Albion Online Surpasses 350K Monthly Active Players, Plans ‘Drastic Changes’ To Alliances
Last month’s massive Albion Online “Queen” update has apparently enticed a horde of new players to try out the Sandbox Interactive’s cross-platform sandbox MMORPG. According to a recent forum post, player numbers have surged by as much as 40% and monthly active users are up to over 350,000 players for the first time since the game’s free-to-play launch.
The developers go on to talk about the recent changes to territory mechanics which were implemented to reduce the gap between small and large groups during PvP conflicts. Game Director Robin “Eltharyon” Henkys says that they’re very happy with the outcome in general but are still unhappy with the way large alliances are still dominating the field.
“This creates a lot of pressure on smaller groups to also join a large alliance, which in turn causes the game world to split into a few very large power blocks,” he explains “This raises the barrier to entry for smaller and more casual guilds, while at the same time carrying the risk of effectively ‘pacifying’ large parts of the Outlands leading to stale gameplay.”
Henkys says they’re planning to make drastic changes to alliances later this month. But, since the outcome of these changes is still uncertain, the devs will initially be rolling them out as a test to help them gather data and player feedback.
Starting February 26th, Alliances will be limited to a maximum of 300 players (the current guild player cap), points sharing between guilds in the same alliances will be turned off, and the Disarray debuff will be tweaked to have a more significant impact on medium-sized zergs.
“It is our expectation that the existing in-game alliances will adapt to the new system and continue to exist through informal non-aggression pacts,” says Henkys. “However, we hope that these informal alliances are less powerful and less stable than what we have right now, leading to more action and tension overall and allowing newer groups to have an impact.”
