At the end of March, the developers of Albion Online announced that their MMORPG will become free-to-play. However, although this will take effect on April 10th, player numbers are already skyrocketing.
How many players does Albion Online have? With the announcement of the model change to free-to-play, Albion Online released a graph with current player numbers.
From January until March 10th, between 9,500 and 11,500 players played Albion Online daily. There is again a graph in a new blog post to remind players about the change.
This shows that player numbers have rapidly increased to between 14,000 and even 17,000 daily players after the new patch and announcement.
The patch also plays a role: In the graph, one can also see the release of the Oberon update. This patch revamped the tutorial and brought randomized dungeons. These dungeons appear randomly in the game world and consist of random layers and enemies.
They have been well received in the official forum, although the dungeons apparently appear too frequently and in some places are so easy that one can simply run through to the final boss.
Developers anticipate queues for the free-to-play release
The high demand on the servers has the developers feeling positive. In a post, they thanked the fans and provided more information about the free-to-play release.
When will Albion Online become free-to-play? The transition to free-to-play is expected to take place on Wednesday, April 10th at 12:00 PM our time.
From their experiences with the buy-to-play release in 2017 and also from the Steam release in May 2018, the developers know that there can be problems and particularly large player numbers, especially in the first few days.
Therefore, they have already drawn up plans in case the influx becomes too large.
Queues for free players: It could happen that there might be a queue when logging into Albion Online.
This primarily affects free-to-play players, as owners of a premium account are given priority. The developers want to ensure that the existing players and fans of the MMORPG do not suffer from the transition.
What happens next? The developers of Albion Online have already made plans for the long term. Since both the patch from November 2018 and the Oberon update this March have been well received by players, the developers have published a roadmap in the forum.
In it, they discuss a major overhaul of the Outland map, changes to the faction war, further adjustments to the open world, and generally more for PvP.
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