ArcheAge Archives - Dragonchasers

ArcheAge: Are the starter packs a good value?

Posted on September 27, 2014September 28, 2014 by Nimgimli

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.

More ArcheAge

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Nimgimli

It seems like the ArcheAge anger is dying down in the blogosphere (or I’ve started tuning it out) as either the queues fade or people just give up and go away mad. Personally I’ve had good luck since re-rolling on one of the first ‘expansion servers.’ As a Patron my queue has never been more than a few minutes and often I get in almost instantly. In-game the initial crush has died down and there’s not as much fighting over mobs.

Not that I fight much. Let’s face it, there are a metric butt-ton (that’s a scientific measurement) of games chock-full of kill 10 rats quests and if you’re struggling to play ArcheAge to do those I can only wonder why. But hey, as long as you’re having fun. I’m playing ArcheAge for the sandbox yumminess, and that means I spend a lot of time growing stuff, crafting items, and exploring the world. I do accept every quest I come across and one of these days I’ll have to think about finishing them.

The last time I wrote I talked about my first Tradepack quest and it took until last night for me to get around to doing it. This is a quest that will drive the impatient away in droves, but I enjoyed it. First you have to make the trade pack and that took me a few days of farming (in-game farming, as in growing crops…not farming as in “killing the same mob over in over hoping for drops”) then you have to carry it from one place to another, which took me… I dunno… 15 minutes of walking? Many will dismiss this as ‘busy work’ and it is, but it was also a neat opportunity to slow down and really look at the world. I made note of some housing areas that had lots of open room, plus I gathered some wild herbs and did some mining along the way. It’s not something I’d want to do every day but there are ways to mitigate your travel time. Mounts and ‘mass transit’ and things of that nature.

My way of enjoying ArcheAge is to really treat it like a virtual world rather than a game, I guess. Sadly my fellow players don’t see it the same way and my attempts to banter with passersby have so far been met with stony silence. Killjoys.

ArcheAge isn’t my new home. I don’t really do ‘new homes’ in MMOs. I flit from one to the other. The real-time aspects will eventually go from fun to annoying (I log in every morning before work to tend my garden) but for right now, I’m finding it all charming and addictive. I actually find myself looking forward to more players drifting away and leaving me with an emptier world, which I know isn’t something that Trion is looking forward to, but I think we all can agree will happen. Packed farming land and housing areas look dumb but the ones I saw in my walk last night actually are quite pretty and make me want to ‘live’ there for a while. Plus competition for mining nodes is fierce right now; everyone is looking for stone.

I’m really glad I rolled on the new server rather than fight the queue and the crowds on Naima. I have plenty of Patron time on my account (since I was a Founder) but if I didn’t, I’d definitely be throwing down my $15 to subscribe, at least for now. ArcheAge is a great game if you’re looking for a sandbox experience, but it definitely isn’t for everyone. There’s lots of down and ‘quiet’ time unless you’re just trying to play it like a themepark, and if you’re doing that I think there are better alternatives out there.

I want a single player ArcheAge

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Nimgimli

So ArcheAge is the new Flavor of the Month. Months ago curiosity got the better of me and I bought a Founders Pack which came with some Patron time, so when the game launched I figured I better jump in since I essentially had pre-paid for time. Of course by now you’ve heard the horror stories of 14 hour queues and such. I don’t have time for that nonsense. But late last week they added a couple more servers and I tried again and these new servers have Patron queues that have so far been manageable, so I’ve been playing finally.

I got to where I could buy a farm and that’s been pretty much full-stop on adventuring. The PvE questing/fighting in ArcheAge is fine but it isn’t anything really special. What I find interesting (and I can not explain WHY I find it interesting) is raising chickens and stuff. So my little farm right now has 5 chickens, an aspen tree for lumber, a couple of grape vines, a few stalks of barley (grain to feed the chickens) some thistle, azaleas and iris (all treated as herbs) and maybe some other odds and ends. I’m going to make…something.

Well, I have a crafting quest to make a specialty tradepack and I need meat (sorry, chickens) and grapes to do that. The rest is just stuff that seemed like it’d be useful to have and I didn’t want farmland laying fallow. And while I wait for my crops to grow I’ve been riding around harvesting trees and ore out in the wild.

This morning the servers are down and it struck me that the one thing I don’t like about ArcheAge so far is that it’s an MMO. The world is PACKED right now and there’s a LOT of idiocy being shouted back and forth. My blacklist probably has 100 people on it already. Now in theory I need these people so the game has an economy, but can’t an economy be simulated?

All this led me to decide I want to play a game like ArcheAge, but one that is single player (or local co-op or anything that’s not an MMO). It seems like a niche that should be filled but I can’t think of anything. Something like Banished but on a smaller scale. Or something like The Long Dark but with more building and cultivating. Or like 7 Days to Die but without zombies tearing down everything you build. Or like Don’t Starve with a little bit less weird to it. (Don’t Starve is probably the closest thing I can come up with.)

I’m looking for a game where I can farm, craft things, build a home (and eventually a fortress), and also go out and fight mobs. And maybe there’re NPC townfolk who need corn to get through the winter, or warm blankets or something. So I could do some bartering as well. And the building should feel like building not just, y’know, you buy a house from a vendor. More like you put down plans and then have to add components to build your house.

This feels like a game that should exist. Anyone have any suggestions?