About a month ago, I started playing ArcheAge and to fully experience the game, I have signed up for Patron status just for a month. My one month is almost over so it’s time to evaluate the game.
While I enjoy the different classes and the ability to change them up at low cost (unlike the stupid ridiculous re-spec cost of ESO), it has been a very rewarding experience. However, not all MMO are perfect and they all have their own flaws thus ArcheAge have several that ruins the fun in my game play.
First, gearing in this game it tedious. The cost of an upgrade gets really expensive as if a great slope suddenly became a cliff. What I mean is, the progression of the equipment is great at first. When I first started, I can receive my complete gears just by going through the quests. Then my gear started to get mismatched until I’m only getting one piece of equipment per area per level. Anyone can imagine fighting a level 40 mob with only one piece of my equipment is of the same level. So the most typical thing to do is to get gears from the Auction House — bad idea. Not only that the gears in the AH are mostly trash, the good ones costs an arm and a leg and the cost just keeps going up as the day goes by. To put things into perspective, the cost of APEX when I started was 35g, last night it’s 88g a piece. Insane.
Second, leveling pass 40 is just a pain. Not only that my character is under geared, the area where I’m suppose to do quests are often contested. So much of my play time are wasted on unnecessary PvP and level 50s ganking lowbies. This kind of experience gets old for me really fast.
Lastly, a lot of time are wasted. Other than the fact that I am still below 50 and under geared, in order to make a decent amount of money is to do trade runs. This part of the game is the most tedious of them all since a worthy trade run will last between 30-45 minutes. Definitely not something a casual play can simply do since most of the trade route has a small window of opportunity that is during peace time. So if someone has only 2-3 hrs to play and the trade routes are contested — tough luck — and that has been my situation for the last 4 weeks.
In my frustration, I updated WoW and played through the initial quest for the next expansion and reconfigured my character and alts appearance due to the character model overhaul. However, I’m still not excited enough to even buy the expansion. So after this I moved on to SWTOR.
As announced in their website, SWTOR had release the stronghold where players can own their own stronghold and furnish them with multiple items that were obtained from achievements and from the ingame store. So every time I get fed up with ArcheAge due to being ganked, I login to SWTOR and design my stronghold. To be honest, this is really fun and it’s a shame that not many game have this and when they do, they make it so impossible to acquire (yes, I’m alluding ArcheAge’s “no more land to claim” problem). Also I’ve reactivate my account and pre-ordered the Revan expansion (only because I like Revan) so that means my alts gets 12x exp from story quests. I’ve already brought 2 alts to level 50 and I’ll work on bringing everyone else while it lasts. Oh yeah, I also have new screenshots from SWTOR to post on the later date.
