Hello all,
I have played Archeage since launch. Recently all I have been doing is logging on each day to 'maintain' my holdings. You get so much 'labor' each day and you convert that labor into items that are used within the payer run economy/crafting system. I also own a bit of land. There is only so much land in the game, and you must log in every so active to keep it.
The game is different than EQ, but at the same time the same.
Some things I like,
-Player crafted items are better than anything you get from a raid or quest. This ensure that the economy is humming with activity.
-Persistant land/house ownership. You place your house and it is there for all to see. No instances. This makes land a commodity that can be bought and sold due to its location.
-High level and low level players are at the same locations. Due to its sandbox, the areas are not segmented. You will see high level players hang out in the starter zones, because that may be where they decided to place their house.
-Outstanding Graphics. Best looking MMORPG that I have played.
-Dynamic transportation system. There are a variety of land/air/sea transports you can own/utilize. It is great to have a guild bring out 11 warships each manned by 5-6 guild members shooting cannons at the giant squid raid boss in the sea.
-Play your way. Do you prefer PvE grind, PvP, farmville, crafting, or questing? This game fits all of that together.
-Easy to change your class at any time. There are a number of skill trees and you can utilize 3 at a time. This adds a level of character customization that few MMORPG have. You could maximize 3 trees to level 50 in about 3 days if you spent $$$ on items that grant you additional labor. Then longer to max all 11 skill trees. Using the 'free' labor you get it takes about a month to max 3 skill trees, and about 3 months to max all of them. I consider maxing all skill trees as 'max' level.
Things I don't like and the reason I stopped seriously playing after 3-4 months.
-Lack of content. There are a few dungeons to explore. There are events you can do daily to build up to rewards. These are both PvE, PvP, and crafting focused events. However they get old the 20th time you done them.
-Lack of community. This is mostly my doing as the game does not require or even encourage you to be social, so I have stayed away from the guild metagame. Once my group of friends stopped playing the social aspect died.
-The server stability is not stellar. Just right now my server is down during prime time. I would be playing instead of writing this post if the servers were up.
-Bots, bots and more bots. In some places you see more bots than actual players. The bots farm gold and sell it via RMT, and spam the chat channels non-stop which has upset the in game economy some. In the past month that has mostly stopped and it seems there is a handle on the bots, and as a result the economy has adjusted.
Things that the game has that I dont care about or participate in.
-Extensive PvP content. Not my style. I like the farmville aspect of the game. I would rather provide the raw materials to the crafters so that they can provide the best in slot items to the PvP players.
-A ton of cosmetic choices for your character/mounts/house/vehicles etc. I am not so interested in playing virtual dress up, but there are a lot of people that are. It was fun to see someone customize their house to look like a Starbucks :-)
About Hackshield. It can be easily bypassed. There are programs like macroquest for Archeage. There are programs that inject themselves into the client that allows you to do things similar to ShowEq, warp, travel fast etc. On the Russian version of the game it is even possible to interject yourself as a GM and spawn raid bosses anywhere. I have not seem that on the US version. For the first month or so I used the program that gave me radar like ShowEq does. It was a nice tool, nothing that could be used to exploit the game. I have not use the automation software, mostly because Trion does actively ban users of that program, and I never wanted to deal with the hassle. There are a number of bots that level 1-50 AFK and then grind mobs for gold to sell. They get banned but not after then earned and laundered a lot of gold for resale.
That is my quick rundown of Archeage. I hope I did not bore you so much you did not read my wall of text.
If anyone is interested in Archeage I can show you around. It is free to play. I would even be willing to trade Archage items for EQ items :-)
Cheers,
MNKenr