(foolishly) Attempting the Archeage PTS!

I wasn't actually going to attempt to play the public test server: I knew there'd be insane queues, I'm not exactly interested in testing things, and it's not as though this is an early launch where any progress will actually go through to Live. I'm happy to wait.

But, there was one thing I really wanted to do.

I wanted to play around in the character creator and save a creation to a character file ready for the Character Creation and Name Reservation this upcoming weekend. So I could literally log in, open my character file, import it, name it -- voila, reserved! -- and forget about it til Launch Day.

So, because I'm an idiot, I downloaded the PTS instead of the current free-to-play Live game and then suffered the consequences! (I didn't even think to download the current Live game until I was sitting in queue, kicking myself.)

I spent three hours downloading the thing, an hour verifying everything I downloaded, another half an hour decompressing everything that had just been verified, and another half an hour applying everything that had just been decompressed. I don't remember it taking that long when I last downloaded the thing. Eurgh.

Naturally, by the time I finally got it open, I was in a very large and very long-lived queue. And that's when the realisation hit me - I didn't need to be in the PTS to open the damned character creator. But it was too late now, so I waited.

And then got kicked from the queue.

I wasn't alone though. Apparently everyone got kicked from the queue.

An hour later when the login servers were back online, I found myself in a far more favourable position! 😃

And then everyone got kicked from the queue again. But this time I didn't care to check the forums until it was mentioned the login servers were back up. I just kept opening and closing the thing until it let me proceed. And this time I got in immediately... and there was much rejoicing!

Yes, of course I made a cat person. My main in Elder Scrolls Online is also a cat person. She is Friend of Razum-dar, a name no-one else has the glory of claiming! Funnily enough, I've never made a cathar in Star Wars: the Old Republic... eh.

Anyway. Of course this cat isn't named that. Different game, different universe, and I was lazy so just threw a Kaelci on top of it. That won't be my character's name at Launch.😊

I had at last made it through the queue and had last played around with the character creator! She's not perfect, but I was rushing out of fear of being kicked again, and now I have a template ready for the weekend. 😃

But now that I had gone through the torment of Queue-ville, I thought to myself: why not open it up and have a quick look around.

I won't lie - I was disappointed to see this:

It looks as though those damned Labor Points are still required to open coin purses. Dear God. I had so much faith. So much. But it's okay. It's okay... well, I hope it'll be okay.

Anyway. The Labor Points happened to be bugged when I logged in so I didn't have a chance to see how Regeneration works now, but there's apparently a mere 12-minute quest-chain you can do early on that gives you more. More is always good.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to check out this quest-chain and the ArchePass thing it's attached to it, because:

Sudden server maintenance!!

But that's okay. Unlike everyone else bitching and moaning about the twentieth maintenance of the day, I wasn't really wanting to play the game yet anyway xD aaaaand I had accomplished my one goal of making my character appearance savefile for import!!

And bonus! ~ I got to see this cute little scene that I remember squealing about when Archeage was first released so many years ago...

So freaking adorable. Despite the low graphics. If I wanted to adjust my graphics, a client restart was required... and there was no way I was doing that! One day I'll be able to adjust the settings to a more favourable appearance, but today -- a day of 4k queues for a mere test server -- was not that day. 😆

Despite my day-long frustrations and coinpurse discovery, I'm still excited for Unchained to launch properly in a couple of weeks. I have optimism that with the pay-to-win removed from the thing and with a company behind it that actually seem to want it to succeed, that the game might actually be as brilliant as it should have been right from the start.

I've been hovering around on the Reddit and in a couple of Discords, and for the most part people seem to share my optimism. And considering that so many people were so super-hyped to get in on the test server, I like to think that the game once launched will have an amazing population.

At least for the first couple of months.

And if I at least get a couple of months worth of enjoyment out of it, it was $25 well spent. 😊 Though, of course I hope for more... I once believed this game to be my "one" MMO after all. And now there's a chance it could be!

 

Until next time!

Thank you for stopping by! 😊

 

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_{All screenshots taken by me, @kaelci, from the game: Archeage}