Gamigo’s touting it as a “successful launch,” but ArcheAge Unchained’s slow rollout yesterday was more like a typical MMO launch, beset by queues, crashes, bugs, and the exhilaration of finally getting into the game. That pic up above? Justin clipped that when his queue was over 5000.
Perhaps the most frustrating news of the day came in the form of the Steam delay; Gamigo is currently aiming to bring the Steam launch up today at 1 p.m. EDT.
“We encountered critical item delivery errors during final preparation for service activation that would prevent all Steam players from receiving release pack items, including the Patron entitlement and labor regeneration. Additional errors with the use of Steam Wallet became apparent as well during the troubleshooting process. We understand the impact that this delay has and the disparity created by not being able to simultaneously progress with Glyph players. To mitigate this issue, we intend to release additional world servers in each region (North America and Europe) 100% simultaneously with the upcoming Steam release. No character reservation will be available on these new servers so all Steam players can have a chance at an equal start.”
So about those mentioned new servers. During the stream yesterday, Gamigo’s Merv Lee Kwai announced the studio would indeed be bringing up a few new ones: Kaylin, the fourth NA server, is online as of last night, while the EU’s Tinnereph is expected to go up this morning. (As we type this, the NA servers are down for maintenance but should hopefully be back as you’re reading.) Gamigo had previously expressed heaps of reluctance about opening new servers; unlike, say, a themepark like WoW Classic, ArcheAge is a sandbox where the land claims matter and people don’t want to lose their open-world homes, so the studio doesn’t want to see a ton of empty servers and land once the launch rush dies down and have to merge everyone and cause another land mess and make MJ cry. Do you want MJ to cry?
Speaking of MJ, she streamed the game for MOP last night after doing time in the queues herself for those of you who’d like to take a peek before investing in the B2P bundle.
And here’s XLGames’ Jake Song’s message to the players, in case you missed it during yesterday’s stream. The most notable bit, honestly, is his promise not to abandon Legacy players.
https://youtu.be/mm62uL3F2BY
“The teams at gamigo and XLGames worked through the evening to address the issues with the Steam version of ArcheAge: Unchained. While significant progress was made to resolve the item delivery issues, we continue to experience problems with enabling the Steam Wallet, a mandatory requirement to release the product on Steam. The main challenge here was that additional client builds are required to resolve the issue and our build/transfer times are considerable. We attempted to provide fixes that didn’t require a new client version but ultimately, they were not successful. We feel strongly about releasing on Steam free of these issues and very regretfully must delay further. As a result, we’re re-targeting official release for Thursday, 17th Oct at 11:00am PDT.”
- The character reservation lock is to stop everyone from piling on the same server and will be “evaluate[d] the character restrictions on a day-by-day basis.”
- #dragonscalegate refers to the problem whereby “the dragonscale is disproportionate due to a much larger percent of East faction players rolling a Harani character.”
- The authentication server for Unchained does not have a grace period for logins. Fixing it was “not ready in time for Unchained” but is still a “top priority.”
- They’re still working on the Razer zGold payment problems.
