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Asheron's Call - How's the Population?
MightyUnclean
Member EpicPosts: 3,531
How's the AC population? Has it increased since it went buy-to-play?
Also, does anyone actually play their characters anymore, or do they all just AFK-macro in a dungeon?
Thanks!
Comments
I go through my spurts of playing some AC from time to time. the populations are low but if you can get into a active guild it isnt to bad. lots of guilds do quest nights and such so it keeps things interesting.
highest population servers are probably frostfell and harvestgain as far as pve servers go.
and yeah there are still macroers you will see people running 5+ accounts at once out doing their thing.
If you've never played it, it's worth the $10 just for the experience!
Took me almost 10 years with a 2 year break for DAoC and a 4 year break with WoW (still played AC about 6-10 hours a week during those time spans) and I hit 275 without ever macroing. Of course I hardly ever spent much time grinding for XP. 99% of my time was spent questing or grinding for loot. What little grinding I did spend was in Olthoi area's cause they drop decent loot, whereas the best XP was usually spent in Tusker areas but had pitiful loot.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
yeah that's what i was thinking after watching some videos of other playing i decided id give it a go and got the game going to start playing tomorrow after work i spent way more on other things that have been far less entertaining then this appears its going to be cant wait to start my gear knight tomorrow!
Just FYI, I think that last time I played, I had to run the game as Admin for it to work.
its not what it used to be, its been dumbed down a ton, however its still a blast, building your character how you want.
best time I ever had was farming Valley of Death for hours on end with my fellowship of 9, everyday for about 6 months.
awesome loot, great exp, great times.
Black Death Catacombs and the original Olthoi Noble was another memorable farming dungeon
last time I played, you showed up to a dungeon and whispered the leader and he would add you when a slot opened up
of course that was 3 yrs ago, its always beneficial with the EXP bonus from fellowships to be in a group though
I played this game from 2000 to around 2003...
and its not what it was.. and never will be again.. It was the best MMO ever created. RIP.
I'm also amazed by the number of people who are choosing enlightenment (resetting their characters to level 1 in exchange for +5 health and +1 to every skill). So there are a lot of people in lower level hunting areas and doing lower level quests.
Any server besides Frostfell has around 10-20 active people, which are constant combat macros.
Darktide is doing even more poorly after these DDoS'd their server for a couple months, causing it to crash so they could dupe items. This drove away all the players, and admins took away everyone's ability chat in allegiance, general, and trade channels (to stop the crashing).
As for someone recommending this game to someone else, I can't believe you would do that. This game was good when it came out for the first couple of years, and while it had large (2000+) players per server, where you could find players of every level out doing stuff. Nowadays it takes 3-6 months of constant UCM (combat macro) to reach end-tier, where the remaining players exist.
Please do not recommend this game to returning players or people who have not played it. Let us remember it in our hearts as it once was, 13-14 years ago. Not as it is, devoid of population, with grind mechanic after grind mechanic stacked on over 16 years, and no monthly story updates or GM's active in game.
AC runs fine for me on Windows 10, but I don't use any antivirus software and I have an old router (a WRT54G) that's as old as AC.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
The Decal app, Virindi says there are usually 1000 - 1300 accounts logged into Virindi across all worlds. Frostfell and, I think, Morningthaw have the largest populations. People congregate mostly in Holtburg and Eastham where the buff bots and portal bots are. A little activity in Shoushi. Personally I always preferred the Sho towns. Better organized and much nicer to look at.
I play the game. Don't have a clue how to macro. The first 50 levels go by quickly because they have centralized the main quests in a portal network. Do some cow tipping to get to 16. Go do the Annex portal quests to get to 50. I think 28 quests in total and you're 50. Do the exploration society's gold lucky letter quests to get a suit with all level 60 buffs and you're almost to 60. And familiar with the game again.
The challenge will be finding someone to quest from level 50 to 100 with. After level 100 more people want to do the same quests over and over and over. Mostly for drops and Luminance.
Acpedia.org is the Asheron's Call bible.
After the lucky letter quests you're pretty much on your own. Whether you choose to grind, explore, quest, dungeon dive or go on a avatar character build spree is up to you. I've got 3-4 avatars around 50-60 at the moment.
Twenty dollars and you've got 2 accounts, an allegiance and 22 avatar slots per world. Allegiance XP chains don't work anymore. Allegiance rank doesn't matter anymore.
Dumbed down? I don't think so. The leveling is faster. If you grind it's quicker. It won't take years to get to 275, much less to 125 like it used to. But with classic random loot drops, suit building, augmentations, tinkering, gemming, alchemy, cooking, aetheria, cloaks, tailoring, summoning and luminance to wrap your head around? You're gonna be confused. Or you can let some 15 year old tink mule that's been rebuilt half a dozen times handle it.
There are guilds that will get you to level 180 in a couple of weeks. But to me that's not playing the game.
After you've maxed an avatar to 275 there is Enlightenment. Enlightenment is where you restart at level 1 with one extra attribute point for each attribute and one extra skill point. There are 5 levels of enlightenment. Basically level the same avatar 5 times to get 25 more attribute points and 5 extra skill points.
Darktide swallowed itself whole by duplicating equipment. Now the scum drop in on other worlds to troll the PKL crowd. And bring their duping. Of course the PKL crowd consists mostly of DT drop outs. I find if you squelch about 4 accounts then the world chat becomes very civil except for Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights.
To use AC on two or more PCs on your network behind your internet presence it is best to not use DHCP but use static IP addresses on your network and assign different AC related network ports on each PC. ACDualClient also helps.