In my last thread there was a fair bit of interest for archeage. I've been playing since Friday with the founder pack and had loads of fun.

Last night we started a war over 200 trees that were planted in the wild (in the wild they aren't protected and anyone can harvest when they've grown). We gathered about 40 people to challenge the guild that had planted them and got our asses kicked, but it was tons of fun. I only really got the end when things started to die off but there's an album here, excuse the low settings.

It was my first taste of large-scale world PVP and I still can't get over how good it was. This game has so much potential.

I was originally just going to post this in the lads/carson/prussia subreddits, but figure I'd put it here so anyone else that wants to play can see it. I don't care about civcraft drama outside of civcraft, if you want to play with us then just hop into mumble and ask. Dickheadedness and drama between ourselves won't be tolerated though.

For those that are joining

Right ducks, the game properly launches today.

We're on the Aranzeb server, in the Eastern faction.

You need to pick either a Firran (cat) or Harani (asian).

For the first couple of days of headstart, the server had a massive queue, there are two queues, one for those with patron and one for those without. Free to play players might be facing a huge wait for at least a few days after launch.

I really recommend you spend the $10 to buy yourself a month of patron status, not just for the queues but so you can claim some farmland. Realistically this early on we aren't going to be able to get space and materials enough for everyone to have their own house, instead I'm working on building a larger farm house which everyone can use.

We have a guild called Compass Rose which is comprised of NJ's friends, Tyrothalos and I. NJ's friends all played alpha/beta so they're a really useful source of info and are decent chaps so if you need help, just ask them.

Let me know when you get online and I'll invite you to the guild.

Guilds

We have two guilds set up at the moment, and one more planned.

The first, Compass Rose is our main guild. It's for legal PVP (enemy faction, criminals) and questing. It's the best place to start, since you'll want to get the hang of the game before you turn to crime.

The second, is our more nefarious guild, crime ranging from stealing crops to raiding and killing members of our own faction (east/west factions, not guild). If you want to yolo it and don't care about infamy then this one is more your thing.

Finally, when we have more people that are up for it, we'll have pirate guild. When you commit enough crimes you basically get banished from your home faction/continent. NPCs become aggressive and you start to respawn on the pirate island in the middle of the ocean. It looks like an interesting way to play if you're up for rading/interupting trade missions/cool pvp. You'd have to build up enough infamy in the second guild to do this and is probably more of a higher-level thing.

Of course, you don't have to join our guilds, if you have a few people you might want to start your own small guild (need a minimum of five players), or join one of the mega-guilds which have over a hundred players.

Questing

You can complete most quests faster by grouping up, to start off with I'd say don't rush the main questline or anything, spend a few hours getting the hang of things.

By doing all the quests in the first few areas, you'll be introduced to things pretty gradually and end up with stuff like your first mount and glider plus instructions on how to use them.

Grinding

You have these things called labor points (LP), you use them when you do some of the more grindy aspects of the game like mining, crafting and harvesting crops.

I think free players gain 5LP per 5 minutes logged in. Patrons gain 10 per 5 minutes while logged in and 5 per 5 minutes when logged out.

Don't let your LP max out. If you're getting near your 5000 cap then go harvest our farms/replant, mine or craft. Early game LP is a real limiting factor because we're spending more time grinding to get set up than doing the more fun parts of the game, this is where patron status and the slight p2w features actually feel more useful.

If you can, AFK when possible instead of logging out. LP is really valuable to us while we're trying to build up.

The pay to win element

I hate pay to win games, and this was a real concern when deciding whether to play or not, while it does come into it a little bit, I'm still happy enough with the game and how little it takes from it. To address people's concerns I'll list off what the major perks of spending a bit extra on the game are.

• LP boost potions, this is the major one, every 12 hours you can use a potion that gives you 1000LP. This sounds devestating, but unless you want to spend 10 hours a day in game with a lot of grinding, they aren't even worth it. I've bought a few with my starting credits from the founder pack because they help speed up grinding in the early game, but after we have our house and ships up and running I don't think I'll have any more.

• Mounts/Gliders you can buy more unusual mounts and gliders from the start of the game. Or you can get them by doing the first few quests you run into. Even the best of either are no better in performance than what you can get in game really easily.

• Tax certificates - you can buy these with credits and pay off building taxes, you can also craft them using a few LP or build them for in game currency. Not a big deal.

• Item chests - these are so expensive and yield such crap that basically nobody bothers with them, their main feature is offering extremely rare cosmetic items for people that want to gamble. (One guy on /r/archage bought £500/$800 of them and got a load of shit I can easily get anyway before he got the rare glider he wanted).

• Other boosts - you can buy a potion that gives you small vocation experience (not level experience) that gives a small temporary boost to stuff like crafting experience, it'd be better to just buy the LP boost and craft more so you get more materials out of it. Not that useful.

• Cosmetic shit - lots of this, probably lots more to come

• Other stuff - things like inventory expanders and extra char slots, can be bought in game too

Basically, while they definitely aim to make extra revenue from item store purchases, it doesn't really take away from the game and you shouldn't let it put you off.

The only irl money thing you might want is patron status for the faster queue and LP recovery, since it's on par with pay to play mmos, I reckon that's fair enough. A couple of LP boost pots and maybe inventory expansions are useful early on, but not necessary by any means.

Useful links

/r/archeage isn't that great, but might have some interesting things pop up every now and then.

/r/archeage/faq has some decent info and guides.

http://archeagewiki.com/ needs a lot of work, but has a lot of good info already.

If you need any help hit me up in mumble or ask in here. My IGN is Tj.

TL;DR:

#ARCHEAGEHYPE