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 | 8 Comments

Blizzard lives in a fantasy world of Tophats and Monocles

HURRY HURRY HURRY LADIES AND GENTLEMEN FOR THIS ONCE IN A LIFETIME OFFER

I had a rather long rant here but after reading it over a few times, fuck it. I can sum up this entire post in a few words. Blizzard is an amazingly great game development company. They produce some of the best games out there without contest, and they know that they have a very significant group of loyal (addicted) players willing to pay money hand over fist for anything Blizzard provides.

I can’t find a nice way of writing this post. I guess I’m feeling a little like “What the fuck, like you people aren’t literally wiping your collective asses with Benjamin Franklin’s face and yet it’s going to cost me about that much if I want to use 2-3 of the services provided?”

I’m starting to wonder if this is the future for all gaming. Sell something for $50, charge a monthly fee of $15, then offer micro transactions for ranging prices of $10-35 as well as $50 again for every expansion that comes out. You could just lower the prices you know, I don’t think it’s going to cripple the foundation of the company for too long if you charge say $5 instead of $25 for a race change. What do you think?

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Posted by Spooner | 7 Comments

New Aion Patch 1.5.0.10: Kinah RMT spam over!?

Looks like we got a new patch overnight that seems to have done WONDERS for the gameplay quality:

From www.aiononline.com

Aion has been updated to version 1.5.0.10 today.

The changes are as follows:

• Gender Tag Fix for French and German languages
• Updated Chat Spam Filter

Log on and you’ll see there is zero spam in the LFG channel or any other channel. What rare bots actually get through the filter have to use these crazy ass symbols and such and are easily stopped. Amazing news and about time we get to see action to backup pretty words.

Also as a thank you overall to us the players for the long queue times and the RMT spam, NCsoft gave every single player a gift. When you log on you should get a little survey icon on the bottom right of your screen. Clicking it and reading through it’s a letter from NC soft apologizing for all the bullcrap and gifting us some Lodas Amulet with 5 charges. This is the same item we got for pre-ordering the game and it grants an hour long buff that persists through death which boosts EXP gains by 20% and it stacks with rested EXP bonus.

So what do you all think? Log into the game and tell me what your feelings are on these changes.

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Posted by Spooner | 17 Comments

NCsoft starts mass account bans to stop RMT and FAILS

So NCsoft came in the dead of night over the weekend and dropped the wicked ban hammer on a lot of accounts. Now the purpose of this was to take advantage of their server lockdowns to wipe out a large amount of players that were violating the EULA. In other words, botters and gold spammers. But they failed. I give them an A for effort but ultimately there’s still a bunch of spam and still prominent and obvious bots in game, but there’s an added twist. It seems that somebody fucked up big time because a lot of players who didn’t do anything wrong also got banned.

Before you ask, no my account is pretty much bulletproof, but that still sucks. Can you imagine trying to log on and fidning your account banned? Worse off you never did anything at all against the EULA that would constitute a ban and you’ve never been reported by another player. That’s some fucked up shit folks.

Sound off, what do you think. How would you fix the gold spam and RMT problem without completely shitting on customer service. I’d like to get a bunch of replies to compile and forward them up to NCsoft.

Good morning/day folks,

A couple of threads on this topic appeared during the night and rather than replying to each one of them I thought I’d create a new one.

We have, as you know, recently banned a large number of users for violating our User Agreement. If you found yourself unable to log in after the night, that would be the reason.

If you are 100% sure you have not been involved with any activity that would violate our User Agreement (this would also include anything related to RMT), then we suggest contacting our Customer Support team at Support | NCsoft who will be able to look into your case.

We understand that the timing is very inconvenient and will make sure that inquiries on this matter are made top priority. Our GMs will be working through the weekend to sort this out as quickly as possible.

- Ayase

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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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