Did anyone really expect yesterday’s ArcheAge 2.0 launch to go well? If you’ve played ArcheAge, you surely did not — but I bet you desperately tried to repeatedly relaunch the game to get in during the brief time the servers were up. I know I did.
As totally expected but still disappointing, yesterday’s launch was what anyone would call a disaster. 1PM PDT/4PM EST rolled around and only a small portion of the playerbase could log in, which promptly grabbed as much land as they could on the fresh and Evolution servers while everyone else sat there staring at a repeating, soundless cutscene. Good times.
The land rush is serious business if you’re a Patron. You need land to farm and make money, and some areas’ climates and proximity to the ocean and other provinces make then more ideal than others. Which is exactly why Trion Worlds pulled the plug on the servers and delayed launch an extra day despite ArcheAge already being down for two days for maintenance. They also applied a rollback to make land grabbing fair for all players.
Moving forward with today’s launch
Today’s launch is being handled much differently from yesterday’s debacle. Instead of opening all the servers at once, Trion are launching the European servers in waves first to accommodate their timezone and to relieve some of the stress on the login servers. This has been completed at the time of writing and there is a sizable queue on the fresh European server, Rangora.
The North American server launch will begin at the same scheduled time as yesterday: 1PM PDT/4PM EDT. Servers will be rolled out similarly to the European servers. Legacy servers will be put up first, followed by Evolution, then the fresh servers.
Hopefully this will alleviate some of the strain on the login servers, which it seems to have with EU, but Morpheus is going to get swamped very quickly. If you want to play on the new NA server and have land in a respectable area, you’re going to have to work fast.
To the new players drawn by 2.0 and fresh servers
While the ArcheAge playerbase at large is not particularly surprised that the 2.0 launch didn’t go great, new players drawn by the fresh servers are not getting the best impression of the game after a full extra day of downtime after the scheduled launch.
To new players, I have to say this: Welcome to ArcheAge, where the bad often outweighs the good but you can’t stop playing it because in a lot of ways the game is awesome but the servers and community at large are terrible and you wish you could stop but you need to keep tending your land, maybe just one more month will be okay.
Then it’s four months later and you wonder what you’re doing with your life as you’re trying to fend members of your own faction off your guild’s ship, which is covered in trade packs, when all you really wanted to do on that stupid trip was fish.
