ArcheAge Update

It's been about a month since I last posted a blog. In that month, Amitabha has been revived and has begun to flourish. With Head-Start for ArcheAge coming up in just three days, we're all excited for whats to come. Although, a lot of us must admit that the excitement we have is laced with a bit of trepidation, as a lot of us are fearful of what effect the recent changes to the Marketplace will have on the game. The term "Pay-to-win" has been thrown around a lot lately.

We've learned a few new things regarding the game. The most important being the launch date - September 16th. This means the Head Start begins on the 12th. We've also learned that we'll be restricted to two characters at launch, with the potential to purchase more slots. The maximum amount of characters we can have per server, per account, is four with a total of six characters account-wide. This is both a relief and a bit disheartening - a lot of us (including myself) have paid $150 and we feel that we should be able to get all that the game has to offer, in terms of character slots, at least, without having to pay even more.

Another thing we've learned is that Northern Continent will not be available at launch. A lot of people think it will be at least two months before it's made available. This threw the plans of a lot of guilds out the window, as a lot of strategy centered around the Northern continent. A lot of people plans to rush to the highest level and are afraid they'll have to nothing to do while they wait for Auroria to be made available.

Onto Amitabha, though. We have joined the Council of Erenor, an alliance of thirteen or so guilds who have a non-aggression pact, along with plans to generally improve the gameplay of all members of the guilds in the alliance. Part of the reason of the CoR's creation is the combat the number of so-called "Zerg Guilds" who plan to play the game. These are the guilds that have members in the hundreds that are generally toxic to the community.

Amitabha has also gained a lot more new members. We're still fairly small - we generally have somewhere between ten and fifteen people on TS3 during the beta - but we're a dedicated lot. I originally restarted Amitabha with the idea of creating a small and tight-knit casual group of players. Since then, though, I've found that we've evolved into a community that is a bit more hardcore than I anticipated. I've yet to find out if this is a good or bad thing, but we'll see.

Above is the emblem we have created that will be used in-game on our sails and flags. This is because our typical Amitabha logo doesn't look so good when seen from the backside of a sail or flag. We felt we needed something with no text that could represent us, so the above was created. As Amitabha was originally a Shaolin guild within Age of Wushu, we made use of a couple Buddhist symbols (The Eternal Knot and the Dharmachakra). We also stayed with the roots of our logo and made use of a circular blood smear. I think it looks quite nice.

Here's how it looks in-game.

 We have yet to decide on a server, but if you see this logo in-game, you'll know it's us.


Well, that's all for now. As always, thanks for reading. I'll try to update again after the Head Start.