Angels Online Global

There is an ancient Chinese proverb, "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away." With their separation from the Chinese company IGG, you would think developer and now-publisher Taiwanese company Userjoy would resolve many of the issues - mostly predatory financial practices - plaguing their beloved early 2000s MMO in this release. You would be wrong. A more fitting quote to describe this game is as Sun Tzu said, "In war, remember to enter the 3 numbers on the back of the credit card." I only play this game for nostalgia's sake as in my youth, oriental PRC digital psyop agents deployed advertisements directly into the side of my Cartoon Network flash games or whichever kissanime clone I used to stream Death Note. If you have no emotional investment in this game from your past, do not touch it with a ten-foot pole. The current state of the game is barely tolerable with a grim prognosis for the future: terrible server infrastructure, half-baked translations, some of the worst and most blatant pay-to-win and gambling/gacha mechanics which get worse with every update, the list goes on. Out of only 2 servers for a "Global" relaunch, one was filled to the brim immediately by all the flavors of Chinese players (undesirables who lack any notion of a soul as is evident by the fact that they don't bother to name their pets) who then leaked over to the other server which was adopted by the player-base initially as the 'English-speaking server.' Everywhere you go, there are Chinese-named alt accounts taking up key farming spots and quest locations and who are impossible to interact with (if you would even want to). The organic factor of players getting together to accomplish things - a core stitch in the fabric of any MMO - has all but disappeared into the sweatshop. I only managed to get together with random, English-speaking players twice (with one instance during the closed beta) to defeat bosses and then converse afterward instead of immediately and silently treading our separate paths. I can fondly recall numerous occasions of this when I first played the game, before the automated "Angel Baby" system and alts were so prevalent - but now all the memories I make in this game are encoded in Chinese. For some reason, either out of poor AI translation implementation or a semi-enthused revisionist's eye or possibly avoiding a dispute with the previous publisher, Userjoy has renamed almost every NPC, monster and location. However, they've done so without adjusting the quest dialogue - so when you're looking for 'Fire Mimics' to kill, you're actually searching for 'Pyro Clowns'. That's one of the more manageable examples, especially if you've played the game in the past and have an inkling as to what mob on the map that is you're supposed to kill, but most of them make quests a guessing game across multiple maps and just waste your time (which is already wasted enough with the incredibly low quest item drop rates). What's even more strange is the vast amount of censoring. You can't type "item" - you get "????". You can't type "censor". You can't even type "Taiwan" without the 'tai' being censored and the string printing out "???wan". Of course "TIANANMEN" is censored (keyword which will prevent Userjoy from responding to this review) and I figured out "annan" - which turns out to be a district in Taiwan - is also censored. This also means a number of character names are prohibited - a shame as I wanted to make a character "♥♥♥♥♥♥". It would've done them better to remove the censor list almost altogether and allow players to simply block any players whose words cause them to profusely bleed from their behinds (the way it was under IGG and the way it should be for all online games - if you disagree you enjoy the taste of leather). Now to the worst of the issues: the p2w mechanics. It was bad before, it's better now but it's getting worse fast. The only real method of getting equipment from the paid item shop is through grab bags/gacha with egregiously low chances to actually obtain the item you bought the bag for. If you spend $15 to get 11 gachas with a chance to maybe get vouchers, with only a 1% chance to redeem a single piece of the outfit let alone the whole thing at a miserable 0.5% chance, you will most likely not get ANY vouchers and instead be stuck with some random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clogging up your inventory. Any game that respects your time and money would offer a flat amount for a whole outfit, this is not that and this game does not respect you. Userjoy does not respect you. $15 flat for a guaranteed whole outfit would be on the expensive side but reasonable only because they need to keep the servers running with a relatively niche player base. And this would only be if cosmetics didn't give you an advantage in the game at all... but they do. There is a new system which encourages mass purchasing of these cosmetic gachas to fuse them together to ascribe stats to them. The gachas for straight-up equipment are only slightly better with a 1% chance of getting the titular item of the bag and maybe another 1% for something on-par - at least these can be farmed... if you're lucky. The regular loot drops in the game are also gacha capsules with a less than 0.5% chance of getting the best, legendary version of the weapon or armor piece. And the drop rates are incredibly low for these gacha capsules from mobs to begin with. It's gambling within gambling. The same thing can be said for the enhancement system - which is similar to and precedes Black Desert Online. You gamble with a grab bag to maybe get an enhancement item instead of the thing you actually wanted and then you gamble to enhance it. If you lose the gamble to enhance the item, the enhancement drops back down a level. How do you increase it again? You use your credit card and get more enhancement items. And if you try using the free enhancement items - which are rare boss drops and non-tradable - you are limited to 3 enhancements before the next enhancement has a chance of completely destroying the item. This effectively puts the majority of free to play players at a significant disadvantage compared to whales. One of the first players to reach the level cap on the Venus server is a guy named Shy - who admitted he dropped $330 (yes, that's USD) during the closed beta (which netted some 'rebate' in-game currency). Some people have too much money to discard - even after assuredly having spent much more on the game prior to the relaunch - and these are the people who are going to run circles around you. But most of them will be Chinese or Taiwanese, not that guy. At the very least, some utility items are cheaper than they were in the past - such as items to change your skills or engage in the Holy Battlefield PVP arena (roughly a dollar each) - but this is not the norm and prices for new items are going up instead of everything going further down to fair pricing. The newest update released items to change your hair, name, skin color, height, gender, etc. These range from 20 in-game currency (roughly a dollar) to change your skin color to 50 (almost 2 dollars) to change your hairstyle to 400 (almost $15) to change your name. You get barely any storage space and are constantly fighting your inventory and a permanent tier of - just a single tier for maybe 20 more slots - storage increase costs over $25. The price gouging is ridiculous. Combine the demonic, abusive monetization with the PVP lagging so badly it's a glorified slideshow, numerous quest bugs, and the worst early leveling grind possible for a game, and you have every reason to avoid this game like the plague. Seriously, what were they thinking making the leveling the worst for new players instead of during the late-game? It's like they don't want this game to succeed. They just want to profit off of nostalgic whales. My final thoughts are in accordance with another of Sun Tzu's sayings, "Wise man does not play Angels Online Global."