Why I'm Leaving AC

I purchased AC because I was looking for a fun multiplayer role playing experience. And I did have fun, at least while I was learning the game. However, it quickly became obvious that enhancing my AC character would require countless hours of mind numbing repetition. That is not what I call fun.

So I stopped playing AC on a regular basis. That's when I started looking for other ways to have fun with AC. In comes Decal and then AC Tool. At first, all I needed was Decal and a couple plug-ins to improve the quality of the game for me. Then even that became boring. I guess I just became tired of buffing, running a thousand miles, killing, looking at the loot, and then repeating the whole process. I like solving puzzles, I like going on quests, but how many times can you do the same thing over and over again before it gets boring?

Enter macroing. With macros, I could see an opportunity to reduce the repetition and to have fun trying to figure out just how much you can do with the AC Tool macroing language. For a time I enjoyed waking up in the morning and seeing my busy character and his pile of pyreals, or my cook and the many levels of experience she gained over night. It was fun because it was something new to the game that didn't require me to spend hours at the keyboard repeating the same actions over and over again.

For me, AC isn't boring because of the macroers in the game, it's boring because it's TEDIOUS! The basic game design seems to be built around tedium. Make the players run miles between towns. Make them try countless component combinations before they can find a new spell. Make them try to decipher impossibly cryptic texts with no clues as to what benefit would be given by exploring a quest further. Make them spend an hour just to create the arrows they need to gain a bit more experience. Make them cast a dozen spells and recharge everything they wear just to go out and kill the monsters to get the pyreals needed in order to buy the stones to buff again.

It's cool that they change things around every month, that for certain is a good idea. I just wish they would work on ways to make it less tedious and more fun. Even the latest patch transfers one tedious facet of the game (appraising) into what looks like an even more tedious facet (tinkering). What would make it more fun for me you may ask? Discovery. That's what made macroing fun for me for awhile, the discovery of what I could actually do using macros in an off the shelf video game. More low to mid level quests would help tremendously, since I don't have a level 85 OG Mage and none of my characters would stand a chance even getting near Martine.

Yet, even macroing has reached its apex or fun for me now. Given enough time, I can now get as many pyreals as I want and create expert cooks, fletchers and alchemists. But those are the means to the end, and I fear the end itself is just not very inviting. It isn't that macroing has killed the fun in AC, if it wasn't for macroing I would've given up AC months ago.

It's simply time for me to move on to the next massively multiplayer role playing adventure. Therefore I will update my macros (Fast Buck and Iron Chef) with any bug fixes posted on the forums and some advances that had been in the works and remove myself from Zone membership.

Please keep in mind that this is my personal opinion. You may still enjoy AC, that's fine and I respect that. I will leave this web site up and running for anyone who may wish to get the last versions of my macros.

More power to you, and may your characters advance despite Turbines tweaks!

-Elcmar of Wintersebb