What the coming week brings

Oh thank the gods

Ladies and gentlemen: Aion comes Tomorrow. A quick glance to that countdown to the right reveals the exact number of hours to go, lest you still be confused as to what time Sunday Noon PST is. If you haven't created your characters proper yet, preselection is still open -- hop on up and make your characters! If you're afraid of your reserved name being taken, follow this quick list.

1. Create a new character and tinker until you find something you like. Memorise all the sliders and options you've chosen, then cancel back to the character creation screen. This can be done even if you've created both of your preselection characters.
   
2. Delete your reserved name character. A six minute countdown will start until it is deleted proper; note what time it is on a nearby clock or something.
   
3. Create a new character and restore all the chosen sliders and settings to how you wanted them: you have six minutes but I found this more than adequate. Enter your reserved name and periodically click the 'check name' button.
   
4. When the six minutes are up, it will report that the name is available. Create your character! This method cuts down the availability of you reserved name down from minutes to seconds. Best for the truly paranoid, or the truly common.
   

That's enough on old news. Headstart, baby! Eighteen hours from the time of this post! Allow me to fill you, the squishy huggable reader, in to what's happening.

Pretty much sums it up for me

At Sunday 12pm PST / Monday 5am AEST / Monday 7AM NZST / More, Headstart begins. If you have preordered Aion, your beta key is good for connecting during this time. You've got full unrestricted access to Aion: it's essentially release day for preorderers. This period lasts for two days for NA players and five days for EU players.

On Midnight 22nd for those playing the NA version and Midnight 25th for those playing the EU version, Aion is officially released: anyone can start playing. An interesting exception about this is that Australia gets it at Midnight 21st, a half dayish before the Americans. At this point, if you've preordered from a store, you need to high tail it down and pick it up. You have a 24 hour grace period in which to do this before your beta CD key stops working, so get moving!

However, if you've done your homework and preordered over Steam or directly from NCSoft, you're fine. Just keep playing ^^

Oh and enjoy your exclusive preorder items!

Clearly your preorder has paid off at this point... but we're forgetting about our items! You have a wealth of free items (and I do mean wealth; some of this stuff will save you a lot of Kinah) depending on your purchase. In general, basic preorders get

• Black Cloud Hat (gives boosts to HP, MP, magical resistance, and evasion)
• Lodas' Amulet (gives a +20% experience boost)
• Ancient Ring of X
  

If you've got the collector's edition, you get extra stuff:

• Black Cloud Wings (+40 seconds of additional flight time; available at level 30)
• Black Cloud Earring (+72 HP and +72 MP; available at level 20)
• Special character title ("Settler of Aion") with stat boost
• Color dye (Rich Purple) to tint ten in-game items
• Two additional character emotes (Boogie and Hip Hop (lol))

That's about as specific as I can get; the various preorder sources differ slightly. For example, if you order over steam, you get a sweet Water special effect ring around your feet while NCSoft gives Wind (haha) and other sources have earth, fire etc instead. There is a ritual to receiving your items however.

NOTE: You will need to follow these steps for each new character you create in order for it to receive the items.

1. Log into NCsoft Account Management.
2. Click the Game Accounts link.
3. Choose your Aion game account listed on the Game Accounts page.
4. Click the Apply In-Game Items link in the Actions section.
5. Select the server your preferred character is on and click the Next button.
6. Select the character you wish to receive the items and click the Next button.
7. You will then see a list of all the items or item packs that may be applied to that character. Click the checkbox next to the item pack(s) you wish to apply to that character and then click the Next button.
8. Review the confirmation page and then click the Apply the Items/Item Packs to this Character button.

You will then get a message saying that the items/item packs were successfully given to that character. You should have these items when you log into the game - simply pay a visit to your in-game mail box.

Note that you can only do this when the game goes live. I have heard conflicting reports (both from NCSoft!) over whether they will be available at headstart or not.

Finally

Previously, GameGuard disabled the Steam Overlay when playing Aion, unless you are running Vista 64 bit. Now that NCSoft has made the phenomenally good business decision to can GG, indications are that anyone can now add the steam overlay to Aion; big news as it's one of the best ways of communicating with friends while playing games (short of Ventrilo of course).

You may have noticed that aion forums have been steadily gaining in popularity the closer we get to launch. The AionAus site in particular has really taken off; threads regularly number in the thousands of views, while Aionsource's realm forums have been somewhat slower on the uptake. I'm not certain of NCSoft's plans concerning forums... they may just leave them for the community, but I think they will release their own suite to the masses, including realm forums. AionAus will most definitely persevere should this occur as it is a specific sub-set of the Aion community but any realm-specific forums would likely suffer. You can expect the bulk of the forum-going population to turn up after release as people settle in and want to know their community better.

You cannot expect the same of headstart, though. Anyone currently interested in Aion has already preordered and almost all will be playing come headstart. The list of people who decided to forgo preordering and all of the perks that come with it - including an earlier release date and powerful ingame items - and instead line up at midnight outside a retail store two days later would be rather small. The retail release population blip will barely register. What we can instead expect is a steady and gradual population increase from release day onwards as the word spreads. Many gamers know the value in waiting a few weeks or months after an MMO's launch to let the developers hammer out the kinks. I prefer the opposite: we will be taking part in MMO history with a title to prove it and if you're as much of a gaming geek as I am, this will mean quite a bit in a year or so.

Come on WoWers, I bet you wish you earned this shit while you could

But there will be kinks. Preselection was the tip of the iceberg, folks. There has never, ever in the history of MMOs been a single one released smoothly and without flaw. Take it in stride and don't stress out when the inevitable failures bubble to the surface; it'll blow over.

Preselection Characters

Lewin: Must admit I'm a bit cut that Lewin is an Asmo NPC name. Would've liked to use it for my main (and I could use it in OB), but oh well. Here, I present to you Ephraim (Assassin) and Sada (Templar).


Tora: While I managed to get Tora and Yukimura, I am incredibly, incredibly cut that Masamune has been ninja'd. By an Asmo, no less. Oh well, at least that means I can hunt him down as Yukimura and yell at him.

In case you're wondering what on earth I'm on about, Yukimura and Masamune are characters from a series called Sengoku Basara which is based off the Warring States era of Japan. They are rivals, so in a sense this is kind of fitting...


Zot: A little while ago I gave permission for my flatmate to punch me in the face, as hard as he wants, if I make an alt in Aion. I'm a recovering altaholic and the instant I make an alt, it's like popping the cork. There's no stopping me. So, I'm not allowed to make an alt until all of the following are met:

• Zot is level 50
• Full yellow+ gear
• Two maxxed professions
• Obtain a Ranked PvP title
• At least six months passed since release

I don't particularly want an alt, but extra incentive to stick with one main is always nice. ^^

Preselection coming up

In 14 hours from the time of this post, Preselection will become available: the ability to create your characters before launch. This isn't just for mucking around with the character editor though.

The first purpose is to create your character so the instant headstart... starts, you can leap in and start playing. The second purpose is so that you can reserve the name that you want. Obviously if your name is Death or Assassin, there's a good chance you're gonna get boned anyway, but for names like mine it's a boon. Zot isn't exactly a popular name but it is a three letter name, which tend to get snapped up fairly quickly in MMOs in my experience. These are just courtesies that NCSoft have bestowed upon us valued preordering types.

This is what goes through Korean's minds when they think western

One of the worst things about MMOs is the reserving of names. It's all fine and good if you genuinely have a unique name you are also known as and want to stop other people from purposely taking it to inconvenience you or impersonate you, but that's actually pretty rare. Mostly people just reserve names they like, so that on the off chance they create an alt they can use it. Often the name is lost for eternity. I was lucky in WoW; I had a tendency to name my characters 'Drey' going from server to server. On one particular server my friends had rolled on it was taken. I added the name to friends and luckily they logged in a few days later. It turns out the guy actually was playing with that name, but didn't like that character anymore and agreed to delete it for me. See, WoW wasn't always so bad...

Getting back on track, to the end of just reserving just your own personal name, NCSoft are limiting the number of characters you can create during this event to two. Once headstart hits you can create characters to your hearts content but I urge you, the reader, to go light on the reserving. We've all been in the position where you've just thought of the best name ever but it's taken by someone who never logs on. Don't be that guy!

There's probably a third reason for preselection: to get a better idea of population numbers. Preselection will likely show NCSoft whether or not they need to switch on a couple of extra servers come Live. It will also be a better test of their faction balancing system than OB was as legions won't be as keen to say "you know what, screw it, we'll go Elyos" this time around. In fact I fully expect that tomorrow will be a day of mass Kyoou-Kyoouing as legions complain that only a portion of their Asmodian guilds can make their characters. It's a better strategy to shaft people's plans and force them into the undermanned faction in the long term, but boy will we hear plenty of the opposite if things go the way I suspect they will ;)

Meanwhile... I'll be stuck with boring white wings.
Stupid Asmodian overpopulation.

Not long until headstart now... maybe Tora will update that countdown to the right. :P

The ground shakes

Well, after half a year of intermittent Aion, we've got a feast coming up for us. An eight-day pre-release treat is just beyond the horizon... er, weekend. It is more commonly called the Open Beta, though it is not a beta... the most it can be called is a server testing event, a preview for us children giddy with excitement at the prospect of the release of such a sexy polished game.

As opposed to the Closed Beta events which lasted 3 days at a time, the Open Beta is a full eight days of Aion in a row. And not just the old 1.0 version we're accustomed to but version 1.5, a container ship of a patch... and all the versions in between. The client is available for download, either from the offical site mirrors or a myriad of other locations. Chances are your ISP has a free-bandwidth download available and with the client weighing in at 10GB, it's worth checking out. There is a countdown available, but I think it's off. How can the 6th in America also be the 6th in NZ if it starts in the morning?

It'll be three weeks between CB6 and the OB but now it's all go. Once the OB ends (13th), it's less than a week before pre-selection kicks in (18th), an event available to pre-orderers in which we can create our characters (but not log in), handy for reserving names you desperately want and tinkering with the new 1.5 looks.

Then it's two days until Headstart (20th), which is essentially the final retail release. In theory everyone else has to wait until the "actual" retail release (22nd in NA, 25th in EU) but when you think about it, who exactly is going to be lining up for Aion on release day? Anybody who wants to play Aion will have already pre-ordered and have access to the headstart.

It's all go now. /glee



Update: the previously linked countdown has been updated with the correct time. The OB will start on Monday for us oceanics.