Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Shatter]

Wasn't the plan that the NPC faction "balanced" out population imbalance? I take it that didn't work in practice (cue massive surprise).

In patch 1.9 they boosted the Balaur(3rd faction) strength so they will take forts more often and with greater power.  Almost daily Balaur will take / attack a fort of the highest influence holder in the abyss.  So this faction does a little to "balance" the forts/influence but for the most part its pretty useless. 

[Threash]

Wasn't the plan that the NPC faction "balanced" out population imbalance? I take it that didn't work in practice (cue massive surprise).

It kept one side from completely dominating the other by occasionally taking back forts, but it didn't actually "help" the losing faction in any meaningful way.  I guess it was better than having the map be entirely one color all the time, gave people more places to farm and encouraged pvp.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Wasn't the plan that the NPC faction "balanced" out population imbalance? I take it that didn't work in practice (cue massive surprise).

It kept one side from completely dominating the other by occasionally taking back forts, but it didn't actually "help" the losing faction in any meaningful way.  I guess it was better than having the map be entirely one color all the time, gave people more places to farm and encouraged pvp.

So, instead of one side winning and quitting, they win and keep playing against the PvE side?  Well, it's different anyway.  More fun for the winners I guess.  Still sucks to be on the loosing side though.

[Threash]

It does but it sucked less than the alternative. 

[Pax]

NCWest announces release date for 2.0

[Shatter]

FFXIV on Sept 22, Aion patch 2.0 Sept 7...coincidence?

[Ard]

Of course.  They're just showing consideration to their competitor, and allowing players a few weeks to realize absolutely nothing has changed for the better so that they can move on in good conscience.

[sam, an eggplant]

These jokers still don't have a real trial available and the full game still costs $40.

Their only quasi-trial is a referral from a current player, if such a beast still exists, and is limited to "three days, five hours, or level 7, whichever comes first". Fuck that noise. It needs to be a week with unlimited playtime capped at level 10, including the quest where you get your wings. That's what it would take to get me to try it out.

[Threash]

Level 10 takes about 4 hours though, what good would a week do you.

[sam, an eggplant]

It only takes 4 hours to hit 10? I thought Aion was slower paced than that. That would take longer to download than play. Anyway, then the trial should be level 20, like WoW. If the game grabs them, people won't quit after a week.

[Threash]

It slows down a bit in the mid 30s and up.  Also it helps that i've done it several times already i guess.

[Segoris]

I'd still say 4 hours is a pretty high estimate for level 10 once you've done the first area once or twice. I do agree though that there should be a free trial for a week with unlimited time capped at level 10.


I wonder how the pets are going to work though, I see people who buy retail boxes after Sept 7 (or Sept 10 for EU) will get unique pets, but what about the older subscribers? I haven't read anything about them getting pets or them getting the pets that are given to the new players, are they being screwed or not here? Normally I wouldn't care about a pet, but it was mentioned that pets give benefits. I'm sure they get pets, but if the new players get pets that the old players can't get that is pretty messed up.

[Outlawedprod]

New Zikel LOL.  4 elyos dominated servers.  Free transfers are open.

I predict Zikel is Elyos haven thanks to the top legions there and folks transfer for easymode.
Israphel becomes new Asmo haven as all decent legions abandon Zikel so they don't get steam rolled.

Goes about as well as everyone expected.
http://www.aionsource.com/topic/116328-tamat-tries-to-rally-the-troops/
http://www.aionsource.com/topic/116332-so-my-sulfur-thread-was-removed/

Pity Forts seem to be one player generated solution on the new Zikel community's table.
http://www.aionsource.com/topic/116317-intervention/

[Outlawedprod]

In patch 1.9 they boosted the Balaur(3rd faction) strength so they will take forts more often and with greater power.  Almost daily Balaur will take / attack a fort of the highest influence holder in the abyss.  So this faction does a little to "balance" the forts/influence but for the most part its pretty useless. 

"What is funnier? Asmos with the help of Tamat attempting to take Sulfur and all the smart Asmos yelling at them in LFG not to so we can get the pvp buff?
or
The dredgion appearing and taking the fort anyways? Seems like if the asmos can't nyerk themselves, the Balaur are ready to nyerk us anyways. Its kinda like on Triniel last week when Elyos had almost all the forts, and asmos only had asteria, and a dredgion came and took Asteria leaving elyos with over 60% influence and asmos with 0%. GG this game hates Asmos end of story."

[Rendakor]

Does this game have a free trial yet? Looking around the net I see you can only do a recruit a friend type thing; is that correct?

Edit: Guess I should have read the thread. Anyone able to shoot me a free trial or two? Me and my girlfriend are bored of WoW and looking to try this out.

[Kail]

Anyone able to shoot me a free trial or two? Me and my girlfriend are bored of WoW and looking to try this out.

I think I can, if you're still looking for one.  Not positive, I just resubbed and there's some clause about having six weeks of play time or something, but I can give it a shot if you're still wondering.

[Rendakor]

PM sent.

[Kail]

In case anyone else is really curious, this weekend (July 30 - Aug 2) they're doing a double XP weekend, and all inactive Aion accounts are temporarily re-enabled. 

[Shatter]

They really made a mess of the game with this server merge and transfer from the past 2 weeks.  After they merged servers and caused a huge elyos to asmos imbalance they opened up transfers so guess what happened?  The already outnumbered Asmodians on some servers left their current servers and transfered to other ones leaving the imbalance even worse.  One server now has higher Asmodian populations while the other 4 are highly Elyos dominated.  Now NCSoft has put a hold on transfers which is about a day late and a dollar short.  How they plan to "fix" this will be interesting because nothing short of a faction transfer can possibly repair this mess.  They do not have enough active Asmodian players to balance out 5 servers, maybe 2 if they are lucky.  Yeah so come back with your friends!!  lol

If you want a little chuckle  http://na.aiononline.com/livestatus/abyss/

[Kail]

 One server now has higher Asmodian populations while the other 4 are highly Elyos dominated.

Awesomely, my Asmodean characters were transferred to a server where Asmodeans are getting the shit kicked out of them, and my Elyos characters ended up on the one server where the Elyos are getting the shit kicked out of them.  If I could PvP with any of them, I'd be pissed.

[Outlawedprod]

Well it's basically like I was posting about earlier. No surprise to anyone who has been playing.  The very choices of the servers they had merging together would guarantee domination by one faction.  Instead of having a couple servers with a chance of being competitive their plan to allow unlimited transfers after the server merges destroyed any hope for a competitive server just like everyone playing the game knew would happen.  They set the sail on the failboat themselves and now this game is about to sink. I foresee massive sub drops once FF14 launches.

Their only hope is to allow faction conversion like WoW but they probably don't have any dev control or resources to do this for NA.  I would love to know some metrics on actual active accounts with level 45+ that had been logged in the last month prior to the merges.  Because the public pop stats on the server webpages were always created characters I think.

Well for Asmodians one good thing finally came from all this.  A lot of guilds from Elyos dominated servers were able to create a Asmo dominated server environment where they could take Divine =p

[Draegan]

FFXIV isn't going to be grabbing subs from any game other than FFXI.

[Morfiend]

If you want a little chuckle  http://na.aiononline.com/livestatus/abyss/

Good game Aion. Good game.

[UnSub]

Any idea on how Turbine's sekret MMO is going? Because I wonder at what point NCsoft goes, "The English-speaking market? Fuck that."

Q2 2010 results will be out in August.

[Shatter]

Any idea on how Turbine's sekret MMO is going? Because I wonder at what point NCsoft goes, "The English-speaking market? Fuck that."

Q2 2010 results will be out in August.

Everyone I know that plays Aion and a lot more are just waiting for new games.  Aion in NA will be dead within a year once all the anticipated games are out startng with FFXIV, then DCU then all the 2011 releases like Tera, GW2 and SWTOR will strip the bulk of the remaining subs.  End of the day NCSoft West has proven they either have 0 control over the game in their market or they are simply clueless as shit. 

[Threash]

Yeah my top 10 on the server Aion guild died pretty much over night, everyone bailed for APB, LOTRO and even Alodds.

[Chimpy]

Free weekend for inactive accounts with double XP. So I patched and logged in and found my asmodean character deleted due to server merge. Way to make your former customers want to re-subscribe! (Apparently you had a 2 week period to choose where to send your other faction characters if the server merges made them exist on the same server, but I cancelled my account 3 months ago).

[Threash]

The sad thing is i thought this game was still pretty decent and mostly balanced (at least on my server).

[Shatter]

The sad thing is i thought this game was still pretty decent and mostly balanced (at least on my server).

Not a single server is balanced right now, 4/5 are heavy elyos and 1/5 is heavy asmo.  With transfers on hold they will likely be like this a while and they dont appear to have any intention of allowing faction transfers. 

[Threash]

Well yeah, i meant before the server transfers. 

[Rendakor]

Is there any way to make both Jump and Flight Ascend work using the spacebar without adding a Shift or some shit? Flying in this game is fucking awkward as hell because you have to use some weird useless key to fly up, instead of spacebar like WoW or CoH.

[Chimpy]

Space bar puts you into glide when you are in free flight. I am pretty sure that your jump key is always going to be tied to glide while in flight simply because of how the glide mechanic works as a whole.

[Rendakor]

Is glide useful at all? I found it to be annoying to control, so I just unbound the key so I don't glide anymore. I made ascend shift+space, simply because that felt less awkward than F or R or whatever the default was.

So, is it possible to make Jump and Ascend both spacebar?

[Pax]

I don't think you can assign 2 functions to 1 key and you'd really be better off just getting used to the keymap and gliding. Getting around faster in non flight zones is the least use of glide mode - cheating fears or getting to remote locations like all the mountain chains in Heiron is pretty much only doable via gliding

[Threash]

If you run out of flight time if you are good you can glide every few seconds to avoid reaching terminal velocity and survive until you can chug a flight pot.