Lost Continent: It's getting harder to like ArcheAge

ArcheAge fandom is hard. It was initially hard because of the waiting. Consider that we've known of the game's existence since 2010 and that some of us have been playing it in various incarnations since 2011, which is a full three years -- and dozens of gameplay changes -- prior to its official North American launch.

Now that we're past said launch, the difficulty has shifted to watching Trion (or is it XLGAMES?) do its best to destroy a promising title via a series of clownshoes decisions.

Case in point is this week's Auroria launch, by many accounts an amateur-hour disaster that either illustrates how little Trion cares about ArcheAge or how few competent people it has assigned to work on the sandpark import.

In essence, the continent of Auroria and its half dozen new zones were hyped as a second land-rush and a chance for players who came up short at release to get in on the fun. "Thirty percent more housing space will be available to players throughout four claimable zones," Trion explained in its Auroria announcement last month. Landless peeps couldn't simply travel to the newly accessible northern continent and plunk down their house or farm, though. They needed to wait until one of their server's uber guilds went through the song-and-dance necessary to claim a zone.

Except, whoops, large portions of the playerbase weren't able to get in game during this Auroria land rush. In an inexplicable return to the woes of launch week, ArcheAge's servers served up random "the gods have disconnected you" messages, character screen crashes, and Hackshield errors that conspired to keep a significant number of players offline during Auroria's debut. Those problems were largely solved by the following morning, and it says here that the server techs and various IT people who likely stayed up all night dealing with those thankless tasks should in fact be thanked.

But Trion's decision-makers, notably whoever thought it was acceptable to leave the servers online during a competitive launch event that was plagued with connectivity issues, should be taken to task.

I don't have the numbers, and so I don't have any way to illustrate exactly how many players were well and truly screwed in this case. But I was one of those players. Massively's MJ was another. Hundreds if not thousands more have been telling their individual horror stories on the forums and Reddit this week. And they were horror stories because many people spent a couple of months doing the large amount of in-game prep work necessary to succeed in Auroria, only to be smothered by the wet blanket of developer/publisher incompetence when the floodgates opened.

Those who were able to log in smartly claimed the zones, and on some servers, all of the surrounding land in a matter of minutes. Whether this was due to a huge and coordinated effort on the part of the guilds lucky enough to connect or to the ongoing rash of land-grab exploits that Trion and XL seem disinterested in combating is something that we'll probably never know for sure.

If you're not an ArcheAge player, some of this stuff probably sounds like typical forum grousing and the melodramatic complaints of open PvP players. Consider the case of the Valor guild on ArcheAge's Aranzeb server, though. Consider the time and effort they spent preparing for Auroria, all of it wasted thanks to Trion's inability to manage its servers on patch day. And consider that Trion's answer to calls for a rollback -- calls that are absolutely justified if the end goal is a competitive but fair sandbox experience -- has basically been a middle finger.

XL isn't blameless, either, though its hard to discern exactly where Trion's buffoonery ends and XL's begins due to the former's PR smokescreen and the latter's lack of visibility outside of Korea.

But it's easy to see a company that overspent and now feels the need to water down its own design in a vain effort to capture a larger audience. How else can you explain XL's 2012 decision to basically nerf the crafters right out of its own crafting-centric game?

"Craft, claim, conquer," right? Well, not really, since a game that originally featured item decay, synthesis, and other sandbox crafting essentials was neutered and saddled with a heavy dose of RNG nonsense designed primarily to prolong the grind but also to placate soloists who hate interacting with crafters.

This was my first clue that all wasn't right in the world of ArcheAge, but given the fact that the MMO genre was still deep in the throes of feature-deficiency at the time, I overlooked it and naively said to myself that things would be different after the finished product hit a western market that desperately needed a triple-A sandbox.

The reality, though, is that XL/Trion continues to make decisions that illustrate how little it values the gameplay ideas that ArcheAge originally brought to the table and how desperate it is to monetize every little aspect of the title at the expense of its soul. Along with the Auroria disconnect debacle, this week's patch brought us new Hasla weapons that are basically required for competitive play and that are obtainable via grinding rather than via crafting/selling/trading.

This is, of course, how most MMOs do it, and it could possibly endear ArcheAge to the sort of online gamer who doesn't want all that pesky virtual world stuff or bothersome human interaction getting in the way of his killing and looting.

Then there is the continued bot/exploit/hack phenomenon, which despite the tweets of Trion boss Scott Hartsman, continues to be a very real and easily observable issue. Just this week Massively's MJ and I showed up at an expiring 16x16 farm plot outside Mahadevi in an attempt to expand our fledgling agricultural empire. Several other would-be farmers showed up, too, which is fine; such is life in a competitive sandpark. What's not fine is that the guy who ended up winning the click-fight and repossessing the farm wasn't one of the people who showed up. In fact, he wasn't even online, which casts doubt on everything Trion says with regard to its desire and ability to shine a light on the cockroaches swarming over ArcheAge's land ownership metagame.

At the end of today's rant, I'm left with little more than resignation as I watch what's happening to an MMO that for so long seemed to be the answer to this genre's post-2004 malaise. The gameplay concepts originally put forth by ArcheAge remain rock-solid and fun, particularly for starving sandboxers. It's becoming increasingly difficult to watch those concepts wither and die, though, whether it's due to XL's misguided notions of mass appeal or Trion's half-baked attempts at caring for a game that it didn't design and that it views as little more than a monetization experiment.

Jef Reahard is an ArcheAge early adopter as well as the creator of Massively's Lost Continent column. It chronicles one man's journey through XLGAMES' fantasy sandpark while examining PvE, PvP, roleplay, and beyond. Suggestions welcome at jef@massively.com.