Labour an expanded look- Good and bad

DeserttFoxx · July 2014

I have been reading a lot of threads on these subjects and i feel that, while some of us have clearly drawn our line in the sand declaring whether or not we are for the current system, or against it. I feel others have taken their stand without fully understanding what the actual situation is.

Those who are for it, seem to be for it because they think the labour gains and expenditures are perfectly balanced, which they are not, and those who are against it, think the problem lies with the labour resource as a whole which it does not. So what i want to do with this thread is, explain labour, patron, and the few items in the cash shop that seem pay to win, what is good and necessary about these features and what hurts the game as a whole.

Labour Points.

Labour is a good thing. I know some people think it should be fully removed because it is some sort of overarching feature that is the foundation of Archage's pay to win, but it is not.

Labour first and foremost function is to act as a control for the economy. Because of the games sandbox elements, this system is necessary. Labour will not only control how many materials will enter into the game space, but control of often high end items, vehicles and buildings are created as well. It can not be removed from the game as some members of the community have asked for, because without it, there is no stopping top guilds from flooding both the economy and the battlefield with the best ships, items and vehicles. Without labour the existence of these items would simply be, cheapened.

Side note - It has a minimal affect on gold farmers. There is nothing stopping them from making numerous free accounts and leaving them all online at once slowly gaining labour, and we don't know their margins. There is nothing to state it wouldn't be fiscally prudent for them to buy patron status along with labour potions to kick start their control of the economy. The only truth is, they will find a way, you just have to wait and see how.

The current labour Problem

The things that require labour dont make sense.

Here is a list of the current things in game that require labour:

Quest rewards

Coin Purses

Treasure chests

Recovering lost Death Experience

Gathering Materials

Farming

Crafting Weapons

Crafting Armor

Crafting Vehicles

Identifying found Gear

As you can see by that list, a large portion of the game is controlled by labour, and because of this can be seen as being behind a pay wall.

Now, Crafting Weapons, Armor, and Vehicles along with gathering, and farming these costing labour makes perfect sense. It ties into what i mentioned in the beginning, you need to control the economy. Slowing down how many of these items can be created into the game world is very important.

Here is the problem: Quest rewards, Coin Purses, Identifying found gear and treasure chests costing labour.

Quest rewards: As you may or may not know, quest rewards come in these boxes, you open the boxes and your inventory is then injected with usually 3 to 6 items, which all need to be identified before they can be used. Now what makes this cool is, sometimes you identify and you can get a Blue quest reward, ive never gotten anything higher then blue and i am not sure if you can, but at the very least, it is going to be green.

Problem is, labour has been given an extremely high value, whether you value it in real money, in game gold or real time spent, labour is expensive. So why are you paying to receive your rewards from doing a quest?

Now i wasnt in the game for 1.0 But from what i understand this is a feature that came from version 1.2. This is a purely toxic addition into the game. It adds very little value to gameplay for the player with the option to get blue or higher quest rewards, and only seems to positively benefits Trion/XL Games. The more reasons to spend labour the more opportunity to get hardcore players to buy labour potions. That is it. There is no other reason besides that to have quest rewards handed out in this fashion.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you do not understand the difference between being a patron and a free to play player, there are different regeneration rates. 10/5 if you are a patron, 5/0 if you are not, i will explain the pros and cons and why this isn't necessarily a bad thing later, all you need to know now is:

Patron after 1 hour of play = 120 labour points

Free to Play after 1 hour of play = 60 labour points.

It currently costs 1 to 5 labor to identify an item. Which is fine when you have an idea of what the heck you plan on doing with your character, if you get a sword you will open that up, you get a staff and you're into casting magic you will crack that open, but that's where it ends. If you dont know the pros and cons of a greatsword or nodachi maybe you will open both of them and mess around, maybe you want to duel wield, but turns out you dont like that, so time to go bow. Point is, people might want to mess around, which becomes problematic when you have to spend labour on every one of these items. before you know it, you can spend 5 to 50 labor points just experimenting with weapons you've gotten as quest rewards. Armor is the same deal, except armor gives you a full set of gear, so now you're opening up 6 or 7 pieces all at once, you just spend 6 to 30 labour in the blink of an eye.

I promise you this, if you know what you are doing you can hit level 15 in under an hour, and by know what you are doing i mean you are experienced enough with the simple quest grinding early game to follow the track laid out for you. You will get in a situation where you have more items than labour to work with to identify said items.

Proposed Solution: When you complete that first quest chain and it gives you that weapon box with one of each weapon, would there be anything game breaking about removing that box, and just letting players choose which weapon they want to use? Same goes for the armor, doing the traditional one of each armor piece (plate/leather/cloth) as a reward as you move through the quest chain until you finish it all and get a complete set would work perfectly fine.

Coin Purses: As you may or may not know, Archage has no loot. No weapons drop, no armor drops, no gear drops, not even great loot or money drops. No what you get are these coin purses, they have silly names and stack up quite nice in your bag but at the end of the day, they are just another labour pit, an unnecessary change introduced in patch 1.2. Coin purses cost anywhere from 1 to a whopping 20 or more labour points to open, and all trash loot and coin has been put into these bags. When you kill over world or dungeon mob they have a small chance to drop gear (from what i am told, i have never witnessed this miracle myself) and one of these bags. From which you usually get is a small amount of gold, and rarely you will get an item known as Archeum dust.

Now for those of you who dont know, Archeum dust is a very important material, some people like to say they are supposed to be rare materials, we would call those people idiots. If you look through the weapon/armor and jewelry crafting recipes you will see that these dusts are required in a small quantity for every one of those recipes from level 20 right to level 50. This is not supposed to be a rare material, it is a controlled material sure, but not rare.

Before the patch, Archeum powders/shards/crystals were obtained from killing over world monsters and salvaging the random gear they dropped, farming dungeons and salvaging the gear found there, or fishing waterlogged boxes. You can no longer get Archeum powders/shards/crystals from random monsters unless you find them in one of these coin purses, you can no longer fish up waterlogged boxes, and you can no longer salvage dungeon gear.

So with the change to quest rewards and the addition of coin purses, Trion/XL Games have introduces 2 crippling mechanics to the game world that do nothing to better the enjoyment of the game. The do however, introduce more opportunities for the players to spend labour, which in turn, provides more reasons to buy that handy labour potion.

Proposed Solution: This should be obvious, revert this all together, drop coin purses, make mobs drop coin directly, and have them drop gear that needs to be identified with EITHER an item that costs in game gold or labour. Dungeon loot should be salvageable once again, lower the amount of dust retrieved from these methods however, if the goal was to control the dusts introduced in the world, then reducing the amount of dust from salvaging should be as effective.

But it should be reverted because, its fundamental to the RPG experience, forget MMORPG. Killing monsters and taking their spoils is fucking fundamental. This change shouldve never seen the light of day. It is clear it wasnt made by developers who are passionate of about roleplaying games. People get excited when a new shiny items arrives in your bag, people like finding loot, so not only is it necessary for the health of the games crafting, its fun. Its is fun to find new items to use, to sell, or to save for later, it is fun. And this change is anti-fun, its the best way to summarize it.

Treasure chests: Im not a fan of underwater activity, but for those who are, the Treasure hunting was something you could do after you ran out of labor to keep yourself busy, with these being gated behind labour, its not one more thing you cant do without ensuring you have a steady supply of labour coming in - via labour potions.

Proposed Solution: Remove the labour cost, add a gold cost, adjust the items that are found if that was the problem.

Patron Status

What is the value of patron status? Lets take a look:

• Bonus online Labor Point regeneration (10 per 5 minutes)

• Offline Labor Point regeneration (5 per 5 minutes)

• Increased maximum Labor Points cap (5000 maximum)

The game isnt playable on an enjoyable level without the above.

• 10% bonus to all Experience gained through combat or labor usage

I could not care less about 10% bonus experience, its nothing, it wont be noticeable at all, and well it shouldn't be, its a perma buff.

• 10% discount on Marketplace purchases (available after launch)

How many purchases a month do i need to make with real money to offset that 15 dollar investment for that 10% discount?

• 5 Loyalty Tokens per day for use in the Loyalty Store (awarded on first login of the day)

Going to have to step up that items in this shop if you want this to be an actual perk, as it stands now, those Daru chests are garbage.

• Ability to claim land by placing farms and houses

• Ability to pay in-game taxes on owned property

This is one of the bread and butter features of the game right? I guess patron for this major feature makes sense, thats a nice perk.

• Ability to post auctions on the Auction House by default

The only one of these that is actually a perk.

The first third of the patron could realistically be labeled as "MUST HAVE". If you plan on playing Archage in a serious fashion, you simply cannot do so without 5000 Labour cap, and 5 offline regen - So if you decided youre going to play this game for real, you just paid $15 for these alone, not because you want to, but because you have to, period.

Now if you are currently an on the fence free to play player, and you like any of the above features just pay for the sub from now and get it over with. Of course you have another option..

APEX... CREDD...CHRONOSCROLLS... a turd by any other name is still a turd. I personally hate, these gold for sub items. Why is this here? Cash shop is already in game, if people want the features that come with the sub, pay the damn sub. The only function these item serve is for people to pay their subs with real money, and then add 10 of these on top of it so they can gain a huge influx of in game currency to go with it. IT IS THE VERY DEFINITION of pay to win. And it fucks with the economy in every game it exists within. If youre going to do this, why fuck around, just add the ability to convert gold into credits like every other pay to win game and be done with it. But lets not pretend this is not a pay to win feature. Ive played pay to play MMOs with people who are willing to spend $2000 a week on the game just to keep themselves and their guild on top, APEX adds nothing positive to the game. NOTHING.

Online vs Offline: Now for those who want to stay free to play, but are highly discouraged by the fact that you get a measly 5 labour per 5, i feel your pain, but here is the reality. You cant ever, i mean NEVER give free to play accounts offline labour regeneration.

But why? Ill tell you why, it would be exploited to high hell. I cant speak for everyone, but i can tell you what i would do, if they gave free to play accounts 5 offline regeneration i would make 10 separate accounts, level one character to 15 on every one of them and then log off for 83 hours. And then nurse them like a labour garden as i use them to simply gather materials to funny to my main. And im lazy. Imagine what gold farmers would do with that much passive labour. At least if gold farmers decide to do it they will be paying trion monthly for the opportunity.

I think changing quest rewards and coin purses back to 1.0 would significantly alleviate the frustration free to play players have however, and i think that alone would be enough to let you guys enjoy the game at 5 per 5.

The pay to win: There are 2 pay to win items in the cash shop as far as i am concerned.

The labour potion, and the vocation potions. However the obvious problem is the Labour potion. 2k bonus labour a day is nothing to scoff at. Currently, and i am going to assume this is a bug, you can use these potions on all 6 of your characters giving you an additional 12k labour a day. I assume this is a bug because it is obvious pay to win, it is so far beyond pay to win it doesnt even require an explanation as to why this cant remain in game.

As for the potions themselves.. we all knew they were coming, my only change would be to making it 1 potion every 24 hours and leave it at 1000. or, leave it at 12 hours and make it 500. 2000 is to much.

So there you have it, these are the points of contention in the current build, now in my personal opinion, i think if the game released tomorrow with this current iteration it would crash and burn. When you run out of labour, you run out of fun, you basically have 2 option, sit around and wait, or go play something else. Too many activities require labour, and once you run out you have nothing you can actually do in game until you get more. Not a big deal early game when you can still go grind experience and level, but late game, what if you want to do some treasure hunting, or dungeon farming for auxiliary material gathering, all of these activities require labour, so unless you like heavy pvp, the list of things you can do without labour isnt very large.

The other founders might not agree with me, and they dont have to, i already know where i stand. I, and i am sure there are many others, have decided to not spend any more money on this game. I will play it until my patron runs out, and use the credits i have through founders but that is it.

I think some of the hardcore fans are in denial about where the game is at right now, i think the best suggestion i could give is, if you are an Alpha player, and you havent experienced this game from the start as a 1.2 player, do that now, create a character on Omega, or on the beta server, start from scratch as a patron or ftp and see if you find the game in its current state fun to play.

Ezze902 · July 2014

Labour points are life my brotha!

If you want any real claim to the land, its essential! Thats why the cashshop will separate the real dedicated players. The more cash you dedicate the more you will be able to achieve.

Wizardry · July 2014

I will make ONE point because it is missed and should clear everything up.

You the player almost NEVER control the economy and neither do the systems such as labor points.RMT control the economy and until a developer puts in the effort and design to stop it,it will always exist in our games.

If you attempt to slow anything down it puts yet more value on outside buying from rmt.If you allow it to freely flood the market RMT will still undercut to the bare minimum.

I do not believe in a labor point system at all,i believe in a realistic nature of how one would act within a real world.In the real world you would trade your wares to a wholesaler for little value and the wholesaler would in turn mark the price way up.In the real world you would get tired but you would not recover in mere minutes but perhaps need food/drink and a long rest.

Labor points do not mimic realism and is probably why it does look like a p2win design.

I believe a better design would be to allow players to design their players,this would entail REAL customization,not the cheap customization we are used to hearing about.Example a player could have a lot of strength which would also play into heavier carrying capacity.Perhaps better dexterity which aside from combat benefits allows for faster gathering faster crafting.Stamina could be used for more than hp and defense but used to determine how much endurance a player has to craft and recover from battles.Intelligence would be more than a magic buff but could determine how much faster you learn example added xp and allows you to learn more skills and abilities andcrafts and Wisdom aside from a Cleric's heal boost could lower the max xp needed for the next tier of crafting or leveling or learning or skills.

Ezze902 · July 2014

Originally posted by Wizardry
I will make ONE point because it is missed and should clear everything up.

You the player almost NEVER control the economy and neither do the systems such as labor points.RMT control the economy and until a developer puts in the effort and design to stop it,it will always exist in our games.

If you attempt to slow anything down it puts yet more value on outside buying from rmt.If you allow it to freely flood the market RMT will still undercut to the bare minimum.

I do not believe in a labor point system at all,i believe in a realistic nature of how one would act within a real world.In the real world you would trade your wares to a wholesaler for little value and the wholesaler would in turn mark the price way up.In the real world you would get tired but you would not recover in mere minutes but perhaps need food/drink and a long rest.

Labor points do not mimic realism and is probably why it does look like a p2win design.

I believe a better design would be to allow players to design their players,this would entail REAL customization,not the cheap customization we are used to hearing about.Example a player could have a lot of strength which would also play into heavier carrying capacity.Perhaps better dexterity which aside from combat benefits allows for faster gathering faster crafting.Stamina could be used for more than hp and defense but used to determine how much endurance a player has to craft and recover from battles.Intelligence would be more than a magic buff but could determine how much faster you learn example added xp and allows you to learn more skills and abilities andcrafts and Wisdom aside from a Cleric's heal boost could lower the max xp needed for the next tier of crafting or leveling or learning or skills.

Games arent mean to mimic realism, Shesssssssssh! Go play goat simulator.

I feel that major guilds who purchase labour points, will dominate this game. Royalty gaming is gonna be one of the top guilds.

laz3rNach0z · July 2014

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

I have been reading a lot of threads on these subjects and i feel that, while some of us have clearly drawn our line in the sand declaring whether or not we are for the current system, or against it. I feel others have taken their stand without fully understanding what the actual situation is.

Those who are for it, seem to be for it because they think the labour gains and expenditures are perfectly balanced, which they are not, and those who are against it, think the problem lies with the labour resource as a whole which it does not. So what i want to do with this thread is, explain labour, patron, and the few items in the cash shop that seem pay to win, what is good and necessary about these features and what hurts the game as a whole.

Labour Points.

Labour is a good thing. I know some people think it should be fully removed because it is some sort of overarching feature that is the foundation of Archage's pay to win, but it is not.

Labour first and foremost function is to act as a control for the economy. Because of the games sandbox elements, this system is necessary. Labour will not only control how many materials will enter into the game space, but control of often high end items, vehicles and buildings are created as well. It can not be removed from the game as some members of the community have asked for, because without it, there is no stopping top guilds from flooding both the economy and the battlefield with the best ships, items and vehicles. Without labour the existence of these items would simply be, cheapened.

Side note - It has a minimal affect on gold farmers. There is nothing stopping them from making numerous free accounts and leaving them all online at once slowly gaining labour, and we don't know their margins. There is nothing to state it wouldn't be fiscally prudent for them to buy patron status along with labour potions to kick start their control of the economy. The only truth is, they will find a way, you just have to wait and see how.

The current labour Problem

The things that require labour dont make sense.

Here is a list of the current things in game that require labour:

Quest rewards

Coin Purses

Treasure chests

Recovering lost Death Experience

Gathering Materials

Farming

Crafting Weapons

Crafting Armor

Crafting Vehicles

Identifying found Gear

As you can see by that list, a large portion of the game is controlled by labour, and because of this can be seen as being behind a pay wall.

Now, Crafting Weapons, Armor, and Vehicles along with gathering, and farming these costing labour makes perfect sense. It ties into what i mentioned in the beginning, you need to control the economy. Slowing down how many of these items can be created into the game world is very important.

Here is the problem: Quest rewards, Coin Purses, Identifying found gear and treasure chests costing labour.

Quest rewards: As you may or may not know, quest rewards come in these boxes, you open the boxes and your inventory is then injected with usually 3 to 6 items, which all need to be identified before they can be used. Now what makes this cool is, sometimes you identify and you can get a Blue quest reward, ive never gotten anything higher then blue and i am not sure if you can, but at the very least, it is going to be green.

Problem is, labour has been given an extremely high value, whether you value it in real money, in game gold or real time spent, labour is expensive. So why are you paying to receive your rewards from doing a quest?

Now i wasnt in the game for 1.0 But from what i understand this is a feature that came from version 1.2. This is a purely toxic addition into the game. It adds very little value to gameplay for the player with the option to get blue or higher quest rewards, and only seems to positively benefits Trion/XL Games. The more reasons to spend labour the more opportunity to get hardcore players to buy labour potions. That is it. There is no other reason besides that to have quest rewards handed out in this fashion.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you do not understand the difference between being a patron and a free to play player, there are different regeneration rates. 10/5 if you are a patron, 5/0 if you are not, i will explain the pros and cons and why this isn't necessarily a bad thing later, all you need to know now is:

Patron after 1 hour of play = 120 labour points

Free to Play after 1 hour of play = 60 labour points.

It currently costs 1 to 5 labor to identify an item. Which is fine when you have an idea of what the heck you plan on doing with your character, if you get a sword you will open that up, you get a staff and you're into casting magic you will crack that open, but that's where it ends. If you dont know the pros and cons of a greatsword or nodachi maybe you will open both of them and mess around, maybe you want to duel wield, but turns out you dont like that, so time to go bow. Point is, people might want to mess around, which becomes problematic when you have to spend labour on every one of these items. before you know it, you can spend 5 to 50 labor points just experimenting with weapons you've gotten as quest rewards. Armor is the same deal, except armor gives you a full set of gear, so now you're opening up 6 or 7 pieces all at once, you just spend 6 to 30 labour in the blink of an eye.

I promise you this, if you know what you are doing you can hit level 15 in under an hour, and by know what you are doing i mean you are experienced enough with the simple quest grinding early game to follow the track laid out for you. You will get in a situation where you have more items than labour to work with to identify said items.

Proposed Solution: When you complete that first quest chain and it gives you that weapon box with one of each weapon, would there be anything game breaking about removing that box, and just letting players choose which weapon they want to use? Same goes for the armor, doing the traditional one of each armor piece (plate/leather/cloth) as a reward as you move through the quest chain until you finish it all and get a complete set would work perfectly fine.

Coin Purses: As you may or may not know, Archage has no loot. No weapons drop, no armor drops, no gear drops, not even great loot or money drops. No what you get are these coin purses, they have silly names and stack up quite nice in your bag but at the end of the day, they are just another labour pit, an unnecessary change introduced in patch 1.2. Coin purses cost anywhere from 1 to a whopping 20 or more labour points to open, and all trash loot and coin has been put into these bags. When you kill over world or dungeon mob they have a small chance to drop gear (from what i am told, i have never witnessed this miracle myself) and one of these bags. From which you usually get is a small amount of gold, and rarely you will get an item known as Archeum dust.

Now for those of you who dont know, Archeum dust is a very important material, some people like to say they are supposed to be rare materials, we would call those people idiots. If you look through the weapon/armor and jewelry crafting recipes you will see that these dusts are required in a small quantity for every one of those recipes from level 20 right to level 50. This is not supposed to be a rare material, it is a controlled material sure, but not rare.

Before the patch, Archeum powders/shards/crystals were obtained from killing over world monsters and salvaging the random gear they dropped, farming dungeons and salvaging the gear found there, or fishing waterlogged boxes. You can no longer get Archeum powders/shards/crystals from random monsters unless you find them in one of these coin purses, you can no longer fish up waterlogged boxes, and you can no longer salvage dungeon gear.

So with the change to quest rewards and the addition of coin purses, Trion/XL Games have introduces 2 crippling mechanics to the game world that do nothing to better the enjoyment of the game. The do however, introduce more opportunities for the players to spend labour, which in turn, provides more reasons to buy that handy labour potion.

Proposed Solution: This should be obvious, revert this all together, drop coin purses, make mobs drop coin directly, and have them drop gear that needs to be identified with EITHER an item that costs in game gold or labour. Dungeon loot should be salvageable once again, lower the amount of dust retrieved from these methods however, if the goal was to control the dusts introduced in the world, then reducing the amount of dust from salvaging should be as effective.

But it should be reverted because, its fundamental to the RPG experience, forget MMORPG. Killing monsters and taking their spoils is fucking fundamental. This change shouldve never seen the light of day. It is clear it wasnt made by developers who are passionate of about roleplaying games. People get excited when a new shiny items arrives in your bag, people like finding loot, so not only is it necessary for the health of the games crafting, its fun. Its is fun to find new items to use, to sell, or to save for later, it is fun. And this change is anti-fun, its the best way to summarize it.

Treasure chests: Im not a fan of underwater activity, but for those who are, the Treasure hunting was something you could do after you ran out of labor to keep yourself busy, with these being gated behind labour, its not one more thing you cant do without ensuring you have a steady supply of labour coming in - via labour potions.

Proposed Solution: Remove the labour cost, add a gold cost, adjust the items that are found if that was the problem.

Patron Status

What is the value of patron status? Lets take a look:

• Bonus online Labor Point regeneration (10 per 5 minutes)

• Offline Labor Point regeneration (5 per 5 minutes)

• Increased maximum Labor Points cap (5000 maximum)

The game isnt playable on an enjoyable level without the above.

• 10% bonus to all Experience gained through combat or labor usage

I could not care less about 10% bonus experience, its nothing, it wont be noticeable at all, and well it shouldn't be, its a perma buff.

• 10% discount on Marketplace purchases (available after launch)

How many purchases a month do i need to make with real money to offset that 15 dollar investment for that 10% discount?

• 5 Loyalty Tokens per day for use in the Loyalty Store (awarded on first login of the day)

Going to have to step up that items in this shop if you want this to be an actual perk, as it stands now, those Daru chests are garbage.

• Ability to claim land by placing farms and houses

• Ability to pay in-game taxes on owned property

This is one of the bread and butter features of the game right? I guess patron for this major feature makes sense, thats a nice perk.

• Ability to post auctions on the Auction House by default

The only one of these that is actually a perk.

The first third of the patron could realistically be labeled as "MUST HAVE". If you plan on playing Archage in a serious fashion, you simply cannot do so without 5000 Labour cap, and 5 offline regen - So if you decided youre going to play this game for real, you just paid $15 for these alone, not because you want to, but because you have to, period.

Now if you are currently an on the fence free to play player, and you like any of the above features just pay for the sub from now and get it over with. Of course you have another option..

APEX... CREDD...CHRONOSCROLLS... a turd by any other name is still a turd. I personally hate, these gold for sub items. Why is this here? Cash shop is already in game, if people want the features that come with the sub, pay the damn sub. The only function these item serve is for people to pay their subs with real money, and then add 10 of these on top of it so they can gain a huge influx of in game currency to go with it. IT IS THE VERY DEFINITION of pay to win. And it fucks with the economy in every game it exists within. If youre going to do this, why fuck around, just add the ability to convert gold into credits like every other pay to win game and be done with it. But lets not pretend this is not a pay to win feature. Ive played pay to play MMOs with people who are willing to spend $2000 a week on the game just to keep themselves and their guild on top, APEX adds nothing positive to the game. NOTHING.

Online vs Offline: Now for those who want to stay free to play, but are highly discouraged by the fact that you get a measly 5 labour per 5, i feel your pain, but here is the reality. You cant ever, i mean NEVER give free to play accounts offline labour regeneration.

But why? Ill tell you why, it would be exploited to high hell. I cant speak for everyone, but i can tell you what i would do, if they gave free to play accounts 5 offline regeneration i would make 10 separate accounts, level one character to 15 on every one of them and then log off for 83 hours. And then nurse them like a labour garden as i use them to simply gather materials to funny to my main. And im lazy. Imagine what gold farmers would do with that much passive labour. At least if gold farmers decide to do it they will be paying trion monthly for the opportunity.

I think changing quest rewards and coin purses back to 1.0 would significantly alleviate the frustration free to play players have however, and i think that alone would be enough to let you guys enjoy the game at 5 per 5.

The pay to win: There are 2 pay to win items in the cash shop as far as i am concerned.

The labour potion, and the vocation potions. However the obvious problem is the Labour potion. 2k bonus labour a day is nothing to scoff at. Currently, and i am going to assume this is a bug, you can use these potions on all 6 of your characters giving you an additional 12k labour a day. I assume this is a bug because it is obvious pay to win, it is so far beyond pay to win it doesnt even require an explanation as to why this cant remain in game.

As for the potions themselves.. we all knew they were coming, my only change would be to making it 1 potion every 24 hours and leave it at 1000. or, leave it at 12 hours and make it 500. 2000 is to much.

So there you have it, these are the points of contention in the current build, now in my personal opinion, i think if the game released tomorrow with this current iteration it would crash and burn. When you run out of labour, you run out of fun, you basically have 2 option, sit around and wait, or go play something else. Too many activities require labour, and once you run out you have nothing you can actually do in game until you get more. Not a big deal early game when you can still go grind experience and level, but late game, what if you want to do some treasure hunting, or dungeon farming for auxiliary material gathering, all of these activities require labour, so unless you like heavy pvp, the list of things you can do without labour isnt very large.

The other founders might not agree with me, and they dont have to, i already know where i stand. I, and i am sure there are many others, have decided to not spend any more money on this game. I will play it until my patron runs out, and use the credits i have through founders but that is it.

I think some of the hardcore fans are in denial about where the game is at right now, i think the best suggestion i could give is, if you are an Alpha player, and you havent experienced this game from the start as a 1.2 player, do that now, create a character on Omega, or on the beta server, start from scratch as a patron or ftp and see if you find the game in its current state fun to play.

nah man its all becaus viable and stuff

Mavolence · July 2014

OP, I respect your opinion and your explanation. I however disagree and would prefer no labor point system and instead use item decay until the item is gone from the world or item decay requiring the mats used to craft the item to repair until you can use it again. I despise the labor point system in every way and since my start playing mmorpgs with UO it is the single worst crafting mechanic i have ever seen in an mmorpg to date to actually limit how much im allowed to do in a day of playing with an artificial cap on crafting. Unreal. That said i played the alpha(and also the korean servers) and quit not just because of the labor point system but a bunch of other reasons in addition so i guess i don't really care one way or the other anymore even if they changed the labor point system which for a long time in aa source,here, and the trion official forums i have been trying to advocate but nothing of course will ever change so I've given up. I wouldn't come back anyways i think AA is not for me it is for someone else i've found. Cheers.

SpottyGekko · July 2014

To me it's quite simple really. Five days a week I'll most probably play 4 hours a day max, so:

Patron playing 4 hrs a day = 1680 LP per day

F2P playing 4 hrs a day = 240 LP per day

There's absolutely no comparison. At higher levels (L30+), that F2P player might not have enough LP to open all their trash loot "purses" every day, let alone anything else. The cost of opening loot drops increases with level, the hourly LP rate does not.

This situation means that the only 'viable" occupation for a non-Patron is to be a bandit and prey on the "landed gentry" who'll have all the money and goods. In fact, I seem to remember that piracy became so bad in AA after the Korean launch that the substantial changes had to be made.

And of course, this game design is something the goldsellers have wet dreams about. AA has fantastic potential for RMT, so I expect they'll be putting a huge amount of effort into it. If the goldsellers are already highly active in the ALPHA (!) phase, I shudder to think how bad it will be after launch...

phumbaba · July 2014

Originally posted by Mavolence
OP, I respect your opinion and your explanation. I however disagree and would prefer no labor point system and instead use item decay until the item is gone from the world or item decay requiring the mats used to craft the item to repair until you can use it again. I despise the labor point system in every way and since my start playing mmorpgs with UO it is the single worst crafting mechanic i have ever seen in an mmorpg to date to actually limit how much im allowed to do in a day of playing with an artificial cap on crafting. Unreal. That said i played the alpha(and also the korean servers) and quit not just because of the labor point system but a bunch of other reasons in addition so i guess i don't really care one way or the other anymore even if they changed the labor point system which for a long time in aa source,here, and the trion official forums i have been trying to advocate but nothing of course will ever change so I've given up. I wouldn't come back anyways i think AA is not for me it is for someone else i've found. Cheers.

Good post and I hope you find a better game. To combat mudflation, there are many ways to increase item demand and in my opinion many of those would have most likely been better solutions over all than what could possibly be achieved with a supply side restriction system that the LP system is. The current implementation in AA is not attractive at all.

There are certainly better ways to implement such restrictions, but I do wonder if the tradeoff compared to increased demand could even possibly be worth it..

Jackdog · July 2014

I am pretty much a diehard fan of the game itself, but the non fluff items in the cash shop have to go away. at almost 4 dollars a LP pot only ones who will be buying those LP pots are gold farmers. Unless those damn things are taken out I will be one sad hillbilly knowing I dropped 150 bucks for a pay to win game. Trion promised only fluff in the cash shop, but then so did teh LoTRO devs.

The genre is dead folks, stick a fork in it. Nothing left now but dumbed down WoW wannabes and pay to win pieces of shit out there. Take up chess, it is the only clean and challenging game left

Myrdynn · July 2014

just stay logged in, I had 2000 LP's by early saturday morning

Ezze902 · July 2014

Originally posted by Myrdynn
just stay logged in, I had 2000 LP's by early saturday morning

Your electricity bill worth it?

Jackdog · July 2014

Originally posted by Myrdynn
just stay logged in, I had 2000 LP's by early saturday morning

go mining for an hour. 5 LP goes away every node, 15 if it is a bonus node. Then another 5 to turn 3 ore into an ingot or 3 stone into a brick. You can easily mine 5 nodes a minute. I can burn up 2000 LP in less than an hour just mining and refining. even better craft a set of level 50 armor and see how much it costs you

Don't despair though if you need more just log into the cash shop. You can buy another 12,000 LP a day for around $45. I can just see me telling my wife I spent $500 bucks cause I needed to craft some armor for my guildies. She will understand don't ya think ?

xAPOCx · July 2014

Originally posted by Ezze902
Labour points are life my brotha!

If you want any real claim to the land, its essential! Thats why the cashshop will separate the real dedicated players. The more cash you dedicate the more you will be able to achieve.

This statement is wrong. Its not the MORE you will achieve. You'll just achieve it faster. F2P and Payers can all achieve that same things. Just at a different pace.

Starbuck1771 · July 2014

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

I have been reading a lot of threads on these subjects and i feel that, while some of us have clearly drawn our line in the sand declaring whether or not we are for the current system, or against it. I feel others have taken their stand without fully understanding what the actual situation is.

Those who are for it, seem to be for it because they think the labour gains and expenditures are perfectly balanced, which they are not, and those who are against it, think the problem lies with the labour resource as a whole which it does not. So what i want to do with this thread is, explain labour, patron, and the few items in the cash shop that seem pay to win, what is good and necessary about these features and what hurts the game as a whole.

Labour Points.

Labour is a good thing. I know some people think it should be fully removed because it is some sort of overarching feature that is the foundation of Archage's pay to win, but it is not.

Labour first and foremost function is to act as a control for the economy. Because of the games sandbox elements, this system is necessary. Labour will not only control how many materials will enter into the game space, but control of often high end items, vehicles and buildings are created as well. It can not be removed from the game as some members of the community have asked for, because without it, there is no stopping top guilds from flooding both the economy and the battlefield with the best ships, items and vehicles. Without labour the existence of these items would simply be, cheapened.

Side note - It has a minimal affect on gold farmers. There is nothing stopping them from making numerous free accounts and leaving them all online at once slowly gaining labour, and we don't know their margins. There is nothing to state it wouldn't be fiscally prudent for them to buy patron status along with labour potions to kick start their control of the economy. The only truth is, they will find a way, you just have to wait and see how.

The current labour Problem

The things that require labour dont make sense.

Here is a list of the current things in game that require labour:

Quest rewards

Coin Purses

Treasure chests

Recovering lost Death Experience

Gathering Materials

Farming

Crafting Weapons

Crafting Armor

Crafting Vehicles

Identifying found Gear

As you can see by that list, a large portion of the game is controlled by labour, and because of this can be seen as being behind a pay wall.

Now, Crafting Weapons, Armor, and Vehicles along with gathering, and farming these costing labour makes perfect sense. It ties into what i mentioned in the beginning, you need to control the economy. Slowing down how many of these items can be created into the game world is very important.

Here is the problem: Quest rewards, Coin Purses, Identifying found gear and treasure chests costing labour.

Quest rewards: As you may or may not know, quest rewards come in these boxes, you open the boxes and your inventory is then injected with usually 3 to 6 items, which all need to be identified before they can be used. Now what makes this cool is, sometimes you identify and you can get a Blue quest reward, ive never gotten anything higher then blue and i am not sure if you can, but at the very least, it is going to be green.

Problem is, labour has been given an extremely high value, whether you value it in real money, in game gold or real time spent, labour is expensive. So why are you paying to receive your rewards from doing a quest?

Now i wasnt in the game for 1.0 But from what i understand this is a feature that came from version 1.2. This is a purely toxic addition into the game. It adds very little value to gameplay for the player with the option to get blue or higher quest rewards, and only seems to positively benefits Trion/XL Games. The more reasons to spend labour the more opportunity to get hardcore players to buy labour potions. That is it. There is no other reason besides that to have quest rewards handed out in this fashion.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you do not understand the difference between being a patron and a free to play player, there are different regeneration rates. 10/5 if you are a patron, 5/0 if you are not, i will explain the pros and cons and why this isn't necessarily a bad thing later, all you need to know now is:

Patron after 1 hour of play = 120 labour points

Free to Play after 1 hour of play = 60 labour points.

It currently costs 1 to 5 labor to identify an item. Which is fine when you have an idea of what the heck you plan on doing with your character, if you get a sword you will open that up, you get a staff and you're into casting magic you will crack that open, but that's where it ends. If you dont know the pros and cons of a greatsword or nodachi maybe you will open both of them and mess around, maybe you want to duel wield, but turns out you dont like that, so time to go bow. Point is, people might want to mess around, which becomes problematic when you have to spend labour on every one of these items. before you know it, you can spend 5 to 50 labor points just experimenting with weapons you've gotten as quest rewards. Armor is the same deal, except armor gives you a full set of gear, so now you're opening up 6 or 7 pieces all at once, you just spend 6 to 30 labour in the blink of an eye.

I promise you this, if you know what you are doing you can hit level 15 in under an hour, and by know what you are doing i mean you are experienced enough with the simple quest grinding early game to follow the track laid out for you. You will get in a situation where you have more items than labour to work with to identify said items.

Proposed Solution: When you complete that first quest chain and it gives you that weapon box with one of each weapon, would there be anything game breaking about removing that box, and just letting players choose which weapon they want to use? Same goes for the armor, doing the traditional one of each armor piece (plate/leather/cloth) as a reward as you move through the quest chain until you finish it all and get a complete set would work perfectly fine.

Coin Purses: As you may or may not know, Archage has no loot. No weapons drop, no armor drops, no gear drops, not even great loot or money drops. No what you get are these coin purses, they have silly names and stack up quite nice in your bag but at the end of the day, they are just another labour pit, an unnecessary change introduced in patch 1.2. Coin purses cost anywhere from 1 to a whopping 20 or more labour points to open, and all trash loot and coin has been put into these bags. When you kill over world or dungeon mob they have a small chance to drop gear (from what i am told, i have never witnessed this miracle myself) and one of these bags. From which you usually get is a small amount of gold, and rarely you will get an item known as Archeum dust.

Now for those of you who dont know, Archeum dust is a very important material, some people like to say they are supposed to be rare materials, we would call those people idiots. If you look through the weapon/armor and jewelry crafting recipes you will see that these dusts are required in a small quantity for every one of those recipes from level 20 right to level 50. This is not supposed to be a rare material, it is a controlled material sure, but not rare.

Before the patch, Archeum powders/shards/crystals were obtained from killing over world monsters and salvaging the random gear they dropped, farming dungeons and salvaging the gear found there, or fishing waterlogged boxes. You can no longer get Archeum powders/shards/crystals from random monsters unless you find them in one of these coin purses, you can no longer fish up waterlogged boxes, and you can no longer salvage dungeon gear.

So with the change to quest rewards and the addition of coin purses, Trion/XL Games have introduces 2 crippling mechanics to the game world that do nothing to better the enjoyment of the game. The do however, introduce more opportunities for the players to spend labour, which in turn, provides more reasons to buy that handy labour potion.

Proposed Solution: This should be obvious, revert this all together, drop coin purses, make mobs drop coin directly, and have them drop gear that needs to be identified with EITHER an item that costs in game gold or labour. Dungeon loot should be salvageable once again, lower the amount of dust retrieved from these methods however, if the goal was to control the dusts introduced in the world, then reducing the amount of dust from salvaging should be as effective.

But it should be reverted because, its fundamental to the RPG experience, forget MMORPG. Killing monsters and taking their spoils is fucking fundamental. This change shouldve never seen the light of day. It is clear it wasnt made by developers who are passionate of about roleplaying games. People get excited when a new shiny items arrives in your bag, people like finding loot, so not only is it necessary for the health of the games crafting, its fun. Its is fun to find new items to use, to sell, or to save for later, it is fun. And this change is anti-fun, its the best way to summarize it.

Treasure chests: Im not a fan of underwater activity, but for those who are, the Treasure hunting was something you could do after you ran out of labor to keep yourself busy, with these being gated behind labour, its not one more thing you cant do without ensuring you have a steady supply of labour coming in - via labour potions.

Proposed Solution: Remove the labour cost, add a gold cost, adjust the items that are found if that was the problem.

Patron Status

What is the value of patron status? Lets take a look:

• Bonus online Labor Point regeneration (10 per 5 minutes)

• Offline Labor Point regeneration (5 per 5 minutes)

• Increased maximum Labor Points cap (5000 maximum)

The game isnt playable on an enjoyable level without the above.

• 10% bonus to all Experience gained through combat or labor usage

I could not care less about 10% bonus experience, its nothing, it wont be noticeable at all, and well it shouldn't be, its a perma buff.

• 10% discount on Marketplace purchases (available after launch)

How many purchases a month do i need to make with real money to offset that 15 dollar investment for that 10% discount?

• 5 Loyalty Tokens per day for use in the Loyalty Store (awarded on first login of the day)

Going to have to step up that items in this shop if you want this to be an actual perk, as it stands now, those Daru chests are garbage.

• Ability to claim land by placing farms and houses

• Ability to pay in-game taxes on owned property

This is one of the bread and butter features of the game right? I guess patron for this major feature makes sense, thats a nice perk.

• Ability to post auctions on the Auction House by default

The only one of these that is actually a perk.

The first third of the patron could realistically be labeled as "MUST HAVE". If you plan on playing Archage in a serious fashion, you simply cannot do so without 5000 Labour cap, and 5 offline regen - So if you decided youre going to play this game for real, you just paid $15 for these alone, not because you want to, but because you have to, period.

Now if you are currently an on the fence free to play player, and you like any of the above features just pay for the sub from now and get it over with. Of course you have another option..

APEX... CREDD...CHRONOSCROLLS... a turd by any other name is still a turd. I personally hate, these gold for sub items. Why is this here? Cash shop is already in game, if people want the features that come with the sub, pay the damn sub. The only function these item serve is for people to pay their subs with real money, and then add 10 of these on top of it so they can gain a huge influx of in game currency to go with it. IT IS THE VERY DEFINITION of pay to win. And it fucks with the economy in every game it exists within. If youre going to do this, why fuck around, just add the ability to convert gold into credits like every other pay to win game and be done with it. But lets not pretend this is not a pay to win feature. Ive played pay to play MMOs with people who are willing to spend $2000 a week on the game just to keep themselves and their guild on top, APEX adds nothing positive to the game. NOTHING.

Online vs Offline: Now for those who want to stay free to play, but are highly discouraged by the fact that you get a measly 5 labour per 5, i feel your pain, but here is the reality. You cant ever, i mean NEVER give free to play accounts offline labour regeneration.

But why? Ill tell you why, it would be exploited to high hell. I cant speak for everyone, but i can tell you what i would do, if they gave free to play accounts 5 offline regeneration i would make 10 separate accounts, level one character to 15 on every one of them and then log off for 83 hours. And then nurse them like a labour garden as i use them to simply gather materials to funny to my main. And im lazy. Imagine what gold farmers would do with that much passive labour. At least if gold farmers decide to do it they will be paying trion monthly for the opportunity.

I think changing quest rewards and coin purses back to 1.0 would significantly alleviate the frustration free to play players have however, and i think that alone would be enough to let you guys enjoy the game at 5 per 5.

The pay to win: There are 2 pay to win items in the cash shop as far as i am concerned.

The labour potion, and the vocation potions. However the obvious problem is the Labour potion. 2k bonus labour a day is nothing to scoff at. Currently, and i am going to assume this is a bug, you can use these potions on all 6 of your characters giving you an additional 12k labour a day. I assume this is a bug because it is obvious pay to win, it is so far beyond pay to win it doesnt even require an explanation as to why this cant remain in game.

As for the potions themselves.. we all knew they were coming, my only change would be to making it 1 potion every 24 hours and leave it at 1000. or, leave it at 12 hours and make it 500. 2000 is to much.

So there you have it, these are the points of contention in the current build, now in my personal opinion, i think if the game released tomorrow with this current iteration it would crash and burn. When you run out of labour, you run out of fun, you basically have 2 option, sit around and wait, or go play something else. Too many activities require labour, and once you run out you have nothing you can actually do in game until you get more. Not a big deal early game when you can still go grind experience and level, but late game, what if you want to do some treasure hunting, or dungeon farming for auxiliary material gathering, all of these activities require labour, so unless you like heavy pvp, the list of things you can do without labour isnt very large.

The other founders might not agree with me, and they dont have to, i already know where i stand. I, and i am sure there are many others, have decided to not spend any more money on this game. I will play it until my patron runs out, and use the credits i have through founders but that is it.

I think some of the hardcore fans are in denial about where the game is at right now, i think the best suggestion i could give is, if you are an Alpha player, and you havent experienced this game from the start as a 1.2 player, do that now, create a character on Omega, or on the beta server, start from scratch as a patron or ftp and see if you find the game in its current state fun to play.

Thats the part I have an issue with. With the current Labour System it puts all the power in the hands of the largest guilds and the richest players. This has already been seen in closed beta 1. 10 bamboo stalks for 100 gold is highly inflated. The labour system could easily be exploited by gold farmers. On top of that if only the rich control the market then there will be no competition and they will be able to charge whatever they want for mats on the market.

BarCrow · July 2014

Only thing I dislike is expending labour to open the coin purses. Even though the cost is minimal it's just...well..petty.

Identifying items and opening (what I pretend are locked) chests are fine. I just imagine it is time and labour spent studying/researching/trial and erroring the item (in the case of identify) or finding a locksmith/solving the locking mechanism for chests. Both of which can be considered labour/time intensive to some degree .

HabitualFrogStomp · July 2014

Wait, are we seriously having this discussion. Are people who aren't even willing to pay a sub for the game already complaining that they can not compete with those that do?

LOL

Man, the audacity of some people. How about you get a sub if you're serious about the game, at least serious enough to care about being competitive. Not seeing the problem.

And this pay wall nonsense needs to stop. No, not all the doors for a game are unlocked the moment you install it on your computer. You may have to pay a sub for certain features. If it wasnt for all the free loading content locusts and their big guilds fluttering around from game to game we wouldn't need this contrived freemium nonsense nor would we need cash shops. If you have a problem with Pay2Win, maybe start Paying2Play.

But the OP made some fair points. There are some questionable design decisions there that should be reviewed. But a better question would be why they feel they need to make these decisions to begin with. I'll admit I'm not that experienced with AA yet, so I can't comment on how viable sub is and if you would actually must have potions from the cash shop to supplement your LP in late game. I don't plan on buying any. if I don't have enough LP, oh well, maybe I'll run 2 accounts to alternate between. There's other solutions to the problem, if the game presents them.

Starbuck1771 · July 2014

Originally posted by Ezze902
Originally posted by Myrdynn
just stay logged in, I had 2000 LP's by early saturday morning

Your electricity bill worth it?

Yes it is because my PC doesnt eat that much power.

BarCrow · July 2014

Originally posted by HabitualFrogStomp
Wait, are we seriously having this discussion. Are people who aren't even willing to pay a sub for the game already complaining that they can not compete with those that do?

LOL

Man, the audacity of some people. How about you get a sub if you're serious about the game, at least serious enough to care about being competitive. Not seeing the problem.

And this pay wall nonsense needs to stop. No, not all the doors for a game are unlocked the moment you install it on your computer. You may have to pay a sub for certain features. If it wasnt for all the free loading content locusts and their big guilds fluttering around from game to game we wouldn't need this contrived freemium nonsense nor would we need cash shops. If you have a problem with Pay2Win, maybe start Paying2Play.

I don't understand it either. In any group since the dawn of time..there are haves and have nots. There is always "advantage" somewhere..be it money...power...privilege..intellect...genetics....or just time...I guess I just got used to not thinking I have to be the best at all times or keep up with the joneses. It's better for my stress levels to just have fun.

Kyleran · July 2014

Originally posted by Starbuck1771
Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

I have been reading a lot of threads on these subjects and i feel that, while some of us have clearly drawn our line in the sand declaring whether or not we are for the current system, or against it. I feel others have taken their stand without fully understanding what the actual situation is.

Those who are for it, seem to be for it because they think the labour gains and expenditures are perfectly balanced, which they are not, and those who are against it, think the problem lies with the labour resource as a whole which it does not. So what i want to do with this thread is, explain labour, patron, and the few items in the cash shop that seem pay to win, what is good and necessary about these features and what hurts the game as a whole.

Labour Points.

Labour is a good thing. I know some people think it should be fully removed because it is some sort of overarching feature that is the foundation of Archage's pay to win, but it is not.

Labour first and foremost function is to act as a control for the economy. Because of the games sandbox elements, this system is necessary. Labour will not only control how many materials will enter into the game space, but control of often high end items, vehicles and buildings are created as well. It can not be removed from the game as some members of the community have asked for, because without it, there is no stopping top guilds from flooding both the economy and the battlefield with the best ships, items and vehicles. Without labour the existence of these items would simply be, cheapened.

Side note - It has a minimal affect on gold farmers. There is nothing stopping them from making numerous free accounts and leaving them all online at once slowly gaining labour, and we don't know their margins. There is nothing to state it wouldn't be fiscally prudent for them to buy patron status along with labour potions to kick start their control of the economy. The only truth is, they will find a way, you just have to wait and see how.

The current labour Problem

The things that require labour dont make sense.

Here is a list of the current things in game that require labour:

Quest rewards

Coin Purses

Treasure chests

Recovering lost Death Experience

Gathering Materials

Farming

Crafting Weapons

Crafting Armor

Crafting Vehicles

Identifying found Gear

As you can see by that list, a large portion of the game is controlled by labour, and because of this can be seen as being behind a pay wall.

Now, Crafting Weapons, Armor, and Vehicles along with gathering, and farming these costing labour makes perfect sense. It ties into what i mentioned in the beginning, you need to control the economy. Slowing down how many of these items can be created into the game world is very important.

Here is the problem: Quest rewards, Coin Purses, Identifying found gear and treasure chests costing labour.

Quest rewards: As you may or may not know, quest rewards come in these boxes, you open the boxes and your inventory is then injected with usually 3 to 6 items, which all need to be identified before they can be used. Now what makes this cool is, sometimes you identify and you can get a Blue quest reward, ive never gotten anything higher then blue and i am not sure if you can, but at the very least, it is going to be green.

Problem is, labour has been given an extremely high value, whether you value it in real money, in game gold or real time spent, labour is expensive. So why are you paying to receive your rewards from doing a quest?

Now i wasnt in the game for 1.0 But from what i understand this is a feature that came from version 1.2. This is a purely toxic addition into the game. It adds very little value to gameplay for the player with the option to get blue or higher quest rewards, and only seems to positively benefits Trion/XL Games. The more reasons to spend labour the more opportunity to get hardcore players to buy labour potions. That is it. There is no other reason besides that to have quest rewards handed out in this fashion.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you do not understand the difference between being a patron and a free to play player, there are different regeneration rates. 10/5 if you are a patron, 5/0 if you are not, i will explain the pros and cons and why this isn't necessarily a bad thing later, all you need to know now is:

Patron after 1 hour of play = 120 labour points

Free to Play after 1 hour of play = 60 labour points.

It currently costs 1 to 5 labor to identify an item. Which is fine when you have an idea of what the heck you plan on doing with your character, if you get a sword you will open that up, you get a staff and you're into casting magic you will crack that open, but that's where it ends. If you dont know the pros and cons of a greatsword or nodachi maybe you will open both of them and mess around, maybe you want to duel wield, but turns out you dont like that, so time to go bow. Point is, people might want to mess around, which becomes problematic when you have to spend labour on every one of these items. before you know it, you can spend 5 to 50 labor points just experimenting with weapons you've gotten as quest rewards. Armor is the same deal, except armor gives you a full set of gear, so now you're opening up 6 or 7 pieces all at once, you just spend 6 to 30 labour in the blink of an eye.

I promise you this, if you know what you are doing you can hit level 15 in under an hour, and by know what you are doing i mean you are experienced enough with the simple quest grinding early game to follow the track laid out for you. You will get in a situation where you have more items than labour to work with to identify said items.

Proposed Solution: When you complete that first quest chain and it gives you that weapon box with one of each weapon, would there be anything game breaking about removing that box, and just letting players choose which weapon they want to use? Same goes for the armor, doing the traditional one of each armor piece (plate/leather/cloth) as a reward as you move through the quest chain until you finish it all and get a complete set would work perfectly fine.

Coin Purses: As you may or may not know, Archage has no loot. No weapons drop, no armor drops, no gear drops, not even great loot or money drops. No what you get are these coin purses, they have silly names and stack up quite nice in your bag but at the end of the day, they are just another labour pit, an unnecessary change introduced in patch 1.2. Coin purses cost anywhere from 1 to a whopping 20 or more labour points to open, and all trash loot and coin has been put into these bags. When you kill over world or dungeon mob they have a small chance to drop gear (from what i am told, i have never witnessed this miracle myself) and one of these bags. From which you usually get is a small amount of gold, and rarely you will get an item known as Archeum dust.

Now for those of you who dont know, Archeum dust is a very important material, some people like to say they are supposed to be rare materials, we would call those people idiots. If you look through the weapon/armor and jewelry crafting recipes you will see that these dusts are required in a small quantity for every one of those recipes from level 20 right to level 50. This is not supposed to be a rare material, it is a controlled material sure, but not rare.

Before the patch, Archeum powders/shards/crystals were obtained from killing over world monsters and salvaging the random gear they dropped, farming dungeons and salvaging the gear found there, or fishing waterlogged boxes. You can no longer get Archeum powders/shards/crystals from random monsters unless you find them in one of these coin purses, you can no longer fish up waterlogged boxes, and you can no longer salvage dungeon gear.

So with the change to quest rewards and the addition of coin purses, Trion/XL Games have introduces 2 crippling mechanics to the game world that do nothing to better the enjoyment of the game. The do however, introduce more opportunities for the players to spend labour, which in turn, provides more reasons to buy that handy labour potion.

Proposed Solution: This should be obvious, revert this all together, drop coin purses, make mobs drop coin directly, and have them drop gear that needs to be identified with EITHER an item that costs in game gold or labour. Dungeon loot should be salvageable once again, lower the amount of dust retrieved from these methods however, if the goal was to control the dusts introduced in the world, then reducing the amount of dust from salvaging should be as effective.

But it should be reverted because, its fundamental to the RPG experience, forget MMORPG. Killing monsters and taking their spoils is fucking fundamental. This change shouldve never seen the light of day. It is clear it wasnt made by developers who are passionate of about roleplaying games. People get excited when a new shiny items arrives in your bag, people like finding loot, so not only is it necessary for the health of the games crafting, its fun. Its is fun to find new items to use, to sell, or to save for later, it is fun. And this change is anti-fun, its the best way to summarize it.

Treasure chests: Im not a fan of underwater activity, but for those who are, the Treasure hunting was something you could do after you ran out of labor to keep yourself busy, with these being gated behind labour, its not one more thing you cant do without ensuring you have a steady supply of labour coming in - via labour potions.

Proposed Solution: Remove the labour cost, add a gold cost, adjust the items that are found if that was the problem.

Patron Status

What is the value of patron status? Lets take a look:

• Bonus online Labor Point regeneration (10 per 5 minutes)

• Offline Labor Point regeneration (5 per 5 minutes)

• Increased maximum Labor Points cap (5000 maximum)

The game isnt playable on an enjoyable level without the above.

• 10% bonus to all Experience gained through combat or labor usage

I could not care less about 10% bonus experience, its nothing, it wont be noticeable at all, and well it shouldn't be, its a perma buff.

• 10% discount on Marketplace purchases (available after launch)

How many purchases a month do i need to make with real money to offset that 15 dollar investment for that 10% discount?

• 5 Loyalty Tokens per day for use in the Loyalty Store (awarded on first login of the day)

Going to have to step up that items in this shop if you want this to be an actual perk, as it stands now, those Daru chests are garbage.

• Ability to claim land by placing farms and houses

• Ability to pay in-game taxes on owned property

This is one of the bread and butter features of the game right? I guess patron for this major feature makes sense, thats a nice perk.

• Ability to post auctions on the Auction House by default

The only one of these that is actually a perk.

The first third of the patron could realistically be labeled as "MUST HAVE". If you plan on playing Archage in a serious fashion, you simply cannot do so without 5000 Labour cap, and 5 offline regen - So if you decided youre going to play this game for real, you just paid $15 for these alone, not because you want to, but because you have to, period.

Now if you are currently an on the fence free to play player, and you like any of the above features just pay for the sub from now and get it over with. Of course you have another option..

APEX... CREDD...CHRONOSCROLLS... a turd by any other name is still a turd. I personally hate, these gold for sub items. Why is this here? Cash shop is already in game, if people want the features that come with the sub, pay the damn sub. The only function these item serve is for people to pay their subs with real money, and then add 10 of these on top of it so they can gain a huge influx of in game currency to go with it. IT IS THE VERY DEFINITION of pay to win. And it fucks with the economy in every game it exists within. If youre going to do this, why fuck around, just add the ability to convert gold into credits like every other pay to win game and be done with it. But lets not pretend this is not a pay to win feature. Ive played pay to play MMOs with people who are willing to spend $2000 a week on the game just to keep themselves and their guild on top, APEX adds nothing positive to the game. NOTHING.

Online vs Offline: Now for those who want to stay free to play, but are highly discouraged by the fact that you get a measly 5 labour per 5, i feel your pain, but here is the reality. You cant ever, i mean NEVER give free to play accounts offline labour regeneration.

But why? Ill tell you why, it would be exploited to high hell. I cant speak for everyone, but i can tell you what i would do, if they gave free to play accounts 5 offline regeneration i would make 10 separate accounts, level one character to 15 on every one of them and then log off for 83 hours. And then nurse them like a labour garden as i use them to simply gather materials to funny to my main. And im lazy. Imagine what gold farmers would do with that much passive labour. At least if gold farmers decide to do it they will be paying trion monthly for the opportunity.

I think changing quest rewards and coin purses back to 1.0 would significantly alleviate the frustration free to play players have however, and i think that alone would be enough to let you guys enjoy the game at 5 per 5.

The pay to win: There are 2 pay to win items in the cash shop as far as i am concerned.

The labour potion, and the vocation potions. However the obvious problem is the Labour potion. 2k bonus labour a day is nothing to scoff at. Currently, and i am going to assume this is a bug, you can use these potions on all 6 of your characters giving you an additional 12k labour a day. I assume this is a bug because it is obvious pay to win, it is so far beyond pay to win it doesnt even require an explanation as to why this cant remain in game.

As for the potions themselves.. we all knew they were coming, my only change would be to making it 1 potion every 24 hours and leave it at 1000. or, leave it at 12 hours and make it 500. 2000 is to much.

So there you have it, these are the points of contention in the current build, now in my personal opinion, i think if the game released tomorrow with this current iteration it would crash and burn. When you run out of labour, you run out of fun, you basically have 2 option, sit around and wait, or go play something else. Too many activities require labour, and once you run out you have nothing you can actually do in game until you get more. Not a big deal early game when you can still go grind experience and level, but late game, what if you want to do some treasure hunting, or dungeon farming for auxiliary material gathering, all of these activities require labour, so unless you like heavy pvp, the list of things you can do without labour isnt very large.

The other founders might not agree with me, and they dont have to, i already know where i stand. I, and i am sure there are many others, have decided to not spend any more money on this game. I will play it until my patron runs out, and use the credits i have through founders but that is it.

I think some of the hardcore fans are in denial about where the game is at right now, i think the best suggestion i could give is, if you are an Alpha player, and you havent experienced this game from the start as a 1.2 player, do that now, create a character on Omega, or on the beta server, start from scratch as a patron or ftp and see if you find the game in its current state fun to play.

Thats the part I have an issue with. With the current Labour System it puts all the power in the hands of the largest guilds and the richest players. This has already been seen in closed beta 1. 10 bamboo stalks for 100 gold is highly inflated. The labour system could easily be exploited by gold farmers. On top of that if only the rich control the market then there will be no competition and they will be able to charge whatever they want for mats on the market.

This was due to the scarcity of bamboo, which is to be expected in the first closed beta, prices are nothing like this on Alpha, and tend to go down over time as people largely complete their building projects.

Relax, it likely won't be nearly as bad as you are fearing......

Jackdog · July 2014

Originally posted by Kyleran

This was due to the scarcity of bamboo, which is to be expected in the first closed beta, prices are nothing like this on Alpha, and tend to go down over time as people largely complete their building projects.

Relax, it likely won't be nearly as bad as you are fearing......

Kyle what do you think will happen to the prices when gold sellers are the only ones being able to compete in crafting due to the LP pots in the cash shop? The botters will be in total control AH because they will drop 14K a day into their trade skill where the average player will be limited to less than 2K

Howdy, Stranger!

Labour an expanded look- Good and bad

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

Labour an expanded look- Good and bad

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV