In the sandpark MMO ArcheAge the communication between US publisher Trion Worlds and the Korean developer XLGames has once again led to a misunderstanding.
Recently, a new event has gone live in ArcheAge. This was announced in one of the last live streams. Players were supposed to be able to kill a red dragon. And they would then have one hour to loot the dragon’s body, or so it was said.
When the event actually went live, there was no sign of an hour. After a significantly shorter time, just a few minutes, the body disappeared. In the relevant forums, threads were seen: “Trion Worlds has lied to us again.” The tension between players and the US publisher Trion Worlds has been tense since the launch, one could say.
In a forum post on Thursday and in a live stream from Friday, the clarification was provided: It was a misunderstanding. At Trion Worlds, they believed (and communicated it that way) that it meant one hour of “real time.” In Korea, however, it was meant as “one hour in-game,” which passes by much faster.
They could not test this at Trion Worlds beforehand because such events are firmly embedded in the code of ArcheAge and only become active when their time has come. For the future, they want to change this in order to test events before their appearance and to provide significantly better information.
My MMO says: We have named the difficult partnership between XLGames and Trion Worlds as our MMO Fail 2014. That should be opinion enough at this point.
