Recent reviews by Roaxis

I had to think about this one for a bit as what I want to say is about this game. Truth be told, Trion money grabbed it, hardcore. I was told by one of my coworkers about Archeage while we were working on a production line. He went on about the game and I was hooked right away. The moment the game went into official launch I joined the fray and signed onto the same server as him. He had a small 3 person guild with some land and farm space in the pvp areas. Overall I had fun with him and I started shelling out some cash to play the game despite knowing it had some problems.

The firrst problem I noticed was with the game engine. For some reason after a few hours of playing I would see character/object wireframes, the textures would slowly start to blur, and shortly after it would crash. I seriously started to question this after a while and stopped playing for a bit after canceling the subscription. Thinking that Trion and XL would get a peg on it after a while I decided to hold off and sit back a bit. By this time my coworker had fallen off the radar completely, the guild was disbanded, and I was left to my own vices.

This leads to me reaching out to support upon my return. The first thing I tried to address was my graphics problem. Now, I had purchased a brand new GTX 980 Amp Extreme Edition from Zotac just before launch, so I had a top of the line GPU for the time. For other games, it ran great, but for MWO and Archeage there were problems. This lead to me placing a ticket with Trion Support that took them 5 days to respond to for their network problems. All I got was a cookie cutter email in response and the case was closed out.

The second support ticket was in regards to a refund I recieved from them. Wanting to make sure it was not a mistake I had submitted a ticket as it was not requested. Yet again I was given a cookie cutter response, the question was not addressed, and they took almost 8 full days to reply. I was growing weary at their antics with the support templates. At this point I was suspcious about how they were handling things, cancelled my subscription, and stopped playing for almost a year and a half.

After some time I had gotten bored and got back into archeage. Hoping for the best I got back in the game, noticed my scarecrow farm blueprint was missing. Now, this was when Trion had officially taken over support and I had the problem resolved in less than 24 hours. They told me that it was a one time deal and it would never happen again. I shrugged at that and was happy that the support problem was corrected... or at least seemed to be fixed.

The graphics problem had never been resolved to this day, and the GPU is now just sitting on my desk as a $620 paperweight. It works, just doesn't handle some games the way I anticpated it to. Nvidia tried to do their best, but the problem was with the game code in the end and how it was interfacing with the GPU's API. By this time I had quite out of sheer disappointment as I had seen on the fourms this had been a problem for many players sense day 1 of my experience. This actually lead to one of the GoonSwarm guilds hijacking my farmers cart, destroying it, and stealing my tradepacks.

I continued playing after that and had amazing guildmates for sure, but I had grown tired of Trion and their business practices. I no longer feel it's the same game that it was originally. Sure, there were some cool things in the game, and yes, they had a currency system that could be used on a montly allowance basis for your loyalty to obtain things that would normally cost cash. However, in the long run they milk the game for every possible type of transaction they can get out of their customers. I've laid down my obsidian spear and shield, and took refuge in runescape for a while, having better support from Jagex themselves to my surprise.

Really not recommending this game. Graphics are alright, videos make it look like it would be a good alternative to Dayz, but it's not. First off, the game does not tell you how it works. It shows you around the interface, but that's about it. There's no tutorial for new players who don't exactly know what they're doing. The game is all in third person view, there's no option for first person that I could find in the game settings. Not only this, but if you die... You respawn... After you wait 5 minutes OR you pay for the game and get a substantially shortened respawn timer. There's no indicators telling you what kind of server you're joining (PVE or PVP) in addition to there being only two game modes. As mentioned before, the developers implemented the bubble system, making it VERY easy for players to constanly camp new players and take what supplies they need. I personally think Dead Frontier did a better job in terms of game content, stability, and client side customization.

I liked what I heard about the game, but was unimpressed with what I saw while playing. Now, before I get started, the game does have very good mechanics; however, whoever they chose for an ISP is poor. I've never had a single game tell me that I have packets failing to reach their destination and get "warped" around the game maps because of that exact reason. In many MMO's I have a 30ms to 47ms ping on average for US East, US West, and most Global Europe servers. I've never had my ping go over 300ms until today on US Servers. With this being said I was impressed with the realism of the game. It's almost realistic in all aspects and looks great with high details. I give the developers props for their time and effort in the game, it's just that there is either some bad netcode or a poor service provider that the company chose to host the game on.