Oberon has been kind to Albion Online. The March 20th update has apparently driven a big spike of users for the not-quite-two-year-old game, and you know it’s good because the devs are actually posting numbers and graphs. It’s 2019. Nobody does that anymore. But Sandbox Interactive just did, and it looks like this week the game’s pushed up to around 17K daily players, when prior to that it was hovering around 10K-11K.
And this is before the game goes free-to-play next week.
“We expect that this change will bring large numbers of new players into the game, and we are already making preparations to ensure that this new phase goes as smoothly as possible,” the devs write. “Improvements thus far include upgrades to our server hardware and optimizations of the game code. However, even if everything runs smoothly from a technical viewpoint, we know from the B2P release in 2017 that there can be a point at which certain zones – in particular, some of the game’s starter cities and surrounding areas – may become clogged. This situation greatly improves as new players disperse more evenly across the game world, as well as after the day-one hype (where it is not unusual for players to run sessions of 10 hours or more).”
In other words, the game might be too popular – expect queues. The studio’s even posted an activity chart to help people figure out when queues are likely to be shortest.
“[If] the total player numbers become too high, we may need to activate a queue to ensure that the game world can handle the inflow. If there is a queue, characters with Premium will get preferential access. This is to make sure that the existing player base – as well as all players who directly support the game’s development – do not get locked out of the game. (Note that free Premium days given out by the game, such as during the tutorial, do not count toward preferential queue access unless your character has previously bought at least 30 days of Premium.)”
Eh, there are worse problems to have.
Looking at Steamcharts I don’t see any player activity spike happening recently
https://steamcharts.com/app/761890#1m
However they were gaining concurrent players for the last few months at quite a good pace of ~5-10% per month. That’s interesting, maybe I shoud try to run that copy still sitting on my hard drive. Found it super boring last time (summer 2018).
Albion didn’t come to Steam for almost a year after launch, which itself was several years after an eternal beta, so I’m guessing the spike is from original core players coming back, not new people buying on Steam ahead of F2P.
So they are coming back to prepare for the stompfest they’re going to have when new F2P players come, how smart of them xD
Hope you’ll enjoy the amount of bots and occasional script hackers~ I remember when Albion online got ddosed on the daily. Ah. . fun times.
Will give it a shot, why not.
Still boggles me why some people choose this over Runescape, much better and not a gankfest, even the classic version with worse graphics is better…
I’ve been playing for 2 years and been farming peacefully never once was ganked.
Albion isn’t much of a gankfest, it has much worse problems like combat being boring… However I’m not sure it’s more boring than Runescape’s combat.
And actually most people aren’t afraid of PvP as the success of so many PvP games shows us.
My main issue with Runescape was the teeny tiny inventory size. I felt like I spent more time walking from the bank and back than all other activities combined. I don’t know if Albion is any better, but if it has better inventory management then I will probably add it to the games I play regularly.
Its interesting how the game continues to grow with so little advertising by Steams main page. It’s always “download Warframe!!”
Steam actually tried to push the game to me a few times.
I’m absolutely not the intended audience, though, as I abhor non-consensual PvP.
Well if you enter a game knowing it’s a game with free PvP it means the PvP is consensual, doesn’t it?
Everything you go to watch on youtube, it often shows an Albion advert
That’s because Warframe makes orders of magnitude more money for Steam than 99% of other games.
As mostly a gatherer I concur the games gotten incredibly busy. People stealing my resources. Might have to go postal on all these newbs even in the yellow zones. Just kidding this game is great. Lots to do and a feeling of accomplishment when advancing your character. The community is great too. Not as toxic as you might think with it being a pvp game. One word of advice don’t go into full PVP loot zones with things you are afraid to lose.
I’ll be one of them when it transitions! IIRC this one of the “gankbox” games? If so then my time will likely be brief, but I’m still super down to give it a spin regardless.
Its a softer version of EVE model. Unlike EVE(and its where it is softer) there are some good size fully safe areas, some semi-safe areas sort of like EVE high security space, some pvp areas without much in the way of penalties and the last 2 are quite dangerous. Like EVE you can choose how far you venture and just buy what you cant get on your own. Overall all that means is there are risks but the game is quite playable.
I had backed this game and was mostly disappointed from the initial experience but they took a lot of steps forward.
By the way i dont consider that a gankbox since on gankboxes you can freely get killed either from the tutorial or from early start and the kills are encouraged by full loot pvp – so there is incentive to kill you. Generally speaking there is a difference between sandboxes with pvp and gankboxes. The top of all gankboxes is probably Mortal Online but even them had to stop kills to the tutorial but with a lot delay.
Nice, the existence of safe zones (even if they have less valuable stuff) and even the semi-safe areas for when I’m feeling feisty is more than enough for me. As long as I can easily retreat to the safety and security of the PvE zones when I’m feeling like a giant baby I’m happy : )
Incidently I made a new char today and the newbie area, past the heretics on the damaged ship was quite populated by lots of player characters