For anyone thinking about playing AION.

Yes, I know most people think of NCsoft as the big-bad right now. I'm not going to try and change your mind on that.

But I did want to say if anyone is thinking about playing AION or returning to it, it's gotten a LOT better than when it launched 3 years ago.

It's still a full world PvPvE game but for those that left due to ganking and issues with not completing quests due to PVP, they added a built in "multiserver" channel that removes all PVP from levels 1-50. It's called the Fast Track server and can be accessed from your main server. You can temporarily move your character to this server and level up with other players from the other servers. Kind of neat.

This Fast Track Server is also a permanent double XP server. So leveling to 50 is a breeze. Even casually, I leveled a new alt to 50 within 2 weeks. Of course, there is a lot more content now but nothing is level restricted. So you can still complete old missions or stuff that you "outleveled."

AION is currently in patch 3.1, but come October 10, patch 3.5 will be released.

They have added a ton of QA fixes and even more planned in 3.5 and 4.0. Also, you don't have to wait all that long for patches to roll out (at least on the North American servers as the European servers are run by a different company and takes them longer with localization). North America is now within 1 month of a release from Korea.

The biggest selling point, for me, is that it's Truly Free like Lineage. No subscriptions whatsoever. There is no gated subscription only content. Everything in game is available to everyone for free. The only pay-for items are the cash shop which have things like costumes, mounts, pets, etc. Nothing that really is needed.

Also, if anyone does try it out, look me up. I play as Blackbeard (Elyos side) on the Tiamat server as well as Blackbeard (Asmo) on the Israphel server.

Plus, Beastyle works there now, so there is someone that feels all of our plight as he's a longtime CoH'er.

Wouldn't touch Aion with a 10 foot pole. Still thinking of trying Wildstar when it comes out. But I have fears that by then it will have been transformed into a pvp grindfest, or that it will be quickly killed because it isn't a grindfest.

From the little I got from the demo at PAX a couple years ago it seemed like a lot of fun and very adaptive to different player types.

Heh.

In all honesty, if you really like the way City of Heroes plays and the kind of people most of us play it with, you're more likely to absolutely hate Aion and its community than love it. It's a very different game with a very different group of players and social expectations. It's an absolutely obnoxious game on almost every possible level.

... And I say that *AS* an Aion player. (It's my "other MMO". I've been involved with the game off and on since the first NA closed beta-)

Has it improved since launch? In some ways, yes. But it's still an unbalanced grinder with limited character customization, an RNG that actively griefs its own players, a well-established community of twinks, trolls and griefers, kinah-sellers out the wazoo, easily-abused party mechanics, and a lot of other issues that are unlikely ever to be addressed because the NA version is run by a tiny group of people with little to no authority or ability to do it. NA Aion is an after-thought, and tends to be treated by the main Aion devs in Korea as such.... Always has been, always will be.

Plus their cash shop is ludicrous.

I tried AION sometime this year. Got killed by something standing a few feet away from where I materialized in the starting area while I was trying to get a handle on the controls. Deleted the game and never looked back.

Tenzhi, that's kind of the experience I had when I tried to get back to Conan. Didn't have that problem with Aion, but since I'm not dedicating a lot of time to gaming, I'd rather put it towards CoH for now, since there's still enough content I haven't experienced in it. After that, I'll probably try SWTOR. I heard it has good story.

Is that Fast track server only on the NA game or is it available to those of us who transferred our accounts when NCSoft offloaded it in the EU?

I tried updating it after the announcement to see what had changed but after 3 weeks I could only get up to 30%.
It would appear that everyone has it set up to disable sharing so there is a chronic lack of peers available.

Also any idea how things were resolved after the server merges a couple of years back if that left you with both Asmodian and Elyssian characters on the same server?

Doesn´t it say everything about the game, that they made a portal to a PVE server to level on ( and "XP also !)

Then you go back and play the PVP ... !

Tried it earlyer this summer... no thanks !

This right here is my reaction:

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/image...aughlong01.wav

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/image...py_jeers02.wav

Aion isn't a game I would reccomend to the coh playerbase.

Between the 60-80 keybinds you need to effectively use all of your skills at level cap, the extremely high skill cap required to be competitve, the relatively grindy nature of the game compared to coh (it's nothing compared to what it was at launch, but it's still much more grindy than coh), and the generally more crude community compared to coh, it's just not something I'd reccomend. Cause if you're bad, the community there will not hesitate to make sure you are aware of it.

I'm not saying it's a bad game though, I love it. I've got 4 lvl 60s, a 51, and 2 48s. Played it at launch for 9 months then took a break til it went f2p and they really improved the game alot especially in regards to having a western playerbase. Really the only thing I dislike about it is their Manastone and Enchanting systems which is far too dependant on luck and/or having obnoxious amounts of disposable ingame money to spend. But otherwise the graphics, world, combat, skillcap, pvp, instances, are all alot of fun, imo.

Oh, and if you roll Asmo, be prepared to be the perpetually losing race. Faction Imbalance is completely out of whack, and the dev team doesn't really care a whole lot.

You can cram Aion and every other NCSoft product where the sun doesn't shine.

Never again will I spend money on NCSoft products. EVER.

No thanks, I tried it and got to level 20 or so and the only group I ever found was someone that needed to rez me for a quest completion. I won't pay for a game if I can't get a team when I log in, or at least after a period of time. Unsubbed and uninstalled ages ago.

Pretty game though.