Arkadia economy?

[Kerham]

Can somebody explain what happened to Arkadia?

My memory of Arkadia is of a very succesful self-sustainable launch (unlike any other planet).

There were these yearly gold rushes, all kind of Oratan invasions and some other events (e.g. the one which gave smuggler weapons, 2014 I think). Instances were very popular, arkoins in high demand, people farming them day and night. Demand for all kind of local resources, be them crafted or hunted and crafting raging on all cathegories.

Now is almost dead, if it weren't Arkadia Underground for high stakes and a couple of general resources of interest, it could be plugged off aswell.

So, what happened there? (I am aware of the ongoing (?) legal dispute between Ark owner and Deathifier, but I doubt this could be the answer, correct me if I am wrong).

Thank you.

 

[atomicstorm]

Combination legal dispute (already over), Mindark screwing Arkadia (gold rush fiascos), and Arkadia folks doing side projects (crypto). They all disappeared.

 

[Joat]

Combination legal dispute (already over), Mindark screwing Arkadia (gold rush fiascos), and Arkadia folks doing side projects (crypto). They all disappeared.

Seen any outcome of how it ended up in court?

 

[WoenK]

Everybody seems to be on Caly now because of Codex and because it is easier to get stuff.
Armours are available on Ark, but try to get some weapons over lvl 40 and you will have either ressort to flying to Caly to get them or get them over the auction (with postal fees).
And still Ark seems to be the 2nd most active planet (if EL and the auctions say anything).

 

[kingofaces]

I was wondering about this too and looked into some of the public-facing social media of some of those like Dylan, etc. It looks like they’ve been very active on other things, but no mention of Entropia. In short, they’re still around, just no interaction with us or notices about game developments.

I assumed this silence was related to the ongoing legal issues, but who knows at this point.

 

[messi91]

In short arkadia is dead since last gold rush in 2015 as far as I am concerned as active hunter since then I don't care about their reasons, i see the result.As active hunter no codex means stay away from that place.
From outside it seems ark devs said fuck it and cash grabed ark moon money and left.As a result we see what Mindark does to them or doesnt
As always everything is a speculation except the real result we can all see.

 

[Kerham]

And still Ark seems to be the 2nd most active planet (if EL and the auctions say anything).

Not that there would be much competition possible on that front.

 

[RickEngland]

These PP's never had control over thier own independent fiscal policy. They're just glorified LA's with rights to design, but not mplement change.

Now imagine a situation where their economy was truly independent with thier own currency exchange all PP's would compete for our custom.

They kind of tried to do, via better weapons, better skilling (instead of lower currency rate). Until caly reclaimed that crown with new weapons. Even Greece tried that game with those swords years ago.... when caly was still sib to level 100 swords. Remember the shock waves with that.

On the plus side it forced MA to offer caly players better and more choice of weapons, to win back customers.

It's not really a level playing field, it's not "partners" it's actually economic warfare. Haha. Always has been.

I think lack of communication or events is just a side issue to the underling issues of control and active accounts. Lets be realistic there's still only about 1200 players across all those servers. Hardly inspires throwing a few million at more development from PP point of view.

As I've said many times, where is the size of community we had back in 2006? Why do MA and partners struggle to get that back?

Rick.

 

[MsPudding]

In its "heyday", 2013-2015, Arkadia was an awesome place to be. Spent a lot of time there running Aakas and hunting/mining planetside. A lot of good memories.

Sadly, now, it is a shell of its former self.

As others have mentioned, the devs have gone MIA. I've been holding out hope they'll return, finish the moon, implement a Perfected-Viceroy mission, and get back on the saddle.

Currently, it seems some of the most promising content is coming from NI, and as always, Calypso.

That being said, Arkadia still gets a lot of cycle and has a decent amount of traffic. They built a nice planet.

 

[Thorns Rose]

Arkadia was great in heyday....Very cool.

Now, I feel with their abandonment of planet will be eventually absorbed by Mindark eventually or an investor.

Sad to say..

 

[PkmX]

I wonder what the exit strategy will be. The planet partner idea is mostly a flop at this point. The top 2 planets (Arkadia and Rocktropia) have devs MIA for more than a year. The other planets are releasing contents at really slow pace and plagued with balancing/communication problems.

I think MA should probably just stick to Monria/FOMA style investment: MA controls/develops all content while players can invest, share revenue and help with promotion.

 

[mastermesh]

OK, just did the gift-grabbing tour. I'll just narrow it who did and did not give:
Calypso - Yes
Cyrene - Yes
Arkadia - No
Next Island - Yes
Toulan - No
Rocktropia - No

I think the xmas gifts are a prime sampler of which planets are doing ok. Toulan did release quite a bit in March. Whether they do that every year or not is left to be determined...

Biggest complaints/things I've noticed currently as a space traveler:
Arkadia communication is gone. I suspect they'll be selling it to the team that bought Toulan and Monria unless something big changes soon... I don't think Mindark will let them do another deed thing since they already squeezed as much juice out of the community as they could with moon and underground.
Oratan mission gets old fast so many quit doing it.

Next Island has no trees to harevest... the tameable bots here stink since you have to kill so many before a tameable one shows up.
Ancient Greece is starting to warm up, but it's got a long ways to go. Taming asclarius with a boiga whip is actually fairly exciting,. Wish more planets had something like that type of thing, where it's easy to buy in to the end part or just do the long ass mission to get there... which is much better implementation than the upgraded tab tab thing going on on Toulan, etc.

Devs on Next Island are communicating but even less than Arkadia... Getting a hold of Socrates in game to get the tee shirt from that silly survey took me about 2 months of constantly checking in game if he was online. He logs out for 1-2 weeks at a time. That's much better than the main Next Island avatar that goes offline for 68+days or more at a time if not longer... behind the scenes BIG became Next Island and they still are trying to figure out how to be something more than regular gaming avatars I think...

Rocktropia is stale... Only real thing it's got going is when folks team to do Kong, but most of the rest of the planet is boring. The server downsize a few years ago hurt it. The new low item point apartments are a joke vs the high item point apartments in Tangerine. It's sad that such a big difference in item points exists and if someone new to the game is just looking at auction they'd have no idea...

Cyrene is starting to do stuff, but keeps getting held back by Mindark since Mindark has no idea how to balance things before releasting it and only does so after the fact....

Toulan had biggest changes in December when they added the daily taming mission for tab tab and that forest of harvesable trees that resapwns constantly, but it's not so hot after the crowd came in March and overcrowded the place, and it's not died down much since then... it was nicer in January when there was only a couple of harvesters out there cutting down the forests.

Some other threads have suggested interplanetary tps are needed. I concur. Space is boring as hell. There's no reason it has to be all spaced out as much as it is. Just add each planet as a different continent on same planet, and make space an asteroid minable full pvp zone... then sell it in an auction to someone that has time to add content to it to develop all sorts of new aliens and stuff.

 

[Aloisius]

I don't see how this Planet Partner business model is sustainable on any level.

 

[Killahbee]

Imagine if we had devs that actively communicate with their playerbase on all the different channels, activity would go up, trust would come back. Most issues/explosions can be related to bad (Or none existing) communication.

History keeps on repeating, promises that it'll get better but it generally stays the same (bad).

They make millions but when was the last time we had actual new content/events/story?

 

[moondog]

I actually moved all my stuff to Arkadia in 2012 and stayed there for 2 years. I skilled melee and farmed Tiarak hide for months at a time only returning to Caly to buy or sell stuff. I loved the place and was happy to be there all the time. The Oratan events they held over holiday weekends were awesome with a lot of big name players turning up and grinding for hours. I had a bad incident with doing Aakas keys and never received any communications from PP about it. Other friends never received prizes they won or it took years to receive them. The Tiarak hide drops dried up and the events stopped, the whole place became a ghost town. I remember Quarry being busier that Twin Peaks but once DD handed the reins over to Dylan, the whole planet just got ignored by what was originally a very proactive dev team. A real shame in my opinion, but with the intro of the underground, which intially I though was awesome, player number seemed to dwindle, partly because players were more spread out and partly because the dev team were not as active as before. I rarely go there now and loot always seemed rubbish when I did go. Last year I spent a week there to try and give it a chance but eventually left as I could not get into the flow of the place.A real shame as I fondly remember the glory days

 

[Msturlese]

THE issue is... MA controls global loot system.
planet partners designing some "interesting item"
are perceived as competitors that attract players
as cyrene received a boost from usual 4% of playerbase anto 18%
during mayhem........ the quest for imperium armor was locked
ppl was to come back to caly to spend decay in mayhem?
armor was too powerful ? (in tnat case remove it....)

simple solutions are there to level playfield
1. new EFF rank of UL and L items dropping... i mean 70 to 80 on ALL planets
2. new DPP rank of items drop all planest (2.90 to 3.15)
3. revamp of melee (they all need to become ammo items)
4. give a menaing to tier up (like increase TT value at every tier up for repairing less often)
5. DIMINSH materials and DIMINNISH bumber of BP ... so that crafting become more interestin
6. add BP for weapons that are competitive woth Armatrix (basically crafting now is... EP for ARM BP thebn ARM craft........)
7. LOWER TIME for spece travel (yes some ppl live off space travel, but it prevent moving back and forth)
8. centralize auction without interplanetary delivery fee so all planets participate to same economy

simple things that can make game last another 10 years... inefficiency was maybe funny in 2003... now games are on different dynamics
(sorry for quad taxi and MS owners, space travel prevent plaet to grow and PCVP in space prevent economy to be smooth)

 

[theProphet]

there's a few other things people seem to have forgotten already

... the armatrix series that made arkadia weapons obsolete overnight

... the (for ark studios quite expensive) regulary oratan events, that got broken out of a sudden and never came back, without any official note

... missing items in goldrush & co, wrong loottables, loot nerfs

... the directX "update". i still wanna puke when i enter underground!

i bet there's more, but i got work to do, and also deliver in time...

 

[Kerham]

...

Thank you, great insight there! Honestly glad to hear about who got Toulan and respectively NI (but not really with fireworks, Monria itself is quite dead, so will see):

On the competition point made by a few here I honestly disagree. Cyrene, RT, Ark, Toulan even have access to some farmable generic MU which went MIA on Caly. If MA would really want to undermine Ark, all they have to do is remove gazz, ignisium and putty from there and is gone. Or the shopkeepers which pop from time to time from oratans.

In regards to Armatrix, I disagree again. Technically speaking, looted and crafted Ark weapons (no clue on the others) can still hold their ground, the problem is the local part of the economy being absent (so all kind of animal parts not having the MU & demand to sustain).

Also seeing how a large part of Caly is actually owned by players and how MA dropped their "taxes" over years, this idea of economic warfare as portrayed by Rick doesn't make much sense to me.

Imagine if we had devs that actively communicate with their playerbase on all the different channels, activity would go up, trust would come back. Most issues/explosions can be related to bad (Or none existing) communication.

History keeps on repeating, promises that it'll get better but it generally stays the same (bad).

They make millions but when was the last time we had actual new content/events/story?

Cyrene devs are actually very much in contact with the playerbase. But same Cyrene is developing Sons of Remus (a mobile game-marketing tool) for, what, 8 years now. Communication alone does wonders, but only from here to there. Their entire economy is based on three lines: the small fap (which I understand that is actually bugged and not paying back), some epic chains to obtain ul guns (so obviously can't rain) and one for armours, which was until recently used for nothing, then for creating the upgradable Imperium series. Which was promptly removed because apparently nobody of relevance at either Cyrene or MA knew that people hoard all local resources. So, is great to communicate, but also godam useful to 1. keep your feet on the ground and 2. actually do something. After the main driving force behind the initial partnership, the chief of the Thai partner, died, pretty much all interest on that side vanished and they haven't put a finger anymore into pushing things, Cyrene is mainly kept alive by a charming/awkward local community which developed over the years.

Hardly inspires throwing a few million at more development from PP point of view.

Be serious, is in the range of 100k-200k per year, you need a couple of coders and a handful of people on the content side. NI was initially developed by a whooping two people, with an amazing effort put there by somebody passionate about ancient history (and wasted by that former "investor" person).

 

[RobBuona]

I wonder what the exit strategy will be. The planet partner idea is mostly a flop at this point. The top 2 planets (Arkadia and Rocktropia) have devs MIA for more than a year. The other planets are releasing contents at really slow pace and plagued with balancing/communication problems.

I think MA should probably just stick to Monria/FOMA style investment: MA controls/develops all content while players can invest, share revenue and help with promotion.

Fully agree. The reality is the PP model never really had a chance. It was a good idea in theory, but for several reasons, the other planets could never gain the traction to be legitimately sustainable on their own.

 

[Aloisius]

Or you could play it like the neverdie character!

 

[Aloisius]

...
Be serious, is in the range of 100k-200k per year, you need a couple of coders and a handful of people on the content side. NI was initially developed by a whooping two people, with an amazing effort put there by somebody passionate about ancient history (and wasted by that former "investor" person).

Or you could play it like the neverdie character!

 

[SuperKanjo]

The planet is beautiful and you can see that it is made with a love of attention and love. But it has been ignored by the developers for a long time now, so much potential in this planet that went to waste.

Monria itself is quite dead, so will see

Monria is far from dead, might not be what you want from it, and not really aimed towards endgame but it's definitely not dead. They communicate with the community, there is an active community and they have regular events and content releases.

 

[Kerham]

Monria is far from dead, might not be what you want from it, and not really aimed towards endgame but it's definitely not dead. They communicate with the community, there is an active community and they have regular events and content releases.

My memory of Monria is of the yog being permanently farmed because of the skin and claw drops, which had active orders and MU. And I mean permanently 2-3 hunters in the lowest spawn and at least a handful spread in various bigger spawns. The puny caves were permanently full also. In my last visit I barely met 2 other hunters on the whole of Monria, across 8hrs or so of activity. All this separated from events. The spawn of cultists was replaced with a wave event and mixed maturities bring too much noise into data. There is no reason to camp it seriously anymore, other than lore/affection/atmosphere which I do agree is superior to most of the universe.

 

[Oleg]

I lost all interest in Arkadia when it became clear that their strategy was to fund the company through highly speculative deed sales (one of the results of which is that almost all of what little new content there has been subsequent to the initial launch is on 5% taxed land) , rather than producing good content in order to attract new players.

 

[Aloisius]

I lost all interest in Arkadia when it became clear that their strategy was to fund the company through highly speculative deed sales (one of the results of which is that almost all of what little new content there has been subsequent to the initial launch is on 5% taxed land) , rather than producing good content in order to attract new players.

And you still play EU because ... ?

 

[WoenK]

In short arkadia is dead since last gold rush in 2015 as far as I am concerned as active hunter since then I don't care about their reasons, i see the result.As active hunter no codex means stay away from that place.
From outside it seems ark devs said fuck it and cash grabed ark moon money and left.As a result we see what Mindark does to them or doesnt
As always everything is a speculation except the real result we can all see.

Really...
no matter how much I say it....
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE MEAL!

You pay for the codex rewards!

Been on Ark since September and my PED card looks way way much better than on Caly because I do not get those Codex "rewards" . It surely is not the setup, because that has not changed in the past two years much, not the mob level, because that has not either and it is surley not because of the events, because they are also not high paying (maybe slightly better than Caly).

And before somebody says anything...I do not need to record every PED ...my spending has been stable over the past two years, I am out of the age of "experimenting". But since codex my spending on Calypso went went up (keep in mind, not changing mobs, outfit or behavior) by roughly 50% and since ark it went down (same mob levels and outfit)

As an active hunter for over 13 years, I do not give a damn about skills thtat give me a 5% boost compared to what I would I would have got without codex, like the codex I rather like a steady progession with the a reward that no one will able to take from me ( be it a figurine I recently got on Ark or a trophy from CP).

I could really not care less about codex, gives no archievement, no frreedom to not participate.

 

[Oleg]

Really...
no matter how much I say it....
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE MEAL!

You pay for the codex rewards!

Will you please stop constantly repeating this garbage? I mean you're right about one thing - that it doesn't matter how much you say it.

 

[True Juan]

I was saying since the very beginning that PP model will be a failure, and it is The way MA set it up, there was no other option. Soon™ planets will just stay big dead LAs, just wait and SEE