I’ve been enjoying the heck out of ArcheAge and found myself looking at all the goodies in the Starter Pages and finding myself tempted to buy one, which is crazy since I already spent stupid money on a Founders Pack. Still the itch was there.

Today I decided to do some math and figure out if they’re actually a good value. And guess what? They’re fair but not a deal.

First step was to determine how much a credit costs. At the smallest denomination $5 gets you 750 credits. So a credit is worth .6667 cents. (Technically .666666666… on and on but I figured 4 digits was enough.)

Using that number, here’re the values I came up with:
$149.99 Archeum Starter Pack = $188.41
$99.99 Gold Starter Pack = $122.27
$49.99 Silver Starter Pack = $52.80

This looks good but there’s a catch, but before I go into that there are some caveats.

The Archeum Starter Pack includes “Purestar Ball Attire” which isn’t available in the store and I didn’t factor it into the cost at all since I had no idea what the value would be. It also includes the Mirage Elk, which again isn’t available in the store but I valued it at 600 credits since that’s the cost of the highest price mounts in the store. It also includes 6 Skybound Housewarming Gifts. Again, not available in the store, but you can buy Clawbound Housewarming Gifts for 420 credits so I used that figure.

The Gold Pack & Silver Packs have 3 & 1 Skybound Housewarming gifts, respectively and there again I used that 420 credit figure.

So if you really want these unique items then buying a Starter Pack is the way to go.

Now let’s talk about that catch. A credit is worth .6667 cents only if you buy at the lowest available denomination. If you buy more than the minimum you get bonus credits.

If you buy $100 worth of credits you get 15,000+3,500 bonus, for a total of 18,500 credits. Now you’re paying .5405 cents for a credit.

If we plug that figure into our spreadsheet then the Starter Packs are pretty much break-even:

$149.99 Archeum Starter Pack = $152.75
$99.99 Gold Starter Pack = $99.13
$49.99 Silver Starter Pack = $42.81

Now for the sake of completeness it’s weird to figure the value of a $50 starter pack based on spending $100 on credits.
If you buy $50 of credits you get 7,500 + 1,000 bonus for a total of 8,500 credits. At this level a credit is worth .5882

The figures then become:

$149.99 Archeum Starter Pack = $166.23
$99.99 Gold Starter Pack = $107.88
$49.99 Silver Starter Pack = $46.59

And there’s one more thing to factor in. Are you going to actually use everything in these Starter Packs? For instance Vocation Tonics let you level up extra trade skills temporarily buff up your trade skills. If you’re not big into crafting you may never use those, or by the time you need them you may be awash in in-game gold that you can use to buy Apex to turn into credits to buy a Vocation Tonic. Personally I haven’t felt the need for XP Tonics; experience rolls in pretty quickly naturally. And I don’t even know what a Crest Brainstorm Reagant is for, do you?

So my advice, unless you really want the Elk, Ball Attire or Skybound Housewarming Gifts, is to instead just purchase credits in bulk so you get the bonus amount, and then spend them on the items you actually need. In my opinion that’s a smarter way to go.

Here’s a link to the Google Spreadsheet I created to figure all this out:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cKLMKg9r_CHKCZWxOlhtYBt6lrwjy6An9O9f7JFL0rQ/edit?usp=sharing

PS If you think I’ve made any errors in these calculations (I transcribed all the items by hand) please let me know and I’ll update.