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Pay to Win and money hungry Trion.
Sadly I must say this game is pay to win and Trion is doing a lot of money hungry scams on this game. Everything seems to be a gamble, you buy chests with real money and gamble hoping for a good mount or item to drop. You also gamble with crafting gear. Its a huge time sink for anyone not willing to fork over thousands of dollars. Yes I do mean thousands. The up side if you are happy with just running around and not having the best gear the game has to offer then this game has a lot of good things about it. You can fairly easily get gear once you reach max level. But to get gear just 1 step better it will take you a month of grinding and farming. That's just for 1 step better, there are 5 steps better overall. It has a lot of fun features but mostly pointless and nonproductive. For example you can put 20 people on a big boat and go around killing and looting players. The result is you made 5-10 gold. You could easily make that gold all by yourself running trades.
The money grab is the biggest disappointment I have seen in just about any MMO. You are easily looking at 10k$ for the best gear in the game and yes you can buy it. Or you can spend the rest of your gaming life farming for it.
Comments
You won't have the best gear in this game without putting money into it. I'm not talking about subbing. You will have to sub and you will have to fork over some major cash if you plan on having the good stuff. At first glance it doesn't look bad. But once you get into the system and crafting then your eyes begin to open and you see the massive impossibility of gearing your character without spending a lot of real money.
The upside is not many people have forked over the cash for the endgame gear yet.
The downside it won't take much longer before they do.
You have to realize this game had a ton of people willing to pay 150$ just to play the game in alpha.
It doesn't matter does it? look at the forums, game is losing players fast and for the same reasons I saw for Korea, Japan and Russia losing them.
The F2P conversion ruined the game. You wont get any agreement by the yes men, they will keep saying yes until the game loses all support, most of its players and then eventually the closing of the game and that is when they will start complaining themselves.
"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/
I don't think it's THAT pay to win. However, it does give you an advantage if you throw down some serious loot, but really, is that winning? The majority is not going to do that.
I will say, it is a grind. I am not really crafting any better gear for myself and I feel I have put in a lot of hours. It's still a fun game, but the crafting grind is a haul and the RNG is a bit too much. Also, I pretty much play Solo. Living on the east coast with a full time job kind of requires it... so I am already at a disadvantage in a lot of situations.
I don't really mind though, I am forging my own path, and even though it may be more difficult, it is certainly VERY rewarding at times, knowing I did it all myself. Except the large scarecrow quest, where I got a ride from a guildmember.
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
You won't have the best gear EVEN if you put money in it.
Best gear in AA has more to do with being a part of a big, useful guild than putting in $$. Putting in money DOESN'T help if you don't have a whole guild of ppl helping each other by specializing in their own field of crafting. There is no way you can craft every single type of mats required to level you out on your craft at higher level.
So seems to me you are projecting your problem of not being social into the problem of money.
Honestly Kano, if you played early alpha, which was version 1.0 or earlier, you would have seen what the game could have been without all the f2p / p2w garbage they have added since.
You have to remember you're talking to the consumer here, you're going to be hard pressed to find those who look at that as a good thing.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I think kano hit the nail on the head with one statement "extremely rich can spend a LOT of money and completely broke can benefit from them funding the game."
Every single F2P game or Cash Shop game is labeled as a P2W game, well people paying for the game should get what they pay for, and free players, well, they get to play a game completely free.
This kind of post seems to be willfully ignorant. AA is so clearly not 'P2W' that insisting it is at this point must because of some kind of agenda, or just come from a lack of knowledge that should make the worst type of poster here blush with embarrassment as they put forward their 'opinion'.
All this mentioned is easily buyable in game for gold, which is easy to make, and plenty of successful competitive players that I know don't spend real money on any of it.
Maybe Maybebaked is talking about the super casual player here who can only play for 30-60 mins every other night? Because that's the only way his statements make any sense. This game won't suit that super casual type of player.
But, yes. Joining a solid guild is the way to play this game. Help them and be helped in return. Be part of an interdependent team. This is not a game for soloers.
AA is a niche title, I have said this from alpha. It is for people that want to invest in a social interdependent MMORPG and work with others. It won't suit everyone. For those that want more than a solo super casual game though it is great.
I personally had no interest in this game but my guild decided to play so I came along for the ride because there was nothing else to do, I am actually pleasantly surprised by the game tbh.
We have a few players in our guild that are not patrons and do quite well, they pay for workers comp with money from trade runs and a couple have already started buying apex to pay for patron by doing trade runs.
People that are crying about the patron status can achieve it quite easily with a a small amount of effort.
I was looking forward to playing AA...paid $50 to play early even.
I loved the idea of multi classing and open world land ownership.
Well...the multi classing is very limited and the open world land ownership is well.....a clusterfuck.
Even the player towns are a clusterfuck with houses and farms all over with no order or logic or structure....just a mass of house and farms. it's like some massive Asian ghetto.
I wanted to love the game, I was fully intending to find some land and settle in and build myself a nice little virtual life for the next few years..BUT...after lv 42, I just couldn't take it anymore.
The game is all force play....after lv 30 you are forced to farm and pvp
in fact...its like pvp Farmville...that's IF you get some land...good luck with that. I wasn't able, even with head start play.
AA is a job...it's a chore....I quit playing with 25 days left on my sub.
I already have a job, I play mmo's to relax and escape life and its pressures for awhile...not to relive em all from scratch
AA is the worst parts of sandbox combined with the worst parts of thempark....throw in some Farmville for seasoning.
Above everything, if you are not having fun then AA is a complete waste of time.
Cheers
Sourajit Nandi
" Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you can't play this or that. That's nonsense. Make up your mind,and you'll never whine or repent about gaming hours anymore, then have a go at every Game. Open up the Internet, join in all the Mmorpgs you can. Go make the Guild. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible. "
Once An Addict Always An Addict .
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Winning a discussion is not what it's about. If you could pass insight to someone or learn something from it in return - noone can really loose, can they?
Gameplay wise i think Archeage is the best MMORPG atm but business model wise i would also prefer a monthly sub based game without free to play option. Even if i don't think AA is P2W the risk is always there with the shop.
Monthly subcription for the win !
Fine, we'll compromise. I'll get my way & you'll find a way to be okay with that.
Agree, thats why i play AA that way and no CS consume. Have a Labor pot each 5 days from loyal tokens.
About the huge amount of money that craft consume atm, only after 4th of next month the full game is available, Auroria will impact the economy in AH. Im ready to try craft my own gear, even only untill lvl 40 for now, but at the moment, i will wait for Auroria and then cheack AH prices 1, 2 weeks after.
To those who want everthing in 1st month of AA in a incomplete version (Auroria is close) i understand that end in frustation, AA dont work that way and is not because of the CS.
Ahh, the good old P2W discussion.
Before I start I have to say that in the short time I've been here on MMORPG.com I don't think I've met anyone more biased than you DMKano, I can see that you like the game and want it to do well, but there are people who like the gameplay just as much as yourself but dislikes the pay model, and even though this model doesn't represent pay to win for you, it might do for others.
Winning in an mmorpg, when do you win? No one can answer this except answer it for themselves only, there is no victory screen pop up saying you've won the game.
So with this in mind we can only look at the possibility to buy gold for real money, and obtain items and/or gear, for said real life money and gold.
Arguments such as:
- You can buy gold in any MMORPG.
- The majority of players won't spend $10k.
- You can earn everything with gold.
Doesn't really hold much weight then.
Now for my personal opinion:
I dislike the RNG boxes, I'm not one to fall for these myself, I bought 3 archeum boxes once in hopes of getting a donkey, but opening those 3 made me feel so bad, I felt like an idiot for wasting my money like that.
I've read about people on the forum spending $100-$200 dollars on boxes and not getting the costumes they want and instead got a total value of ~120-250 gold, which is far under what you would have gotten if you spend that money on APEX and sold those on the Auction house.
So RNG boxes, I would like to see them REMOVED.
The labor system is an okay system, but it's too restrictive as it is, and it's only like this to make you buy Workers Compensation Potions (+1000 Labor), even though these can be bought for gold as well, it still kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Those are my biggest gripes with the game, I do really like the gameplay itself, very fun and addictive.
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
This I fully agree with.
A straight up sub would be preferred for me as well, because I do understand the slippery slope of cash shops, but I am fine with AA for now because it isn't P2W at this time.
I find the cash shop really has zero impact on me. There are not even any cosmetics that I want to buy, and everything else I purchase with in game gold.
Ok this is how it is. If you decide to go patron then you are basically stuck and can't do anything unless you spend an ungodly amount of time farming or fork over some major cash. They created a really big WALL. Most of you people who are defending the game haven't reached the wall. This wall can easily be reached without paying 1 dollar and can easily be reached without even becoming a patron. So when anyone decides to climb over the wall it costs a LOT. And there are 7 walls not 1 or 2. And they get harder and harder to climb exponentially. So the first wall costs about 1k gold to climb over the next will costs 5-7k gold.
Being in a guild does not help you climb the wall. This is an illusion and complete false statement. I am in a guild and have crafters who can craft my gear. I just don't have the money to buy the materials so they can craft it. And its like this for everyone I have encountered. The crafting system is random so you don't get what you are crafting for you get some random item that may or may not be the item you need. How does that sound?
It sounds fine.
AA isn't game designed to be 'beaten' in a month. Saying that, 1k gold isn't that much already.
No one is entitled to great gear just because they show up and feel like they should be given it.
But, wait... your thread title was 'Pay to Wind and Money Hungry Trion'... This sounds like whining about play to win rather than pay to win tbh. What has the cost of in game items in terms of in game gold got to do with 'pay to win'?
Are we here to talk about that, or the seeming fact that you find the gear too hard to get?