ArcheAge's Descent Into Madness Continues, and I'm Leaving the Trion Worlds Train

Michael Byrne
By Michael Byrne, Editor in Chief
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It's sometimes difficult deciding what to write up for the site. With Jason and myself being the primary writers for our daily content, we have our own sources for news, we tour the usual websites and some lesser known ones, we try to balance the content as best we can. We don't want to cover one game a ton and totally ignore another. Do we miss things occasionally? Of course, we're only two people and we can't possibly write about EVERY F2P game occurrence. Often, we receive tips on things from you, our readers and friends, and believe me, we're grateful for them.

That's why I have such a hard time writing about ArcheAge lately.

If I wrote every single thing that's been going on with ArcheAge in real time I wouldn't have much time to cover anything else much less do the podcast, First Looks, interviews, etc. I try and hit the high points when things really get crazy and provide you with other content to read rather than stories about the hack of the day.

However, everybody loves a train wreck and this is quickly becoming (already IS one if you talk to people who play daily) and I hate seeing this out of both a genre I love (MMORPGs) and a company I once admired for the way they ran their Rift F2P conversion.

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Is XL Games at fault too? Of course, but they didn't sell this game to North American players. Simply, in my opinion, Trion Worlds has damaged the reputation they once had through a series of missteps culminating in the colossal mess that is their publishing of ArcheAge for North America. This is the opinion of someone that isn't logging into that particular game much. Imagine the frustration of those that actually enjoy the game despite its flaws (like we all enjoy our favorite MMO despite things we'd love to change.) I feel for those gamers the most.

Let's not even get into the hacking, hacking, and more hacking.

What happened today? Well, it actually started early yesterday morning when the ArcheAge NA servers were brought down for emergency maintenance. To sum up quickly, Scapes posted to the forums about the outage and provided updates throughout the day...then stopped. The communication went silent. Fast forward to right now and not all of the NA servers are up yet. The ones that are up have exorbitant queues again. Not a peep from Trion Worlds. Not even the "Hey it's not our game to program, we need XL Games to fix some things" mantra we've been given for months now. Silence. And it's not getting any better. If you visit the forum post I linked above, tread carefully. It's almost 14,000 posts long right now and the moderation must be busy doing something else so they're a bit "not safe for work."

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Massively even reached out to Trion Worlds for comment on the 2 day outage and only received the following:

"The team's been working all night and has already made a lot of progress improving things and are currently working on fixing the remaining problems with XL GAMES' help. We should have updates coming to the community in the next few hours."

Will we ever know what happened? Probably not. At least not in full. And this is where I get off of the train.

Frankly, I feel Trion Worlds has taken not only ArcheAge players for granted, but players of all of their games for granted. I love Rift. I have since it was subscription based. It's a game I constantly come back to and frequently spend money in. For me to even think about stepping foot into Rift again, much less spending money, Trion Worlds needs to make a drastic change of direction.

I, and many others, aren't upset that a game has issues. They all do. Some big, some small. Usually they get worked out and most companies worth supporting attempt to make reparations like the ones Trion explained to Massively. That's not my issue.

My issues are with Trion Worlds directly. Do not allow a developer to serve broken materials that were well reported LONG before the game was released in North America under your (trusted at the time) name. Do not adopt an "advertise one thing and deliver another" mentality. Do not play the "we're not the developer, we need (insert company here) to fix it but we've given them the feedback" game. You may not be the developer, but you are one of the profiteers. You are willingly taking money, shifting issue responsibility, and being somewhat obscure and often not present at all in your communication to players who pay you.

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Sadly, many of Trion Worlds' employees are great people that I've had the great pleasure of meeting and interviewing through the years and I am sure they are working as hard as they can to get your favorite game up and running and bug free. Many of them feel that they owe that to you as their customer. They're good people that have a job just like many of us and they honestly want to do their best for the game they work on and pour their hearts into. I am sure (but have no "inside knowledge" to confirm) that many of them want to do more, say more, and take more action but cannot due to limitations put on them and their communication by others. Unfortunately, they usually are the people that shoulder the brunt of "upset gamer complaints" with little to no kudos to go with that burden. I feel for those people.

Trion Worlds as a company though has become a company that I can no longer personally support. Until such a time as ArcheAge is the actual product that was sold in advance to its players, I cannot and will not play a game I actually enjoy. Nor will I financially support it.

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The nature of my position here requires that I report on MMO news, and that includes almost all of Trion's portfolio. I cannot change that, nor would I want to change that. I want to know what changes they are making, how their product is being made into what it should have been for those that love it, and through that reporting I hope to receive good news that will allow me to return to Rift. As a person though, not a dime will be spent nor an hour logged as playtime.

I sincerely wish the best for Trion Worlds, its employees, and most of all, ArcheAge fans. You got a raw deal and it just keeps getting worse. I hope that one day my faith in Trion Worlds as a company is somewhat restored by them doing the right thing. Even if doing the right thing may not be the most immediately profitable decision to make.

This is not a "call to action" or a "join the cause" type of editorial. It is however, an editorial. My opinion. Some will share it, others will not and that's fine by me. Either way, I'd love to know how you feel in the comments below.

UPDATE: Scapes has posted a new update to the forums on the current connectivity issues. Still no reasons explained (besides to say it is NOT DDos) but the team is working on the issues. No rollbacks planned either.

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In this article: Trion Worlds, ArcheAge.

About the Author

Michael Byrne
Michael Byrne, Editor in Chief

Mike “Magicman” Byrne has been a part of the MMOBomb family for years and serves as the site’s current Editor-in-Chief. His love for MMOs and gaming in general has led him to covering games for numerous gaming websites including Gamebreaker TV and XIV Nation where he proudly displays his fanboy flag for FFXIV:ARR.

More Stories by Michael Byrne

Discussion (41)

Lagwin 9 years ago
It seems to be the norm now for MMO's not to communicate with the players and releasing seriously broken games.
At least Archeage is free(though it's no excuse) as the face of the game Trion should be communicating with the players...it's not like the don't have a fairly large team and couldn't do it...they just choose not to.
Don't think it doing to much worse than ESO did though, and that was a big expensive sub game and it was bugged to hell , hacked and broken and botted to epic levels.

Then you have a tiny wee indy company that has next to no staff compared to these big names and their customer service blows just about everything else out of the water, and if they mess up there is usually an apology and a step by step breakdown on how it happened and what they learned so the can avoid it happening again.

Can't say i like the way Rift is heading atm either, planer vouchers removed to "stop people from exploiting planarite" but they have removed they could have just removed the option to cash in on planarite and kept the stone transfer so you could get some decent leveling gear...but why do that when they can remove that to and try to get you to spend money.
Attunments for opening up gear slots...seems to be lifted straight out of defiance, seems that they have set it up so that any expansion they now add they can add new gear that can only be used by having an attunment.
And holy crap that grind to 65, if you don't have rested you'll be pushing it to even get to 65, i used 3 of the top end exp flasks(which i got free as compensation for some problems they had months ago)...seems they want more money from pots.

er0s13 9 years ago
had my account banned for no reason, did not bother to investigate, so i repealed and they responded stating that the ban was valid, again, no evidence to support their claim. this is a total slap in the face. i come back in a month and ban was lifted. what a total insult. too little too late i'd say. horrible customer service, will not deal with in the future, good luck trion.

Baium 9 years ago
This game is a peace of shit wont waster ur time with it , scams , hacks ! Not for us , gamers ! Trion is worthless and the game sucks ass ! U don't pay u wont get shit ! P2w that's it, been playing 2 years now and I quit , its shit belive me !

NobleNerd 9 years ago
Magic, I feel the same way about Trion lately. I was on board during the whole Rift development. I was excited for the lore, the ability to create a character's skills the way I wanted to through the souls system.... then as the population dwindled and the excitement of Rift wore off Trion started to majorly change the game, doing away with factions (pretty much) and so much more. Now with the way they are handling or not handling the ArcheAge fiasco I am done with the company as a whole right now. Trust lost.

Cloak 9 years ago
I've been saying all year and Imma say it again. 2014 is the year of the scammers! Fake hype with fake promises, equals... profit. And its probably going to continue because people are stupid enough to throw there money at games that are in alpha. Thus mmo's are dead, dead dead dead!

idontlikemyname 9 years ago
I just wanna say i want my 50$ back from the pre order....

Southstar 9 years ago
RIP Tahyang Server NA. USELESS PATRON!

Mr Heartless 9 years ago
I tried to warn people from the start, they gave into the hype. Maybe they will listen now.

Grims Bane 9 years ago
I have to admit Trion has really disappointed me, when it comes to Rift when the new update came out, the gear and health scaling was disgusting, not to mention that when I looked in the item shop and saw what it would take to get that end game gear, only represented how the grind in the game was greatly increased. Sighs, though ArcheAge I played cbt each and every single one, and had high hopes truly thought the game was well thought out, and was well hosted but then it released and everything fell apart, I've never been more disappointed in a company than I have been with Trion. So with that I left and will never go back, there is no forgiveness when it comes to their mistakes. I went back to Aion where they do make an effort to answer your support tickets and keep you updated. Next year though Skyforge will be the game I will play, lets just hope its not a flop like Trion's idea of hosting FailAge

UltimateLooser 9 years ago
You do realize that Trion is just the publisher, right?
I will just try to be the devil's advocate, here. I am not a AA player, but I did enjoy a lot Defiance (who got the best instance auto-grouping that I'm aware of - but that's just a opinion).

Publishing a game that's not optimized happens. But, due to the massive code involved in this sort of game, the first personn who can temper with it... is the one who write it. You just can't play with hundreds of thousands lines if you don"t know them. Your problem is IF XL games didn't respond well to Trion or IF they did write their code so badly that you can't fix things without rewriting the core code. This incident prove that Trion probably decided to try to fix it by themselve... Meaning that they just put their hands on this code and that they will try to decipher the massive datas of this game. It take times. A lot.

I'm a gamer. To casual a gamer to invest a ton of money in a game, but still a gamer. I enjoy playing to detend myself, like a lot of people. So F2P is great for me. But, I'm not in the trend of paying a game to be able to buy a portion of land, be a patron, etc. I do understand people who want to invest time and money in this sort of "paralel reality" (I'm using this term, because I don't know another one). But, you must understand too, that when there is real money involved and that if you must pay to have advantages over others, there will always be Bots. And hacks. And Ddos attacks. And mega crashings of servers.

Remember when some people farmed Diablo 2 to death to be able to sell objects with real money "under the table" ? That was the beginning of all of this. Now, there is bots to farm instead. And Diablo 3 did have his own Shop ingame after that, to make some profits too. Annnnd some bots too. But, can every publisher be like Blizzard and invest TONS of money and time to test and protect their games?

I don't think so, but even if I'm wrong, still this peoples lives with your transactions. And they know it.

But the crap can happen. Like now. Don't forget that there is probably a contract behind all this. One of those where you can't break it without loosing a lot of money. Initially, it's not Trion' job to fix the game. But they must and I suspect they try to do it. There is probably some tension beetween them and XL games. Anyway, they do it because, like all of you pointed, the blame is on their head and not on XL (Trion name come first on all the articles).

Seriously, what can they do? People are shooting out since the first day of the launch in North America. Of course, if you pay, you could expect a stable experience, or some communication. But don't buy anything the first week! Some of you are talking of known problems, did you wait to see if some things were fixed before jumping in?

And don't say that you payed for a finished product: today, there is no such things, even on single player games. Even Diablo 3 did have enormous launch problems. They simply were victims of their hype. So is ArcheAge.

Morality: don't bury Trion. I'm sure they're doing what they can. Just wait and see if the game become better for you to enjoy the experience. Because if you bury Trion, they will shut down and if they do, your money is lost. And don't expect any kind of refund.

Simple maths.

Sorry to put things so bluntly. I'm not defending Trion on a whole, but the peoples who work there that are forced to patch a probably bad deal...

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Fosio 9 years ago
You know there's something fishy when you have to buy access rights to a Beta phase.
And when the game was actually released, all those F2P business model changes done to clearly force people to pay in order to be slightly competitive. Have they no shame at all?
I do agree with some takes on the article above, but remember, Rift failed once and then it went F2P and more mistakes were made after the conversion as well. Maybe you choose to highly regard Trion but i'm done with them a long time ago and after trying AA for OB3, OB4 and some weeks after release, i can easily claim that i'm done with any title that has anything to do with them or is Trion Worlds related.

Sadakomi 9 years ago
for someone whose account is still unresolved due to false banning... They're only priority is the money they earn, they don't care for the dedicated players... I can withstood a milking publishers, annoying goldsellers spamming in the entire chat box...but leaving the player alone without help is a no no... It so sad that they only saw Archeage as a short term profitable game, not a long one.

Merkadis 9 years ago
"With Jason and myself being the primary writers"
The only writers, you mean.

"Trion Worlds has damaged the reputation they once had through a series of missteps culminating in the colossal mess that is their publishing of ArcheAge for North America."

And i wonder who "helped" them along to their failure, surely a pro DDoS doesn't just happen for the heck of it, it was a job that had been paid for (as are likely all those hacks are as well) and the payment i'm sure came from one of Trions primary industry rivals< now who would that be huh?

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tolshortte 9 years ago
I was not satisfied with the way they handled Defiance, at all. the game was fine, its choices of design were ok, worked for the most part etc. had no issues with that part of it. didn't even mind it when it went f2p tbh despite buying it day one with a season pass. I wanted to support the game/show model and wished it would be successful and profitable in hopes for other shows/games to follow suit. transformers the mmo with movie/show tie ins sounds awesome to me lol.

the problem I had was when something was broken, or being exploited their response was less than stellar. hacking was an issue etc. they were very slow in admitting there was a problem and even slower to act on problems. while the game works fairly well today (last I checked), it left a bad feeling with me.

I tried AA when it was in CBT and saw the same road id been on before. so I avoided it. glad I did. Trion has pretty much lost me as a customer. it would hard for them to win me back considering im not playing or buying their products.

tldr: I agree with MM on this one.

exaccuss 9 years ago
I feel sorry for the people who actually bought founder packs for this game.. It won't be long until it shuts down anyway.

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XevianO92 9 years ago
Magicman I really felt the same thing.The company which made one of the best if not the best mmorpg RIFT is publishing an "incomplete"-"Bugged" game.

My friends had high hopes for AA they spend some money too but seeing how this game went downhill bots and hacks,they left the game and now feel cheated.

They made their REP with RIFT and now they LOST it with AA.I am glad I didnt liked the game in first place or spend any rather to get sad leaving the game.

Jambock 9 years ago
I am really impressed that some people not only like it but support it with money besides the problems... Because of communities like this that crap after crap is thrown in our faces... I am very sad, the small number of games that interest me or didn't come to the west or was a total failure IMO... I leveled one character till lvl 36 and day after day i was only get disappointed... I want a good equip? Pay RL money or farmvile.... I want a big ship for naval battle? Pay for the game or/plus an enormous grind plus farmvile with at least a # of friendly players wanting to do the same thing of you... I want to pvp? PAY FOR IT or die, not even the grind and the farmvile saves you from this...
The game is a simple farmvile with battles and a lot of bugs...

Android 9 years ago
Im on server full of russian scammers and cheaters , trion should name servers like english, german, etc, in international server most of players there not understand simple mmorpg termins and there is no option to change to another server without criminal scum from shit hole, i not saw any positive post about trion anywhere, game have so many bugs i saw in cbt and still not fixed,xl games suck if they implamented alpha stage game, also gameplay is bad, there is nothing to do if u not farmville fan and peasant, there is only 2 instances for lvl 50 players, after months of playing and almost everyday looking for party to run dungeon i found team less then 10 times, wtf is this, i played tonns of mmorpgs, i never see something like that, to play pvp arena u need to wait alot also, only u do everyday is repetetive dailies to earn gilda stars, some crafting lvling till u have labor points, arena and instances, brainless pvp with other faction without reason is waste of time atleast for me im not a fan of brainless pvps like counter strike etc lobby craps(die, revive come back,die, revive, come back, die revive,come back, i better suicide), also other faction have like 10 times more players so in halcyona pvp battle impossible to win and pvp areas and delivery runs is much harder if u play faction with lower player base, there is no ballance, still playing in hope of changes and game update till waiting other mmorpgs, for now is boring, most of time i play afk, also in last month like 100+ ppl quit playing and its just from our guild, but bots and gold spammers become more, halloween event was so shiiit, there was nothing, was like daily for candies, one costume and one coffin bed in cash shop, i not expect anything more for cristmas event, trion not bring even patch notes after updates and is silent, trion and xl games should learn from digital extremes warframe staff, best of the best, fixes and countless updates and they communicate with community, not only one person community manager but many from staff, bug section is fixed quick, there is no old closed beta bugs and patched content always have patch notes and they give goodies for players for free all the time and after fails they also give to players cas shop cash otr something, trion should give this game to xl games to fix all this mess.

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Powerslave 9 years ago
To many things wrong with AA. Sick of Trion as a company. Takes them a month to get back with response. To bad they just dont shut down AA Refund everyone who put a dime into that crap game and move on.

ShinigamIan 9 years ago
Archage is crap, agreed. But why take it on Rift?, It's still a good game with a good player base, and it's been managed reasonably by Trion. They screwed it with Archage and the best thing they can do is close it, send it back to XL, apologize with the players, and release another game at least playable. But Rift has nothing to do with it, just saying...

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Revar 9 years ago
i played the game for about 4 hours , and i soon realized that i wasted 4 hours of my life eating SHIT from a SHITY company .

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Cappie 9 years ago
Trion has been screwing up ever since they got Defiance.

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Hero 9 years ago
seriously 'ArcheAge's decent...' it's 'descent' ... not decent. wtf

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Shiraz 9 years ago
I tried CBT and based on my past experience with Trion, I knew things won't go well, but never expected to go this far down the ditch. I guess my hunch was on right track and didn't support them time wise or money. I left ArchAge after 2 hours gameplay once I found out many of the flaws that most likely will never change. Those flaws are from Trion's decisions not the game developers. At same time decided not to look at any present or future games published by Trion.

Booya 9 years ago
Damn... thank goodness I never touched this game.

Henry Lu 9 years ago
Garbage game. Warned about this crap in CBT and never touched this shit again. Forum name Landlord.

Halberd 9 years ago
Agreed. And you spelled "Unfortunately" incorrectly.

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