Posted by Spooner | 10 Comments

Aion & WoW side by side, a Spooner Q&A Session

I got an email from a reader the other day named Lew. He’s got a pretty solid question and it’s taken me a little bit to get the answer for him. In a nutshell, he’s requesting a fact by fact comparison of Aion to the World of Warcraft for the purpose of translation ans transition not to judge which is better or worse.

I want to point out right now that even though I read every single comment posted on this site, I’ll be personally moderating this article to make sure it’s being used as a reference source and not flame bait. So let’s begin:

Transportation – Mounts? Flying Mounts? I heard that you get wings, is there any other mode of faster movement/travel?

At the moment the only way to travel in Aion is either through flightpoints, running, gliding, or teleports:

• You have to spend kinah (money) in order to use the flight points in game however, unlike WoW you do not have to learn them before using them. Just being in the zone at all will grant you full access to all the flight paths in the zone. You will also reveal the map as you fly over it through the use of the taxi but revealing parts of the map don’t grant EXP. Teleports are pretty self explanatory. All the zones in the game are instanced from each other but you can travel between them typically through normal paths (going from one zone to the next like you would in WoW into you hit a loading screen in between) or through teleports given by an NPC right next to the flight master.

• Running is pretty self explanatory. There are stats on gear, potions and scrolls, and class buffs that increase run speed by a significant amount and this makes a big difference in PvP for the most part.

• Gliding is the primary means of quick travel. When you ascend to a daeva at level 10 you’ll get your wings. Now you can only fly in areas with high aether concentration like the Abyss and certain parts of Atreia but you can glide anywhere. Mastering how to glide and get lift is pretty essential to getting by quickly. Gliding is fast and actually a pretty cool mechanic and somewhat replaces the need for ground mounts. You can fly but flight is more of a strategic battle thing than just a means of travel.

• There are currently no ground or flying mounts in Aion. It has been said already by the developers that they have plans in the works for ground mounts and flying PvP mounts but no solid details have been released.

That about covers all the bases for travel so far.

Servers – Is Aion like other Asian based games where you can play on ANY server after you create your character? or like WoW where once you create your character on one server that is the one you have to play on every day unless you realm xfer?

The 2nd thing you said. Creating a character is almost exactly the same as it is in WoW only the faction rules are like Classic WoW where if you make Asmodian you cannot make an Elyos on that same server, and vice versa.

How stable are the servers and how long are maintenance times? Are there huge random chunks of time for server maintenance at peak hours, or do they have scheduled times?

Maintenance is maybe at most 1-2 hours a week and typically on Fridays from what I’ve seen. Sometimes they apply a very small patch 5MB large and that’s it. The servers are actually stable, but that depends on the server. The high population servers (like Azphel) are pretty much bogged down ass during peak hours but smooth and flawless during off-peak.

The server I play on is actually flawless and never down once since it’s launch. I have not seen servers go down for maintenance once during peak hours unless it’s a crippling issue. Servers have gone down as of this writing because of latency problems and other crashes due to overpopulation though. Yes they are allowing server transfers in the future as early as November.

Are there a few amount of servers with huge populations creating immense lag, or are there a variety of servers with differing population bases?

At the start, few servers with a lot of lag. They’ve launched new servers which has helped some but for the most part it’s very dependent on your realm. Some are bogged down all the time and to prevent lag, there are long queues to get online. Lag is still there but minimal. On other servers, there is no lag at all and no wait time to get online.

NCsoft has been adamant about not throwing tons of servers at the problem because in a game so incredibly PvP oriented, faction balance is VERY important and causing a bunch of one sided near dead population servers will hurt the game in the long run. It sucks in the short term because people have to wait, and that is unacceptable with some of the times being tossed about. But in the long term, it will help the game because as more people level up to fight in the Abyss, it’s going to be VERY noticeable if you’re outnumbered by 10% or not.

Questing – Is it like the normal grind? WoW grind or Asian mmo grind? How different are quests? Is it mind-numbing kill after kill or are there riddles or puzzles you have to figure out?

You can level to the end cap pretty much by only doing quests. The questing is identical to that of WoW in that you get a quest, complete it, then turn it in to the NPC. There are repeatables, long chains, gathering quests, kill quests, group elite quests, instance quests, PvP quests, and so forth. It’s not mind numbing and they do provide an in game wiki with the quests so you can locate and mark on the map where your objectives are. Sometimes the objective is harder and you have to explore.

Good news though, there’s no mindless faction grind or daily quests that limit your play and progression. Most repeatable quests have a 100x limit but there’s a lot of them and some are as simple as “Deliver these supplies for me on the other side of town then come back and I’ll give you 3,000 kinah”.

Leveling – Is there a level cap? How hard is it to level?

Level cap is 50. It’s not hard to level. You gain EXP from questing, killing mobs, gathering and crafting. There really isn’t any excuse as long as you’ve been keeping up with your gathering and quests to ever have to brainlessly grind for EXP. This is of course my observation from Lv 1- 24.

PvP – Are there severe disadvantages vs. certain classes? How do level differences factor into PvP? How does gear factor into PvP?

Gear plays a role but not as massive as it is WoW. Armor types are noticeable in that cloth is very weak and plate is extremely strong, versus physical damage. The gear and weapons in Aion are very simplified so more emphasis is placed on classes and player skill.

As far as class balance goes, it’s relatively fine. The game is in no way balanced around a 1v1 level; when you PvP it’s assumed that you’re going to be in a group or fighting a group and so the classes really compliment each other dramatically. The only out of whack factor seems to be in duels where most of the time a healer (Cleric or Chanter) will win out because of their heals, or versus a Mage archetype (Sorcerer or Spiritmaster) since they have a lot of defensive spells and really strong nukes.

Fighting a sorcerer is downright suicidal most times as their burst is very strong, however. If you can break through their mana shield skill (Stoneskin) they have the lowest HP pool of any class int he game and fold really quickly. Also they run dry on mana very quickly int he earlier levels so exploiting that is crucial. Every class has a weakness – melee is highly susceptible to kiting and few have any ranged attacks to compensate, cloth users have shit health, Rangers have no real defenses if they fail to kite you, and so forth.

PvE – One of the main problems I had with classic WoW, or for anybody that was a true raider back in the day, was that you needed 40 people to raid. That meant 40 people wanting bathroom breaks, needing a beer, smoke, or what ever other fix there was. So it was always you having to wait for other people to get to see end game content and gear.
How is Aion different?

Currently the max group size for a party is 6 players and that’s where most of the “instanced” dungeon action is. You can form raid groups called Alliances with many more but there aren’t any instanced raids as we’re used to in WoW. You will see A LOT of massive group raiding in the Abyss for PvPvE sieging of enemy player fortresses which can be captured, or NPC controlled Balaur strongholds which can also be captured.

There are also a lot of world raid bosses which consist of these massive epic legendary monsters wandering through zones that drop great loot.  There are plans to bring large scale instanced raiding in the future to Aion but very few details are available right now.

If you all have any comments, corrections, or additions to make here please leave them in the comments and keep it civil.

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Posted by Spooner | 9 Comments

A New way to build Hodir Reputation!

Finally. I’m glad to see they added this into the game and feel a little bit frustrated it’s taken them so long to make such an obvious decision but you know, water under the bridge and all that.

What do you guys think of the whole concept? Necessary shoulder enchants (pretty much something you NEED are only available to the general populace through a reputation grind. And yes, it is a grind. People talk shit about grindfest games defending WoW but when you do dailies what are you really taking part in?

The same repetitious redundant exercise every day without deviation. Grinding.

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Posted by Spooner | 16 Comments

This just in! Hard modes are Hard

Welcome to hard mode 25man Iron Council:

That about sums it up, thanks for reading.

There really isn’t much left to say but for those that miss the point entirely I’ll spell it out plain and simple. The World of Warcraft has evolved into an MMO that caters to all walks of life. For better or worse we’re stuck with a game that panders to the mainstream audience, not so much gamers. Gamers as a sub-culture have been growing up, and ultimately the target audience has changed. In the end, one can surmise that WoW’s learning curve has dropped off to nothing short of elementary, however.

There’s very little in the way of punishment or truly unimaginative grind sessions (and don’t lie to yourself reader, WoW is an MMO and all MMOs essentially revolve around grinding as the core mechanic. If it isn’t XP or PvP honor points or Arena points or quests or raids or GEAR which WoW is fucking infamous for) which makes the game addictive enough yet open and very non-intimidating.

Possibly the very last bastion of this game that truley feels like a challenge would be the hard mode content and even that isn’t immune to the cries of the average player looking to get his slice of the pie and demanding that yet again, the game change to fit his needs. Its a little too utopian to think that everybody is going to be viable. But all the same if Blizzard wants hard modes to be where gamers go for their challenges, they succeeded.

For now, I see WoW as a game that has no idea whether its coming or going, and I can’t ascertain the direction it will take in the next expansion. Personally, it’ll either be the breath of life this game so desperately needs or the death knell of an amazing MMO.

Either way it’s a good thing because as this game will eventually rot and die, the land will be fertile and ready for Blizzard’s new MMO that will hopefully have learned from the mistakes of Wrath.

This all went downhill when Morhaime left development to work with the new MMO.

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