The sand park MMO ArcheAge rewards players’ creativity, knowledge of secret shortcuts, insider information, and tricks. However, the community prefers to keep many of these secrets to themselves. What is a trick, and what is an exploit? How significant are the advantages for veterans, and how beginner-friendly is ArcheAge? Is it beneficial if complexity is achieved through technical design decisions like interconnected or separate pools?
MMO players love to be the only ones who know a particular trick. To be the only ones who know how something works and how to gain an advantage in the game. They go to great lengths to be informed, to know more than the “noobs.” Therefore, they buy guides and special publications from gaming magazines that promise to “reveal everything about a game, expose all secrets.” Thus, they scour forums for information, listen to podcasts and watch videos from experts, and exchange information among themselves. The sand park MMO ArcheAge takes this cult of information and tricks to the extreme with some dubious methods.
The Puzzle of the Sleeping Robots
ArcheAge is complicated, and there are numerous sneaky ways to succeed that one would not discover just by looking. Yesterday, a user on reddit wondered why so many bots peacefully dozed in pattern beds. It was a mystery to him.
Another user had the explanation: “It’s not just bots, I do it too. That gives 120 labor points in 12 minutes,” he said. The bots create fresh characters in the starting zone, quickly earn 2 Gilda stars, then rent a special bed in the first village for these 2 stars, lie down, sleep for 10 minutes, and earn 120 labor points.
So if you need labor points, but the labor potion is on a timer, this is a reasonable way to earn points monotonously but reliably.
One of many tricks that one cannot come up with just by looking, which one either knows or does not.
The trick works, like many others in ArcheAge, because the freshly created and then deleted character and the holy main character of the player share the same pool of labor points. The twink can do things that the main character can no longer do, which are extremely useful for him.
Knowledge Advantage Pays Off in ArcheAge
How does someone come up with such tricks?
At release, ArcheAge had already been in alpha and beta for months, playable for years in Korea and Russia. However, not everyone had access. Access to the alpha and beta required a financial investment. Anyone wishing to play in Korea or Russia had to overcome language and IP barriers. This was likely not an option for most later players. But this investment turned out to be beneficial.
The information advantage of these “veterans” was enormous. Just a few hours after the head start, all building areas were occupied. Mind you, free-to-play players couldn’t even get into the game at that point. Others stood in long lines in front of buggy quest givers or were still stuck in the server queue (which was partly due to players knowing tricks to bypass them).
In the meantime, veterans methodically worked their way through a pre-made plan, followed an “ideal” line, and started with the best conditions fully connected to the new life.
Gone are the days of other MMOs when at the beginning, at release, everyone was a noob, everyone fumbled around aimlessly. Those who practiced this in ArcheAge found themselves later in completely overcrowded residential areas, as the veterans had intentionally built poorly and occupied as much space as possible to capitalize on it later. Some later sold their building lots for exorbitant amounts of gold and further increased their advantage from the first 8 hours of gameplay.
While some started anew, for others it was already the second, third, or fourth start in ArcheAge. A bit like coming in at age 19 with a completed high school diploma and going back to the first grade, knocking a few first graders over with your elbow.
Most tactics were based on creating twinks and rushing them through the main story as quickly as possible. This earned the desired Gilda stars, which could then be used to purchase specific items beneficial to the main character.
Those who know tricks and secrets get ahead. Our article on how to effectively exploit game mechanics to gain experience points through labor point usage is the second most popular piece we’ve ever published about ArcheAge. Only the evergreen on the complicated class system is more popular.
What to Do When Even the Operator Cheats?
There are tricks and secrets even with Trion Worlds, the operators themselves. Yes, there is a 12-hour cooldown on the labor potion. So even players who want to spend a lot of money can only consume two per day, which gives them an advantage that is quite manageable, right?
Well, unless a player has twinks, then instead of just 2000, they can indeed gain 12,000 labor points, as all characters share a common labor point pool, but each character has its own cooldown. This way, Trion Worlds sells individual players not just two labor potions per day, but rather 12.
Player Tactics in ArcheAge Resemble Tax Evasion Methods of Corporations
But who knows if Trion Worlds can comprehend which pools share a cooldown and which do not. When reading strategies on how players use these tactics against Trion Worlds, it reminds me a bit of how large corporations want to evade taxes:
“You create a char on an American server, log in once daily, invest the loyalty in chests, turn them into gold with your labor, buy Apex with that, redeem it on your account, and pay for your patron with it. And you even make a profit on top of it. Because the labor and loyalty pools are only region-specific. Meaning they differ for EU and NA, but the credit pool is cross-regional.”
The user from whom this statement originated was then criticized in a German ArcheAge forum thread for revealing those secret tricks that enable money-making. He was admonished, as this merely rewards the laziness of those who do not want to think for themselves.
One Protects Their Secrets
This is a trend observed in ArcheAge: players who are “in the know” keep their knowledge to themselves as much as possible; tricks and nuances are rarely made public, circulating in guilds like the secrets of craft guilds from the past.
For newcomers to ArcheAge, it can be challenging to navigate the complex world of the sandbox. Recently – also on reddit – a player posted an overview of crafting online.
Well, all clear, right?
Conclusion: The complexity of ArcheAge is something many players have wished for and welcomed. While other games like World of Warcraft strive to become simpler with each expansion, ArcheAge is different. There is nothing wrong with that. The “complexity and sandbox” niche that ArcheAge occupies is wide open; apart from EVE Online, there is hardly anything else in that space.
However: There is a difference between complexity and strange “tricks.” Everything that has to do with “And then I do this with the twink for my main because… uh… pools” represents a relatively strange game design that does not necessarily appear attractive. Hopefully, future MMORPGs will find other ways to reward “special knowledge” than these rather grim and odd tricks that are prevalent in ArcheAge. The line between “trick” and “exploit” also seems to blur too often in the game.
