Week One: Building the Foundation

As we wrap up the first week of Albion Online, we faced a couple of setbacks in our plan due to the poor launch that SBI had but we’re now on an upswing from those setbacks.  On day 1, SBI had a terrible launch that left a lot of people in the dark — literally!  Black screens of death were everywhere and folks could not zone from one area to the next without hitting the “dark” end of that issue.  Myself included.  The original plan was to have me head straight to Caerleon to secure plots as I had the most accumulated gold of all of us — well over 500k. The backup plan was to have Eckhart head straight to Bridgewatch (a town we were the most familiar with from the last beta test) and secure plots there ASAP.  If we got our plots in Caerleon, the plan was to sell the plots in Bridgewatch for 1 mil each right away.  That plan worked brilliantly except for ONE BIG ISSUE —  I did not get credited all the gold I was due once the server reset.  I only got 114k and I didn’t even get my LPs.  Another issue that prevented us from getting the plots we wanted was the lag and black screens — once I got to Caerleon the lag of selling gold there was almost at a dead stop. We made the executive decision to just stick with Bridgewatch since Eckhart managed to secure those plots. The good news was, we got 14 plots secured.  So off I went to start setting up our shops.

After amazing black zone dungeon runs that put us ahead of the curve, the zergs started to push back.  So we then concentrated on building up our core and the infrastructure to support the LONG GAME… while everyone else focuses on the short game, we want to be here for a while! What it takes to do that is a system of revenue that allows our crafters, gatherers, and players the freedom and longevity that is needed to push ahead in the coming weeks. So we’re hitting up those expeditions and the red and yellow dungeon farms with black dungeons later on in evening when it’s quieter and easier to get around.  We’ve done some amazing strategies to avoid detection in the black zones and have loved squashing those big zergs like the bugs they are.

GvG Teams have started to form — we’re up to 6 teams now — but we’re not doing any territorial warfare just yet.  We’ve rather pushed into the realm of Open World PvP for a bit and kind of wait this out. There is a huge swarm of people all over; just like cockroaches! So let’s focus on fame farms and getting to T6, so we can hit the yellow zone GvGs at 6.1 (which is the cap) and start flexing the teams out.  Our established teams lost a few members, Serbian Huskies [EU] is looking for a new tank while Taint Ticklers [NA] is now looking for a new healer. The Rogue Wolves [NA] will be our more casual team and won’t get into play for a few weeks more. The new teams forming, Seagulls [NA], the Down Unders [ANZ], and Black Parrots [SA] are still getting their teams together and are looking for T6+ folks with a hardcore mentality to join up. Each of our teams is made of up 5 + 2 spares. That’s the system by which we operate.

We’ve had to start adding folks to our TLP2 guild (with alts into the alt guild) because we’ve quickly reached the limit of members allowed in one guild, which is currently 300 — to me that’s just silly as everyone is breaking up into split guilds anyways to bypass this.  World of Warcraft’s limit is 1000, that’s much more in line with the influx of players that AO’s seen and it’s my hope that the limits are increased. Here’s the deal — I honestly believe that if the servers/coding does not improve player performance that a lot of people are going to quit sooner or later, so to me adding all kinds of folks now is the best option to secure folks will continue to play.  Creating a welcoming environment goes a long way to keeping people interested in the game despite the server performance issues.  And there will never be a larger influx of players than there is at a game’s launch.  So while this may make folks feel isolated, I need everyone to understand that a) things will calm down soon enough and b) you have to make yourself a PART of things and take some initiative to get things going for yourself.  I have amazing leaders, but they are not always available to put things together for people… you ALL have to step up to the plate.  This means hopping into Discord and jumping through the accessible channels to see what others are doing, and if they are not doing anything, putting something together for all of you to do!  And my hope is that that something is GATHERING STONE! LOL

Another big discussion is whether or not we would be joining another alliance and while that seems tempting, to be honest… alliances are SOOOOOOO freaking fluid right now — we’re seeing them split up and be reformed or this guild splitting off and doing this or that… it’s not worth it to just join something right now!  Sooooo we decided to re-launch our own alliance with our old friends Super Skunk (who are also building up their foundation as well).  We’re happy to be working with Ascra again, he’s a real awesome guy and we will do great things together. We already have the structure by which we operate (been running alliances for decades) so it was just easy to plug into that.  I created a new Discord server for the alliance and an application process for guilds. Everyone will know how a guild gets added, how a guild is reprimanded, what the guilds’ responsibilities area, how to mediate issues, how a guild is removed, etc. etc. WAY before they even apply. It’s all on our alliance website.

Please remember that our Weekly Guild Meetings are on Sundays at 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST on Discord and that if you have to miss one, they are recorded and available for you to listen to in the #guild-meeting-recaps channel. 🙂

<3 Dani

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