Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Falconeer]

Dye person? Where in Pandemonium is he/she? Is that for tinting armours?

[Threash]

Yeah, also gives a quest for some free dye.

[01101010]

Dye person? Where in Pandemonium is he/she? Is that for tinting armours?

There is a quest for dye as well. The NPC is over across from the arena IIRC in one of the shop rooms.

[Ashamanchill]

Forgetting to bind at a stone and dying is.

In general, death is only a bit worse than WoW. Although I seem to be broke all the time and the spiritmaster person is not super cheap.

Do I ever wish this game had a corpse run. I really fucking miss that thing.

It's not dying by myself, that doesn't bother me too much. It's when my friends and I are grouped up. Last night we were doing quests in that Krall area in the Elyios zone, which is sort of like an open world dungeon. We were making progress and having fun, when something happened that wiped us all. Okay, that erased all our progress towards killing this boss, but okay. I was bound at the nearest rez spot, as was my cleric.

Unfortunately one of my dps was bound in the citadel a flight path away, and another was bound two flight paths away. So that was the end of killing elite mobs together and having fun. Now back to the grind. A situation like this has happened to us three times so far. It really halts the flow of the game.

[Draegan]

Seems like user stupidity/laziness.

Also, not sure if everyone realizes this, but there are ress crystals that everyone can buy.  There are recall scrolls for Altgard and Morheim.  You can even buy Kisks for 20k if you want.

[Ashamanchill]

Look, I'm not denying that it was our fault, but haven't we learned from wow. Remember the old wow, of corpse runs to Molten core, vs new wow of spirit healers right outside the dungeon. It just feels like there is a bit too much downtime in AIon.

Oh yeah, we all had rez stones, but since we all died they were useless.

[tmp]

The appearance vendor is no longer free.  It requires a plastic surgery ticket, however the dye person you are told to visit does not sell it.

Yup; suspecting these tickets will be some sort of paid service, similar to re-customization in WoW etc. There's another NPC who allows gender change and requires these tickets, too.

[01101010]

Look, I'm not denying that it was our fault, but haven't we learned from wow. Remember the old wow, of corpse runs to Molten core, vs new wow of spirit healers right outside the dungeon. It just feels like there is a bit too much downtime in AIon.

Oh yeah, we all had rez stones, but since we all died they were useless.

i think draegan was talking about the self-rez stones

[tmp]

In other non-news...

"Top 10 Keywords" on EU Aion page ticker:

#1 "server full" ^99

[Venkman]

Look, I'm not denying that it was our fault, but haven't we learned from wow. Remember the old wow, of corpse runs to Molten core, vs new wow of spirit healers right outside the dungeon. It just feels like there is a bit too much downtime in AIon.

Oh yeah, we all had rez stones, but since we all died they were useless.

Ah, I love to hear "old" associated with WoW mechanics. You want old? Do ya?!  

Back in my day, we did corpse runs naked, just to get our crap back before it despawned. And this without any talk of getting XP back, at all.

But no. We didn't like it

Just being able to get some XP back at all, being able to run to our corpse invulnerable and invisible, that no matter what we did we would never lose our gear, and all this without public space dungeons where people trained our corpses just for kicks. We got it easy nowadays.

But yea, WoW is slightly less punitive than Aion. I suspect in recognition of that, they'll decouple bind stone function from rez stone and just let you respawn at the closest one of them on death, WoW graveyard style.

[Ashamanchill]

Ah it doesn't really matter to me too much. Just something for me to talk about while waiting for my friends to log on. PvP is where I'm going to hang my hat in this game anyways. I wish more people did the arena in the city, cause I'm still too low for the abyss.

[Lantyssa]

Just being able to get some XP back at all, being able to run to our corpse invulnerable and invisible, that no matter what we did we would never lose our gear, and all this without public space dungeons where people trained our corpses just for kicks. We got it easy nowadays.

There's a reason I strongly advocated for the removal of DTs from my MUD.  We might have it easier these days, but it was a known issue even back in the day.  The problem was "tradition" versus questioning why the mechanic was good or bad.

[Falconeer]

Well, why I usually have two hours queues when I log in at peak hours, today I've been welcomed by the following message:

"You can't connect to the server because there are too many users".

Not even the queue. Just a fuck you message.

[Threash]

That blows, removing the perma shops removed all the queues on Triniel.

[Xanthippe]

Well, why I usually have two hours queues when I log in at peak hours, today I've been welcomed by the following message:

"You can't connect to the server because there are too many users".

Not even the queue. Just a fuck you message.

I have never faced a queue, ever.  Also, they just added a new server, I noticed. 

I just dinged 20 and went to Morheim, and noticed there is only one channel.  There are 5 for Altgard, and 10 for the newbie zones.  My friend said that they are dynamic, but they really don't seem to be.  I've never seen those numbers change.

[Ard]

They are dynamic from the perspective that NC Soft can lower them once the initial glut is over.  Also, all zones past Altgard (20+) only have one channel since that's when pvp starts.

[Falconeer]

What can I say? Maybe Aion is more popular in EU than US. Or maybe my server is just unlucky.

EDIT to add: my server is exploding and it still has only one channel for Morheim. Channels are not dynamic at all. This sucks, yay.

EDIT 2: On a second thought, lack of channels for Morheim could be related to the fact that it is, by all means, a PvP zone. Are there additional channels for Brusthonin (which is rift-disabled, so no PvP)?

[Morfiend]

Well, why I usually have two hours queues when I log in at peak hours, today I've been welcomed by the following message:

"You can't connect to the server because there are too many users".

Not even the queue. Just a fuck you message.

I believe that means there are more than 3000 people in the queue. Or maybe its 4000. We had that on Azphel, but now we are down to like 600 person queues in primetime.

[Draegan]

I'm 500/1100 right now in Azphel queue.  QQ

[Koyasha]

Ah, I love to hear "old" associated with WoW mechanics. You want old? Do ya?!  

Back in my day, we did corpse runs naked, just to get our crap back before it despawned. And this without any talk of getting XP back, at all.

But no. We didn't like it

Yes, I did.

EDIT to add: my server is exploding and it still has only one channel for Morheim. Channels are not dynamic at all. This sucks, yay.

PvP capable zones never have more than one channel.  That means Morheim, Beluslan, Eltnen, and Interdiktah (which they renamed to something I forget at the last minute) never have channels.  Brusthonin and Theobomos have two channels.

Oh and as far as I know the appearance vendor was never free, unless there was a bug in the first couple days of live?  In open beta it was there, but needed tickets as well.  I really hope they go with a reasonable price for the various tickets (assuming these are some of the things they're going to be selling for real cash) because if the cost is like $1 to $3 or so, I would probably use it pretty regularly (to change things like hair relatively often) but if it's anywhere over $5 it's unlikely I'd use it unless I felt I really screwed up my character's appearance.

[Zane0]

I hope they implement appearance tickets soon. There's no way to account for lighting, animation, perspective, and a thousand other little things in character gen. It's rather fiendish, really.

[gryeyes]

I was going to wait a few weeks for queues to die down, but I need a new game. Any recommendations on servers that are not constantly flooded?

[Lantyssa]

Avoid Lumiel.  Had a thirty minute queue in the early afternoon and an hour queue at 7:00.

[01101010]

I was going to wait a few weeks for queues to die down, but I need a new game. Any recommendations on servers that are not constantly flooded?

Fregion is the new one. Roll evil... Roll Elyos! 

[gryeyes]

STEAM is so swamped I cant even begin the download.

[Chimpy]

I was going to wait a few weeks for queues to die down, but I need a new game. Any recommendations on servers that are not constantly flooded?

I am playing with friends on Vaizel, they said they never have had a queue, and they all started with Head-start.

Steam DL took me 8.5 hours last night, good luck with that.

Oh, and if you buy the regular version, you can UG to the Collectors for 10 bucks on NCSoft's site until Oct 23.

[gryeyes]

Motherfuck, I had my urine bucket and Dr.Pepper drip all ready to go.


Edit: Did you get a constant message of "servers too busy blah blah" or just a slow download?

Edit2: STEAM ran out of fucking CD keys and are waiting for the new batch to arrive. And I still cant even begin the Download.

[Chimpy]

I am on DSL, so even in a perfect world, I would only get about 600KB/s, for the Aion D/L it fluctuated between 375 and 450. I got 600k on the 300 meg patch from NCSoft after the steam D/L was finished.

Had I known about the 10 dollar CE upgrade I would have just gone to Walmart or Best Buy or w/e and bought a retail CD then done the UG online and gotten 2-3 hours of playtime in yesterday. Oh well got to 14 today anyway.

[Falconeer]

Whoa, [Spy] quests are awesome. They are quests starting at 20 where
Beside the [Spy] quests, the whole idea behind rifts in low level zone is great. It's "Inglorious Basterds" kind of great. 

[gryeyes]

Your spoiler is funny. Im now downloading directly from NCsoft,steam is completely full/non-functional,they ran out of CD-keys earlier today. Im curious does the NCsoft version have anything different? copy/cheat protection?

[IainC]

Here is a graph from a Korean theorycrafting site showing XP per level and what percentage can be quested and what needs grinding. This is apparently from before patch 1.5 though where more quests were added at lower levels.

[Ashamanchill]

So it's going to be WaR tier 3 all over again. Fuck I hope not.

[Draegan]

I believe that was inaccurate at the time, and it's completely inaccurate now even if it was accurate then.

[tmp]

Not sure though if that graph takes into account the "quests" are essentially thin wrapping around mob grind assignments, and in order to carry them out one usually has to grind their way through hostile areas as well, picking up some extra kills/xp. Both would, depending how one looks at it, take from the "xp to be grinded" bar.

[Draegan]

I was reading a few posts from a spirit master who can kite and kill elites solo at around level 41, and they can kill one in 2-4 minutes that yield 300-400k xp at that level.