Actual wait 9-10 hours!
The uncontested king of Pay-to-Win (P2W) games, Archeage has recently been on a downward spiral of epic proportions. It was a game that centered around PvP in which the amount of money you spent directly correlated to your PvP performance. There were several people who openly bragged about spending thousands of dollars a month, yes a month, to maintain their positions of perceived superiority.
Archeage is a Korean game developed by a company called XL. XL sold the rights to publish the game to a company called Trion. Although Trion owned the rights to publish the game in the US, XL still maintained overall control over the game, updates, direction, etc. Trion is and was simply a joke and turned Archeage into a cash grab. Plain and simple.
Don’t get me wrong, there were aspects of Archeage that were insanely fun. To this day there hasn’t been a game that combined all of the elements that Archeage brought to the MMO world. I played it for a few years with family and friends, but the pay-to-win and mismanagement were finally to much to deal with and we all left.
Fast forward to today and a new publisher, Gamigo Group, is attempting to reintroduce the game with the pay-to-win aspects removed (so they say) under the title Archeage Unchained. The official go live was supposed to be Sep. 30th but that got moved back to Oct. 15th. They are currently in the 2nd day of open PTS and so far….well it’s as you would expect, a disaster.
Let’s start with the obvious, if you are 2 days past your original go-live date and are doing PTS, then the issues arising should be the very obscure kind, like someone finding an exploit by jumping up and down 500 times to get the ability to fly. (yes that happens) This is something one would expect. What you wouldn’t expect is to have a company launch a PTS session with no directions on how to access the PTS and no dedicated button on the launcher. Instead if you want to participate you have to load the old Archeage’s (shudder) PTS and then select PTS 2. No not Archeage Unchained PTS, instead you connect to a nondescript PTS 2. If that comes off as strange and not well thought out then you aren’t alone. Now the fun part, the queues the first day were insane. I personally tried for hours to get in and after trying all day, went to bed disappointed. They promised they would open the test server up to more people today, but this morning when you try to connect, you simply drop to desktop. This is happening to many, many folks. Some are getting to the queues, which are reportedly just as long as yesterday, but most just drop to desktop. The explanation being floated around is that if you fail to connect, then it drops the connection. This begs the question, how can a company to is going to roll out a game in less than two weeks, not have capacity to at least queue up players? The simple answer is that the original developer brought a half baked game to the US via an competent publisher, Trion and now the legacy of ineptness is being continued by another substandard company, Gamigo Group. If this sorry excuse for a game does actually launch on Oct. 15th then I’ll be shocked. If they do however push the floating turd barge forward, then you can expect weeks and even months of the same, server down for emergency maintenance that plagued the original boondoggle.