Back to Age of Wushu

I failed to make a post about it, although I felt I should have, but about a month ago I came back to Age of Wushu. If any of you know me, or have seen my past posts about Age of Wushu, you'll know I have a love-hate relationship with it. I love the game (for the most part), but I hate the way Snail USA has been running it. The game has infinite possibilities, but Snail has no Customer Support, issues with hacking, bots, etc...

Now, as for the reason I came back to Age of wushu. I decided it was time to play again for two reasons. First, is that ArcheAge is not yet out of Alpha/Beta testing in NA. If ArcheAge had been available to me as a permenent game that wouldn't be wiped, I would not have given Age of Wushu a thought. However, due to that not being the case, I was on the out look for a game to play to occupy my time til ArcheAge was ready.

The second reason is that Age of Wushu got its Tempest of Strife expansion, which expanded upon the "Vagrant" path a lot, and added new factions to the game that you could join and participate in. There were also a handful of other neat features that caught my eye, such as events that occur only during certain weather conditions. This is one of Wushu's biggest content updates (if not the biggest). I figured it would be worth it to play the game again and try out all this new content.

The last reason, though not a major one, was that a new server was starting up. Silver Viper offered a unique opportunity to partake in the fun that always happen at the launch of  new in any game, to try out the new Vagrant content, and to join one or more of the new Factions added to the game. All that combined sounded like a good time to me. However, I was still quite weary of Snail after having played the game in 2012-2013.


At first I figured I wouldn't spend much time in the game, and decided I would not spend any money. However, I found myself changing my tune quite fast. I decided to purchase a months subscription within the first 24hrs of playing. I figured that nine dollars wasn't much, so why not? And now, here I am a month later, and I've got to admit I've enjoyed my time so far.

Of course, Snail is still an issue. There Customer Support is still nearly non-existent and the support you do get is questionable at best. Bots seem like they're still an issue, though not nearly as much. Gold-spammers are everywhere, just like before. And they've instituted a bunch of changes that has made it quite hard for Non-VIP/Premium players to make unbound-currency within the game. Oh, and they've made the game more pay-to-win in plenty of ways, such as making it possible for you to directly purchase in-game unbound currency with real-world money, with a conversion of $3 per 100 liang.

Needless to say, the game is still "pay to win." If you've got money, you're going to have an easy time of things. If you don't, you'll have to scrounge up $9 for the monthly VIP fee in order to even have a chance of keeping up. But, other than those problems, the game is still a ton of fun. I think a major reason I love this game is because of my love for this type of fiction. 2008's Legend of the Condor Heroes is still one of my all-time favorite TV shows. I love The Breaker and The Breaker: New Waves - which are set in the modern Korean version of the fictional Chinese Jianghu/Wuxia. I eat this stuff up constantly, and that contribued a lot to my love for Age of Wushu.


Anyways, that's enough for now. Over the next few days I plan to post more on my time in Age of Wushu on this blog. My next post will be about my time in the Shen Family Golden Needle sect faction. After that I'll probably post about my plans for the future within Wushu. Thanks for reading!

Addicted to Age of Wushu

So, originally I had planned to make Darkfall: Unholy Wars my "main MMO" that I play when I'm not playing something to write about it. Unfortunately, at the last minute (a few days before launch :/)the guild I was in fell thru and decided not to play Darkfall. I ended up joining another guild, but having to play with a bunch of guys you aren't familiar with, especially in a game like Darkfall kinda kills your will to play a game.

I had previously made the decision not to play Age of Wushu at launch, as the last time I played, I got sucked into it heavily and I ended up spending way to much of my time on there. And then after that, due to lack of participation in the guild I didn't get my character very far, though I did get up to 33 on my first internal. I ended up quitting.

Well, since Darkfall didn't work out I decided to go ahead and give Age of Wushu another go. I played for a few days, developed my character rapidly, did very well on instances and ended up making my own guild, Amitabha. Just like in Closed Beta, I made a Shaolin and I love it just as much as I did back then. I'm not sure what I will do with Amitabha, I am thinking about handing it off to one of the more dedicated members, as I am not cut out for leading a guild. I much prefer following and helping than leading.

Since the start of the server, nine days ago today, I have poured a lot of my day into the game. So far it hasn't gotten boring, and I'm kind of afraid. Normally I would get bored at this point, but I've been hooked. Between doing spy missions, Team Practice, gathering, crafting, and instance running, I'm constantly busy while in the game. When I log out I'll throw up a stall and hope to sell my ares for the day.

And my guild is working towards getting to a point where we can upgrade to guild level 2. This will allow us to take a guild HQ and we have our eyes on one of the two in Shaolin. Since we are a primarily Shaolin guild, it makes sense.