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I kind of feel sad for Trion
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
I kind of feel sad for Trion, since most of the problems with this game isnt really their fault. They Published the game of course but it was a failure before coming to the West.
it had a lot of hype which is likely why Trion jumped on the bandwagon to support the game. But the game flopped in the east hard, and Trion was pretty much forced to try to nickle/dime as much of their invested money back out the Western Release before the Western version flops.
I know I may be coming off as defending them, but thats only because I am looking at the current situation from all sides here.
Lets be honest here, ArcheAge was one of the biggest hyped up MMOs for a few years now in the West that is. Even though it was a East built MMO.
Most of the Development for ArcheAge is in the Eastern Developer's hand. This isnt Rift people. Trion had control of Rift. Not so much here.
like I said before, it just seems like Trion is trying to get their bad investment back before the Western Version flops like the Eastern counterpart has already done.
I believe the game in the west could have been a lot better if Trion had full control, and more financial support and stability from the ArcheAge community in the West, that they would feel comfortable investing deeper into the game and making bigger changes to separate the Western and Eastern version of ArcheAge's development into different directions.
again, lets be honest with ourselves for once. Western MMO gamers and Eastern MMO gamers have different taste. No point sticking to one Development over all versions. Agreed?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
Too early to tell if it will be a bad investment for Trion, they may make money hand over fist.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
If you equate "failing" to actual sunsetting, then very few MMOs actually fail. But very few MMOs are so bad/underplayed, that to keep a skeleton crew on staff to service it, it's a red mark for the company. And even then, lots of big studios will keep a revenue red MMO on the market because "sunsetting" it is a humilation that impacts consumer perception of said company and, they feel, would cost them more.
The reality of the situation is that failing is equated to underachieving. And in that respect, very few MMOs *don't* fail. IMHO, the best way to show failure is for an MMO to peak on Day 1. Games like AOC, TESO, Wildstar - and yes, Archeage - and many others who will never have more player than they had on the first day... that's a failure of an MMO.
Games that have shown steady growth over the average life expectancy of an MMO (3-4 years), like EVE and WoW, are both examples of successes in their own relative ways.
I feel bad for Trion too, and wince every time there's a very public failure to handle issues that crop up. They are - mostly unfairly - getting a lot of bad press for things beyond their control. But it does seem to point to a lack of planning or due diligence or something else, since the problems have been so predictable and so huge.
What are you playing atm? For the past year you've been doing a lot of hating of everything and not much praising of anything. Have you given up hope on the genre?
With the heavy hype and marketing a lot of games these days get it is inevitable that the launch draws a lot of attention. This leads to a lot of players checking the game out but many do not stay. EVE launched sometime ago and I betaed it but did not buy it and it grew slowly and I have no idea how many players played in the beginning. If you start small then grew then yes that is a good litmus but the only litmus that matters is whether the game is making money.
If a game is making money it is a success and this yardstick is the only factor companies look to. As players we may wax poetic on what is a success but the bottom line is the bottom line.
Much like WoW, Eve came about in a different time. We will have to see if ESO can climb back to life that at the moment is the closest to Eve's resurgence from its start. As for AA...not sure ESO has a built in audience to prop it up...I have a feeling AA has a group that will jump to the next game that offers similar ideas to AA.
They agreed to become the NA & European publisher for a notorious Korean game simply as a financial decision. It's not like they are bringing us AA out of the goodness of their heart, love of the genre nor any other high-minded reason fans tend to ascribe to the MMO developers they like.
They are getting dumped on for a lot for things that are really XL's fault, this is true. But like I said in another thread, what did they expect? they're lying in the bed they made when they agreed to be the middle men.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I can't feel bad for them, they saw dollar signs from the cash shop, and everything else became tertiary at best. Whether it was dealing with bots, double charging people accounts, denying people refunds, or reneging on their 10% discount. They got greedy, they arent the same company that they were when Rift launched that is for sure.
You reap what you sow.
Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Trion actually pulled a decent profit for this fiasco. When a company institutes whaling practices for an MMO, they generally do so knowing that it's going to "fail" in terms of lifespan, which is fine as long as it's a success in terms of profit.
If anything, at the very least I imagine they made a pretty penny from all those founders packs. For all we know, maybe they got Archeage at a bargain cost due to how badly it's failing in other regions, sold a ton of founders packs for a game they knew wouldn't do well in the long term, spent VERY little on servers (there are so few!) and very little on combatting hackers, and now are going to have a very VERY nice ham for Christmas due to how much revenue they made for such a cheap cost.
Maybe. Obviously without any financial data, I can only speculate. Maybe they failed horribly and we can expect lots of layoffs. I'd be kinda surprised if that were the case though.
At any rate, it's hard to feel sad for someone when you don't even know if they made a lot of money or not. And that's even before you try to think about other things like whether or not it's their fault and whether or not they were being greedy.
I wouldnt be surprised if they made off like bandits. Their strategy was brilliant, sell the game on the idea of exclusivity of owning land, then after youve sold tons of copies open two more servers and sell new packs that were better than the founders. Shady, but brilliant.
I love how peeps are already stating AA failed as if it was a fact. The only fact is that too many are basing their opinions on popular opinion. Unless you are actively playing in either RU or KR CURRENTLY, you know nothing of if it failed or not. What is "failed" based on? My experience from playing nearly a year in KR was not failure at all. Population did drop but the game was still active.
Those dooming NA AA based on the perceived failure in other countries is completely ridiculous because AA is currently hugely popular and servers are jam packed. So the current reality doesn't support failure at all unless you solely base your opinion on the vocal minority while the rest of us are perfectly happy IN-GAME.
Even more so, if you look at the majority of the complaints about the game, rarely is the game itself what is being criticized but rather technical issues, payment model, lack of housing (don't even get me started on that one), labor system (lack of understanding/dead horse), or cash shop. In fact, the popular opinion is that AA is a great game but the "other issues" are what it is struggling with. What does that all mean? It means, that what the majority are actually complaining about are things that are very fixable. So everyone is making long term accusations and decisions based on short term problems.
In reality I don't feel bad for Trion but rather those who are jumping ship this early. Get back to me in a year and tell me how much money you spent MMO hopping while still not finding a long term home. I would rather play AA given all it's issues than be left playing the alternatives.
/rant off
Well I havnt been hating on anything, and I dont praise anybody else's MMO games. So no idea what you talking about. Show me proof that I been hating....
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I see tons of mentions in posts how bad the PvE (exploitable, boring, generic, for example) and PvP (too CC based, over too fast, too numbers based with little emphasis on tactics, etc) are. They just tend to be ignored because the posts also tend to mention the labor point system leading to yet another huge debate on what's pay-to-win and what isn't. Well, that and perhaps even AA fans don't seem to care to bother defending the PvE and PvP gameplay in most cases.
No.
Archeage was a SUCCESS in Japan where it had far more players than anywhere else, not even the Russian F2P release had more players than AA had in Japan when it was a sub only game. The F2P conversion killed it and they killed it by making it FOR WESTERN F2P players.
You kept saying Trion had no hand in it, yet Trion was in constant talks with XLGames during the conversion and as they said themselves, made sure they were allowed to make changes that would FIT Trion's store and non-P2W ways of doing business. What Trion has isn't that different from the other markets, and the reason is due to XL NEEDING Trion to release it in the west. so their conversion to F2P was heavily based on Trions input.
XL did what they did, threw their Eastern players under the bus, to make the game more compatible to Western players.
Lastly, the botting issue was not a new issue, it was a known issue long before Trion even announced that they were actually going to port the game over and during all that time Trion did nothing to get XL to get it under control NOR did they take the steps they are taking today (according to Trion they are using their own heuristics now), while they were testing the game in Alpha/Beta. They sat back and did nothing...didn't even take the short amount of time to change the chat script to limit the amount of lines and text so spammers couldn't do 12+ line texts to take up everyones screen.
Long time known issues. And yeah, Trion could do something about it because GameOn did it for AA themselves. Not once while playing the Japanese version (started a little before the F2P conversion) did I ever see a spam that took up the entire chat screen...and while people staying at the training dummies was an issue after the F2P changes, bots were not to be seen.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Pretty sure Trion doesn't feel bad for Trion.
You probably shouldn't either.
Sadly these days this behavior seems to be the ground state for the majority of users here at MMORPG. It seems instead of a place where everyone gets together to discuss games they are playing or awaiting, they only come here spitting and snarling like a visigoth over their latest MMORPG disappointment. These are sad days, this site, well at least these forums, seem to have become the elephants graveyard for MMO vets, the place where the joy of playing MMOs comes to die.
Oh well, c'est la vie. While I can honestly say that AA is a game with many flaws, and the launch was horrible, surprisingly the game has grown on me and I'm actually enjoying myself. And even on the newer servers the population seems to be thriving. So currently rumors of AA's death seem to be greatly exaggerated. However if it makes you feel better to pretend otherwise, please yourself.
Oh well whatever. If those of you here that hate this game can think of nothing more constructive to do then to come here and inflict this continuous negativity on your selves over a simple bit of frivolous entertainment, have at it, its your life. And frankly, your mental health. I however no longer see any percentage sharing this pointless and self imposed hell with you.
"Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once and awhile you could miss it."
lol so true, it's just such a echo chamber of negativity, and if you dare enjoy it and say so you are accused of being a shill. The most enthusiastic 'critcisers' of the title admit that they haven't played enough to get out of the teens, and yet they talk everything about the game down. Elements of play that they know nothing about and have had no experience of.
And then they will dismiss someone's view that does play as being simple 'honeymoon' or 'shilling', even though that person is speaking from 3+ months of experience.
This is what happens here though, the negative drags the positive down and drives them out, pretty much endorsed and supported, and then the negative points to the rest of their herd and says, "look, it's bad, everyone agrees".
Thus, the echo chamber is created and misinformed and faulty points of views are reinforced in a loop of bad received wisdom.
I understand and share your other sentiments here as well to be frank.
This game is FAR from a 'fail' here in the West at this point. It's part of the juvenile culture that exists here to even be saying that at this point. Servers are alive and thriving, and it's only the usual 1-4 week F2P MMORPG tourist that has left, but you get this with every modern launch. Those guys only really DL games these days in order to find flaws to have something to post about.
AA did have a terrible launch, and it will always be a niche game, but those calling 'fail' when the game is clearly doing so well (clearly to those on the servers and part of the community) right now are pretty ridiculous.
AA is a sinking ship? Exodus of sub players occurring? That's great news! Maybe now more of my guildies can lay down some property finally. Unfortunately, on Aranzeb there is still a group of 10-20 people that hover around every property that is about to bust at about any time of day. The original batch of servers and many of the new ones are at heavy status starting around 3-5 PM PST, often times dipping into a queue. No clue how long the queues are, I sub (Only about ~30 people back for me usually). This is AFTER Trion reluctantly opened new servers a couple at a time. Logging in on those days was like pulling teeth. If Trion had stuck with their original number of servers (what was it, 5 originally instead of the... 9 now?) I would imagine all servers would be at queue status a large part of the day.
Is Trion facing an uphill battle, communicating and trying to work with a parent/partner company that has a different language and culture and is halfway around the globe? Yeah, that's gonna be tough. They also underestimated the abilities of their marketing team and the size and voraciousness of the western player base. I would hate to be on their QA/Customer Service team. Yeah, they and XL have fumbled on many points throughout launch and into the first months, and continuing to work together and give Trion the freedom it needs to make Western players happy while keeping papa XL happy will continue to be a struggle, but I wouldn't worry too much in the short run on the revenue streams of these companies. Let's reconvene in a year and look at the state of the game, then maybe we'll have something to talk about
Trion is doing just fine and AA is in fact a blessing for them after their financial difficulties in recent years.
They get a hugely overhyped game, sell $150 early access for months and months then change the game into a massive P2W scheme right before launch. They were even so greedy that they were going to add 4 hour labor pots but were forced to pull back due to massive outrage.
All they care about is extracting as much money as possible out of the initial launch hype. Its not their game so they don't care if it dies which it most certainly will in a month or two when people are demanding server merges. They already sold out their integrity when they made Rift P2W.
They knew the game was going to suck which is why it didn't even bother with the subscription model before going F2P which is the norm. The best thing for them is that they get to say sorry its all XL Games' fault we are only the publisher.
They don't care about hackers, land, class balance, OP gear, server lag or anything. They just want to get as much cash as possible from the Whales during the first few months of launch hype.
I think you both just care too much about what others say.. People aren't out to get trion, people are here sharing views on the new game that launched, I don't think the game failed, don't think the game is awful, nor do I see it as something I wouldn't play. Yet you lumped me in with this category of poster yesterday... Simply because I shared a thought on FFA PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
funny all problems are trion fault not the devs, holding back auroria till day 4, made us use the lvl 55 skills tree when we are still capped on lvl 50, never cared to stop bots and hacks who did happen during alpha, didn't limit the land grab per account since most people who get land to sell did it using the land grab hacks, takes too long to ban bots, plus the bots are always in the same places, didn't ban the gold buyers just did a hand slap and take they gold, they head start was bad performed for they lack of preparation, "normalization" of the mounts stupid change on some skills who prevent you for using combos, archeum dust,shards, crystals still are on a crap drop rate, amking crafting really bad, forcing everyone to do hasla weapon farm then rush for GHA for armor.
serious do I need to continue?
I don't see it that way, all Trion has to do is keep doing what they're doing, fighting for changes, banning cheaters/botters/spammers, as well as keep the servers up. No reason to grossly exaggerate typical launch problems..
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson