Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Hello Community
ArchivedUser
Guest
I wanted to take a second to say that I am very excited about this MMO.
I'm getting old now and have been mmo'ing for a long time. Started playing Eve Online in 2003 and have played it since. I love that game but I have grown out of it. It's a different game these days.
Started playing WoW during vanilla. Loved it. Enjoyed leading raids and progressing one boss further each day with my guild of dedicated adventurers. Over the course of time with each expansion WoW became a different and more remedial version that seemed to cater to very young people.
After WoW ended for me, sometime around WotLK though I was in and out over the previous expansion, I continued on with Eve. Again, it's a great game. But then came Archeage. I was more excited about AA than any game I can recall. I kept up with archeage prior to the western release. I was there testing in Alpha, then closed Beta, Open Beta, and then release. I brought with me nearly my entire corporation from Eve online and we made ourselves a nice guild.
Archeage was an incredible game. So much of that game was right. The balance of open world and on-rails activities was great. The pvp was excellent. The variation and choices in character builds was fantastic. The options a player has to make money is diverse and they were all worthwhile (something on which BDO totally fails). What a freaking awesome game! There is soo much more that I love about AA but we'll just leave it at that.
Then.... Trion. There was a lot of speculation during testing phases that this arrangement between XL and Trion wasn't as efficient as it needed to be. Bugs weren't getting fixed. Balance issues seemed impossible to get changed. Then Trion wasn't able to deliver on promises of dealing with hacking/spamming/cheating.. etc. With one blunder after another, including the 10 hour queue times many people experienced for months at launch, the game stepped closer and closer to collapse. My guildmates and I made a mass exodus from AA around the time that they opened the northern continent.
On our server, land grab hacks snatched up huge swaths of the land before anyone even set foot on the continent. This had been an ongoing issue on our server prior to the expansion and I know other servers experienced this as well. The hacking wasn't the deal breaker, however. What was the deal breaker? The manner in which Trion handled the offenders. They received temporary bans and were not forced to relinquish the land. This experience compiled with the multitude of instances of ineptitude with regards to their handling of the game. The lying regarding the cash shop. The lies regarding the chat spam. The lies regarding anti-cheat software. The inability to fix things in a timely manner. Etc etc etc. It was the straw that broke the camels back. Not to mention the outright attacks on players who were vocalizing issues publicly (I had my forum account banned for discussing such issues).
Since AA, we have largely quit playing MMO's. A few of us dove headfirst into Black Desert. It seems like a great game at first but you quickly find out that it is a shallow, empty, grindfest which offers very little in terms of the variety of experiences one could have. The game forces you to grind and grind and grind as there isn't really another way of making real money. I won't go into it in detail but it doesn't have an endgame which is very disappointing. We spent about 4 months playing BDO.
We tried FF IV but we left that experience unimpressed. FFIV doesn't do anything well when compared to other MMO's. We did not stick around in FF very long.
Some of our friends tried ESO but they were let down, the common theme was 'there isn't really any group activities'.
I've tried a handful of other mmo's since AA but didn't really find one that I enjoyed. In fact, I think that the AA experience has made me somewhat jaded in my MMO outlook. How could a developer have something so incredibly good on their hands and use it as they did to squeeze as much money out of it as quickly as possible without any long-term vision of sustainability? I know that the game was fundamentally flawed with all of the calculations being made client side without verification system server side. Or that's how I understood it at least. But I thought that all game developers were cut from the genius cloth and would figure out a way to improve it. Boy was I wrong.
So, I've set the bar pretty high for myself with my AA experience. The game was great. The management was awful. The awful management killed the great game.
Recently a friend of mine mentioned AoC. I started doing some digging and listening to the interviews with the devs. I looked over the little bit of gameplay I could find. This game does sound like it's heading in the right direction with a good development team. They're saying all of the right things and the small glimpses of the game support the somewhat grandiose claims of the dev team. Needless to say, I'm very excited and I want to participate in the testing.
Anything I can do to ensure a place in Alpha? I have a youtube channel where I do game reviews and let's plays. I would love to feature this game from the beginning and drag all of my gaming buddies into this new adventure. That is, IF they'll follow me one more time.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I sure hope AoC turns out to be what it appears at this early stage of development.
Screwball
I'm getting old now and have been mmo'ing for a long time. Started playing Eve Online in 2003 and have played it since. I love that game but I have grown out of it. It's a different game these days.
Started playing WoW during vanilla. Loved it. Enjoyed leading raids and progressing one boss further each day with my guild of dedicated adventurers. Over the course of time with each expansion WoW became a different and more remedial version that seemed to cater to very young people.
After WoW ended for me, sometime around WotLK though I was in and out over the previous expansion, I continued on with Eve. Again, it's a great game. But then came Archeage. I was more excited about AA than any game I can recall. I kept up with archeage prior to the western release. I was there testing in Alpha, then closed Beta, Open Beta, and then release. I brought with me nearly my entire corporation from Eve online and we made ourselves a nice guild.
Archeage was an incredible game. So much of that game was right. The balance of open world and on-rails activities was great. The pvp was excellent. The variation and choices in character builds was fantastic. The options a player has to make money is diverse and they were all worthwhile (something on which BDO totally fails). What a freaking awesome game! There is soo much more that I love about AA but we'll just leave it at that.
Then.... Trion. There was a lot of speculation during testing phases that this arrangement between XL and Trion wasn't as efficient as it needed to be. Bugs weren't getting fixed. Balance issues seemed impossible to get changed. Then Trion wasn't able to deliver on promises of dealing with hacking/spamming/cheating.. etc. With one blunder after another, including the 10 hour queue times many people experienced for months at launch, the game stepped closer and closer to collapse. My guildmates and I made a mass exodus from AA around the time that they opened the northern continent.
On our server, land grab hacks snatched up huge swaths of the land before anyone even set foot on the continent. This had been an ongoing issue on our server prior to the expansion and I know other servers experienced this as well. The hacking wasn't the deal breaker, however. What was the deal breaker? The manner in which Trion handled the offenders. They received temporary bans and were not forced to relinquish the land. This experience compiled with the multitude of instances of ineptitude with regards to their handling of the game. The lying regarding the cash shop. The lies regarding the chat spam. The lies regarding anti-cheat software. The inability to fix things in a timely manner. Etc etc etc. It was the straw that broke the camels back. Not to mention the outright attacks on players who were vocalizing issues publicly (I had my forum account banned for discussing such issues).
Since AA, we have largely quit playing MMO's. A few of us dove headfirst into Black Desert. It seems like a great game at first but you quickly find out that it is a shallow, empty, grindfest which offers very little in terms of the variety of experiences one could have. The game forces you to grind and grind and grind as there isn't really another way of making real money. I won't go into it in detail but it doesn't have an endgame which is very disappointing. We spent about 4 months playing BDO.
We tried FF IV but we left that experience unimpressed. FFIV doesn't do anything well when compared to other MMO's. We did not stick around in FF very long.
Some of our friends tried ESO but they were let down, the common theme was 'there isn't really any group activities'.
I've tried a handful of other mmo's since AA but didn't really find one that I enjoyed. In fact, I think that the AA experience has made me somewhat jaded in my MMO outlook. How could a developer have something so incredibly good on their hands and use it as they did to squeeze as much money out of it as quickly as possible without any long-term vision of sustainability? I know that the game was fundamentally flawed with all of the calculations being made client side without verification system server side. Or that's how I understood it at least. But I thought that all game developers were cut from the genius cloth and would figure out a way to improve it. Boy was I wrong.
So, I've set the bar pretty high for myself with my AA experience. The game was great. The management was awful. The awful management killed the great game.
Recently a friend of mine mentioned AoC. I started doing some digging and listening to the interviews with the devs. I looked over the little bit of gameplay I could find. This game does sound like it's heading in the right direction with a good development team. They're saying all of the right things and the small glimpses of the game support the somewhat grandiose claims of the dev team. Needless to say, I'm very excited and I want to participate in the testing.
Anything I can do to ensure a place in Alpha? I have a youtube channel where I do game reviews and let's plays. I would love to feature this game from the beginning and drag all of my gaming buddies into this new adventure. That is, IF they'll follow me one more time.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I sure hope AoC turns out to be what it appears at this early stage of development.
Screwball
0
Comments
An impressive documentation of the MMO world situation.
Also, rather sad - when you consider just how much you (and so many here) have been so seeking 'The Game' ... and so frequently let down by so many game developers over the years.
It also makes me 'feel' a bit for @GMSteven and AoC as a team. They seem to be really seeking to be that so-rare thing: a genuinely-responsible game creator. And we've all understandably 'leapt' at supporting their ideals. But the responsibility of it must make him break out in a sweat sometime.
Nevertheless, you're with us - and we're grateful! Welcome!