First Impressions

Smashix

I just played an Asmodian Cleric to level 23 on Tiamat. The game is quite playable, but it has so many weirdnesses and annoyances.

The forum behaves weird (click on a page and it takes you to a different page, it's down at odd times with no announcements, MyAion doesn't work, can't change main forum character, the list goes on and on).

Of course, right now, the forum has been down since 5/12/2015, when they announced that it would be down from 2:00 AM to 7:00 PM Central. That was posted on the 12th and has not been updated, but there are no new forum posts after the 12th, so clearly, the forums are still down. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in NSoft that they haven't been able to update an announcement anywhere about what is happening and when they expect the forum to be up and running again in 6 DAYS! Seriously, how can you not give your customers any kind of update when the forums have been down for almost a week?

The main reason I may not pursue the game further is that the community is not exactly welcoming. Once I hit level 20 I thought I could get into a guild (legion in Aion) pretty easily and get some of my n00b questions answered in chat, as I have in every other MMO, but nope. Even people that advertise recruiting players of all levels simply ignored my tells. Very rarely does anyone answer game questions in chat (I tried general and even LFG, which seems to be the only active channel most days). I'm pretty sure it's not me. I did get a few replies about irrelevant social chats, so people can clearly read my posts. I am not rude when I chat with anyone.

I have played numerous MMOs and in many cases, even a flawed game can be fun to play with a good community. The Aion community, OTOH, has made me feel very unwelcome.

Beyond that, the game has some nice features, like instant travel, a decent class selection, everything in game generally works and does so smoothly. Graphics are nice. Fights are longer than most MMOs, and more challenging, so that's good. However, at about level 20 they went from being trivial to me dying constantly if I get 2 mobs on me, which happens a lot while questing. Might be gear, we'll see. Generally, challenging is good! I hate how trivial WoW leveling has become. I would much rather die over and over than pull 5 mobs and have no chance of dying.

I gain experience from gathering (yay!) and there are lots of people at my level questing near me. The bad part, again, is that few people have asked me to group or chat.

I may keep going for a few more levels in the hope that things improve and maybe some of the higher level skills and fights are more fun.

Inventory management is annoying. It's easy enough to buy more inventory slots and even at low levels I made enough gold to buy several inventory cube expansions and have gold left over. However, the number of different items I constantly get from quests, loot and events eclipse my free inventory quickly. I am constantly worrying whether I'll have space to keep going. This is the thing I thought most MMOs were past.