Posted by Spooner | 51 Comments

An honest review of Aion after 7 weeks

I want to ask you guys a completely opnion based question here. There are no right or wrong answers, just feel free to voice how you feel about this issue. Aion. I stopped playing for three reasons.

• 1) I don’t have the time to dedicate to a game like Aion as it’s entirely way too grindy and there’s no sense of progression.
• 2) NCsoft has a track record I should have researched for shit-canning a lot of their titles into extremely niche markets that ultimately fail.
• 3) The level of botting and RMT is staggering and if not for the grind oriented game mechanics, could be easily remedied.

So here’s my question. Do you agree at all with any of these statements. The game for me was kind of a complete fallout, I was promised something and it was not delivered, the game was sold to me under the guise of pretty profound lies. NCsoft claimed to lessen the grind (quoting exactly “this game isn’t just another Korean grinder) for the Western market as we’re not fucking robots here in the USA – the game is still a complete and utter grind-fest.

NCsoft are repeat offenders.

NCsoft pretty much fucked City of Heroes since grinding and farming was pretty much the entire basis of the gameplay soon after its inception. You may have also heard of a little game called Lineage II which is essentially played only by bots with nothing at all done to change it. Coming back full circle to Aion, NCsoft deems it a worthy solution to remove chat from the game entirely until you reach level 10 at which point you can enter the chat channels which are typically still full of RMT spam or people complaining about the game. I won’t even get back into the tirade about their utter failure of a launch. As for server balance? Yeah you can say they’re balanced, congratulations on that, PvP in the Abyss is still tripe where the land is ruled by the few no-lifers who sat down and grinded for something like a week straight, most likely using bots or popping enough caffeine pills to raise the dead.

PvE? Not here.

As for my progression comment, there is none. Some fanboys will spout off saying “oh you have to earn your gear in Aion.” Bullshit, go fuck yourself. The earliest you can run an instanced dungeon is at level 25. It has a cap of level 29 so the moment you hit 29 you cannot enter the instance ever again and if you level up inside and you die and release, you’re never going to finish that run. Ever. After you run the instance you realize that the trash pulls don’t drop any loot at all really except some coin and anything you would normally find (and as frequently) outside in the regular world. Then the 5 or so mini-bosses drop absolutely nothing. Then you finally hit the last boss the big badass general, you kill him. He has no loot table. Sometimes he will drop an item. Sometimes he won’t. I ran the dungeon 12 times and saw loot 3 times. In the end, I lost the roll for the staff I needed as I hit 29 to another player (a cleric that would never use it to its potential like I would as a chanter) who was level 25. There is no need or greed just roll or pass.

Aion Community managers, making the game better by parading like assholes in the street.

Say goodbye to your family, your sex life, and your health.

So you grind all over the game. You enter a dungeon and really, it’s just instanced grinding for exp. You PvP in a fortress and more often than not you’re attacking the Balaur which is the NPC faction and also more often than not, players will come and gank your group or essentially ruin your raid.

I wasn’t asking for handouts, I was asking for a sense of progression. Not billion kinah money sinks, I feel I should email NCsoft and take them to court so I can get my share of a stimulus package and player kinah bailout. I level up and should feel good, I don’t because it’s 92,000+ kinah to learn 3 new spells all of which really don’t do shit differently than the previous ranks. Flight? Restricted, get ready to buy a million kinah at $6.00 a hit so you can afford the consumables that you’ll need to be chain popping just to keep in the air, that is of course until some ranger comes out of the blue and pushes your face through your own rectum – you know, fair fights and all.

I like PvP, when it’s balanced. I was promised this and got nothing. I like to feel like I’m making progress, I spent hours and hours watching a little blue bar fill up ever so slowly until I died and watched half of it vanish and the game asked me for 45,000 kinah to buy back the past 8 hours of exp.

And what are the people responsible for making good on their claims and for delivering a wonderful gaming experience doing? Striking poses like a bunch of douchebags on Facebook celebrating how awesome they are for making money hand over fist on a game that really isn’t anything new and most definitely isn’t any better than a glorified slot machine with no jackpot. Keep up the good work fellas, you lucked out that most if not all your players were World of Warcraft burnouts and I give it another two months before they either quit MMOs entirely or go back to big Blue.

Over the last year, gamers all over the world have been introduced to Aion. This new lifestyle has grown into an overwhelming passion that transcends nationality, religion, or race.

Really? Are you fucking kidding me?

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Posted by Spooner | 4 Comments

October Aion Community Address looks pretty amazing

I’ll just pick apart through to the best of this community letter. I also want to point out that I really like this idea of issuing monthly bullet letters to the community to show us that the developers are indeed listening and what their plans are. This level of transparency helps to alleviate a lot of stress that comes along with not knowing whether or not anything is going to be done. The Blizzard community members have been getting better over time with this by keeping communication open but you typically have to wait for a datamining site to give you answers that the developers are trying too fucking hard to keep secret for no apparent reason.

• Raising EXP gained through mobs and quests to stop the grind feeling.
• Hiring more GMs and a special team dedicated to simply stopping bots and gold spam.
• Working with system and memory updates to get the game to stop crashing for certain people (Crysystem.dll issues)

It’s been a month now since Aion opened its doors to players in North America and Europe. In that month, the growth of the game’s community has signaled Aion’s success. We’ve received an amazing amount of feedback, both positive and negative. We’d like to reiterate that we’ve been listening. We have been working around the clock toward solutions to the problems many of you have experienced.

You’ve told us that it’s difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we’re planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly “grind.”

In this week’s Eye on Community, we answered a question that a player had about client instability. In the reply, we noted that most of the claims stem from the infamous “Crysystem.dll error.” We’ve been working with members of the community to identify the cause of the problem in order to find a permanent solution. Our development team is currently investigating, and will be testing a variety of different short- and long-term solutions. These include adding additional and improved display options to the Aion client, as well as system and memory optimizations.

We’ve heard your unhappiness about the chat spam and bots in Aion and recognize it as an annoying problem. We’ve taken measures to reduce the amount of chat spam you’ll be subjected to and have already seen substantial improvements in this area. We’ve been expanding our GM customer service staff, and we have also assembled a special team dedicated to hunting down and eliminating botting operations. It’s obvious these activities erode your gameplay experience far too much to be acceptable. They also harm us from a business standpoint due to the RMT organizations’ frequent use of stolen credit cards.

Many of you have asked us why we haven’t spent more time communicating the specifics of our plans. The unfortunate truth is that the same people spamming chat channels and setting up bots are also reading our announcements. In order to keep the enemy in the dark, we cannot be too vocal about our plans to fight back.

We want you to know, though, that we’re more dedicated than ever to eliminate chat spam and the use of bots. The good news is that you can help. If you see any suspicious player activity, report it. To quickly report these players, use the /AutoReportHunting feature by typing /AutoReportHunting while a suspicious character is targeted. It’s important to note that this system will actually begin to penalize players after they’ve been reported multiple times. The more of you that use this system—the more effective it will become.

To add more specificity to what we’re discussing here, early next week we’re going to be releasing details about a game update that will go into further detail about how we’ll be fixing some of these issues, in addition to others.

It’s been an exciting month, and the future of Aion is full of promise. Please continue to send us your feedback and never forget that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

-The Aion Community Team

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Posted by Spooner | 10 Comments

Aion’s Ayase regarding Gold Spam in game.

Aion community liaison Ayase has finally made it back into the Seattle offices along with most of the more publicly known staff. Here’s the official press release regarding the insane amount of “gold spam” going on in game at the moment.

While Executive Producer Lance Stites took time to address some of the most prominent issues raised in the Aion community last week, we want to specifically address another issue that is a top priority for the team here at NCsoft: in-game real money trading (RMT) advertisement, sometimes referred to as “gold spamming.” These activities are something we’re actively combating right now. They are also something you can help us with, and something that we are committed to addressing continually in the future.

We currently have Game Masters monitoring all our servers. They track chat channels closely and have been banning thousands of spammers every day. This form of active monitoring is a part of a much larger network of tools and sensors that we’re currently utilizing to help create a better game experience for the Aion community across the board.

If you’re experiencing chat spam, there is a way for you to address this immediately on your own and help us create a better gameplay experience for everyone. You can use the Block User feature. All you need to do is to right-click on a user’s name and choose to block that user. While this doesn’t eliminate the problem, it is one small step you can actively make to improve your game experience. Using Block User also helps us identify spammers much more quickly.

We are considering a number of methods to address this chat spam that have been implemented in previous games, as well exploring new technologies and what they may have to offer to improve your game experience. One upcoming feature for Aion will be an improved chat filter to help reduce the overall chat spam. This filter, along with new tracking and monitoring methods, is the first of many steps that we’ll be taking to help resolve the issue of gold spamming.

We appreciate all the feedback and ideas you have been giving us so far. We will continue to scour the communities out there for other ideas as we go. We absolutely recognize how important this is to you and a good game experience in Aion, and we reiterate that we are currently addressing it. Thank you for your patience and for all of your input.

faff

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