I find overwatch more social if you run with a team in competitive. There's not much chit chat but lots of team work and comm.

You can even play for free now with their "aloha clone" thing... it just limits you to relatively basic (but still useful) ships and stuff unless you start subbing via the ingame item or normal monthly charge

I'd say if someone tried ArcheAge and didn't make it past their pretty horrible linear quest progression portion, you really missed the meat of the game. The leveling process is like a 1 week tutorial that shows you combat, trades and all the other major systems. After that, the game it completely open.

The only drawback was that PvP was heavily gear dependent, and gear was heavily credit card dependent. I hear the new server they just launched a few days ago actually removes the majority of the P2W. Not entirely, but I guess the worker potions are out. Stuff like worker potions and regrade materials were the worst part, and I guess they're gone.

Wasn't enough to bring me back, but I believe if ArcheAge had a purely subscription server, I'd probably play it faithfully until Pantheon (which is looking amazing, despite what haters say).

Archeage was a pretty amazing game for the first year or so. Trion really fucked it up in a variety of ways though, even the fresh start servers were and still are a disaster. The P2W gear gap at this point is insane for new players. A guy on my server before i quit supposivedly dropped over 100k in the game. I'm with you though, if they put out a sub based non p2w server I'd come back. I would gladly deal with the awful regrade system again if that happened.

Supposedly they've really changed the way regrading works. I heard a lot of the RNG was removed with downgrading or breaking items, but at the cost of being harder to get the upgrade mats. You still fail and I guess can downgrade at the top few tiers, but until that point it's just grinding for mats.

I just don't have the time for it, and really I was never that impressed with the guild competition aspect. There are only a couple castles to compete over for thousands of people, and only a handful of contested raid mobs. You look at things like Eve, Darkfall or even Age of Wushu, there were always a lot of guild achievements by way of territory, bigger ships, a fortress etc. In Wushu, they had like 30 guild territories on every server, and they required extensive resource and time commitment to build out. In AA that aspect is limited to only a few zergs, and everyone else are just bystanders. Like I said, just doesn't offer much in the longterm.

Regrading was changed a little bit like you said but it's still absolutely soul crushing. High risk high reward. It is what it is. The castle system never really did much for me though. I participated in a few sieges as hired muscle for the most part but I spent most of my time on the water, windscour, or in hellswamp. I ran with a small 20 or so person green pirate guild that was like 80% 5kgs+ darkrunners and 6kgs+ healers lol. We probably stole 10k gold worth of stuff a week.

yea the connect the dots and do all the things on the map leveling got old fast. It still basically has quest hub to quest hub grinding but its hidden under the heart quests, map completion, and "random" events that happen over and over again.

still log in on occasion, freaking beautiful game world

Great, now I have to go download the 60 gb file again and reinstall it :p sounds better than I thought.

Black desert never gets harder. It was a total spamfest jump around snoozer. Does have a great looking world and the expansive cities and busy npcs felt very immersive. Rest was awful. Hands down the worst execution and waste of high quality art assets in the history of the industry to have a totally shallow and uninspired turd come out the other end.

Far as "sandbox" goes, both ArcheAge and Age of Wushu were closer to making a game and world that felt livable.

Ric, maybe consider pausing more to emphasize strut. Sometimes I think you are serious and other times ... wWOOooOOOOOoo(sp)!