I was looking at some of my old screenshots today, after thinking about this game yesterday when I got bored.

2000+ hours spent here, not a penny spent. No form of payment was accepted, I've tried over a dozen things. For a cash grab, they weren't doing a good job making payment options available outside NA.

The daily grind as a F2P player in this was too heavy. I simply wanted to pay for patron status so I can use my earnings on improving my character, rather than using the vast majority of my earnings to maintain my patron status and land tax.

I forgot the name of the server I played on, but I heard it got merged, and all my friends transferred away shortly after I stopped playing (transfers just became available for the first time).

I played solo for a huge portion of my time on this game, joined Phantom Troupe (The first person who wasn't from SG to join), moved to Synyster (Same people from PT),
moved over to pirate and joined NaCl (Same group I was with, + others from both factions. We were friends with them before pirate and joined them for Kraken),
moved over to Clockwork (a large portion of NaCl separated due to differences in leadership and general desires, the old PT group stayed together).

Hows the war like? Still active, or died down? How have the updates been? Always something new to exploit, or have they finally grown a brain before releasing content?



I remember being in with 90% of the Kraken kills, cross faction working together, and as pirate.



I honestly don't miss this, though it was great money, and very social activity with other pirates.



It looks like they took away the non trade topic thread categories, so I'm selling my good ole memories free of charge.

I played this on my old computer, and have the screenshots saved on an external hard drive, so the graphics quality isn't top notch, and my current screen is even bigger

Had a great location for my chalet too.



Had a good time with a bunch of friends at my place.



I had more plushies than anyone in Ynystere!



Yes, that is underwear. Oh you mean that? My tail.

If you didn't catch what I said earlier, I stopped playing before server transfers started for the first time.

I've played many other games since quitting this, but nothing has satisfied me nearly the same.

This includes BDO, CS:GO, WoW, LoL, and sometimes even RuneScape. RS is the closest thing that satisfies me today, but I do miss the good ole AA days.

The days I miss the most are when people were honestly impressed by hasla weapons, full heroic, and full unique gear. When dungeon gear was great. When we were excited about clearing Serpentis for the first time with few people having anything higher than unique. When someone would call me pay-to-win when I haven't spent a penny, and linked gear that was earned, not bought.

This post was edited by Kokua on Sep 29 2017 09:23am

Game was fun until you experienced the p2w end game reckage.
Before that I thought I would play it for quite some time.

when this game first came out I downloaded it and liked it a lot but I didn't get far, I really thought that owning a house would be epic, etc. but my comp at the time was kinda garbage it could run it on low settings but the movements and stuff kinda felt choppy. I thought maybe it was the game itself. so I stuck with WoW but I recently tried this game and it runs great on a descent comp it felt like GW2 (which i also didnt play cause WoW ran better back then).

definitely wishing I had a good comp back then lol this game looks great

I also started playing on a relatively cheap computer, but I ran fairly smooth on lowest settings. When I got my new computer (current one) I was able to play all my favorite games on the highest possible settings seamlessly. 80v80v80 in GW2 without any lag spikes or frame drops, to give you an idea. Other people in teamspeak would say they can feel when the enemy is approaching, because their game would start to lag, but it wouldn't be any different for me. It's quite beautiful seeing all the skills being casted from that many players without it causing your frames to drop.

Owning a house on AA was a great feeling for me, though many others chose to ignore houses in preference of farms, or no land attachments. I always had great locations for my houses, and was never one of those houses lost in the middle of the zone. With my old computer, some of the large housing zones were a bit laggy to travel through, but my new computer had no lag spikes on AA anywhere.

Dungeons were a great experience, and knowing that your group was one of the few who completed something in the server was awesome. I picked up WoW again a month before Nighthold released, and it was a bit fun learning the mechanics of it all, but people were a lot more elitist when it came to groups. I was able to play both as tank and dps, but I had no option to play as a healer with the character I selected. And people who played specific characters during specific patches got lots of shit from other people. It felt good showing that you can do better than most people even with a character that they may believe to be a bad choice.

Being able to play multiple different roles was quite a good deal for me and ArcheAge. I could go from tank, to healer, to dps all with just a couple clicks. I used to run specific combinations that very few others ran with at the time, and as time went on, I saw more people running similar builds as me. I started off playing with a defensive combat and healing approach, and ended up playing as a healer as one of my first roles. When I joined dungeons, people weren't expecting me to do much if any damage, they expected me to just stand in the back and keep everyone topped off, but that wasn't my play style. I joined the fight and did just as much damage as the rest, and still managed to keep everyone topped off.

Later down the road, I was working on my dps and tank roles, to the point where I was equally effective in any role that was needed. When it came down to main stat rolls, I ended up deciding to go for tank, and with some great luck, won the roll for the 3rd kraken shield in the server. My friend won the 2nd shield previously. My guild owned no less than 90% of all kraken items in the server, with the rule being if you win it, you equip it.

The p2w reckage wasn't as relevant before the update that caused everyone to go from unique to divine + within days. Prior to that, people spent several thousand per item, or just had insane luck, or abused some of the many bugs released with updates. By the time I stopped playing, one of my guild mates crafted up a mythic ayanad sword and was one shotting people. I went on a test run with one of my friend's divine sword, a couple stages lower than both ayanad and mythic, and I was able to 1 vs 5 a group of people, and killed them more than 30 times before going down once. They finally got smart and started to chain their cc's. I wasn't targeting them, wasn't trying to bully them. They came after me cuz I was a pirate exploring the land. My gear was unique, as I could barely afford to maintain my land taxes, my apex for patron, while also trying to upgrade my gear. It came to a point where I was falling behind rapidly, and the only way I could have any hope of catching up to even my guild mates would be to spend money, which was impossible, as all forms of payment were rejected, and their support said there was nothing they could do to help. Ultimately, that led to me not spending a single penny on the game. My plushie pirate outfit was my reward from their compensation boxes when literally everyone else who spent a penny or more got a free dolphin and much more.

It was a great free experience for me personally from launch till a bit after the level 55 update. There were many things that I would have loved to be different, but it exceeded my expectations, and I still can't find a game that gives me quite the same or better feeling as this did. There are so many things that AA did right that others could learn from, and there are so many mistakes that provide equally beneficial lessons for others to know what to avoid.

that's pretty awesome sounds like your a pro ;P.

but in your first line it's hard to believe you get no lag at all in GW2 world vs world pvp or you just must have an insane rig. either way that's cool too.