Category: Gaming

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.