Last week, we covered the out-of-the-blue news that XL Games was moving western publishing rights for ArcheAge from Gamigo to Kakao. We say “out-of-the-blue” because Gamigo’s own announcement admitted that it was leaving players with “a lot of open questions,” and Kakao’s announcement did little more than clarify that ArcheAge Unchained will get a revamp while Classic ArcheAge will see parity between the Korean and Western versions.
Gamigo has now posted another piece addressing the hand-off. For starters, the process begins on December 1st, when Kakao takes over the game. “We have put in hours of work to ensure safe data transfer to find a way that you can continue playing,” Gamigo says. “We had several discussions with the staff of Kakao Games to make the transfer happen. This means your progress will not be lost. Your data saved until November 18, 2021 (with all your characters) will be encrypted and transferred to the new platform. All subsequently saved data until the final implementation at Kakao Games will thus not be transferred.”
In other words, nothing will be saved between November 18th and December 1st, so this is your last week to do anything meaningful on Gamigo’s servers; compensation for the effective downtime is expected. Thanks to the GDPR, you’ll have to proactively use the transfer code and agree to finalizing your data with Kakao, so make sure you actually do it, else your ArcheAge account will be deleted at the end of all of this. (From the FAQ, it sounds as if you’ll have about half a year to make that happen.)
“You can continue playing with your Glyph account until December 1, 2021, however, progression will not be saved after the maintenance on November 18. Kakao Games will take over the service starting December 1, but the exact service launch date will be announced on their transfer page. You will be able to find the link to the transfer page on November 18 in an upcoming news post. Once the service launches, you have to download and play the game via the official website from Kakao Games. Please note that you cannot request a transfer of the data of multiple Glyph accounts to one single Kakao Games account. Each account you wish to transfer needs its own destination account. Once everything is completed, our game data will be permanently deleted.”
The FAQ has no clear answers on refunds, patron time, and credits. Critically, while your characters and accounts will transfer, it sounds like the servers won’t, meaning you’ll lose your land and could lose your character names too. Yes, this is going to mean the mother of all land rushes come December.
“All players will have no land at the beginning. There will be a land rush, but the time and date has to be determined yet. […] Furniture items in your home will be returned to you via the standard demolition process, and that includes items in chests. Livestock and plants, however, will not be recovered. […] Only fully completed houses are returned as a full kit. Unbuilt houses will return the design but not the materials.”
It’s a lot to take in, so if you’re an active ArcheAge player or looking for a fresh start, you should dive in.
