Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[gryeyes]

I can fight 7 equal level mobs before i need to recover some hps, and this is usually a 10 second or so rest, grouping doesn't speed up my kill rate in any way shape or form in fact grouping with a non dps class lowers it by quite a bit.

Id be amazed at the explanation for this. Unless you are killing mobs in a single hit no way is this true. And yeah the 45k or so for the repeatable quest is only 5 kills, but you get that exp every for a 13 kill bounty quest that is right next to the quest giver. Its a substantial increase of hourly exp not to mention to AP it gives.

[Draegan]

Only issues is that those bounty quests are so crowded that it's impossible to farm.

[Threash]

I can fight 7 equal level mobs before i need to recover some hps, and this is usually a 10 second or so rest, grouping doesn't speed up my kill rate in any way shape or form in fact grouping with a non dps class lowers it by quite a bit.

Id be amazed at the explanation for this. Unless you are killing mobs in a single hit no way is this true. And yeah the 45k or so for the repeatable quest is only 5 kills, but you get that exp every for a 13 kill bounty quest that is right next to the quest giver. Its a substantial increase of hourly exp not to mention to AP it gives.

I phrased that wrong, i should have said it does not improve my exp gain.  Even getting to do turn ins faster doesn't help much when the repeatable quest areas are so crowded you gotta wait on respawns anyways.

[veredus]

I just realized that the youthful voice is Zuko from Avatar.

[Kovacs]

Well, they did something.  After Maintenance last night, the chatspam is gone from the channels.  PLayed for several hours after restart and saw no spam at all.

I'd love to know your secret.  Spending all your time in the combat spam window perhaps?

[Chimpy]

The RMT spammers have found the emoticon icons for their spam, hearts and smileys abound in LFG.....Block list actually got full today and I had to remove a bunch of the oldest ones.

Learned something mighty useful today, express mail shugo will come into instances (was not sure if they would). I ran out of arrows in Fire Temple, and one of the other guys who has an alt that has cash went and express mailed me a bunch. I now have 5000 arrows in an express mail package for emergencies.

[gryeyes]

I phrased that wrong, i should have said it does not improve my exp gain.  Even getting to do turn ins faster doesn't help much when the repeatable quest areas are so crowded you gotta wait on respawns anyways.

You do have to scout out the place to see if its full, personally I don't even try to farm there until real late. Not only because competition with the tireless farmers, but you are almost assured to get ganked on a regular enough basis for it to be a wasted endeavor.

Doing the attunement quest for FT at the moment, does it give the same ridiculous exp as NTC?

[nurtsi]

Is there anything like a barbershop in the game? Can I change the appearance of my toon after character creation, like hairstyle, body proportions etc?

[tmp]

Is there anything like a barbershop in the game? Can I change the appearance of my toon after character creation, like hairstyle, body proportions etc?

The tech is in game (they have NPCs which basically give access to character creation screen and allow to change all attributes this way) but the functionality is currently locked -- it costs in-game tokens which are not available for the time being.

[Jerrith]

The RMT spammers have found the emoticon icons for their spam, hearts and smileys abound in LFG.....

They're the brands / marks that group leaders can set.  In terms of entering them, they're unicode characters E000 through E025.   is my favorite (the smiley).

[Threash]

I wish i knew why every single gold selling site i get spammed with is a wow site if they've done such a good job at stamping them out.

[gryeyes]

Because people still purchase gold even if its not flooding every channel in your game making communication impossible and filling up two block lists in under a weak?

[01101010]

i don't so much mind whacking the spammers with the block bat when they pop up. I do mind the constant reminders from the GMs warning about the phishing sites but nothing on the kinah selling. Maybe add onto that timed auto message about phishing sites with a little note about how the purchasing of ingame items is against the rules or something. I mean AT LEAST make it known you are aware of the problem.

[Shatter]

I noticed yesterday the price of Aion kinah is down to $15/mil and prices have been dropping steadily, makes me wonder if many people are actually buying it.  I did have a person in my guild who was on an awful lot.  We asked him to hop on vent and wouldnt answer our tells.  Eventually he did answer and had horrible english(the guy I know could write and speak english well) so we knew at that point he had paid a site to level him.  Needless to say /gboot and I havent seen him on now for over a week. 

[gryeyes]

Happens in every MMO, as more and more people reach higher levels the relative value of everything plummets. If people weren't purchasing gold there wouldn't be swarms of farmers/bots. A million kinah when everyone is level 10, is far more valuable than when everyone is 40. 

[01101010]

I noticed yesterday the price of Aion kinah is down to $15/mil and prices have been dropping steadily, makes me wonder if many people are actually buying it.  I did have a person in my guild who was on an awful lot.  We asked him to hop on vent and wouldnt answer our tells.  Eventually he did answer and had horrible english(the guy I know could write and speak english well) so we knew at that point he had paid a site to level him.  Needless to say /gboot and I havent seen him on now for over a week. 

Simple economics would say demand for kinah is a tad low. Leveling services on a grinding game is much more plausible than a need for kinah.

[Xanthippe]

Not only is the gold spam crazy bad, but the botting is ridiculously obvious.

There is a command under skills, /reportautohunting, that you can use.  Target the player, then either type it or use the conveniently provided button. 

The problem is, there is absolutely no feedback when you do.  No "You have reported so-and-so for botting" nor "Report submitted, we'll look into it" -- nothing.

Seeing the same bots working day after day.  Does NCSoft really care about this stuff?  It's quite disheartening.

[March]

This game is drifting in to the "failure to launch" category.

I put up with the 3 hour newbie experience with a good heart (the first time); working to 20 with milestones at 13 and 16 was merely unfun; the fact that I'm still looking at unfun redux to get to 25 is planting seeds of doubt in my mind; what happens when my fashionably late character reaches the [undifferentiated] abyss populated by [much] higher level characters will be definitive... that is, if I make it there before the free month wears off.

My current policy is to cancel immediately during the early month and only manually re-subscribe if I'm enjoying the game.  Right now, not looking good.

Biggest non-mechanics beef: So far, when I am not slaughtering horned sheep, I seem overwhelmingly to beat the fuck out of what I can only characterize as doughy pre-pubescent androgenous tweens... and it's not making me feel heroic; in fact its kinda creeping me out.

[gryeyes]

Abyss is optional, you can level to 50 and never enter the abyss if you are afraid of being the little fish. The spam is getting worse (Im not sure how that is possible but it is), Botting is rampant and NCsoft support seems non-existent, does this game have any live GM/CS at all? They don't even seem to have the tools to send server wide emails, and spam your screen with bullshit every 30 minutes in varying colors (So that the message can be seen due to having an absolutely eye destroying chat window).

While its endearing to have channels spammed with nigger,faggot and goldfor hours at a time the shit is getting old. I have not been in direct contact with a human GM, Im starting to doubt they even exist. I have not seen a single obvious botter disappear from my friends list, Im having to clear my block list daily to make room for the 20 or so names I add a game session. Beyond aesthetics this game is pretty mediocre in every category this combined with the abysmal support is starting to kill my desire to log back in. I am rerolling a caster after hitting 30 due to not wanting to be completely sub-par in every aspect of the game. The game is so close to being good im going to try my hardest to tough it out. But it really appears that NCsoft does not really give a fuck, that this game has been live for over a year and is not their first rodeo makes is even more infuriating.

[Threash]

I have a lot of minor annoyances like not having a separate bag for quest items, not being able to gather stuff i already have in my bags unless there is an empty spot, getting kicked to desktop everytime i get disconnected (which fucking happens quite often with embarq) and a few other things that are easily addressed.  My only big complaint is aerial combat, not only how fucking annoying it is in melee but also that some of my best abilities don't work in the air by design.  I hear they are easing up on the range check while in the air to make it easier on melee next patch, heres hoping i can actually hit a moving target.  I honestly do not understand the spamming complaints, if for some unknown sadomasochistic reason i were to subject myself to public channels i would be bothered just as much or more by absolutely almost everything everyone who uses a public channel has to say.  There's absolutely no reason to group if you don't want too, why in the world does anyone chose to subject themselves to anything other than guild and group chat? i wouldn't last in any game more than a few hours if i did that.

[gryeyes]

So complaining about a special bag for quest items is valid, but complaining about non-stop scrolling of every fucking channel in the game isn't? At least we have evolved beyond outright denial into bland rationalization.  People seek groups because there is content in every level bracket designed around more than one person, what exactly do you find so confusing about this that you repeat your "I dont understand" shtick every page?

[Threash]

The difference is one is completely avoidable and the other is not, obviously.  I spent the first 20 minutes in beta trying to figure out how to turn off public channels, same as i did in Warhammer, AoC and WoW, and not one of those times was because of gold spammers.

[Chimpy]

The lack of any apparent GMs is starting to grate on me, simply because it is obvious nothing is being done. And the NCSoft auto spam my screen is almost as bad as the gold spam.

Very little about the mechanics outside of the stupid failure on enchants/manastones mechanic destroying previous successes is bothering me.

[Xanthippe]

Apparently NCSoft banned a bunch of people on Friday - just in time for the weekend when there apparently is no customer support at all.  Apparently they inadvertently banned people who did nothing wrong, other than mail large sums of kinah (100,000 or more) to different accounts. 

Apparently, NCSoft's idea of customer service is to write scripts that detect possible gold farmers and then automatically ban people who might perhaps be gold farmers?

Worst customer service I've ever seen in a MMO.  First Korean MMO I've played - I hear this is par for the course.

They're going to bleed subs by the end of the month if they don't fix this pronto.

[Pennilenko]

They're going to bleed subs by the end of the month if they don't fix this pronto.

They will bleed only American and Euro subs, because they have trained their Asian customers to accept these standards.

[waylander]

I feel mislead.  I think instead of spamming us with messages about fake sites, they should really tell us that they didn't truly westernize the game to reduce the grind.

It should read something like this...................

Greetings Daevas!

Recently there have been attempts to fool our customers into thinking we had modified our Korean grinder into a more friendly Westernized version.  Our only official product is AION KOREAN GRINDER 1.5!!!  If you log into any other version of AION, your soul will be crushed and your WALLETS looted!!

Please remember to only play AION KOREAN GRINDER 1.5, and all your troubles will go away!

[Ashamanchill]

Lol, Waylander you speak the truth. My friends and I are already out. We hit 33, and our abyss pvp experience was starting to look like this: we either smoke the hapless chump, or chumps we find, with no challenge except us all rotating through our chains, or we make no dent in them and they dust us, with nothing we could have done (we have a screen going just to check on the level of our foes after each fight).

We would have to level up by a lot just to stay competetive, and the grind required for that is just brutal. That's the only reason we couldn't go on.

[tmp]

Funnily enough, if you read recent interview on Gamasutra about the Aion launch (which also touches on Lineage 2) there's no single word about that impact/importance of CS, GM presence etc.

It's like it's either a tabu or honestly beyond their comprehension.

[Sheepherder]

Apparently NCSoft banned a bunch of people on Friday - just in time for the weekend when there apparently is no customer support at all.  Apparently they inadvertently banned people who did nothing wrong, other than mail large sums of kinah (100,000 or more) to different accounts.

A lot of people will simply complain loudly and publicly when they're been caught, or use it to try and weasel shit out of GM's.  I've seen people try to extort epic flyer training out of a GM by saying that he bought the mount and training right before server maintenance and lost the training and his gold.  People were even white-knighting for him up until the GM posted a log of every transaction he had made in the minutes preceding the server shutdown with his gold amount never increasing above what was required for the reins plus change.

That being said, false positives will also get players pissed, which is why assbags try this route.

[Chimpy]

I think there is a problem that Aion makes pretty clear, is that the reason Blizzard was as successful as they were is the accessibility of the majority of their game to average people. Aion is accessible up to about 25 and then it starts to hit you between the eyes with the sheer time/resources required to do anything later on.

Don't get me wrong, I am still enjoying the game at this point, but you cannot entice the 10hours of max playtime a week crowd with a game that is as grindy in every aspect as this is. I tend to be one of the more OCD kind of players and the friends I play with are even worse (they actually enjoyed Vanguard) but I know I am in the minority of videogame players when it comes to the amount of time I will commit to a game like this. To keep interest (and possibly get more) NCSoft needs to make some big adjustments to both their exponential time->reward curve for basic things like upgrading spells when levelling up, and their GM/Customer Service philosophy.

[gryeyes]

I saw for the very first time a GM message responding to some question in a class channel. The GM was instantly spammed with locations of bot farms in a dozen locations, he promptly vanished. All in all the bot spam in and of itself i can ignore, its the complete disregard NCsoft is giving to the issue. This game demands round the clock support with a staff that has the ability to ban.

[Morfiend]

I made it to level 20, and I just havent had any will to log in for over a week. The combat is just not very exciting, and grinding mobs over and over is not my thing. I think I will probably cancel before my free month is up.

The funny thing is, playing Aion actually made me want to go back to WoW. Which I havent had any urge to play for over 9 months or so.

I honestly think they need to really up quest exp if they dont want to lose a chunk of the casual players like me.

[Modern Angel]

So everyone who said it was just another Korean MMO with a centimeter thick coat of Western paint on it only to be subsequently taunted about how this is the best game since WoW were right? Imagine...

[Sheepherder]

The fact that all special melee attacks mechanics for this game are apparently identical to the same mechanic Slam had in WoW prior to 3.0 makes it abundantly obvious that this wasn't going to last.

[tmp]

So everyone who said it was just another Korean MMO with a centimeter thick coat of Western paint on it only to be subsequently taunted about how this is the best game since WoW (..)

I think the confusion stems from some people being under impression these two are somehow mutually exclusive. Literally everyone said it's another Korean MMO etc, there's no argument about that point.