Fresh Start from a whale perspective, long read. I don’t expect this bubble burst to go over well, but here it is anyway.

TL: DR Alts are free money, use them, and don’t complain about whales when you don’t understand how easy it is to make money in game. Don’t get me wrong, I am a whale; my point is you don’t need to be one to be relevant, just to be at the tippy top tier. I understand the irony of being tagged gold spam, I don't understand why it's there though >.>

Heyo everyone,

My name is Magician, if you play Fresh Start on the West side, you’ve heard of me, if you’re on the east, you’ve seen me around, and if you’re a pirate, I love you too. So I play a lot of Archeage, I am on the forums a lot, and this may fall on deaf ears, it may not. But I have my two cents to add to this whole Archeage thing we all presumably share. I want to specifically address the pay to win aspect of AA everyone talks about.

Now, I am a mostly new player to Archeage, I played at launch all those years ago, never got out of GHA gear, and quit quickly, I came back for 3.5 and quit again during the whole Castle Fiasco, again never got out of GHA gear. I came back for this Fresh Start, because Archeage, at its core is almost exactly what I want in an MMO, obviously nothing is perfect, but AA gets pretty close within its niche for me.

Now on to the topic at hand; I am a top 5 gear score player on Fresh start. I got second in gladiator because I thought I had one more day to take first. But where was I the first month of server launch? Where was I before Epherium gear you may ask, or at least I’d ask if I saw me seemingly pop out of nowhere. Well, I was just another random in unique GHA around 3200 gear score.

Then, day one of patch 1.1, I was top 5. This wasn’t achieved without effort and time. I spent every day before epherium, farming, grinding, and growing mats, and day one of epherium, I had 10k gold in bank, and mats for: 3 sets of Epherium cloth, 9 scepters, 3 shields, 1 bow, and a flute. I came out of day one with full divine, a legendary scepter, and a divine shield, 100% from in game time. At that point, I had not whaled outside of the initial $150 Archeum Legends return pack, the $100 name reservation thing, and I bought all three costume packs(if you bought any costume week one-two for 50gish, you’re welcome, I did not know any better). If I wasn’t brand new, I’m sure I could have had significantly more.

I came into this game, almost entirely blind, and I realized, just like all of you have, labor is gold. And if I had more labor, I would have more gold. So I did the math on alts, I used loyalty. If you buy patron with two apex, currently for 335g each (Obviously a lot less earlier on, price is irrelevant though), just from logging into each region once a day for the 5 loyalty per, you could get 4 labor pots in a month, currently selling for 100g(Only relevant in that 4 > 1 Apex), and buy one apex per region, with gold and loyalty leftover. Credits are account bound, not region specific.

This nets you, 86,400 extra labor to use(Per region, but that’s extra credit), at the cost of ONE HOUR a MONTH, or 2 minutes a day, just log into NA, then log out and log into EU. There are a literal slew of things you can do to get >2 silver/labor, and many of them are pure afk (If you can’t buy mats and craft into material for 2 s/l, I can’t help you). You can net 3.6 silver/labor If you use this purely on baobab, (Side note; don’t do this, baobab is only viable once you reach a certain threshold, you don’t have that amount). This is literally free gold at what amounts to no cost. This is pure labor profit; not to mention all the extra gold you save yourself on vocation, honor, or gold gained from dailies.

You can do this with as many accounts as you are willing to manage. I personally manage 5 alts on top of Magician; I don’t do anything crazy or extra shenanigans with them. I literally log into each region on each account once a day, I spend my labor on NA only.

I have spent basically $1 per hour to play a top tier Fresh Start Character, and approaching 800 hours in game time, I can easily say it was worth the money I’ve invested. There a TON more ways to make money, but this is the literal easiest, most brain dead way to do it. If you have a basic grasp of economics, investing, or flipping, you’ll realize you can make a lot more.

Edit: Figured I'd just add another method to pay for patron, if you make 1 s/l on that 86,400, you'd have 864g, which is 130g more then 2 apex currently.

P.S. DEAD WEIGHT BTW
P.P.S  I am sorry my guild is toxic sometimes, it’s what happens when you put a bunch of elitists together.
P.P.P.S. I hope you have a wonderful day.