The sandpark MMO ArcheAge has now apparently developed a fix for the “land grab” issue. With an additional delay, they aim to eliminate the problem, which was allegedly never as big as it has been made out to be in the meantime.
Why are the same people always the fastest?
The “land grab” is probably one of the most frustrating phenomena in ArcheAge. A plot whose rent is expiring gets demolished. The timing for this is fixed and known. Interested players gather around the plot to then, as soon as it goes into demolition, place their own “building” on it or rather: the foundation for one.
Sounds like an exciting thing: Sometimes you win, sometimes someone else wins. But afterwards, you always have something to talk about. In practice, however, it was the case that on some servers, the same people always won.
They often weren’t even near the plot. And sold the freshly acquired foundations for sums that made your ears twitch, which causes quite a stir with the kitty ears of the Firrans.
Some of these “fortunate” ones turned it into a real business, becoming brokers and selling the virtual plots on eBay for real money.
Hack or Skill? The issue creates distrust
How could the same people always win? There are two theories.
Trion Worlds itself and some fans say: Everything is going fairly. Some players are simply faster, have developed the right tactics, and those who complain about it are sore losers who can’t handle the fact that others are just better in a “sandbox”.
Proponents of a second theory show in disbelief on Russian hacker sites, where programs are circulating that enable such a “land hack”. Trion Worlds also admits that there have been isolated cases of such programs being used, but these are only isolated incidents. Nevertheless, they have taken action against this in the past and plan to do so again now, hopefully with lasting success.
With the next patch, which is currently being tested on the new test server, the following new fix is coming to ArcheAge:
* Property placement now has a five-second delay between attempts in order to disrupt rapid spam-placement attempt tools. Please adjust your strategy for property grabs accordingly!
So in the future, there will be a 5-second delay between individual attempts to place a foundation.
Mein MMO says: One can only hope that this will mean one of the biggest problems in ArcheAge is in the past. Although, one can hardly say that the problem was solved in time. The first complaints about such “hacks” and “land grabs” appeared more than two months ago.
