Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Venkman]

Welcome to diku PvP. You merely hit 25. You don't magically become competitive at 25.

[Threash]

You know there are many places to go into the Abyss at any level where you can farm with minimal ganking right?  I suggest you spend time looking around more.  Most enemy players will go to the congested areas to gank, they dont go to the lesser populated spots.  I spent 3 hours last night farming a spot and saw 1 enemy the whole time and he didnt bother to attack me.  Im level 38 now and since level 25 I have found at least 5 spots that were decent grinding areas with minimal interruption but I spent time looking around to find them

Wait, what? 25 is the magic level to start PvPing, and when you got to 25, you go to the PvP area to... get away from other players and PvE?

Just because you can pvp doesn't mean you want to spend every second doing it. 

[Malakili]

You know there are many places to go into the Abyss at any level where you can farm with minimal ganking right?  I suggest you spend time looking around more.  Most enemy players will go to the congested areas to gank, they dont go to the lesser populated spots.  I spent 3 hours last night farming a spot and saw 1 enemy the whole time and he didnt bother to attack me.  Im level 38 now and since level 25 I have found at least 5 spots that were decent grinding areas with minimal interruption but I spent time looking around to find them

Wait, what? 25 is the magic level to start PvPing, and when you got to 25, you go to the PvP area to... get away from other players and PvE?

Sounds like WAR to a T.

[Gorky]

As a final update to my 24 Ranger, I decided to grind to 25 to check out the fabled Abyss, did all the introduction to the Abyss quests which made me run all around the world, then finally got the go ahead to enter the Abyss.

Was fairly impressed for the first 2 minutes, then noticed how empty the whole place was, at-least the areas around the Asmodian fortress. Did more fed-ex quests.

Then noticed we had 2 fortress, so decided to check them out, ported to one, stepped off the teleport pad, and got killed in about 5 seconds by an assassin, while surrounded by about a dozen guards who seemed unable to even scratch him, stun locked the whole time... Yay

Appeared back at the main fortress, then cautiously stepped onto the nearest platform with mobs, started killing them, after the 3rd one, got jumped on by another assassin, lasted longer this time, almost 8 seconds, but died while stun-locked... Yay?

Back at the obelisk, happened to check out how many million xp I needed to hit 26, hit Alt+F4, uninstalled the game and started loading Fallen Earth.

Have to say, Fallen Earth is giving me a pretty good feeling right now, love the world and the depth of crafting so far.


Summary:
Grind is soul crushing
PvP is accessible at 25, but not enjoyable till high 30s to mid 45s
World is uninspired
Grind is soul crushing

[waffel]

Oh wow, an Asian MMO has a killer grind. I hope everyone learned yet another lesson about hyping up a game for what you think it is, not what it actually is. It was deafening how many people screamed, on different forums and different threads, about how amazing Aion was GOING to be, and how it was going to finally fix every single issue with every PvP game before it.

Reading this forum and the official forums, 1 month after release, tell the tale pretty well:
Killer grind
Tons of unchecked bots
Lots of crashes at the end game (lolhammer)

And I can't help but watch these lemmings go "Man Aion sucked, can't believe I bought it and listened to all the hype. Oh well, I just went and purchased Fallen Earth, hopefully this will be batter, people say its supposed to be awesome!"

[Threash]

I'm leveling faster in this game than i did in WaR, AoC and even WoW which took me six months to max out on my first char.  The game feels grindy but it certainly isn't because of the time required to level. 

[jakonovski]

I don't know why, but I really like Aion. I'm only lvl18 though at the end of the first month, so that might play a part. Not going to continue it for a while though, we finally got an EQ2 group together so I'm going there.

[01101010]

Oh wow, an Asian MMO has a killer grind. I hope everyone learned yet another lesson about hyping up a game for what you think it is, not what it actually is. It was deafening how many people screamed, on different forums and different threads, about how amazing Aion was GOING to be, and how it was going to finally fix every single issue with every PvP game before it.

Reading this forum and the official forums, 1 month after release, tell the tale pretty well:
Killer grind
Tons of unchecked bots
Lots of crashes at the end game (lolhammer)

And I can't help but watch these lemmings go "Man Aion sucked, can't believe I bought it and listened to all the hype. Oh well, I just went and purchased Fallen Earth, hopefully this will be batter, people say its supposed to be awesome!"

I do agree on the principle here.. however, in beta, 25 was it and wasn't hard to get to... not to mention the PvP was fun since the limit was set to twink mode and not god mode. Level limit would be perfect at about 35. But alas... I have to agree with you - except for the fallen earth part. Borderlands maybe...

[DLRiley]

Its really funny that the sandbox/diku, "crafting rocks", game is getting money because the big graphically enhanced diku is a grindy piece of shit. People must be desperate to give their $15 a month to someone.

[Threash]

Its really funny that the sandbox/diku, "crafting rocks", game is getting money because the big graphically enhanced diku is a grindy piece of shit. People must be desperate to give their $15 a month to someone.

I would be extremely surprised if Fallen Earth had a tenth of the subs Aion does currently.

[Bzalthek]

Its really funny that the sandbox/diku, "crafting rocks", game is getting money because the big graphically enhanced diku is a grindy piece of shit. People must be desperate to give their $15 a month to someone.

I would be extremely surprised if Fallen Earth had a tenth of the subs Aion does currently.

duh?

[kondratti]

Its really funny that the sandbox/diku, "crafting rocks", game is getting money because the big graphically enhanced diku is a grindy piece of shit. People must be desperate to give their $15 a month to someone.

No, what's funny is reading F13 and believing it is representative of the outer world.  If that were true, nobody would play DIKU MMOS and everyone would be awesome armchair game designers.

[Tearofsoul]

Aion is a 

[Xurtan]

I rather like Aion. But then, I have a 44 Glad, a 20 Temp, and a 21 Sorc being raised currently.   The grind so far hasn't been in leveling, its trying to find a group. Grouping as a Glad is like grouping as an EQ Wizard.

The crafting system as a whole, however, can go die in a car fire. It makes me miss the original EQII/Vanguard crafting systems.

[nurtsi]

I have four lvl 20 toons (glad, sorc, sm, chanter). I can't decide which one I like the most  Maybe I'll try one of the scouts before I make my pick.

They should make plastic surgery available pronto.

[Shatter]

I am having a lot of fun in the game but the BOTS are out of control, Ive never seen anything like it.  Yesterday morning saw bots running around a 35+ area and as of last night they were all still there.  These bots are grouped in 2's usually 1 DPS and 1 healer.  You cant even train them into stuff cause the healer actually heals both parties.  The bots for me only became frustrating when I had to kill X of whatever mob and they would swoop in and kill them all, including the ones im on :P  Thankfully there are plenty of areas they arent in but they camp up the best farming spots usually.  

[Chimpy]

I have four lvl 20 toons (glad, sorc, sm, chanter). I can't decide which one I like the most   Maybe I'll try one of the scouts before I make my pick.

They should make plastic surgery available pronto.

You get the tickets from repeatable quests, for Elyos it is in Theobomos, I assume the Asmodean equivalent no-gank zone is where they get theirs.

Don't bother with a scout if you really like the caster/tougher melee classes. Rangers are the absolute most painful to level between 10 and 19, and I have heard assassins are somewhat bland as well (though all the melee classes are bottable (I see them all over auto-hunting), so I guess you could call THAT boring)

I am having a lot of fun in the game but the BOTS are out of control, Ive never seen anything like it.  Yesterday morning saw bots running around a 35+ area and as of last night they were all still there.  These bots are grouped in 2's usually 1 DPS and 1 healer.  You cant even train them into stuff cause the healer actually heals both parties.  The bots for me only became frustrating when I had to kill X of whatever mob and they would swoop in and kill them all, including the ones im on :P  Thankfully there are plenty of areas they arent in but they camp up the best farming spots usually. 

I had that issue yesterday, in Heiron there is a place where you need to kill 50 mobs to get their essences and the bots were everywhere picking the place clean. I did get quite a few manastones off of the corpses they left though :D.  One of the bots got a damn Orange item while I was on handing in a quest this morning. Right as I was logging off I saw them put "sell<ITEM>" in LFG. I can't even get greens to drop and the bots are getting oranges, sigh.

[DLRiley]

Its really funny that the sandbox/diku, "crafting rocks", game is getting money because the big graphically enhanced diku is a grindy piece of shit. People must be desperate to give their $15 a month to someone.

No, what's funny is reading F13 and believing it is representative of the outer world.  If that were true, nobody would play DIKU MMOS and everyone would be awesome armchair game designers.

I think the outside f13 response was "I can do the same thing in a f2p mmo so why should i play this past beta?". The typical forum rage comes from those that played the beta, figured "hey this is fun", so they pre-ordered with some magical expectation that paying for aion will increase their enjoyment by a factor of 10 and when the game launched discovered the game was a grinding their ass hole and quite wondering whatever made them spend $50 on this game. You can sub Aion for WAR or AoC and get the same results. In fact its even funnier considering AoC was bleeding subs to WAR and WAR and AoC are bleeding subs to Aion. PvP is this generation of mmo's fly zapper. It used to be large worlds and exploring.

[Modern Angel]

No, what's REALLY funny is that people actually don't play Dikus except WoW past three months. Did you not pay attention to every launch the past four years where it went OMG WOW KILLER to WELL I GUESS THIS IS OKAY to OMG THIS NEW DIKU/WAR/CONAN/AION/WHATEVER is going to rock. I mean, look, the jury's out on how many subs Aion is going to have a year from now but if what bit of anecdotal evidence I have ends up being a trend the answer is "not the three million or whatever boxes they sold"

[gryeyes]

I have tona of qualms with Aion, but the worst aspect is the complete lack of CS by NCsoft. There is message in the ncsoft announcement section, that says official NCsoft reps are unable to post officially due to bugged forums. That was weeks ago, they have fucking twitter feeds as their only means of interaction with NCsoft. Economy is so fucked by the bots and rampant RMTing going on. Im assuming rampant gold buyer is what fuels the broker, the prices are insane and are rising. So many blatant gold buyers and bots, even if everything else was perfect this would insure I cancel.

[Threash]

I am having a lot of fun in the game but the BOTS are out of control, Ive never seen anything like it.  Yesterday morning saw bots running around a 35+ area and as of last night they were all still there.  These bots are grouped in 2's usually 1 DPS and 1 healer.  You cant even train them into stuff cause the healer actually heals both parties.  The bots for me only became frustrating when I had to kill X of whatever mob and they would swoop in and kill them all, including the ones im on :P  Thankfully there are plenty of areas they arent in but they camp up the best farming spots usually.  

Yeah, i spent 25-35 in the abyss but once i started seeing campaign quests giving 1.5-2mil exp i decide to step outside for a while.  When you see a templar pull a mob with 10% hps away from an assassin its pretty obvious that its a bot, i figured reporting them was a waste of time so i just started KSing them.  Assassin > Glad or Templar, thank god for dps based kill assignment.

[Falconeer]

This addresses lots of your whines, people. And lots of their bleeding subs, eventually

+ more quest XP
+ more mobs XP
- less grind
- less bots

Do I believe them? No. It'll take them ages to rais XP by 0.0001%
Do I care about it? No. I am ok with actual Aion.

October Aion Community Address
10-24-09 00:15:53views 5660
It’s been a month now since Aion opened its doors to players in North America and Europe. In that month, the growth of the game’s community has signaled Aion’s success. We’ve received an amazing amount of feedback, both positive and negative. We’d like to reiterate that we’ve been listening. We have been working around the clock toward solutions to the problems many of you have experienced.
 
You’ve told us that it’s difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we’re planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly “grind.”
 
In this week’s Eye on Community, we answered a question that a player had about client instability. In the reply, we noted that most of the claims stem from the infamous “Crysystem.dll error.” We’ve been working with members of the community to identify the cause of the problem in order to find a permanent solution. Our development team is currently investigating, and will be testing a variety of different short- and long-term solutions. These include adding additional and improved display options to the Aion client, as well as system and memory optimizations.
 
We’ve heard your unhappiness about the chat spam and bots in Aion and recognize it as an annoying problem. We’ve taken measures to reduce the amount of chat spam you’ll be subjected to and have already seen substantial improvements in this area. We’ve been expanding our GM customer service staff, and we have also assembled a special team dedicated to hunting down and eliminating botting operations. It’s obvious these activities erode your gameplay experience far too much to be acceptable. They also harm us from a business standpoint due to the RMT organizations’ frequent use of stolen credit cards.
 
Many of you have asked us why we haven’t spent more time communicating the specifics of our plans. The unfortunate truth is that the same people spamming chat channels and setting up bots are also reading our announcements. In order to keep the enemy in the dark, we cannot be too vocal about our plans to fight back.
 
We want you to know, though, that we’re more dedicated than ever to eliminate chat spam and the use of bots. The good news is that you can help. If you see any suspicious player activity, report it. To quickly report these players, use the /AutoReportHunting feature by typing /AutoReportHunting while a suspicious character is targeted. It’s important to note that this system will actually begin to penalize players after they’ve been reported multiple times. The more of you that use this system—the more effective it will become.
 
To add more specificity to what we’re discussing here, early next week we’re going to be releasing details about a game update that will go into further detail about how we’ll be fixing some of these issues, in addition to others.
 
It’s been an exciting month, and the future of Aion is full of promise. Please continue to send us your feedback and never forget that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
 
-The Aion Community Team

[amiable]

This addresses lots of your whines, people. And lots of their bleeding subs, eventually

I doubt it. this reminds of how poisonous the word of mouth got after AOC and WAR.  I don't see them ever making a comeback in the NA market unless they institute radical changes in the next few weeks (I give them 3).  After that there will be no coming back. 

The fundamental problem with this game is that the core gameplay isn't fun.  (The PvP game may be fun, but by the time you get to it who cares anymore?)

[Falconeer]

If the XPboosting plan is to get there (the PvP) faster, changes are definitely gonna help NCsoft wallets.

[amiable]

If the XPboosting plan is to get there (the PvP) faster, changes are definitely gonna help NCsoft wallets.

Perhaps, I just don't see how you do it.  Even with the xp boost new players hitting 25 and entering the Abyss aren't going to have a rocking time (unless you consider having a rocking time constantly hiding and looking over their shoulder while folks 10-20 levels above them 2 shot them). 

The problem is the open world model they created creates such a huge power disparity.  They really need to stratify the experience so folks are are engaged against like leveled folks (this would also solve the crashing problem somewhat by evening out the player load).  They need BG's badly (I know: BLASPHEMY).

[01101010]

Perhaps, I just don't see how you do it.  Even with the xp boost new players hitting 25 and entering the Abyss aren't going to have a rocking time (unless you consider having a rocking time constantly hiding and looking over their shoulder while folks 10-20 levels above them 2 shot them). 

The problem is the open world model they created creates such a huge power disparity.  They really need to stratify the experience so folks are are engaged against like leveled folks (this would also solve the crashing problem somewhat by evening out the player load).  They need BG's badly (I know: BLASPHEMY).

Or level limit the Abyss - upper 35+ lower, 25-34. Since I was not designed like that, no way it will ever happen, but it should have. I know they limit the levels to rifts, its marked right on the rift the levels that can access it. Why they didn't do that for an entire zone is beyond me. I said before, you are nothing but fodder when you first get to the abyss and will remain so until the end unless you are on the upper-most part of the leveling spectrum. The only redeeming quality is the 1kinah soul heal, but even then you have to decide to go back to the spot you were grinding/questing and being farmed.

[tazelbain]

I don't know why battlegrounds for 1-40 would be controversial.

[Nebu]

I don't know why battlegrounds for 1-40 would be controversial.

Takes people out of world pvp.  See WAR/DAoC/etc.

[Falconeer]

I don't like BGs but it's not blasphemy. If Aion had BGs it would be a certain kind of PvP experience. Aion, as is, without PvP is another kind of PvP experience that could be succesful (not WoW-succesful. Just Aion-succesful) if the whole experience was quicker and lighter.

So, boosting XP won't make it the ultimate wowkiller MMO, it will just make it more accessible to everyone. I am glad it doesn't have Battlegrounds and while I wouldn't mind a faster progression I am ok with it and I am sure I am not alone. That said, given that it's not going to have Battlegrounds anytime soon, by simply boosting XP they would certainly save lots of subscription, I think that is undeniable.

[amiable]

I don't know why battlegrounds for 1-40 would be controversial.

Takes people out of world pvp.  See WAR/DAoC/etc.

that's because no one ever incentivizes it properly.  Players flow into the path of least resistance, make world pvp worthwhile vs. BG and you will see less of this.

[tazelbain]

I don't know why battlegrounds for 1-40 would be controversial.

Takes people out of world pvp.  See WAR/DAoC/etc.

Ya, but when the world pvp consists of 20s get obliterated by 50s.  Taking the 20s out is good.  Besides there is no pvp world in Aion.  It's a frontier with fort flipping.  Forts that 25s are useless for.  Not to mention that answer still doesn't cover people under 25 since they aren't even allowed to go out to be obliterated.

[tmp]

These bots are grouped in 2's usually 1 DPS and 1 healer.  You cant even train them into stuff cause the healer actually heals both parties.

Oh you can. Apparently heal aggro is huge in this game, if you drive a bunch of mobs by a healer who happens to be healing they're likely to drop everything you included and make a beeline for him 

[tmp]

Ya, but when the world pvp consists 20s get obliterated by 50s.  Taking the 20s out is good.  Besides there is no pvp world in Aion.  It's a frontier with forts.  Forts that 25s are useless for.  Not to mention that answer still doesn't cover people under 25 since they aren't even allowed to go out to be obliterated.

I think the system they currently have could work really decent actually, even if they left the level range as it is... but had all the hit/miss/etc rolls based purely on character stats, because it seems these don't advance that much through levels. This way 2-3 l.25 would have a decent chance to bring l.50 guy down (and have him ragequit  ) and could contribute quite a bit to the sieges and such. It's the stupid artficial modifiers based on level that throw a wrench in the whole thing, the very same approach WoW and the wannabe's are doing.

As i understand it this is primarily done to make sure all levels only take the PvE park rides with their number on them, but it's very dumb in a game with large PvP component.

[Shatter]

I don't know why battlegrounds for 1-40 would be controversial.

No BG's or arenas thx

[DLRiley]

No, what's REALLY funny is that people actually don't play Dikus except WoW past three months. Did you not pay attention to every launch the past four years where it went OMG WOW KILLER to WELL I GUESS THIS IS OKAY to OMG THIS NEW DIKU/WAR/CONAN/AION/WHATEVER is going to rock. I mean, look, the jury's out on how many subs Aion is going to have a year from now but if what bit of anecdotal evidence I have ends up being a trend the answer is "not the three million or whatever boxes they sold"

Someone who has been playing wow for 3 months can't honestly be expected to follow the genre. If you have been following the genre for 4 years you have 4 years worth of mmo's under your belt, which means your either a fanboy or a jaded armchair game designer.  Even the jaded armchair game designers fall within two camps, which are those that still preorder and those that don't. Today mmo's are built for the fanboys, the guaranteed subscribers who will marry your mmo until some predetermined breaking point which can be either the subs bleed too much or all your friends leave. A three month WoW player has more than one char above level 60, they may think your new game is a WoW killer but that is before they realize that they are starting at level 1 with no high level toons and no access to end game content. Once that fact settles in they either A. goes back to WoW or B. become jaded armchair game designer of the jaded mmo players who still preorder clan.