure Trion’s solution has been ineffective.