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 | 44 Comments

The Soapbox: How to fix Aion.

I’m by no means a game developer and as such, I don’t know what kind of man power or hours will go into these suggestions. I’m pretty damn sure that a lot of people will argue against my ideas and have solid and powerful opinions and that’s welcomed. So here is the summed up list of problems with Aion that can enhance the game altogether.

Mind you, I don’t talk about bots or lag, that’s not a glaring game mechanic flaw – that’s just bullshit 3rd level drama that can be fixed. There are tons of MMOs (World of Warcraft at the forefront) that can lend strategies through history on how to fix the latency and bot problems.

Punishing us for playing is ignorant and stupid.

Gathering: You can either pass or fail at gathering. This doesn’t make sense. I just found a node in the world and you’re going to take away roughly 30 seconds sometimes more of my time to try and pick the item off the ground only to have the chance of it suddenly failing and me getting jack shit. This serves no purpose, punishes the player for playing the game, and is a major liability in most mid-end game areas since PvP and other friendly players stealing your node in mid gather is pretty much a constant threat.

Change it so that as long as you have the appropriate level required to even gather the node, you will always gather from it. Remove the action interface and substitute in the typical fill meter you get when opening a door or collection quest item.

Crafting: You can spend easily upwards of millions of kinah on crafting alone and still even at max level, fail at making an item. When you do fail, you lose every single material in the process. When most of the materials are Orange (ultra-rare) quality items that drop off raid bosses and the likes and even then at an extremely low chance – having a failed craft is simply insulting. The pass/fail mechanic for crafting doesn’t seem so harsh at all until you start to get into the higher range crafts where expenses are extremely high and the payoff is fucking dismal. If anything, only allow non-drop materials to be lost. Keep the fluxes used, the special green or higher quality parts, and lose the aether powder or crystals or other player created parts.

Most if not all high end gear is crafted using epic quality crafted items as their materials. If you think I’m out of bounds with this issue then spend 2 million kinah making plate pants, then another 4 million for the other mats, and lose everything in a few seconds because the little red bar was a millimeter ahead of the blue bar and your crafting skill is maxed out for the game.

Player run economy AND massive NPC money sinks are worthless and not fun.

Yes, everything in the game SHOULD have some modicum of fun factor to it. Why the hell would I pay money and invest time to do something that’s tedious and boring and ultimately stressful and unrewarding?

Dying in the game costs money. If you want your EXP back that is. But if you manage to die at level 29 you’re going to spend at least 12000 kinah per death. Die a few times because of a bad group or whatever, and you’re pretty much fucking broke. Or you can RESPEND the next 5 hours or so grinding out EXP since you can’t redo the big payout quests you used to get the EXP in the first place. See where I’m going with this? Why? Fucking pointless.

Everything costs kinah. 90% of the time I talk to an NPC and it’s not quest related I’m giving him my money. Hell there are even quests out there that ask for up to 50000 kinah. What the hell? How much money are the Korean players making that the inflation was ramped up so high? What the hell are the developers thinking when they set the bar at this level?

I’m not afraid to spend time and earn some cash but when I have to decide to either play the game and quest and group and have fun, or mindlessly grind out money when I’m not even at the level cap; well there’s something wrong there. But that’s the great illusion because there is no choice, you must have tons of cash on hand constantly because the costs at vendors and such scale exponentially as you level. Why? You once again punish the player for playing the game. So you succeeded in leveling to 50? Great now if you want to fly it’s 15000 kinah instead of 8000 and it all started out as only 121.

You can make tons of cash on the Trade Broker (Auction House) but they LIMIT THE AMOUNT OF ITEMS YOU CAN PUT UP FOR SALE. Why? As if the AH isn’t already flooded to fuck all and back even with the cap. Basically this is another hurdle another pointless brick wall in the face of somebody trying to advance in the game.

So the AH window is full, let me use my private store! THAT TOO HAS A CAP EVEN SMALLER NOW ON HOW MANY ITEMS YOU CAN SELL! And now as a very pathetic and amateur solution to their botting problem, private stores have a time limit before they stop working. So again I ask why bother? Why? Why should I give a shit about my private store? I can’t set it up and go AFK because it’ll run down on time and shut off. So my alternative is to pay money to play a game where I literally sit on my ass and do NOTHING in the game.

It’s 92000 kinah to get all your new spells at level 22. It’s 150000 kinah to get your 4th inventory expansion and it’s still just another 9 slots, like the last 3 purchases were; only those cost 1000/30000/80000 respectively.

Solutions: Give us the option to run back to our corpse from the obelisk for no kinah or EXP cost or resurrect at the bind point for some exp loss and kinah cost upon soul healing. Stop scaling the cost of flights and teleports, that’s pointless. Raise or remove the cap on how much you can put for sale in the AH and do the same for private stores. Why does it cost so much to train in the skills you need as a class to continue playing? Lower the price. Also lower the price or possibly give items or quests to expand your inventory instead of just leaving it as another mindless money sink. That’s LAZY game design.

This is a player controled economy with every single NPC interaction acting as a sever money sink. Money sinks server 2 purposes; to keep players playing to earn back money spent, or to control the amount of money in circulation. Obviously this is a fucking failure in Aion as players need billions of kinah simply to carry out daily class functions.

Flight

The one major selling point that is supposed to make Aion unique from WoW or any other MMO, and it’s a fucking chore. You can’t fly everywhere only in certain places that really serve NO GAMEPLAY PURPOSE as there are no mobs in the air there. Gathering Aether is also fucking pointless. You need aether to fly as per the lore… gathering aether from the sky doesn’t replenish your flight timer. Explain this. What possible fucking purpose does this server. Yes we pay good money and invest hours of time and as developers it is your responsibility to support your decisions. As adults you’re held accountable for your actions.

Even in the abyss where aether is all over and the world is shattered and composed of NOTHING but floating islands. You have flight limits, you can fall and die and lose money and EXP and more. Why? Its insulting. We can fly freely in the entire world of the Abyss and yet you put a limit. How stupid. You play up the fact that you can fight and gather and do everything in the air and it’s a tactical aspect of PvP – no its not. You have extreme limitations so really what it means is that the tactical choice of flight is reserved only for players with billions of money spent on flight potions and scrolls and rare gear.

Solution? Gathering aether should refill your flight meter. In the Abyss the flight meter should only begin to drop as you engage actively in combat as in you’re attacking not running away from an attack. In the normal world there should be a cap on the altitude your character can reach and chalk it up to fatigue and aether concentration being very low.

Environment

There are tons of terrain clipping problems and bugs. If you jump over a log, odds are you’ll see your character glitch a little – replay and rubberband a second – and then maybe land where you expected him to. Why? You can do it in WoW and every other fucking MMO so why is travel in Aion so buggy?

The zones as well are either MASSIVE and require a mount of which there are none, or tiny and cramped with tons of grinding fodder (neutral mobs) and over the top terrain doodads that really serve no artistic purpose either.

Flight paths have a kinah issue that I already discussed, as well there are only 2-3 in most zones and they’re almost never at a MAJOR quest hub. You spend such an astronomical amount of time WASTED in traveling throughout Aion. Gliding helps some but ultimately it too is a lackluster and uninterestingly boring way to travel. I don’t want the hassle, I want a mount or better placed flight points.

Solutions: Place more flight paths. Introduce mounts. Expand on the land mass because as it stands, there’s very little earth to explore with even less reason to go explore it.

I could go on more here about the crippling reliance on consumables, the fact that PvP is broken down to basic zerg vs zerg lag wars where the victor is the side with more Rangers and Sorcerers and more kinah to supply the trillions spent on kisks and potions.

This isn’t so much a dig, hell readers of the site here know that I really like Aion. I was very excited to get into it, to be on the ground floor. But right now I’m immensely disappointed at how NCsoft is handeling the IP. They ruined Tabula Rasa, and now they’re on the slippery slope of ruining Aion.

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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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Posted by Spooner | 12 Comments

Gathering vs Crafting: The great Kinah sink of Aion

So you should all know by now how to gather and craft in Aion. I mean, it’s pretty self explanatory but I did put a guide up here much earlier but for the sake of argument here’s a quick refresher.

• Gathering and crafting opens up a Pass/Fail window that determines based on your skill level and a modicum of luck towards the end game if you succeed in crafting or gathering.
• Gathering certain materials from the game world can result in a HQ or high-quality random chance. Same for crafting armors, potions, weapons, etc.
• There is only one gathering skill for all materials. The other gathering is for Aether only which can be found in areas where you can fly, typically near a fortress or in the Abyss.
• You can have all professions but can only grand-master 2.

So one mistake I made while leveling was taking more than one profession at a time. Let me tell you what a fucking massive money sink that is.

Pushing 3,000 kin per profession just to learn it initially adds up. Buying the vendor mats for most work orders also does it’s fair share of damage on the wallet. You won’t feel it at the time though. Expanding your inventory the 1st time is a measely 1,000 kin. The second time is 11k, the 3rd is 60k, and it just gets more and more expensive after that! Here’s a little preview, at level 22 I spent 52,000 kinah on my new spells alone. At 25 I’m looking at something near 70 thousand.

Once your gathering or crafting is at the 99/99 cap you’ll have to shell out 13,000 give or take to have it raised to the next level. Yeah this shit can get expensive. Let’s talk though about consumables real quick.

Consumables being downright mandatory isn’t a new gameplay concept and honestly, it’s not that bad. A lot of people reading this and playing Aion are coming from the Blizzard school of thought where you don’t need consumables to accomplish X goal in the game. But that mentality has gotten things to the point where nobody at all was fucking using them making the entire Alchemy profession somewhat of a joke or only something worth taking up for groups of people looking to raid and even then only used at all during a raid.

With consumables being cheap and easy to make and also being so important and necessary it helps keep the flow of money in the server moving. There will always be a demand and thus players that provide supply will always have a niche to fill. Granted if everybody takes up Alchemy and starts supplying then the prices will drop tremendously, but that’s where shrewd economics come into play and we start playing Wallstreet.

There are ways to make loads of kinah in Aion, you don’t need to buy it. Ultimately it’s proportional to your level. You might have to scrimp and save here and there but that’s nothing new in an MMO. Spending some time gathering mats and then selling them on the AH and making sure to not buy gear and weapons but use drops or quest rewards will make a world of difference.

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