Happy 1 Month Anniversary!

Aion has now been live for a whole month in North America!

My initial impressions are all very positive. Aion has already given me more enjoyment than I expected -- though admittedly I did purchase 6 months of service right from the start.

(Photo: D Sharon Pruitt)

Something I think is interesting is the amount of complaining done on the forums regarding various issues people seem to have in the community. Some of them are legitimate, some of them are real issues but grossly overblown, and then there are plenty of fanboys from other games who have come just to start trouble.

I think, of the real issues, both large and small, the sheer amount of complaining done on the forums (especially the official aiononline.com forums), shows that the community for the game is strong, rather than just angry. Because people are always going to be angry and uncompromising and unreasonable, but when those people quiet down and quit, and the forums go silent -- THEN you know there's a real issue. Until then, I just accept it as how some people like to get entertainment from games.

We all know people whose favorite part of going out for dinner or going to a movie or doing any number of other things is complaining about it. (If you don't, can I come live with you?) And online MMOs, due to the anonymity either attracts people like that or brings out the quality in many. So in my opinion, we have nothing to worry about so far, and hopefully in another month the issues will get resolved and those people will be angry about something else!

So, with that, here are a few of my issues that I'd love to see resolved in the next month:

• Botting -- this really seems to be an issue, and I'm not really sure what to do about it, other than spend a lot of resources consolidating log files and doing some complex analysis on them.
• Gold spam - this must stop. Of all the people I know that would start playing Aion, I would be embarrassed to have them start playing, and start getting upwards of 20 messages an hour from gold farmer groups.
• The way the client and server resync world state - right now, if you get out of sync with the world, it looks like the server comes in and resets your client state instantly to what the server says is correct. It would be awesome if that process was done either incrementally or some compromise could be reached. I hate it when I get rubber banding and even worse, when I start attacking a mob and it starts healing to full for no perceivable reason (except that what I'm seeing isn't "truth").
• Lack of quests at all levels - I have completed every quest that I have found from levels 1 - 16 and I can say that there are just barely enough quests to get from one level to the next at this point. In the future, I have heard, that its almost not worth it doing the quests because the rewards are low quality and they give so little experience compared with grinding/hunting. Instead of bumping up quest XP couldn't we just get more? I have greatly enjoyed many of the quests -- great job Aion writers and cut scene producers -- and I would love to see maybe 3 more quests per level and maybe one additional cut scene.
• Random request - I would love it, if there were quests for higher level characters in the starter zones, maybe just a single one, where I got to go back to Poeta and help out, now that I'm a big powerful Daeva. It is always interesting to go back to places you've been and see how you used to be perceived and contrast that with how everyone sees you now (this is a really neat effect in table top RPGs, but obviously translates to MMOs decently).
  

Whats going on in the starter zones?

So I was playing in Verteron (I saved Alteno and Enia's marriage via the Alteno's Wedding Ring quest -- Enia will never be the wiser!) and I decided to go and check out Cliona Lake and Poeta.

I teleport over and what is the first thing that happens? I get my General channel flooded with 3 level 5 mages spamming about their gold farming sites.

(Photo by: Giorgio Monteforti)

How about this NCSoft? No URLs allowed in general chat? I can't think of a valid reason to give everyone in a region a URL besides spamming players.

And the second thing I noticed: I was the only one there in the starter village or at Cliona Lake. There was not a single person leveling that I could see. It makes me very nervous -- even though I'm on a low population server. There should be SOMEONE legitimately leveling a first character or an alt or anything!

Anyways, I hope this isn't the beginning of the end: if no new players join or start leveling, the community isn't growing. And if you aren't growing, you're dying. Eeek!

Some Interesting Posts

I found these on the way home from work, and thought they were pretty interesting:

Aion Source

• A post about Kinah laundering
• A possible halloween party in Aion?
• Odd disscussion of the problem of too many dps, not enough healers and tanks

Aion Forums
As a note -- Aion Forums seems pretty dead. What gives?

• Why did you roll on Elyos instead of Asmodian?

The Aion Forum is about dead as well!

I haven't looked much at the offical forum since it launched, but I hope its doing better than Aion Forums/The Aion Forum. Hopefully this is just a consolidation of many new forums instead of a shrinking player base or lack of interest among subscribers...

Making Leveling Fun: Part I

In the beginning, I played Asheron's Call -- a wonderful MMO with really only 1 goal in mind: collecting experience and gear to make your character cooler. Both cooler because she did more damage/took less damage and cooler because her armor was all from the same model set and was all the same color/complimentary colors. (And yes, my main characters in Asheron's Call were women) At the time, this seemed like great fun: there were monsters all over the game world that were really hard to kill, in big packs. So walking into a pack and taking three, four, five big dudes out felt like an accomplishment to me. And looting the bodies became kind of like opening presents on christmas: Turbine made the random world drops range between not so good and amazing, and there was plenty of amazing to go around. So I would go out to the far reaches of the world, kill maybe 100 of some monster, pick up maybe 75 pieces of loot, tons of money, and every few days or so, I'd also pick up another level, a skill point, and maybe some of my individual skills would level up too.

Back then, as far as I was concerned, all there was to an MMO was:

1) Kill monsters

2) Collect loot and experience

3) Kill harder monsters

4) Collect better loot and more experience

And what made this so enjoyable was the fact that I didn't have any other MMO experience, I could go hunt as long as I wanted (or, what I really mean, is for as short of a period of time as I wanted, minimum of around 30 minutes), and I ended up pulling some really neat stuff to make me look cooler or richer. Eventually though, after around 12 months of solid playing, I burned out on AC and quit. I made one or two return journeys of about a month in Asheron's Call and the sequel before hanging it up for good about 15 months after my first visit.

It took me a whole bunch of years to try out another MMO, and like most people I picked up World of Warcraft. Now, World of Warcraft was so fun for me for so long because it took many of the things I enjoyed about Asheron's Call and made them better:

You don't want to cast armor increasing spells on each piece of your armor every time you have to fight? DONE

You don't want to deal with having to run back to your corpse to collect your prized armor and weapons all the time? DONE

You want more than leveling? DONE

World of Warcraft did a really interesting thing which I really don't remember paying much attention to at all in Asheron's Call: questing and instanced dungeons. Now, the game turned from something you could call "grind until you quit" into "grind in instances until you quit". And I hope that doesn't offend anyone, because I don't really mean it in a derogatory way -- I really, really enjoyed my time in WoW because the instances are a lot of fun to play in, and the quest system is superb. At the same time, the point of the instances and quests below the level cap is to make the grind up to level cap more enjoyable. WoW's way of trying to prevent people from burning out due to gaining XP was to simply remove that part of the game at a certain point.

(It's almost like Blizzard was speaking directly to me, when I first learned about the cap before I started playing: "Wait you burned out on AC because you spent 12 months leveling up? Come play with us! You'll be 60/70/80/85 in no time and then you can just enjoy the end game!")

So they actually, for me, made leveling more enjoyable because I knew, eventually, it would end. Going from 69 to 70 and 79 to 80 became a lot more fun because I knew that once I reached those points I wasn't going to have to go fight another mob ever, if I so chose.

So thats just a little breakdown of my past experiences and some insight into how I perceive the leveling process in MMOs. I think if you come into a game and decide that anything you do before the cap is pointless or just filler should really consider why they're playing in the first place. So far, MMOs have universally decided that playing an RPG means taking a weak character and turning it into a strong one over a long period of time, so until someone creates a game where you start off at the maximum level (like you might if you played a FPS), we won't really know how the experience changes.

Next time, I'll talk about what I think Aion does to make leveling fun and more than that, an attractive part of the game, rather than a way to slow us down from the end game.

Okay, seriously I'm back.

Well hello there! Remember me?

I recently read a comic about a character who has a blog, who only makes posts that say "Sorry I don't update this blog more often, I promise in the future I'll be better about that". And it both cracked me up and made me really nervous that this was starting to happen here.

Fortunately, I have a great excuse: Japan is +16 hours from San Francisco, CA (where I live). The whole week has been pretty hazy to me, to be honest, I've basically gone to work, then worked, then gone home to sleep right away. But last night I felt better and I think I'm ready to start writing on here again! I actually --played-- Aion for once, got to level 16, and explored the awesome canyon near Verteron. This really is one of the most beautiful parts of the game that I've seen so far with the fog and cliff sides.

So in case there are actually people out there reading these ramblings, I'm back! Oh, and Japan was awesome, by the way.

Back in the Country

I'm back in the country! I'll probably spend a day trying to recuperate before posting here. The trip was amazing and I'm exhausted, but I've missed Aion and I can't wait to get back to leveling.

I'm up to 14 (14.6 or so) and I really want to see some more content. Each zone is perfect and beautiful and I could hang around any part of the game and just admire the surroundings. Alas, I'll run out of things to say here if I don't level at least a little bit.

So thanks for being patient and I'll be back soon!

Looking for Friends (Again)

Well, it has been a few weeks since Aion has been here and since I've set up shop. I'd really like to see a community of bloggers get together and do something really interesting. Maybe an inter-blog conversation on a set topic, or guest writing/blog swapping from time to time.

If you're interested, shoot me an email and we can discuss further. I think this game, since its so new, has many interesting things to discuss and debate. I've read many, many Aion blogs and forums, and there seems to be no lack of ideas for topics and complaints.

Thoughts?