During Gamigo’s ArcheAge Unchained stream this afternoon, the chat erupted with cries of “pay-to-win confirmed” over the revelation that cosmetic gifting will be in the game.
The discussion starts around 34:30 minutes in. “Gifting is currently enabled on the Unchained marketplace,” Executive Producer Merv Lee Kwai confirmed on the stream, “and I’ve seen some concerns around that. Mostly people are concerned that it’ll become some sort of a default way to transfer paid items to other players. We understand the concerns about it. Of course any sort of agreements like that are made at your own risk. […] It’s unsupported by us. We don’t recommend that you do that. […] And if you really think about it, there are other ways to negotiate gifting that we don’t support. So this is one of those.”
On Reddit, multiple threads have sprung up to argue against the move. Some echo the argument that Khrolan was plainly trying to head off – namely, the idea that people will use gifting to conduct trades with real money. But other players point out that similar trades can be done without official gifting too. As is true of every game where everything isn’t bind-on-pickup, we suppose. And in some where it is!
Khrolan later halted another question to conduct a chat poll, asking players to press 1 or 2 to say whether they thought it was pay-to-win or not. It looked pretty split, but it’s safe to say the studio is listening.
Gifting disabled, now go cry about other stuff from archeage
