We’re taking a look at Age of Wushu/Age of Wulin for our newest “Things You Would Change About…”, the Wuxia Croaching Tiger, Hidden Dragon styled martial arts sandbox MMORPG where players journey across ancient china on epic adventures, fighting bandits and joining one of the many martial arts clans of the setting. With many unique and interesting features in the game, plenty of scenery and content to inspire, the game has struggled over time primarily down to not getting a handle on some of the issues that are simply pushing their western audiences away (with the core of the game primarily being developed and catering to a Chinese/Asian audience). Some of our primary concerns are as follows:

• Clear P2W Features - Paying doesn’t let you win, but it is a chore to not cough up money. When making a free to play business model developers always need to decide how they intend to make money, from time to time Subscriber and VIP accounts are used as a way to bring in cash, which brings two schools of thought. Firstly are the games where VIP offers perks, enhancing the core/original game (particularly those that may have switched from a pay to play/subscriber business model originally), giving benefits to players for paying and supporting the game. The second school of thought is making the core/original game experience more challenging/difficult/boring/weaker and using strong arm incentives to make players pay to play; AoW takes this route. The game is a chore without paying cash, from reduced XP Cultivation, limitations on resource acquisition and hindering many features. Furthermore the cash shop blatantly has items and weapons that you can buy with money that will be better than a lot of what players can get on their own; whilst it’s not exactly pay to win, it’s pretty obvious that without coughing up cash free to play accounts will never be able to compete with the Wallet Warriors who play/pay the game. There’s no solution other than the developers/publishers adopting a less game ruining business model, but we can’t see them giving that up any time soon.


• Jail Time/Imprisonment - Being in jail is boring and the punishment doesn’t match the crime. In the game players can PK each other, it’s open world PVP with little to no safe zones and players can become victims pretty easily; when making an “Illegal” kill the player accrues what are essentially PK points, turning their name red, orange and then purple as they get more points. If they are killed they go to jail and the amount of time you spend there depends on how many points you picked up. That in itself is fine, it’s not the worst system I’ve seen dealing with PKs. However, the amount of time you can spend in jail is ridiculous, players can literally be forced to spend time in jail for hours, some even days if they’ve been busy. There are a few things you can do in Jail, but not many, and you can pay A LOT of cash to bribe a guard and get out early, even get friends to attempt a jailbreak (quite difficult to do) or you can sit out your punishment and do the time. We like that there is punishment, what we don’t like is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, unless you are rich or have tough friends you will as often as not be forced to not play the game… that’s the punishment. A system that has been put into a game with World PvP punishes you for killing players, punishes THE PLAYER as if what they did was griefing (and that’s not always the case as “illegal” kills can include killing a flagged criminal when you don’t have Police status…). The kicker? The problem is that there’s no benefit gained from killing players, so in many ways it IS just to annoy them, and so it is treated as such. For us we’d say either give players a benefit to PKing so that the punishment is more fitting, or lower the punishment and stop treating world PVP/PKing as something players shouldn’t do if you’re going to make a system that supports it.


• The Kidnap System - Now only benefits VIPs. Again, another example of how the VIP system is being used to break the game for free to play players (though it’s not quite that simple as we shall explain). When players log off in the game they become an AI NPC that roams around the world; these characters can be kidnapped by online players who gain silver/teal at no detriment to the kidnaped player. Now silver/Teals are only earned by VIP accounts, taking away a primary source of currency for F2P players. The reason behind this is how much it is abused by BOTs to farm, and so by putting it behind a paywall it makes it harder for them to access it… but it does bring us onto one of the bigger problems with the game…


• BOTTING and Gold Farming/Selling - Botting is rampant in the game. Whilst not exclusive to AoW, and pretty common in most MMORPGs, it does seem like it has reached critical mass in the game. Logging in and the chat channel is just a spam of Gold Selling services, resource material nodes are constantly camped by multiple automated accounts, the economy has essentially crashed as BOTs can oversaturate the market with their goods and sell them at cheap prices, or have near exclusive access to harder to acquire items and push up the prices; BOTs control the games’ “player economy”. What has been the solution? Make F2P accounts useless; restrict chat broadcast range, remove rewards from kidnap system, reduce levelling… it constantly feels like the way to “handle” the BOT problem with the game is to tie up the F2P gameplay, and when such a wide net is cast then it catches up a lot of genuine players in it. It’s hard to say why BOTing is so prevalent in some games and not others, typically the systems and hardware and detection behind the scenes, some just aren’t up to par and some just aren’t implemented at all; other than the occasional round of bans we feel that Snail just do not have a handle on the problem or the inclination to try and curtail it.


• Stale Content - Questing is a grind. For the most part the PVE questing feels like one constant trek from one NPC to the next with little in between, whilst they may occasionally take you through some scenic areas there’s never any reason nor reward to explore the game in detail and so the story content is simply one badly translated quest line to the next (seriously, even years after development/release the translations are awful). There should be some motivation and compelling reason to explore the pretty fantastic world that has been created, coming across random otherwise unannounced events, characters and locations that only those who go looking for them will find. Instead players are stuck with a fairly monotonous grind.

So that’s what we’d change with Age of Wushu/Wulin, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2015 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.