f13.net

...in Europe  :why_so_serious:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/12/14/aion-going-free-to-play-in-europe/


I've always kinda been interested in trying this game out, but never wanted to pay the retail fee. Why can't they do this in the US?

Would have been better if they let you fly around everywhere instead of a few choice spots. I had fun with it, but it had no staying power.

Shadowbane had better flying pvp.

Not sure why they're not doing it in the US servers.  Either they still have enough subscriptions to milk it a little longer, or their version system is like Lineage II, where the NA servers are several patches behind the Asia servers.  I don't really know.

It's a world PVP game (you quest and PVE-grind to gain levels and gear to PVP with your guild against opposite-faction guilds).  Via PVP you can gain control of castles/fortresses, and that opens/closes quest hubs for everyone on your faction side.  And yes, it sucks that you can't perma-fly - flight is limited to quick bursts (which can be extended to a few minutes via potions and items), after which you have to land and recharge your endurance.

They probably should go free2play given how rapacious their cash-shop is. 5$ for a Christmas theme skin you can apply to 1 weapon? That's the spirit of giving in something that is still a full subscription price game.

I dunno, isn't F2P mostly for relatively casual, low commitment games?  Subscriptions are generally about dragging subs out as long as possible, while F2P is about advancing fast so you can experience a lot of stuff to spend money on before you get bored?  Aion is one of the grindiest, most casual unfriendly games I've ever played, I can't see someone playing the level 10-20 zone and saying "Wow, I hope there's forty more hours of this crap before I can even start PvPing, I'm sticking around!"  Unless they MASSIVELY changed the mechanics since I played last.  It's a PvP game, Steam tells me I have 53 hours played, and I have not seen any PvP except for being the victim of some minor random ganking.

I'd tend to agree.

But since Lineage 2 is pretty much the same and went F2P they must be seeing something. Probably collapsing sub numbers and a realization that a PvP game needs cannon-fodder to survive. Though I suspect they've also drastically cut the levelling curve to get people into the end-game fast, they estimate the first 20 levels in L2 to be "about an hour", and I suspect it wasn't like that on launch.

(Still not worth playing though from what I can see).

I've seen PVP as I levelled up in Aion, but it's like EVE - it's group PVP and you have to have a good group that's going out there looking for fights.  When like that, it was kinda fun.  The grind was horrible though.

No, no they were not. :uhrr:

I don't remember an announcement of it going f2p anywhere other than Europe, but when I logged in to check my City of Heroes character (still a lingering desire to get to cap) I saw an install for free button.

I really don't know what I want out of MMO's anymore, and a old, PvP oriented asian grinder probably isn't it... but it's hard to resist. And fortunately my internet quota resets tomorrow.

(edit)

And apparently the idea of "PvP rifts" resulted in over-geared twinks laying waste to anyone attempting to level and got severely nerfed. I guess no one saw that coming in advance.

The game, while grindy, did have a decent story and there were some very very well done PvE aspects (though you probably would not see some of them now that there is no decent sized 45-50 level population playing.)

I think Steel Rake was the best designed instance in any game I have played. It had good artistic design, the boss fights were all novel and required more than just "don't stand in fire, pew pew". The choose your own difficulty/pace of Dark Poeta was cool too. I didn't care too much for Fire Temple simply because it reminded me too much of Molten Core in WoW visually.

Dredgion was cool too, though I quit right before they changed it so I am not sure if it stayed that way.

I have a hunch NCSoft made more off of cash-shop novelty stuff than they did off of subs even 3-4 months into the game's release in the West. At the time I quit playing, I think I was the only person that had not spent at least 50 bucks on various "special" packages.

The "graded" raiding was a novel idea that made repeating the same raids over bare able.  Basically the faster you finished and the more optional goals you accomplished the better your grade and loot from the last boss was.

That sounds terrible. I already find dungeon runs are done at a "you should have studied the walk-through videos first" sprint. I don't think I'd want to make that a rewarded behavior. Though I guess it works if you never PUG and trust your group-mates.

The game sure is pretty. Maps are heavily abstracted but the character models, armor and combat animations all have a very definite sense of style that alternates between cool and creepy.

It appears they are opening a new server in a week or so, it's open for name reservation and sounds like it's intended for another f2p release, which I guess is the US if it's already f2p in Europe. That said it looks like they did a lot of server merging up to this point.

Trying to beat your time/score makes the runs more fun than mindlessly running the same farm content every week for months at a time.

The best mechanical thing about the game was res stones though. Having everyone be able to rez in combat was so much better than "oh fuck, tank/healer died game over" that other games have.

I played on a few EMU servers from time to time in the past, and the only way this game was bearable is if XP is turned up to like 10x.

I'm actually quite enjoying it, though I'm only level 20 and I have read the grind starts to kick in about L30.  I've no idea if it has been elevated but with XP for gathering and crafting I've actually out-leveled my quest log.

The art design is stupidly lovely, alternating this and LotRO is blowing my mind with how different the "feel" is. LotRO is bad models, bad animations but the look suits the relatively "tramping through the wilds" feel of the setting. Aion declares you, basically, as a heavenly spirit at level 10 and the world is full of bright colors, radiance and light effects and a level of model and clothing detail that is obsessive/korean (though they just give up on caring about clipping). The Aion pets have better animations than the LotRO PC's. I don't mind the combat either, some chained and reactive abilities plus the nice animations keeps me interested and the downtime is minimal.

I'm not taking the game seriously though, I fully expect to run out of steam when the curve steepens. Especially because I suspect the end-game has nothing to offer me. On the positive side the cash-shop has been entirely optional so far, something LotRO can't claim.

The other minor observation is that "body sliders" in character creation should be strongly constrained. Some of the default body types could best be described as "alien" and with creative slider abuse I've seen some monstrosities wandering around. Likewise I assume all the miniature characters I see are either loli fetishists or serious PvP people minimizing their hit-box or visibility. Oh, and like most PvP games the community is caustic and the combination of extreme cute and PvP just feels sort of weird to me.

My biggest complaints when I last gave this a go (before it went F2P) were that the crafting system sucked and being able to fly for like 60s at a time was fucking stupid. Anyone know if these have changed?

I never felt like the grindy part of Aion was the leveling, which at worst was slightly above average.  The grind was everything at the endgame, pvp pve enchanting socketing were all huge horrible grinds that made leveling feel like a walk in the park.

I miss getting 5/6 manastones into my leg piece and failing on #6....good times.  I love telling the story of when it cost me over 110 million kinah to reduce my armor enchantment level from 12 to 10 due to failures....love me some Aion!

The leveling grind was worst in the late 30s as you run out of quests and they sort of forced you into grinding the elite Kraal/Lepharist/whatever the cat people were called to get enough tokens for the jewelery/armor pieces.

Oh, and the other part of the grind was spending 3 hours in an instance, kill the final boss, and get zero loot. Not zero loot you could use. Absolutely zero loot as in empty corpses.

The crafting system seems okay... it's grindy but then I haven't seen one that isn't. With EQ2 probably coming closest. That said I haven't made any gear upgrades using it because the found components seem rare and the marketplace less effort. The flight aspect is pointless so far, it seems like the only place I can fly is a couple of friendly outposts so it's useless... still 60 seconds though, and any expansion to that is in the big bucks territory.

I can easily see the gearing grind. Even just messing around with taking weapons to +2 enchantment and +2 manastones had a pretty high fail rate.

If I make it to 30+ I'll see if they've populated that stretch with some quests. Oh, the recent patch also added housing which is quite nicely done, but like most housing largely useless.

They great thing about TERA is they got rid of the Korean enchanting system of losing levels.  They should do the same with Aion.

They added(at least at some point, not sure they still have it) pots you buy with RL money from their store(no not the ones in game that did jack squat) that gave you 100% chance for success, they were around $2 to $3 for 1 pot I believe.  Clearly they never intended to increase the rate of success since they could profit from a high failure system in their store. 

Does the pot last for a certain amount of time or was it 1 pot per enchant/manastone? The latter would cost a bloody fortune to max out all your gear  :ye_gods:

I found this enchantment guide (http://www.aionsource.com/topic/15566-guide-enchantments-manastones-and-godstones/) handy the last time I played. Of course I only discovered it after I'd lost a fortune using the wrong level stones!

Not sure, I never tried them was quit by then.  I think it was 1 pot per enchant so yeah you could spend a lot of RL money to get your stuff to +15

I haven't seen anything like that, and can't seem to find it in the online store. NPC vendors do sell "enchantment powder" which increases your chance but gets pretty expensive.

I also need to take it back about the crafting. I had assumed you collect stuff, make things, skill up but in fact that's not really how it works. You grind repetitive, cash-sink, work orders to skill up until you get to a high level. Apparently once there you discover it absorbs insane amounts of material, gained from grinding instances, and the really valuable gear requires critical combines on items which then become raw material for another combination into a "deluxe" item which again needs a critical combine. Anything else is basically inferior to rare instance drops.

I can't tell what it is in the Korean psyche that makes this seem like a good idea. The feeling of achievement and ego from putting insane effort into a game is all that comes to mind, with the possible side-order of using PvP to demonstrate your advantage.

Still, pretty though.

God the crafting.

I had some blowhards try and tell me that the crafting failure shit was all about "risk vs. reward". No, it is about fucking Koreans having a fetish about putting your dick in a meat grinder all the time.

It's the RNG that makes it so cruel. They have to balance the effort so it is still a serious investment for the person lucky enough to succeed first try. But that means the person who gets cursed by the RNG and fails multiple times is going into masochist only territory. In essence an RNG system where you can move backwards is generally going to end up being punitive. One where your progress is reset to zero on a fail doubly so.