13.September.2014

So ArcheAge the sandbox MMORPG available on PC has gone into it's Founder's exclusive 4 day head start and like most MMO launches it has been quite a ride for some players. Within minutes of the game launching Servers were queued with some servers quoting 3+ hours waiting time. The items that are founders exclusive have yet to be seen in the European servers, with some North American players reporting problems with the packs. Some even state that they received more than 1 pack and others received non so that may be why Europe hasn't seen any yet. As all MMO launches are bound to have queues we will not look directly at the queuing but we will mention how some players were placed in the "General" queue which is only for non Patron (The games subscription status) players, which of course all founders are Patron so this bug was notified and quickly fixed before the end of day 1. The queues although very long and tedious was better than not getting into the game at all.

After sitting through a 1 hour queue I managed to get into the game, create my character and begin my Journey for the next hour my game play was uninterrupted and went very smoothly, although the servers were very cramped and some NPC's had a large number of players around them making them difficult to interact with however the game played as it should have. That was until the first disconnect of the night, in which I quickly jumped back on to find myself in another queue... However don't fear because the games developer is implementing a grace period for disconnected players which will give 5 minutes to log back in and not require queuing. Queuing aside the actual game play is flawless with the odd bug here and there, one of the most entertaining was my character suffocating from air after having been under water, but a report has been sent to the developers and they should get round to fixing it. the Quests are very crowded and at one point i found myself in another queue as shown in the title Image to pick up a quest item, it was nicely organized though and it moved along fairly quickly. The biggest disappointment was the selfishness of players who as soon as they could placed a house in the limited farming areas and had their friends help with the blueprints which require a certain number of Gilda Stars (the in game currency gained through main quests). On more than one occasion i have walked through housing areas and seen 4 houses next to each other owned by the same player whilst other players cannot place the basic farm due to the plain selfishness of players. The limited land space is the biggest problem so far and the fact players can own more than 1 house is the cause, the houses should have been 1 per server that way it would have been equal chance for players to get houses or even place the basic farm, maybe Trion will look to this problem in the future but at the moment it is the biggest cause of world chat complaints.

With the server status fluctuating as can be seen via the twitter page that posts the status of the servers @ArcheAgeStatus the servers fluctuate between up and down causing plenty of lag and in some cases disconnections, however as we are into day 2 the queues are mostly gone but the disconnections are still there. As I am writing this the game is currently unavailable to me due to the server status and other errors causing issues with login authentication which is causing the game to not recognize players usernames/passwords and not letting them play. ArcheAge has personally posted saying their engineers are working on getting everything back on track as soon as possible.

All in all the launch has been Problematic with unseen errors appearing on peoples screens but Trion have done well to provide some public information and say they are working on it. We will just have to see what happens on Tuesday for the full release, I can see Queue Simulator 2014 being a big hit on September 16th it was a couple of hours for Patrons, the general queue will be insane!

For more information on ArcheAge please check out our Beta review or simply search Archeage and get involved in the madness!

~ Mike