Cutting off the appeals process one day before the free return weekend was dirty pool. It showed contempt for former subscribers, as though we are not real customers. Never mind most people who bought Aion will buy from NCsoft again, and a good number of us probably subscribe to some other NCsoft product, or at least play Guild Wars.
I didn't lose any names so I don't much care, but it tells me I could invest a lot of time in one of my characters, take a break to play something else, come back and find the name taken. (Then again, last time I did that my account got stolen and then banned, somehow without NCsoft's system informing me of changes to the password and payment information.)
I wonder how many people actually reupped this week. Personally three days just doesn't tell me anything. I'm not going to spend 10-15 hours of my weekend finding out if it's a good vibe or not. No one even talks in this game anymore. Was it just a slow part of the day? I guess I'll never find out.
einexile the meek Vacuos, Winterlong, Vaciante, Eicosapenta Atlantean, Tyranny, Malton
Faction mmo's are hard to pull off, Thats what I take from the game.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Faction mmo's are hard to pull off, Thats what I take from the game.
It's crazy that DAoC was the last game (for me) to get faction-based PvP right. Maybe it was the third playable faction that did it, or the fact that the PvP areas were large enough that a you could hide a raid sized force in it and people could avoid getting steamrolled. That was old frontiers of course.
I think the fault wth Aion was that the abyss was open to all levels. That is what made it unpalatable to those arriving late to the party. I was in the first wave(headstart - and still lost my name after the server merge NCSoft!) and still the abyss was a no-go place solo and that was before there were any level 50s.
Plus the Balaur were not the unpredicatble, savvy AI race they had touted to be. Not like the pesky Hibernians for sure.
Maybe they can look to the good things in games like DAoC(battlegrounds etc.) to improve this game and remove the bad things (grind). But I think it's too late to turn the ship around (again) NCSoft.
I've played Aion CBT, OBT and Retail, and all I say is, Aion failed the moment they introduced the PvE maps. Aion is supposed to be PvPvE! Not a Fvcking PvE Game. The point system is crap, you lose more that you gain. Raiding became SO useless. We used to raid during CBT and OBT and we were having so much fun, and during retail all that fun was sucked out by ncsoft. This game failed me, I even bought the CE because I liked the game. Lack of End-game content, Just farm mats, sell in auction house and RMT. Although I hated this game for failing my expectations, they won for the best background music in any of the 30+ mmorpg I've played.
About the merge - It was a good and bad idea because both servers needed more people, but it was a bad idea choosing the server with the best Elyos and merging it with the server with the worst Asmo.
I think Op is refferring to the essential disregard for population sides with the merges. If you were previously on an elyos dominated server, now your really fucked as an asmo.
Merges were fine, the part they screwed up was as follows.
Some of the servers merged caused a natural imbalance, and werent the best choices.
When they merged, they gave everyone a free transfer, however, they didnt restrict these transfers, so everyone bandwaggoned and we now have MAJOR side balance issues
Add on to this that they killed transfers before they completed, so you now have guilds and friends split and on two different servers...
#3 is the real game breaker. Imagine a husband wife team, or a guild that has been playing together for 10 years like mine...this definitely cost them quite a few folks who were at least paying to play prior.
My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.
I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why. He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP.
Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.
I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why. He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP.
Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players.
I still play both wow and Aion, but currently I switched back to Aion. I agree about the imbalance issue. The good news is so does NCSoft...they are outright admitting that things are imbalanced due to player choices. For the issues that have concerned me the most, they have been pretty good about addressing them. For now, it's kind of a waiting game. Although, on my server (I play Asmo) when we actually do take something we feel like we won the super-bowl! LOL. Lot's of partying goes on because it's a rare occurence.
Of course, I feel the same way when the horde on my wow server actually take wintergrasp too :P.
My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.
I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why. He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP.
Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players.
You're son prolly got a taste of the miragents/fenrils quest and got out while he was ahead.. Smart kid, i'd say..
Took me about 3 months and 5-6 different fails on my proc for leggings till i eventually quit.. not to mention the 3n half weeks it took me to get to my miragent leggings in the first place.
Currently Playing: Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
all the clothy's in my guild pitched in for my expert quests I made the tunic i believe in 1 day after 6 attempts :P
Expert questing was the easy part for me lol.. I got my cooking on first attempt tbh.. It was the miragent leggings itself that i couldnt proc >.> u'll know what i mean, or maybe you'll be one of the lucky few who proc first attempt.. I hope for you it's the later
Currently Playing: Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
Aion is far from dead. In fact, most MMOs are far from dead....EQ1 is still around, and still gets expansions. People think WAR is dead but it does have a healthy community (yeah a few servers now but its not dead). Add to the fact that Aion is huge in Asia...it's not going anywhere nor is it dead. I, for one, and enjoying it still. Only level 28 but I am enjoying the pvp aspect; and the expansion is just around the corner. I go back and forth from MMOs anyway: one month i play Fallen Earth, then Aion, and then maybe Wow....with a couple F2P/unlimited trials (WAR, Champions, LoL) thrown in.
Aion is far from dead. In fact, most MMOs are far from dead....EQ1 is still around, and still gets expansions. People think WAR is dead but it does have a healthy community (yeah a few servers now but its not dead). Add to the fact that Aion is huge in Asia...it's not going anywhere nor is it dead. I, for one, and enjoying it still. Only level 28 but I am enjoying the pvp aspect; and the expansion is just around the corner. I go back and forth from MMOs anyway: one month i play Fallen Earth, then Aion, and then maybe Wow....with a couple F2P/unlimited trials (WAR, Champions, LoL) thrown in.
I'am not gonna argue about AION's future any longer lol.. I'll just say this, the game may not be dead anytime soon, but it is defiantly a under-acheiver for NC Soft here in the states.. And if you check NC's track record they arn't afraid to pull the plug on MMO's that don't make them money anymore.. Then again, AION has a much higher chance of sticking around a lot longer due to the fact that it's a re-released game and almost all the content was already their for us, it jus needed to be translated and tweaked for the northern audience.
Don't get me wrong.. I enjoyed AION.. I still havent found a game that does PvP better.. But no matter how much i like it's pvp i refuse to give miragents leggings another shot.. Sure, i could jus skip miragents, but then the whole point of getting 50 is pointless when you die in 2 seconds to any other 50 in miragents lol.. You'll see what i mean when you hit 50, if you hit 50.. You have a long ways to go, it get's really bad around 40ish, you'll run out of quests and be forced into grinding elites, repeatable quests, or if you wanna go really slowly you can instance..
The new expansion is nice, but too little too late if you ask me.. It sucks waiting a year for a big patch, just because it has to be translated and tweaked.. We end up waiting too long to get these simple fixes/content additions.. And they are already cutting corners, for example, most people know that melee air combat is seriously gimped compared to range.. How does NC Soft fix this? Well you'd think they'd listen to player feedback, do some closed testing, and work out the kinks with glads/temps/assasins/chanters/ect.. But now, they'll simply add ground-only places to the abyss (comeing in the new expansion), which is stupid cuz i thought the whole point of the abyss was airiel combat lol.. >.>
Currently Playing: Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
im laughing so hard over this thread, i cant breath, seriously yall are gonna suffocate me
Seriously whats your point? close your eye take a deep breath and start making sense again. ... useless post. We dont even know what side your on ... do you agree or not with the OP?
To OP : I would say server merges are no to be seen bad or good really. They are done when too many servers means they are half empty than authors originally intended. Game is designed in certain way and i think server merges do help to achieve this from the point of view how full they are. So it's nothing against anything unless you want to play sieges 30 vs 30.
To Aion being dead i'd say it's not. It has some major issues (aerial combat for example is wtf seriously, it's chaos rather than combat) imo. I was there at launch and in pre-launch period but left the game once my retail time expired (like many i think) but recently returned. I must say i see major improvements. Literally tons of quests everywhere. In Abyss, other zones, everywhere. Putting weapons together, recent temporary XP faster gain as preparation for 2.0. Very nice changes in 2.0 incoming overall. True, some of them could have been here already, but please, Aion is still very young MMO, tho from experienced publisher. It's still evolving.
What i see currently as bad is that on my server Elyos dominates (i don't mind this fact itself ofc, but it has huge consequences). They have upper castles and core abyss. They can farm these which gains them money and all. This leads to twinks. Asmo cannot really do much about it. Gear plays huge role in this game (well this is kind of everywhere, only here i think it's more visible).
Comments
Cutting off the appeals process one day before the free return weekend was dirty pool. It showed contempt for former subscribers, as though we are not real customers. Never mind most people who bought Aion will buy from NCsoft again, and a good number of us probably subscribe to some other NCsoft product, or at least play Guild Wars.
I didn't lose any names so I don't much care, but it tells me I could invest a lot of time in one of my characters, take a break to play something else, come back and find the name taken. (Then again, last time I did that my account got stolen and then banned, somehow without NCsoft's system informing me of changes to the password and payment information.)
I wonder how many people actually reupped this week. Personally three days just doesn't tell me anything. I'm not going to spend 10-15 hours of my weekend finding out if it's a good vibe or not. No one even talks in this game anymore. Was it just a slow part of the day? I guess I'll never find out.
einexile the meek
Vacuos, Winterlong, Vaciante, Eicosapenta
Atlantean, Tyranny, Malton
Faction mmo's are hard to pull off, Thats what I take from the game.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
It's crazy that DAoC was the last game (for me) to get faction-based PvP right. Maybe it was the third playable faction that did it, or the fact that the PvP areas were large enough that a you could hide a raid sized force in it and people could avoid getting steamrolled. That was old frontiers of course.
I think the fault wth Aion was that the abyss was open to all levels. That is what made it unpalatable to those arriving late to the party. I was in the first wave(headstart - and still lost my name after the server merge NCSoft!) and still the abyss was a no-go place solo and that was before there were any level 50s.
Plus the Balaur were not the unpredicatble, savvy AI race they had touted to be. Not like the pesky Hibernians for sure.
Maybe they can look to the good things in games like DAoC(battlegrounds etc.) to improve this game and remove the bad things (grind). But I think it's too late to turn the ship around (again) NCSoft.
NCSoft = EPIC Fail
I bet they will find a way to screw up GW2.
I've played Aion CBT, OBT and Retail, and all I say is, Aion failed the moment they introduced the PvE maps. Aion is supposed to be PvPvE! Not a Fvcking PvE Game. The point system is crap, you lose more that you gain. Raiding became SO useless. We used to raid during CBT and OBT and we were having so much fun, and during retail all that fun was sucked out by ncsoft. This game failed me, I even bought the CE because I liked the game. Lack of End-game content, Just farm mats, sell in auction house and RMT. Although I hated this game for failing my expectations, they won for the best background music in any of the 30+ mmorpg I've played.
About the merge - It was a good and bad idea because both servers needed more people, but it was a bad idea choosing the server with the best Elyos and merging it with the server with the worst Asmo.
iQQallNightLong~
Often the mistake is having too many servers in the first place.
I think Op is refferring to the essential disregard for population sides with the merges. If you were previously on an elyos dominated server, now your really fucked as an asmo.
Merges were fine, the part they screwed up was as follows.
Some of the servers merged caused a natural imbalance, and werent the best choices.
When they merged, they gave everyone a free transfer, however, they didnt restrict these transfers, so everyone bandwaggoned and we now have MAJOR side balance issues
Add on to this that they killed transfers before they completed, so you now have guilds and friends split and on two different servers...
#3 is the real game breaker. Imagine a husband wife team, or a guild that has been playing together for 10 years like mine...this definitely cost them quite a few folks who were at least paying to play prior.
My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.
I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why. He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP.
Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I still play both wow and Aion, but currently I switched back to Aion. I agree about the imbalance issue. The good news is so does NCSoft...they are outright admitting that things are imbalanced due to player choices. For the issues that have concerned me the most, they have been pretty good about addressing them. For now, it's kind of a waiting game. Although, on my server (I play Asmo) when we actually do take something we feel like we won the super-bowl! LOL. Lot's of partying goes on because it's a rare occurence.
Of course, I feel the same way when the horde on my wow server actually take wintergrasp too :P.
"NCSoft = EPIC Fail
I bet they will find a way to screw up GW2"
Blah blah blah! do better =**
No suprise there. Since when has NCSoft ever produced a game worth playing? OH YEA! NEVER!
Fortunately ArenaNet is much more independent of NCSoft than the teams running their other MMO's. GW2 will do just fine, like GW.
You're son prolly got a taste of the miragents/fenrils quest and got out while he was ahead.. Smart kid, i'd say..
Took me about 3 months and 5-6 different fails on my proc for leggings till i eventually quit.. not to mention the 3n half weeks it took me to get to my miragent leggings in the first place.
Currently Playing:
Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
all the clothy's in my guild pitched in for my expert quests I made the tunic i believe in 1 day after 6 attempts :P
Expert questing was the easy part for me lol.. I got my cooking on first attempt tbh.. It was the miragent leggings itself that i couldnt proc >.> u'll know what i mean, or maybe you'll be one of the lucky few who proc first attempt.. I hope for you it's the later
Currently Playing:
Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
Aion is far from dead. In fact, most MMOs are far from dead....EQ1 is still around, and still gets expansions. People think WAR is dead but it does have a healthy community (yeah a few servers now but its not dead). Add to the fact that Aion is huge in Asia...it's not going anywhere nor is it dead. I, for one, and enjoying it still. Only level 28 but I am enjoying the pvp aspect; and the expansion is just around the corner. I go back and forth from MMOs anyway: one month i play Fallen Earth, then Aion, and then maybe Wow....with a couple F2P/unlimited trials (WAR, Champions, LoL) thrown in.
I'am not gonna argue about AION's future any longer lol.. I'll just say this, the game may not be dead anytime soon, but it is defiantly a under-acheiver for NC Soft here in the states.. And if you check NC's track record they arn't afraid to pull the plug on MMO's that don't make them money anymore.. Then again, AION has a much higher chance of sticking around a lot longer due to the fact that it's a re-released game and almost all the content was already their for us, it jus needed to be translated and tweaked for the northern audience.
Don't get me wrong.. I enjoyed AION.. I still havent found a game that does PvP better.. But no matter how much i like it's pvp i refuse to give miragents leggings another shot.. Sure, i could jus skip miragents, but then the whole point of getting 50 is pointless when you die in 2 seconds to any other 50 in miragents lol.. You'll see what i mean when you hit 50, if you hit 50.. You have a long ways to go, it get's really bad around 40ish, you'll run out of quests and be forced into grinding elites, repeatable quests, or if you wanna go really slowly you can instance..
The new expansion is nice, but too little too late if you ask me.. It sucks waiting a year for a big patch, just because it has to be translated and tweaked.. We end up waiting too long to get these simple fixes/content additions.. And they are already cutting corners, for example, most people know that melee air combat is seriously gimped compared to range.. How does NC Soft fix this? Well you'd think they'd listen to player feedback, do some closed testing, and work out the kinks with glads/temps/assasins/chanters/ect.. But now, they'll simply add ground-only places to the abyss (comeing in the new expansion), which is stupid cuz i thought the whole point of the abyss was airiel combat lol.. >.>
Currently Playing:
Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
im laughing so hard over this thread, i cant breath, seriously yall are gonna suffocate me
Seriously whats your point? close your eye take a deep breath and start making sense again. ... useless post. We dont even know what side your on ... do you agree or not with the OP?
To OP : I would say server merges are no to be seen bad or good really. They are done when too many servers means they are half empty than authors originally intended. Game is designed in certain way and i think server merges do help to achieve this from the point of view how full they are. So it's nothing against anything unless you want to play sieges 30 vs 30.
To Aion being dead i'd say it's not. It has some major issues (aerial combat for example is wtf seriously, it's chaos rather than combat) imo. I was there at launch and in pre-launch period but left the game once my retail time expired (like many i think) but recently returned. I must say i see major improvements. Literally tons of quests everywhere. In Abyss, other zones, everywhere. Putting weapons together, recent temporary XP faster gain as preparation for 2.0. Very nice changes in 2.0 incoming overall. True, some of them could have been here already, but please, Aion is still very young MMO, tho from experienced publisher. It's still evolving.
What i see currently as bad is that on my server Elyos dominates (i don't mind this fact itself ofc, but it has huge consequences). They have upper castles and core abyss. They can farm these which gains them money and all. This leads to twinks. Asmo cannot really do much about it. Gear plays huge role in this game (well this is kind of everywhere, only here i think it's more visible).
My 2 kinahs into this...