A couple of months of beta and the first month of live and I am now at a point where I have nearly absolute faith in NCSoft and their decisions when it comes to Aion.

So, what has changed my mind?  Simple.  Their track record so far when it comes to Aion.  Let’s take a look at what NCSoft has done thus far with Aion in the West, starting with beta.

The first major concern that everyone had after beta started was the issues with Gameguard.  Every time beta went up the beta boards were inundated with anti-Gameguard posts and with good reason.  It caused players to crash, blocked legitimate programs and was an all-around nuisance.  NCSoft listened and upon release we found Gameguard removed from the client.  NCSoft has said that it may come back but only after it is in a state where it does it’s job with a minimum hassle for legitimate players.

Score 1 for NCSoft.

The other problems that players had in beta were mostly about the User Interface.  We tend to control MMOs differently here than in the East.  We use WASD, they use click-to-move and that sort of thing.  A couple of days before the release we were introduced to a patch that added the much asked for features of inverse mouse and left button camera control.  NCSoft listened and added that functionality to the game.

Score 2 for NCSoft.

The release came and we found a stable game that we couldn’t play because of queues.  Much gnashing of teeth ensued on the forums and on blogs.  Bloggers who didn’t like Aion made a point to make fun of the situation and used the queues to “prove” that NCSoft was a bad company and couldn’t manage a game in the West.  More rational bloggers and players pointed out that the hard population controls and less servers were a pain in the short term but would pay dividends in the long term.  NCSoft stuck to their plan, despite the griping, moaning and threats of doom, and we now have 14 servers with balanced population.  No server has more than a 2% population difference between Asmo and Elyos.  No server is dead.  Contrast that with WAR.  One month into WAR and the population imbalances were already a detriment to the game.  Now a year later WAR is still struggling to keep a balanced pop and will probably always have that problem.

Score 3 for NCSoft.

The next issue we came across in Live was the s0-called grind.  Quests, some say, seemed to disappear at later levels and players were forced to grind mobs.  Many said that quests didn’t give enough experience.  Again NCSoft listened. They are now testing a patch that ups quest experience by as much as 500% in some places.

Score 4 for NCSoft.

Gold spammers and bots were always my biggest worry going into Aion.  Lineage was infested with them and so was the chinese Aion servers.  Sure enough they came in droves.  My block list was full in a matter of days.  The LFG channel was useless because of all the spam.  It was bad.  Then came a mass banning and it was alleviated for awhile but did not go away.  However, in the latest patch NCSoft introduced a chat filter and 95% of the spam is gone.  I see a couple of spams every hour or so but nothing more than what I saw in WoW.

Score 5 for NCSoft.

So far NCSoft has been very quick to answer and address our problems.  There are a few outstanding issues that NCSoft needs to address.  The bot situation is ridiculous.  The Crytek.dll error is getting bad for alot of people.  Things are not 100% rosy in game.  But I have faith in NCSoft.  They have addressed nearly every issue the player base has brought up and they have done so in a timely fashion.

Contrast this response to WAR.  Mythic took months to even acknowledge some of the issues players had with WAR.   Server balance has never been addressed.  The AoE issues took forever for them to acknowledge and address.   Players griped about a lack of RvR and Mythic introduced the Land of the Dead which brought more PvE…

Not everything is perfect in Aion but NCSoft has made sure to address the issues as quickly as possible.  They have turned a skeptic into a believer.  I have faith in NCSoft.

Wow.

So, with the little free time I have had lately I have been playing Aion.  Quite a lot actually and I am really enjoying it.  As you may already know I started out with a Ranger, Ahira.  I was loving him and he reminded me quite a bit of my old WoW hunter without a pet.  The leveling on a ranger is very slow at first but at 16 starts to pick up and become much easier.  I leveled Ahira up to level 21 and ran into a problem.

I play with a group of real life and online friends and we have migrated to new games together for quite a bit.  This time we all rolled together and Aion and began grouping and helping each other as we normally do but we ran into two problems.

First, I level faster than they do.  I tend to get a bit more game time in than they do for whatever reason so I was finding myself outpacing them, which is not something I wanted to do.  When I hit 20 they were still around 15 or 16, which meant I found myself doing content over and over again while helping them level.  This sucked for me and for them.

Secondly, none of my friends rolled a healer.  None.  We had DPS, we had tanks, we had off-tanks but we had no healers at all.  This was not good.  I have found healers to be a fairly important part of group make up during my MMO travels and Aion was proving to be no exception.  I am not a big fan of pugging especially (arguably) the single most important role in a group.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and roll a cleric.  When I started the cleric my friends were all between 15-17 or so.  Now they are around 20-24.  I am also 24.  Damn, they are slow.  Painfully slow.   At this rate I am going to have 4-5 characters hit level cap at roughly the same time.  This sucks.  I think I need to bribe my friends to level faster.  Actually, I think I just need to sit down with their wives, bosses and family and explain the situation.  I am sure they will understand.

Anyway, my cleric is now 24.  I am one level away from the greatness of the Abyss and I can not wait.  I expect to hit 25 tomorrow and then make fun of my friends for being slow.  That’s the plan anyway.

Fenriz contemplating the reason for being.....

So, that is my cleric, Fenriz.  The battle-scarred, rugged warrior of the North.  Or cleric actually.  Also I think technically he is from the south but you get the idea.  Also he’s a lot of fun.  More fun than I thought a healer would be.  Unlike my Ranger, I can accidentally get an add when soloing and not have to run off like a little girl, screaming in fear.  I save that for when I get two adds.

I have not really been able to do much PvP as I am saving Rifting for a bit higher into my twenties.  I did kill a single Elyos outside of Morheim Fortress the other day but I think he was just trying to get the hell out of there so I don’t think that really counts.

I have been able to duel a number of people and I must say that Clerics are tough to beat 1 vs 1 at this level.  I have no problems with Gladiators or Assassins.  Rangers can be tough but certainly beatable and the same goes for sorcerers.  I have found dueling a Chanter or another Cleric to be almost identical to watching old people have sex, slow and boring.  Spiritmasters, aaaah Spiritmasters.  You remember what I said about running and screaming like a little girl when getting more than 1 add?  Yeah, that pretty much applies to me when a Spiritmaster asks to duel.  It’s not pretty.

So, I am going to wrap this up with a bit about what I am going to cover tomorrow.  A lot has happened in the world of Aion and NCSoft and I plan to touch on some of that, including more about the gold spamming and bot situation, the PvE that I have been able to do so far and some other miscellaneous stuff.  I hope you check it out!

As you can tell from the screenshots above (taken from the MMORPG.com Aion forums) NCSoft is starting to take a harder line with gold-spammers and botters.  As detailed in my last post, this is an extremely serious problem at the moment.  Gold spam is bad enough that I have to go /anon when logging in and leave all the channels, including general and looking for group.  This does not make for a very enjoyable experience and is the one problem I have with Aion at the moment.

But, as detailed in the screenshots, there is hope.   It’s a start, albeit a small one.  There needs to be easier tools to report the spammers, as it is way too difficult at the moment.  Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

Really there are only three things that have bothered me so far about Aion.  At the moment it is a minor annoyance but it has the potential to become a major problem if NCSoft doesn’t nip it in the bud quickly.

First of all, the Gold spammers have arrived in mass.  Every night I have to block a few more.  Mostly it’s private tells but occasionally you will see a couple in “general” or “trade” chat.  The worst part about it is that there is no easy way to report them nor an easy way to block them.  Each attempt requires multiple steps and can be a hassle when adventuring.  I know stopping gold spam is very hard, it took WoW years to lower it to the current level, but at least give us tools to make it easier to report and/or block them.

Secondly, Customer Service not 24 hours?!?!?  Seriously?  WTF NCSoft?  You folks just sold around 500,000 copies of Aion so I am sure you have enough money laying around to hire a full time, 24 hour customer service team!  I could not believe it when I tried to create a petition, only to be told that there was no one to receive it.  This is a 24 hour game, there needs to be 24 hour customer service.  Period.

The last thing that is annoying me are the bots. So far it has not been too big a problem.  I see one every so often and sometimes I will see a group of them working together.  However, this has to be stopped.  Like now. Bots destroy the economy, add to the queue times and cause problems in the community.  Get rid of them.  Ban the ones who are reported and do it quickly.  Give us updates to how many you ban.  Make a spectacle of it.

I never played Lineage or Lineage II but I have been told horror stories about the bot problem there.  Do not make that mistake in the West.  In the West players leave when the botting problem gets out of hand.  With the bad rap NCSoft already has about bots, it will only take a short period of seeming inaction before everyone assumes the problem is going to continue in Aion.  Don’t let that happen.

Other than those problems, I am having a really fun time in Aion so far.  Despite NCSoft’s track record, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  They have to know they are going to be on a short leash with these issues due to their prior failures to address them in Lineage.  They have to know that.  Don’t they?

This caused headaches for Legions and friends to get on their preferred server, it caused a lot of griping as players logged in on Tuesday to find 3-4 hour queues during prime time.  Much gnashing of teeth commenced.  Players were mad, blogger’s griped or made fun, depending on their interest in Aion and the situation, for some, looked grim.

I made a post early in the week that this was planned and was actually a pretty smart idea by NCSoft.  The post was met with some agreement but, also, much laughter and accusation of fanboyism.  Then Friday something funny happened. NCsoft announced that they were going to put a timer on the Personal Shops that were contributing to the queue.  In addition, they put up a new server.

Friday night we logged in to find sharply reduced queue times.  What was nearing 4 hours in prime time dropped down to 30 minutes or less for most people.  I logged in Friday night to a 12 minute queue and on Saturday to a 4 minute queue.  The “rage” posts about the queue dropped to near nothing on the Aion Source forums and moved on to other things.  All was right in the Aion world, at least as far as the queues were concerned.

So what was the results of NCSoft’s heavy hand at launch?  Let’s take a look and find out!

Here is the entire server list for NA Aion:

First thing to notice is that Aion gives more information on it’s server page than any other MMO I have ever seen.  WoW doesn’t give half this much information, which is not really a big deal as it is a PvE game so faction balance is not as important.  WAR’s server info is a joke.  It gives faction balanced in a low/medium/high format for both sides, with no real indication of total balance.  Aion knocks this out of the park.

Second thing that you should notice is that every server is almost entirely balanced between factions.  The Asmodians have the advantage on almost every server but the advantage is no more than 4% on any server.  Matter of fact, most servers are showing that the balance is no more than 2% on the majority of the servers.  That is, frankly, pretty damn amazing.

WAR was horribly, horribly balanced between factions at release.  Destruction was vastly overpopulated on nearly every server.  Sometimes at a ratio of nearly 2:1.  You can not have a PvP-centric game with balance like that and Mythic paid the price.

Next take a look at the Legions created on each server.  We really have no solid indication of total population on the individual servers but the Legion numbers can give us an idea of the population on each server.  By looking at that, you can assume that each server has a healthy population.  Not only that but the population of each server seems pretty fairly balanced.  With the exception of the new server (Fregion) each server has a pretty similar number of Legions on them.  So, not only are the factions balanced on each server but the total population looks pretty well spread out on each server.  No dead servers.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the servers.  For this I am going to use Lumiel, which is my home server.

On Lumiel, Asmodians own a slight advantage at 51% versus 49%.  Not 100% balanced but pretty damn close.  I can not think of a single WAR server that, at release or later, was anywhere close to this balanced.  This is pretty impressive.

The next thing I am going to point out does not have anything to do with how NCSoft handled the release, unless you give credit to NCSoft for creating classes that are all equally appealing.  The classes across the server are broke down into percentage of total population.  Looking at this, Rangers and Spiritmasters are the lowest populated classes, with 10% each.  Chanters follow with 11% and so on.  Gladiators are the most populous class with 15% and Clerics are close behind with 14%.  All in all a nice division of classes and hopefully will make finding tanks and healers a bit easier.

So there you have it.  We basically traded 4-5 days of low server caps, low faction caps and queue hell for 13 balanced servers.  We went through hell and came out the other side with a balanced game.  That’s not a bad trade-off to me.  Not at all.

Balance is so important in MMOs but doubly so in PvP-centric MMOs.  Bad balance for faction based MMOs will kill the game.  No one wants to play on a server where they are vastly outnumbered.  Even if you are on the overpopulated side, it gets pretty boring dominating the underdog side.  NCSoft showed a hardline when it comes to balance and I think the game will be better for it.  The fruits of that decision are already starting to show.  Balance will continue to be a ticklish thing to do but NCSoft has shown a willingness to do what it takes to walk that fine line.

I, for one, am glad.

Got back on later in the evening and was able to get through the early area and Ascend into Daeva-hood.  Thus was Ahira, Ranger Extraordinaire born.

The Preorder Helm looks fairly ridiculous on a dwarf....

I am really enjoying the Ranger so far, they are extremely difficult to level in the early game but very rewarding and engaging.  Kiting is a necessary skill and the inability to kite will result in countless deaths.  To make matters even more difficult, many areas are so packed with mobs that kiting is fraught with danger, as it is very easy to aggro additional mobs.  You have to be very cognizant of your surroundings at all times and plan out each and every combat.

Luckily, I was able to get into a Legion group fairly early this evening.  We were doing the quests immediately after the Altgard Fortress in the first forest area.  We started the night with myself, a Templar, a Cleric and an Assassin before adding a second Templar later in the evening and it was one of the best grouping experiences I have had in a long, long time in an MMO.

We were able to progress through a large chunk of quests all the way up to the Elite Black Claw area with no problems.  We entered the Black Claw area under-leveled, as we were only level 14 and all the mobs were red to us.  Even with that we were able to complete a couple of quests there and down quite a few mobs, though we had to be extremely careful with our pulls.  More than two and we were in a lot of trouble.

Speaking of which, it was so nice to play an MMO that has group content outside of an instance.  WoW used to have a number of areas like this but they have since been nerfed into solo-able content.  I love solo content but I would really like to see some group content in the mix as well.  Aion provides that and it’s refreshing.

At the moment, I am level 14 and moving quickly toward 15.  Not as high as I wanted but I am having fun.  Quite a bit in fact.  Tomorrow our group from this evening is getting back together for some more questing and I can hardly wait.

This is a queue

I am going to start off my impressions of the first day of Aion with a look at the biggest controversy of the day…the server queue.  For many people the queue was insanely long, upwards of 3-4 hours for some.  Many people were frustrated for a lot of the day because of this reason.

One of my good friends was one of those folks caught in the queue for an extended amount of time.  He had actually come over to my house with his laptop to play, brought a bunch of snacks and drinks and we settled in for a day of Aion.  When the servers opened up we both logged in and got in immediately.  However, this was the first time he had played Aion on that laptop and he had to reboot it to change some settings.  By the time he got back he found himself in a queue approaching 2000 people.  I was already in, so I stayed in.  I didn’t want to level without him so I ran around and gathered Azpha and waited…

And waited…

And waited…

He finally got in after nearly 3 hours.  It was pretty frustrating and the wait would have been longer if they had not increased the server cap when he was half-way through the queue.  Many people were in the same boat and I saw quite a few heated forum posts because of it.

But you know what?  NCSoft again did the smart thing.  It didn’t

Aion's queue was a lot like Wally-World

seem like it at first but in hindsight what they did was nearly genius.  You probably are yelling at you computer monitor now but hear me out and let me explain.

Now you are probably wondering why I chose a picture of National Lampoon’s Vacation and Wally-World.  The reason is because the queue today reminded me of an amusement park.  It’s the best analogy I can think of, that represented exactly why I think what NCSoft did was pretty damn smart.

When you go to an amusement park and head toward the roller coaster, you will inevitably find yourself in a line.  The line sucks, it’s hot and you want to ride the damn coaster already.  But they don’t let everyone on the ride at once.  It’s dangerous, someone would get hurt and no one would have any fun.  The same theory applied to Aion today.  The queue caused people to log into the game in smaller size groups.  This had the effect of groups of people logging in, starting quests and moving forward.  By the time they got to the second quest hub, another group of players had made it in and started their quests.  They made it to the second quest hub and another group had started.  It kept problems to a minimum.

I was there when WoW launched.  I can remember standing in a nearly hour long line to kill a slow spawning named mob for a quest.  I can remember waiting for almost an hour to kill Vagash in Dun Morogh.  I remember chaos reigning in the Wendigo cavern while everyone fought for mobs.

I was there in WAR launched.  I can remember the horrible lag and the horrible framerate while hundreds upon hundreds of people ran around in the starting areas.  I can remember waiting in line to kill squigs because they were all dead from all the players.

There was some of that in Aion today, I waited for 20 minutes to finish the “Ribbit” quest on the Asmodian side and I stood in line for a short period of time to get the map on the pirate ship.  But it was nothing like what I went through in WoW and WAR.  Framerate was solid, quests moved quickly and lag was non-existent after the first 10 minutes or so.  The launch was smooth.  By far the smoothest launch day I have ever been through and I have been through a lot.

Much of that smoothness is owed to the queue.  Letting people in in small groups instead of one big flood allowed people who were in the game to have fun and not become frustrated over a laggy mess.  It sucked for those in the queue but once they were in it was amazingly smooth.  It was like a roller coaster with the required number of people on it and no more.

In hindsight, it was the right thing to do, though they should have warned people.  Really, I think NCSoft has done a number of things with this launch that, in hindsight, worked out remarkably well.  Go to Aion’s server page and look at the servers.  The hated server caps from a few days ago, the ones that only allowed X number of Asmodians in and would cap them if they got too much higher than the Elyos…yeah they worked.  The servers are now amazingly balanced.  My server, Lumiel, has 1% more Asmodians than Elyos on it.  ONE PERCENT!! Even the most heavily skewed server only has 5% more Asmodians than Elyos.

Contrast that to WAR, which had horribly unbalanced servers at launch.  Destruction dominated servers, some people reported Destruction up by a two to one margin on some servers.  None of that in Aion.  They are as balanced as they can be.

In the short-term these methods they used sucked.  The side caps sucked.  The queues sucked.  But there was a method to the madness and it looks like it’s working.  We suffered a bit for the short term so that the long term prognosis could look better.   In hindsight it was worth it.

Welcome to the roller-coaster.

It’s a pretty amazing little website and looks really nice.  It also seems to run pretty fast, though the 3D character viewer takes a moment to load.

Ahira in the character viewer:

Ugly little dwarf, eh?

You can rotate him and put him into combat stances as well as see all your gear.  It’s a pretty nifty little feature.  Kudos to NCSoft for the new website features.

I was all set to jump into Aion tomorrow on my shiny new Cleric.  I have watched

I Changed My Mind...

countless PvP videos about the Cleric, read tons of strategies, poured over all the skill charts and Stigma builds.  I was a Cleric and I was ready.

Then why do I find myself, a few hours from Headstart, deleting my Cleric and creating a Ranger?

I am Brett Favre.

No, really it’s not that.  Really it’s not.  I am not an indecisive person, I promise.  The truth is, something Borgio said in my class poll started to make sense to me.  I have played a physical ranged class in my two favorite MMOs.  In DAoC I was a hunter.  In WoW I was a hunter.  I loved them.  I was good at them.  One on one I could hold my own with anyone.

Now in WAR, LotRO and every other MMO I have played, I deviated from the physical ranged.  In WAR I played a tank and a healer.  In LotRO I played a healer.  For some reason I never could enjoy those classes as much.  Now, admittedly, a lot of that was the games themselves had problems but I think I just didn’t enjoy the classes as much.

I think my true calling is physical ranged, at least as a main.  I imagine I will roll a Cleric or Chanter at some point in Aion but, right now, I am going Ranger.

Elyos beware.