I try and play Atlantica Online, but there are so many things about it that are just flat out irritating. They took a bunch of really good ideas and then twisted them with buggy, non-intuitive programming.
It takes 10 mins to log into one character. If you want to log into another character in your account, you click "Log Out" and it takes you all the way back to the sign in screen. Then you choose a server. As part of their efforts to stop botters, there is now a captcha you have to respond to when logging in. More about that later. Then you get to choose a toon and click log in.
Once in the game, it takes an additional few minutes to load the game. Even with my graphics on the lowest setting possible, it still takes several minutes before my game settles down. The lag is horrible because there are constant pop up windows. If someone buys something good from the item mall, this huge window pops up on your screen, intterupting your battles. If someone enchants or enhances an item to +3 or above, it is announced to the whole world. If someone wins in gambling, this is announced to the whole world. When the auction starts, a window pops up. Every hour and a half, a free league window pops up - even if you have no interest in free league. Not to mention the little window that pops out from the side when a friend or guild member logs in or out, or their craft skill goes up, or they level.
All these pop up windows are needed because the chat system is horrible. One window does way too much work. You can't read back in chat because every little thing goes into that chat window, including info you really don't want to see.
They have a lot of good ideas in this game, it has a lot of features - crafting, the fact that there's no vendor trash, quests, extra quests you can pick up anytime, dungeons to do with your guild, party or nation... But everything is a little buggy. Because there is no vendor trash and they drop armor and weapon boxes constantly, there's very little reward for crafting.
They have some really nice social ideas. Then they ruin them.
There's a way for new players to ask questions from other players - not exactly an in game mod system, but it does allow new players to get help. Then they ruin it by making it cost will. Will builds up at 1% per minute, to a max of 100% when you begin (noob) to 125% when you max out (level 120 at this time). So, it costs will to ask a question... and if you get a bad answer, you have to wait ten minutes before you can ask again. This is necessary because they have the chat limited to peers, guild and nation ONLY. You can't speak in any open world chat, or even a city chat. You can't seperate chat into seperate windows. This tends to isolate the beginners from the higher level players. So, they do a lot to compensate for their cheap chat window - the ask a question feature, whisper windows, a forum that no one reads much, pop up windows for everything that should be in a battle info window...
You can share mob infos - this is a great idea, there are 3 pieces of info for every mob in the game. For each piece of info you have, there's a benefit, higher defense, more dmg, and more loot. If I learn about a mob, I can share it with you... but it takes will to share the info, depending on the level of the toon sharing. So, sharing is allowed, and even encouraged, but then they ruin it by making it cost will.
You can also share your skills with lower level players. Also ruined by will.
They encourage you to be logged in. Your guild gets points for attendance. You get exp when a wandering npc decides to move to your town. You can fish overnight. You can do free league when away from the computer. But all of this adds to the horrible lag. they encourage you to be logged in 24/7, which really uses up massive amounts of bandwidth - making all those announcements to people who arent' even going to see them because they are sleeping.
To share infos you have to be a friend of mine - on my friends list, in my guild or nation. Then, they limit the friends list to about 40 ppl.
They added the captcha system to stop botters. Not only do you have to respond to it correctly when you log in, but if someone thinks you are a botter, they can "report you". This means you get to respond to a captcha in battle. But only if you loot. This means that their report feature does nothing to stop spammers in town. And if you block a spammer to keep their chat out of your extremely small chat window, it doesn't block them from spamming your email!! So, they had the idea to get rid of spammers and botters be "reporting" them, and then it's ruined the game for everyone else. It feels a lot like spitting in the grand canyon. The only thing it really accomplishes is to keep bot programs from logging a botter back in if he got caught the first time.
I could go on about the way this game took a good idea - a new way of fightig that is new to MMO's -and ruined it. I don't expect to see this game around very long. No one makes it very far in this game, except a few die hards.
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