Yesterday I took a break from doing trade runs, spent pretty much all of the money I had saved up, and decided to craft a clipper (pictured above). Instead of spending my gilda which I have been painstakingly saving up, I went to the auction house and bought the design for roughly 40 gold. I had already saved up the components for the fabric, iron, and lumber packs, so all that was left was placing a ship dock out in the water (cost is 10g plus it requires 10 iron ingots and 10 lumber) and to complete construction. Takes a handful of labor, and then tada, you have a ship.

I also customized it with the guild logo for Greymoon Trading Company. When I was done with customization I decided to purchase one of the appearance items from the market, and created a matching shirt.

Today I’m hoping to get back to trade pack runs and make up the coin that I spent yesterday creating the ship. I haven’t done a lot of leveling (except leveling through crafting) and it’s my weekend so I have some extended time to play.

I’m still really enjoying my time in ArcheAge, which I know is easy to say considering the game is still fresh and new. I have a feeling that a lot of people will grow frustrated with the 30+ game when it turns to pvp more than anything else, but I’m prepared for that. I’m hoping one day to afford a 24×24 and actually find a spot to place it, but in the mean time I’m content with exploring the world, doing trade runs, and generally having a good time.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Even though I spent a pretty sum building my first house (it requires 2 stone packs & 1 lumber pack) I decided that the land would be of better use if I had a 16×16 farm, instead of a house. I decided to take the house down and place my 16×16 farm field instead. I also wanted to create the farmer’s workstation, but I didn’t want to lose the small farm on the right hand side beside my large farm. My alt (I have 4 characters, 2 of each faction) had her 8×8 farm plan still, so what I did was sold the large farm to her, then used the large farm to craft the farmer’s workstation. She placed it, and since all of your characters can access one another’s homes / farms without having to fiddle with permissions, I’m set. I have no house, but that’s alright. I still don’t own any land on the West, but it’s not a big deal.

One thing I learned is that if you’re looking for furniture items, check Mirage Isle first. Chances are those housing items you see on the broker are vendor sold. That was the case with the fencing in the screenshot above, along with other house items like plushies, candles, furniture, and there are also a lot of recipes for sale. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Try going inside of each of the display homes, they have all sorts of goods that show up as for sale when you approach them. Glad I figured this out, I honestly had no idea and was about to buy a very over priced bed from the AH.

My Daggerspell went from level 20 to 26 without doing a single quest. Instead I spent yesterday focusing on farming and crafting (processing materials, mostly). I’m eager to save up for a clipper (and to get it built). I have the cloth portion taken care of, but stone has been hard to come by as of late. Unless you camp right beside the iron nodes, I haven’t seen too much in the wild lately.

So it has been a lot of crafting, farming, and more crafting. A perfect way to spend a gaming session, if I do say so myself. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

One of the best ways to make money in ArcheAge if you’re not wanting to focus on PvP is to run trade packs. Those who are interested in PvP can make a lot of coin by intercepting trade pack runners from opposing continents (or if you’re a pirate), but that’s a post for another time. Anyway. Trade packs. There’s a lot more involved than simply making a specialty pack and delivering it, at least if you want to get your monies worth from the pack. There are a few starter pack runs you do to get your donkey and eventually your large scare crow, but none of those reward big money (especially since so many others are doing the same run).

I’m going to talk about my own experiences here, and yours may vary. First, my housing zones. I own a house in Arcum Iris, which is great because there’s a specialty workbench there. It allows me to craft two things currently. One uses 60 turmeric and 50 dried flowers, the other uses 50 dried flowers and 30 eggs. Now, you get paid based on a few factors. One is the distance you have traveled. Since you can’t port or use gates or other means of instant transportation ideally you’re looking for carriage rides, blimp rides, a fast ship, or as a least resort, your donkey. If you’re just looking to do a handful of runs a week, the donkey option isn’t so bad. You’re not going to be incredibly wealthy, but you’ll make more than enough for yourself.

You’ll also earn more depending on what sort of zone you drop off at. I tend to look for PvP zones that are in peace time. That includes Cinderstone and Sanddeep  on the West, and Ynystere on the East. I also have a non-pvp alternative if the zones are not in peace time. You CAN also go during times of turmoil but I wouldn’t suggest doing that unless you are well prepared.

On the East, carriage rides are in abundance. You’ll want to use those to get to where you need to go. Link shows all of the carriage and airship rides on that continent. On the West you’ll find a surplus of airships. Remember the goal is to try to get to where you’re going in the shortest amount of time possible (and alive). The more people who are dropping off your particular product at that destination to the gold trader, the less value your items will have. I get on average 5g-8g for a 20 minute walk, so I try to run 4 trade packs a day on average.

There are of course other ways of doing this. You can go cross continents and trade to alts if you want (I have not attempted this). You can go with a guild outing. You don’t NEED to do trade packs at all, but it’s a fun relaxing way to make some extra coin.

I’ve dedicated portions of my farm to each type of trade pack I want to make (for now), to earn some money to afford supplies for a clipper. Once I have the coin for that I’ll probably swap the crops around some. I also have a few spare items growing, like yata (trying to get them to breed) and pine in the hopes of RNG shining down on me and giving me a thunderstruck tree (I doubt it).

Have no idea where your trade pack can be turned in at? Open your map, go to merchants (make sure all is clicked) and put a check by gold trader. That’s the person you’re looking for in whatever zone you want to deliver at. Remember, generic trade packs don’t have a quest. You just make a specialty pack (at a workbench, you can also mark these on the map) and pick a trader to deliver it to. If you don’t want gold, and you want tokens or resources, you will need to look into cross continent trading.

A few other handy posts I read up on before making my trade pack exploration runs. Remember most of the information is actually NOT for the NA version of the game, so it may be outdated, and wrong. For example the pack values, and the names of the packs.

• Commerce Guide
• Trade Routes – The Risky Road to Fame and Fortune

Have fun, and good luck!

In ArcheAge the economy is mostly player driven. People who like to kill mobs but don’t like to craft can put their goods up on the broker and those who adore crafting will scoop them up and create items with them and put them back on the broker. Or maybe you like to craft, and don’t like to adventure, so you buy items off of the broker that require adventuring to obtain, and then you craft those and put them back up on the broker after to sell. Or maybe you enjoy both. Whatever your preference, there’s something to do. One of the main money makers in-game is to create and deliver trade packs. The amount of coin you earn back varies depending on the zone you deliver the packs to. Each zone has a specialty pack that you can create and drop off at a Blue Salt NPC in a neighbouring town (you can’t drop it off where it was created). The less supplies that are being dropped off to that NPC, the better. Of course more dangerous zones are worth more money. I wasn’t interested in delving into PvP territory or pirate land, so I decided to craft from Marianople (cloth), and then deliver it to Cinderstone Moore during their peace time which lasted for an hour. Walking with a donkey took me approximately 12 minutes to complete the rout, with a few minutes to spare waiting for gate to pop back up. Then I repeated this a few times.

Each pack I turned in netted me 5g and some change, which I’ll get tomorrow morning after 22 hours has passed. Once Cinderstone turned into a War zone (ie: PvP) I decided to drop off a few packs in Solzreed Peninsula but the reward wasn’t quite as good (it’s not a PvP zone). In the mean time I’m hoping Sanddeep turns to war (and then peace time) so that I can drop off a few packs that way too. It’s brainless and time consuming, but a good way to make some coin for future adventures and gear.

Plus the view is just absolutely amazing.

The situation with queues has been pretty bad this weekend, I don’t think anyone will deny it. Even as a patron, I had a 3 hour queue on Thursday night, as well as Friday afternoon. By the early morning hours the queue nudges down to an hour or so on the weekend. During the weekdays I’m not seeing much of a queue. This is after two more new servers were added. I know Trion is probably reluctant to add new servers, after all ArcheAge is at its core a PVP game and people don’t want to PVP on empty servers (let WildStar fans tell you about that) but you have to make a decision, what is worse. Losing players now because they can’t even log in to play and / or spend money on your game, or losing players later.

In any case, I did manage to get past the queue monster a few times and play. My paladin is now level 28, and I decided to completely respec my cleric to a daggerspell. I also finished building my first house. It was a mixture of purchasing goods and those that I had farmed. I needed to buy 50 of the wood component and 50 of the stone, which cost me about 30g or so. I debated whether or not I wanted to build the house or just hang onto it or sell the plot, and in the end decided that building it would be best. I’m glad I did, because I learned a few things. Number one, you can plant along the perimeter of your house. This includes before the structure is built, but the space at that time is quite small. Once the house is completed you’ll have a lot more room to plant some goodies. I also purchased a mailbox, and made it a recall point.

I’ve been learning to manage my farm space much better. You can probably fit more than you think on it, and of course it’s best to take advantage of that space. In my farm pictured above I have 4 yew trees, 4 potato, and 4 strawberry bushes all growing in an 8×8 farm (the small beginner one). A mixture of items and figuring out what placements work best so you can get the maximum return is ideal. I’m contemplating taking the house down once I get my 16×16 farm, but I haven’t decided yet. The chances that I’ll make it over to the PVP area in one piece are pretty slim. Aside from the queues, I’m having a great time

Around level 20 you’ll run into your first dungeon in ArcheAge, though it may be earlier / later depending on how much ‘stuff’ you do while leveling. My paladin obtained the quests for this zone at 22, which is a pretty comfortable level. The game does a good job of getting you used to dungeons from the get go – they have one daily quest players can do that requires mentoring or being a mentor to the dungeon. That means ideally your first time through you’re with a player who has been there before, and who is higher level than you. I don’t know if all dungeons are the same, but this one consisted of three players. It was myself at 22, and two others, level 20 and 36. Unfortunately I did not get the mentor quest completed because the 36 had already completed theirs for the day, but it was still a good run.

Loot is a bit weird, it’s not NBG (need before greed) but a simple roll / pass concept. I imagine this may be frustrating to some players but because everyone can all use anything (even if it’s not optimal) it doesn’t bother me too much. If I want something I’ll roll on it, if I don’t, I decline. It may also encourage players to talk to one another and find communities to play with so that you’re less likely to run into the sort of player who simply rolls on everything and doesn’t discuss whether or not they’re willing to trade an item to someone who can use it.

That being said, I won the neat scepter below. No one in the group could use it, we were two tank-esc characters and a melee dps. The gear is also bind on equip, which means technically I could sell it but I’m not sure if I will bother. I may just save it and pass it to an alt. I love the fact that it has three sockets, though I have not come across one of the items that goes into those sockets yet.

The dungeon was pretty short and simple, which I think is great for an introduction. Because there’s no way (that I know of) to double tap to dodge out of the way I do find it a bit difficult to avoid creature attacks, and it can be frustrating to move out of the danger zones on the ground, but I managed to survive (my two party mates each died on the final encounter). This dungeon is also where you’ll find your first cloak if you didn’t happen to get one in a founders / starter pack. In a game where dungeons are NOT the main point of the game (I still consider PvP / Trade / Politics to be the point) I think the very simplified PvE themepark content is wonderful so far.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

One of the most difficult aspects to ArcheAge I have had to deal with so far involves picking a class to play. There are 120 class combinations and of course some are going to be better suited to your play style than others. There are of course “recommended” paths, but what fun is that.

As I have mentioned a few times now, I started out with two characters. One on the East, and one on the West. On the East my character eventually went down the cleric path, and I have to say – I don’t like it. The heals are mediocre, killing is slow, and while I do have survivability, the class is just not speaking to me. Reading forum posts it seems that healers should wear a mixture of cloth and leather to make the best of their skills (and not be quite as smushy), and use a shield / scepter combination. There’s no way you can unlock all the skills in each branch, which is something I wasn’t aware of from the get-go so I wasted a lot of my skill points (thankfully you can re-set them for a small fee). You also don’t need to purchase any skills in order. Your best bet is to look up an ArcheAge build generator, and mess around with the options there. You’re also not locked into the class you play (thankfully). I’m pretty sure I’ll be swapping around my cleric to something more of my liking. I’m not really sure why it’s not speaking to me, normally I really enjoy playing healer-esc classes, but this time it’s just not good.

On the West, I’m playing a paladin – and I love it. One really important thing to keep in mind is that each skill you use can set off a combo. For example my paladin build has 8 combinations that I can trigger. It’s a pretty generic PvP build, but it’s got good DPS (at least so far, I’m level 19) and great survivability. Plus I get to wear plate, and hey, what lady doesn’t look amazing in a shiny set of armour. Each character is inching towards 20 since I have been swapping back and forth on them and playing each faction. The two sides are different enough that it’s actually holding my interest for now. I expect that some time in the future I’ll get tired of one side or the other and start to focus on “just one” character. So far that hasn’t happened.

The game is incredibly complex, especially if you do more than just follow the quest chains (which are pretty generic kill 10 rat quests). The politics involved are astounding, and I’m loving every second of it.

You may have heard the term “illegal farm” in ArcheAge while you have been playing. What is it? It’s anything you (or another player) happens to plant that is 1) not in a public farm and 2) not on a designated farm plot. These are farms that you plant anywhere you want, which means other players can come along and harvest them any time they want (including when they’re in the sprouting stages). These farms are not technically ‘illegal’ by game rules, you’re able to plant where ever you want. They’re termed this by other players, most notably those who come along and uproot things after you have planted them.

There are two ways to handle this. One, don’t plant anything you mind having removed, and two, you can report players who uproot things that don’t belong to them. They will then (after accruing points) go to trial – there’s ups and downs to the trial process when it comes to illegal farms. I’m not sure if it’s the same for every server / faction, but on mine most people do not find these players guilty if they are dealing with illegal farms. Why? Well their explanation is quite simple.

• People who use illegal farms are “evading” the tax system.
• It’s a method of balancing the economy (keeping items ‘valuable’ instead of letting players plant 10,000 items anywhere they want.

The above are the two most popular reasons I have heard so far regarding not guilty charges against someone who has ‘stolen’ crops. Everyone of course has their own opinion. On one hand sure, it really sucks to have a stranger come along and remove things you have planted, but there are ways of keeping your stuff safe and if you choose not to use those methods, well the blame lays on your shoulders. The other side of this argument is that right now there appears to be very little space for players to purchase farms / housing plots, thus more people resort to illegal farming. Is it really ‘their fault’ when they’re forced into the action in order to experience this side of the game. The whole ordeal is fascinating to me, and while most of the trial battles I have witnessed so far are pretty cut and dry, some times an interesting case does come along. Players who really get into defending their stance and awaiting the verdict can become quite passionate. In most cases as I said on my server at least, players uprooting illegal farms are doing a service to society and are found not guilty. Pirates and other pvp battles on the other hand, are a mixture of guilty and not guilty depending on the whims of the jury.

Just one more of the many reasons I’m having so much fun.

Headstart for ArcheAge began a few days ago, letting me finally make use of the $150 Archeum pack I purchased months ago. Sort of. As with any head start or game release these days, Trion was plagued with DDoS attempts, server queues, and unstable authentication problems. None of these were new to me, in fact we went through pretty much the exact same thing when WildStar launched a few months back. Ah, memories.

Despite all of the issues that plagued servers and players, I did manage to create two characters on the Naima server. I first created East, because that’s what I had played in my very limited alpha / beta experience. I reached level 15, purchased an 8×8 farm plot along with a 16×16 house plot, and all was well. I didn’t realize at the time just how difficult it would be to obtain land just a few hours later.

After playing for a few hours I also realized that a number of my friends were playing West, and so I decided to create a tank class (my first character being healer-esc). I absolutely fell in love with everything. The world, the quests, the character.. it is completely different than my experience playing East. The only downside is that this character is now 17 and I haven’t been able to find a spot of land anywhere. It’s not a huge deal because (for now at least) I have been able to plant things on my old character and ship them off to my alt. I’m thinking that 16×16 housing plot will actually become my larger farm plot, so I will have to do the secondary quest that rewards me with the larger scarecrow. Eventually.

I’m having a LOT of fun. A lot more than I thought I would. I have been trying to meet up with a guild and get involved in some of the more social aspects of the game, but so far that hasn’t been working out too well for me. I suppose it’s due to the time that I’m online, or the fact that pretty much everyone requires you to use TS or ventrillo, and honestly I’m just not THAT social. I’m hoping I find my own little niche to call home soon, and I can certainly see me sticking around ArcheAge for quite some time to come.

I know my experience probably doesn’t match that of the majority out there, at least not if you go by the attitude on social media. I’ve heard many people upset about the lack of land and the connection troubles they have been facing. I can’t say I blame them, but I do think that if I am patient, I’ll find my “dream home” eventually.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Yesterday in ArcheAge I decided to just work through some quest chains and adventure a bit. I haven’t figured out how crafting works exactly yet, or how to set up my very own little farm or house, but since this is alpha, I’m not too concerned. Everything I do right now is going to get wiped, so I’m using this as a learning experience.

I ended up questing to this little mining hub, and noticed there were mine carts travelling the rails. Technically I could have  walked up those rails to reach the top (aside from the very last one, the incline was too much) but it was way more fun to hop into the carts and travel the rails while riding my mount. The quests are still very much themepark-esc, go here, kill this, return it, interact with some cogs and report back, but there’s a lot of ‘stuff’ to do that lets me branch off a bit when I feel like exploring.

I turned chat channels back on last night to see if I could pick up any useful information from the players, and immediately regretted it and turned it back off. Normally I enjoy listening to the chit chat of players in new games because no matter how ‘bad’ the chat gets, there are little nuggets of wisdom tucked away.

For others who are playing ArcheAge, a few friends have also set up a public “Tips & Tricks” page on Anook. If you have any tips & tricks that you would like to share with everyone please don’t hesitate to head over and post!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.