Introduction
So the last two patches left Archeage with a lot of disappointed Korean players alongside with a ton of bugs in every aspect. Some bugs were sighted in the Golden Shrine dungeon as well as Sungold Anthalon. XL continuously justifies its 20% tax rate and is rolling out new changes.
In-game Economics
June and July contained several patches, but the part that affected the players the most was the balance in the economy. Since the economy is a core part of the game, it gets affected by a lot of variables. It’s also difficult to balance, because a various type of players exist.
However, for Archeage’s healthy development, XL promises that they will keep close eyes on the economy and act swiftly.
Some Stats
It’s a reach to compare real-life economy with in-game economy, but XL believes a certain amount of inflation should help the economy in general. Rather than preventing gold inflation from happening, the dev team is aiming to keep a good balance based on upcoming patches.
Apart from May’s “Enjoy PC cafe benefits at your home” event temporarily reducing the overall amount of gold, the overall amount of gold has rather been increasing in a fast pace. After July’s tax patch, the total amount of gold has been decreasing, but it has been recovering back to its normal rate.
New gear or growth mechanisms can be a solution to slow down gold increase, but the past 2 years of gear changes has been tiring players, so XL believes this is not a good solution. As a result, the dev team planned to change parts of the game that enables small amounts of players from concentrating large amounts of gold.
There are still more to look into, but XL believes their changes seem to help overall. Here are some of XL’s excuses.
To begin with, some categories are excluded from the graph such as gold gained from Castles or gold gained from quests, because those numbers were rather minuscule.
In fact, the 3 largest contributors of gold generation are trade runs, coin purses, quests (large to small in order) and the 3 largest contributors of gold consume are gear synth, auction house tax, and shop purchases (large to small in order). In May, trade runs and gear synth took 65% and 63% in their respective gold generation and gold consume. After July’s patch they got reduced to 55% and 53% respectively.
Especially the reducing the difficulty of gearing up helped ease players gearing up, but this leading more players to gear up increased the overall gold spending in gear progression and XL considers this a positive for the economy. Of course this also reduced gold generated by trade runs by 8%.
Below is the graph to visualize the change of gold spending per category during the following 3 months.
Since a lot the players were worried about coin purses affecting the inflation the dev team have also been keeping a close eye on the numbers, but the actual amount of gold generated by opening coin purses is rather less than the loss of gold generated by trade runs and the gold generated from coin purses tend to be spent towards gear progression more than other types of gold generations. As a result, XL doesn’t think there’s much to worry about yet.
Since the changes aren’t fully set stable in the game yet and more observation is required, XL says there’s some close investigation required to make sure if all problems are addressed.
Siege Weapons
The changes made in Castle siege in August adds a variety of siege weapons. Players have been able to modify their vehicles in many ways. On the other hand, castle sieges had limited types of weapons which caused strategies to be rather simple. This improvement by utilizing vehicle modifications in various applications is thought to improve castle sieges.
Changes in Castle Siege
- Participants that have the Siege Weapon Vehicle ticket can spawn said vehicle and a tank the player owns.
- If the player does not own a siege weapon that can be used, the player can just use the default provided weapon instead.
- Added a range shock shot skill on the flamethrower. (Probably stuns?)
Mechanoid Worm Siege Unit
The Magical Lands mechanoid chasing event now gives the Mechanoid Worm shown above. This giant mount has powerful siege damage and skills that are helpful in mass RvR. But instead of using its mana, it consumes its own health. Due to its strategic importance, it requires good care while using the mount.
This mechanoid worm mount and be obtained from the chasing event and can also be summoned during castle siege.
Naval Arena Season 3
The naval arena is back for season 3. Like before this will last for a month and players will be able to enjoy a unique experience.
Changes on the Clipper
In Season 2, the game play heavily focused on obtaining the newly added bat mobile clipper so other parts of the game were rather neglected. XL thought that the bat mobile clipper made the arena too RNG based, so in season 3, the it will not be in the arena.
The bat mobile clipper had some weaknesses, but it was able to simplify the arena’s complicated clipper progression. All players needed to do were to get chests and RNG spawn the bat mobile clipper. To keep the advantages of this boat progression method, XL will make the battle clippers improve by getting exp. Based on the amount of exp, it will gain certain types of improvements. This might over simplify the game play, so XL aims to buff the special abilities so that it would prevent the combat from becoming to dull.
Summary of the Changes:
- Can gain exp by collective supplies.
- Based on the grade of the supply, the amount of obtainable exp changes.
- If the clipper’s level increases, 1 out of 3 stats gets improved.
- If you obtain the rare supply chest, you can use one of the special abilities.
- The special ability can be used again when the cooldown is over. (Probably will need to loot another rare supply chest.)
- The higher the grade of the supply chest, the more special abilities available.
- Reduced the amount of minimum required players to 20.
(Easier to rig. Sigh)
Rewards
If you loot the fortune chests that spawn randomly in the zone, you can get even more gold. Compared to last season, this season will have more rewards. Also, players will be able to obtain a timed bat mobile clipper as the navel arena.
Ancestral Skills
This time 8 new Ancestral skills have been added. These new ancestral skills aim to counter powerful dps classes in small scale pvp situations. (KR players have been saying this is a anti melee counter change.) It requires an activation prior to being able to use the skill (Like Death Vengeance), so it’s utility will be different, but the skills have powerful damage, debuff reduction effects. Check the tool tips below for detailed explanations.
Future Plans
The following changes are what the dev team is preparing to release during from September to December. The big update Winter patch will be rolling out on December and January, but XL’s plan is to only reveal information from December’s patch as January’s patch note might be a spoiler. The following contents don’t have a set release date since it is still actively being developed.
Leave comments on the various communities we have and XL will take them in consider. Yeah sure…
New Vehicle Modifications
Like previously discussed, XL is prepping the following changes:
The Rampage series will now be able to have vehicle mods installed and the Timber Coupe series will now have an extra slot available for vehicle mods. Check the following image to guess what would be the Rampage’s real modification?
Quality of Life Improvements
Here are the following QoL improvements the XL is planning to add.
- Expanding the number of Skill savers.
- Expanding the number of Skill slots.
- Micro sized housing. (Maybe 8×8 sized houses?)
- Will be able to change faction respawn locations. (Massive for Sungold PvP and such)
New Golden Plains Map
Golden Plains was a great content because it lets users enjoy massive RvR without requirements. Actually its just for 1k labor lets be real. But this content can be boring if it repeats too much. As a result, XL is aiming to add a new map with the same rules to let players play the Golden Plains instance in a different terrain.
New Aurorian Housing and Trade Runs
Archeage always had issues with the lack of housing. Because Housing is a base for most types of production, to have more players engaged in productions the game needs to have more housing. XL is planning to improve some areas so that they can become housing zones instead and are aiming to add trade runs in Auroria.
Micro housing will help players utilize House Fairies. XL believes these two changes will help lessen housing problems. XL also discussing how to reduce the initial housing rush issue.
New Skill Class “Insanity” and Guns
Like previous stream’s announcement, September will have more information available for the new class and weapon type which will be released at the end of the year. XL is working hard as the new class is highly anticipated by the users.
Conclusion
There weren’t really any separate notifications for the recent unstable server, but XL is doing its best to improve the stability through weekly updates. The dev team is highly prioritizing lag and disconnect issues.
There’s a server merge that happened in Korea that merges 3 servers into one and they are starting a huge event for it.
Like previous events where you can gain labor, this even lets players get up to 10 labor chargers per day. Holy shit. However, this item has a time limit, so do your best to use all these before they expire.
D_Pain's Lazy Archeage Translations 