Albion Online

Player mods because SBI is too cheap to hire enough CSRs, which isn't surprising considering all the other essentials they skimped on.

CCP uses player volunteer mods in Eve and has for years. It's a shit system. They use a volunteer CSM panel where players vote for volunteers who are flown to Iceland to speak to CCP cause they can't read their own forums or talk to lowly players. Never understood how a company could rely on volunteers as first contact for most players in game. It's gone wild in recent times. The volunteer mods ISD mod the two in game help channels and they continually give out warnings. They sound like soccer moms talking to kids that don't listen.

All Caps, first warning. If someone uses all caps they will spam the warnings 20x for 2 lines of all caps text. Maybe a Euro thing I dunno but it looks really dumb.
Vulgar language, first warning, second warning. I have seen them get to 4th warning since they have zero actual power other than to spam warnings. Vulgar language includes the use of the words crap. What is this crap, 43rd warning.
At certain times ISD will all be drunk and using lewd language and nothing to do with Eve, I have said first warning and a GM popped in and told me to stop it.
ISD is the same people that lead to all the bans on the CCP official forum and the majority of the player base moved to reddit, where GM's and devs now have to read and respond cause their official forums are a ghost town.

It's a pretty big joke. I sent in a petition once that an ISD had listed "warnings" 30+ times for someone and he was spamming the channel with useless warnings. I got a GM given two weeks muted in chat from it. Have volunteer mods who can't do anything other than post stuff they keep on their notepad and warnings, without anything they can do about it like muting, banning, or whatever. It's a pretty big clusterfuck. I dunno if it's a Euro thing sine Euros account for the big majority of eve players or not.

CCP still can't figure out why new player retention is damn near negative.

I got a lifetime ban from the official forums when they asked for player ideas to fix XXX. I forgot what it was now. I made the suggestion that CCP should come up with the ideas of how to fix/enjoy their game and leaning on players should incur a discount for said players. I want to play a game, not design the game and then pay to play it. That did lead to a lifetime ban from the official forums and a long cut and paste about how difficult it was to deal with "legacy code" which is their goto answer for anything, no idea if they changed it or not.

Not suprised at another game they are in "charge" of has issues as well. I got silenced/muted on the CCP twitch stream when they were talking about new ideas. I made the comment that the biggest thing Eve had going for it was lot of players with too much time/money invested to just quit. Bam, silenced in chat on the stream.

CCP now host a lot of the streamers of their games on their channel now. We'll see how that goes if they start complaining about CCP and "legacy code".

Borzak said:

Not suprised at another game they are in "charge" of has issues as well.

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Unless I'm missing a joke here, AO isn't a CCP game. Its developers, Sandbox Interactive, have no relation to CCP.

But you're probably not the first to assume that, because AO is likened to Eve at every turn (the same people would claim oil and water are the same because they're both fluids) and its devs never shut up about how it was their primary "inspiration".

Borzak said:

I got a lifetime ban from the official forums when they asked for player ideas to fix XXX. I made the suggestion that CCP should come up with the ideas of how to fix/enjoy their game and leaning on players should incur a discount for said players. I want to play a game, not design the game and then pay to play it.

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Yeah, SBI is also guilty of this "design-by-committee" approach and are always seeking player feedback to fix problems with their game because they lack the competence to do it themselves. To make it even worse they invariably act on the most retarded ideas or flat-out ignore sound advice/botch the implementation of it.

Barab said:

who looks for hell gate players via lfg ?

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Key words here being YHG - As in you don't lose your gear on death in yellow hell gates, as you do in red/black zone hellgates. Tons of people PUG YHG's cause its for casuals.

The population has been in freefall since release but it looks to have stabilized over the past week or two. Lots of newer players quit so blue zone cities and yellow zones in the royals are much, much less populated. However the majority of the players now are black zone focused so the black zone has been crazy with action lately. For the size of the world the game right now has a healthy population. It's not going to really drop any further and might tick back up with new content patches.

Strifen said:

It's not going to really drop any further and might tick back up with new content patches.

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No, the game will be at late-phase alpha/beta test population levels (i.e., dead) before the year is even out and content patches won't revive it the same way new tests did.

The last uptick this game will ever see is when they finally manage to "release" it on iOS, and that too will be brief.

uniqueuser said:

Unless I'm missing a joke here, AO isn't a CCP game. Its developers, Sandbox Interactive, have no relation to CCP.

But you're probably not the first to assume that, because AO is likened to Eve at every turn (the same people would claim oil and water are the same because they're both fluids) and its devs never shut up about how it was their primary "inspiration".

Yeah, SBI is also guilty of this "design-by-committee" approach and are always seeking player feedback to fix problems with their game because they lack the competence to do it themselves. To make it even worse they invariably act on the most retarded ideas or flat-out ignore sound advice/botch the implementation of it.

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Sorry my bad. I really didn't know and CCP has started hosting streams of their games like Eve on twitch on a schedule of at least 3 different streamers a day. At least 3 ocassions that I saw CCP was hosting a streamer playing Albion. I assumed it was "their" game. That's a winning move, make a big PR move and push their twitch channel both on twitch and in game notifications in eve, then host another game multiple times. So in game I got a notification CCP Twitch was live and clicked on the link to see who was streaming and it was someone I didn't know (Eve only has so many streamers, very limited) and they were streaming Albion.

Sorry for the really off tangent move there. The stream was not what I would call exciting, but lot of games are like that at times.

uniqueuser said:

No, the game will be at late-phase alpha/beta test population levels (i.e., dead) before the year is even out and content patches won't revive it the same way new tests did.

The last uptick this game will ever see is when they finally manage to "release" it on iOS, and that too will be brief.

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Do they show/release player numbers online or active?

uniqueuser said:

No, the game will be at late-phase alpha/beta test population levels (i.e., dead) before the year is even out and content patches won't revive it the same way new tests did.

The last uptick this game will ever see is when they finally manage to "release" it on iOS, and that too will be brief.

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I played two beta phases and the population right now is no where near late-phase beta and I doubt it will be in 2-3 months. I think they're going to release it on steam and hell they always have the f2p option.

For a small one server game in a niche market, Albion Online right now has enough population to make it work/enjoyable for people who do play.

Borzak said:

Do they show/release player numbers online or active?

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There is a fame leader board icon. Can break down fame earned by the week. Week ending Oct. 8th. the 42.6K person made 3 fame. The week just ended it's 38.6K. That bottom fame number has been dropping at an average of -11% per week. How to get just 3 fame in a week? I guess killing a bunny.

What that implies is open to interpretation.

It's gotten bad enough that Korn had to come out of hiding to make a damage control post hand-waving away the plummeting population by misapplying metrics and abusing irrelevant math concepts. He even provided stats indicating they've lost over 80% of their launch numbers, but claims that's only bad when viewed in relative terms, not absolute ones (as if an additional 25,000 concurrent users wasn't absolutely preferable).

My schadenfreude varies directly with their dishonesty.

New Invite a Friend Program

These scumbags are now so desperate they've taken a page out of the MLM playbook and are selling 7-day trial keys to conniving players who hope to earn kickbacks from any referred purchases of the full game.

Resident forum retard already crying about his <10% conversion rate.

Good lord look at that gold. Did they ever reward the early backers. It's been 4 months from release, you could never catch up. Not that they aren't trying to inflate.

Free to play now, boys. Anyone else jumping in?

Has some neat systems. Still grindy though.

Sithro said:

Free to play now, boys. Anyone else jumping in?

Has some neat systems. Still grindy though.

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I logged back in and spent 20 minutes running around and couldn't remember how to do anything, got frustrated and logged out again. I may just need to start over again.

I play this off and on.
Anyone new feel free to use my recruit link:
Recruitment Link

RoyalAssassin said:

I logged back in and spent 20 minutes running around and couldn't remember how to do anything, got frustrated and logged out again. I may just need to start over again.

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There is a brand new tutorial now

I don't mind grinding, but grinding in this game is bad and fucking boring

Tearofsoul said:

I don't mind grinding, but grinding in this game is bad and fucking boring

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In what game is it not?

I'm really enjoying this, glad I found it. I'm sure like most things I'll be bored after a bit.

Also, jesus christ, I hope it quiets down in a month or so, too many fucking players.