I won't launch into what I think is wrong with the game... either you already know, or you're too low level to know... all that really needs to be said is that the game turns into something ugly after level 35 or so. I don't want to put anyone off buying Aion as it's entertained me for two months, a bragging right that most games could never claim, so it's definitely worth the purchase. In perhaps a year or so, the game will be fit for release.
Until then... adios!
I will bite no longer.
hits since August 10, 2009
Man, that sucks...I really enjoyed your articles. I can't help but think that the timing of this is a little suspect. Yesterday, huge ban wave....next day you're quitting with no reasoning. :)
ReplyDelete=(
ReplyDelete*cries inconsolably*
ReplyDeleteThanks for the inspiration Zot, your articles were top-notch.
Good luck in your gaming, hope to see you around :<
Thanks folks.
ReplyDeleteSif suspicious! My account is quite intact :)
Excellent articles, shame to see them end
ReplyDeleteDefinitely going to miss this as you were one of the best sources I had on how to actually play a sorc in a PvP setting. Your videos were pretty much invaluable to see how to move. I'm definitely tired of the grind myself, but the group content is what keeps me going right now and I'm enjoying it a good bit, but without a ton of high end content beyond AP farming and Adma/Dark Poeta, I'm not sure how long this will hold my interest either without some serious content patches. Let us know if you go to another game, your videos are great to watch!
ReplyDeleteNooooooooooooooo! :(
ReplyDeletePlease don't... I love your vids and your articles... And I'm nearly 35... Is it getting THAT vad after that? =/
man you were my inspiration for beein' a sorcerer. I will blow things up in your name.
ReplyDeleteOh no ... I'll miss y'all! :(
ReplyDeleteDot quit ,,,re-roll....lol. Thanks for the guide and tips.
ReplyDeleteNoooo... not you, my Idol! Your videos taught me how to PvP, your articles have always been awesome and full of valuable informations, its really sad see you leaving!! :(
ReplyDeleteI hope the game changes and becomes more interesting, just PvP won't be enough, I'm only 37 and I am starting to wonder what it will be once I reach 43+..
Bleh. And I'd just checked here for inspiration to log in again.
ReplyDeleteAh, well - it's been a great blog. Thanks! :)
Meh, too bad I liked it here. However, why you dont want to share the reasons? I would like to know.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine that there is missing some things to do at 50, but I dont see what happen at "35 or so". Is it the grind the problem?
I enjoyed your articles... would have loved to see you guys stay... Let us know where you guys play next?
ReplyDeleteDragon Age? GW2? Take care.
what problems are you having just "logging in" errors, etc..??
ReplyDeleteI guess it's relatively safe to rant in the comments, hehe. I just don't want to put anyone off buying Aion, because it is worth the money.
ReplyDeleteFirst and foremost, The Grind.
I didn't mind it to start with. Hell, I was completely expecting some grind when I bought the game and was looking forward to a game in which getting somewhere required some effort. In theory it was the bees knees. However, the grind is a little beyond excessive. By 44 my interest in Aion was dwindling as I just couldn't bear to do anything PvE outside of a group. The journey to 45 was long, and the journey after that to 46 took longer. Two bars into 46 I'd just had enough.
PvP
Forts are very imbalanced, especially on my server. On Nezekan, Elyos are hopelessly outnumbered due to various factors and a fort capture on our part is either luck (high level asmos taking an upper fortress or we catch them off guard an hour into vulnerability) or excessive planning (organising 15+ of the top legions to work together). In the history of fort events, we've never had a 1:1 assault:defend ratio, which is the scenario one conjures in their mind when they think “fun fort pvp”.
Rifts have level limits. Makes sense in theory, but in practice that means the higher level you are, the less you can rift. Only one (or occasionally two) rifts can be open at once in an area. At 46, I can enter three of seven. At level 50, that becomes 2/7. Casually logging in each day for five days, I was unable to find a rift of the appropriate level.
The abyss has mobs from level 25 to 40, then no mobs until level 50. So, between 43~ to 47~, there's no fair fights in the abyss any more. It's just ganking lowbies for crap AP and XP. You can't even grind mobs because of the arse AP. The mobs themselves, at same level, grant shit all AP. As it stands the best way to get AP by a huge margin is to enter a rift and kill people there... it will net you 4-5x the AP you would get in the same amount of time from any other method.
This is mostly due to the immaturity of player levels, but my attempts for queuing for Dreadgion haven't gone too well. The one time out of four a group actually formed, it was 6 elyos versus 3 asmos, who just trained mobs on us (didn't kill anyone thankfuly) then quit, ending the instance.
Crafting
ReplyDeleteYes, it's boring, I can get over that. It's just bad when the vast majority of items that one can create are not worth the materials put into them. The time sink is ridiculous too, when just creating something you want... it takes 30 minutes per craft, for example, to make a single Worthy Linon Tunic. One of the issues with cost of crafting is that most of the cost is static and unchanging: you have to buy mats from the NPC. The economy doesn't allow your crafted materials to exceed their creation cost, not by design – the player-findable materials are less expensive than the output – but because of the vendor cost.
PvE
Steel Rake, one of the flagship instances of Aion, is boring as sin. The boss fights are simple and clunky, the trash is excessive, it takes over an hour to get to a boss... which then isn't even guaranteed to drop anything. I wish I could pin it to just SR but all instances are like that. TG is perhaps the best instance in Aion, in that it gives you a nice reward (XP) even if the boss doesn't drop anything.
Content
At 46 I have a few things to do: hope for a rift, wait for guildies for Steel Rake or indratu grinding or 1-2 other group possibilities. Or, just grind. In an hour solo I can get a bar-ish of XP. By this point i'm bored off my tits. Nineteen more hours of that? No thanks. The abyss doesn't have anything for me beyond getting outnumbered in forts. If a rift hops up, I can enter it and hope for players rather than just an endless sea of bots, until the game slaps the “YOU'VE BEEN HAVING TOO MUCH FUN” debuff on you (randomly, at that) and you're suddenly not allowed to enjoy the game until you've been afk in a city for half a day.
This is getting a bit ranty. It's just not for me. Too much effort and risk, for jack all reward. I can't bring myself to log in because it's just work. There's very little fun left in the game for me, just work. Maybe in time all the various niggles will be fixed and there'll be +500% more quests in the game and several times the number of instances, which actually have bosses and loot in them. Until then I'm off.
The three of us are playing WoW again at the moment, with some other ex-Aioners. It's quite fun mentoring the few that haven't played the game at all :)
I just got an xbox 360 ..end of story and mmo's untill something better comes along ....
ReplyDeleteTime to take you off the favorites list.
ReplyDeleteIt was great to have you as a resource, it's just unfortunate you didn't hit 50.
You hit on some points that seemed to take the fun of the game out - the grinding, the crafting, the off balance pvp. But thats to come with any game. The same can be said of WoW which I played for 3 years.
Sadly, you quit.
It... /could/ be said. In the same way it could be said that the moon is made of cheese.
ReplyDeleteMy flatmate has started a WoW druid and has set himself the challenge of getting to level 10 by just exploring. His kills are at zero, his quests completed at zero, his deaths are over 110. Since he's in level 20-30 zones at the moment, 90% of his time is spent running back to his corpse. His res timer is often minutes long.
He's having exponentially more fun than he did on his level 42 assassin in Aion.
Actions speak volumes...
LOL, I was curious how leveling would be in Aion by only using Extract experience as the source for experience. Unfortunately, you must at least complete the first series of campaign quests to leave the newbie areas to get access to better nodes. I was able to get to level 4 on gathering and non-killing quests in about the same time it takes to get to 4 killing/questing like normal. I gave up after that though, cause my server came back up :P I bet between crafting and gathering, you could level up at a decent rate since the exp upgrade to those systems.
ReplyDeleteBack to the topic at hand, it is sad to see you retired already after only 2 months. It will probably take me at least another month to catch up to where you left off. Hopefully by that time I will be able to come up with something fun to do to keep the grind from killing me :P
I was thinking that it might be fun to get a group of 6 sorcs together and see what they could come up with to challenge their skills as a group.
Anyway, thanks for all of the info you have provided for the community. I already knew most of the points you mention throughout the guides, but there were definitely a few that I was not aware of. Your guides should be added to the official wiki under the Sorc section! Every sorc should read your guides.
- Drexius / Siel
Ok tks for the explanation, it make sense even if I dont agree with all:
ReplyDelete- grind; one of the advantage to be an ex L2-player: grind in all games after that seem easy :p
- pvp: I didnt felt the imbalance yet but I didnt make any serious fort either so... The limit in rift level (and so numbers of rifts) definitly sucks
- pve: I am just 42, so I didnt see farther than shugo boat and Alquimia but they increased the drop rate in this 2 instances at least at last patch (and especially on boss); I dont know if you stopped before or after this change though.
- What is the debuff you are talking about?
- bots: as an ex L2-player, that is my greatest fear about this game; they seem to take it more seriously than in L2 though, but I will really keep on eye on that. If it give any advantages at 50 to the boters/ebayer in pvp, I am out. But for the moment it doesnt affect me much exept a few bots taking "my" mob.
- craft: I must admit that I dont see any much interest in crafting for the moment, exept for pots, scrolls and food; the ingredients price is too high compared to the sell price. But even if a big part of the ingredient's price is fixed (by the npc) it still depend on the players: the rest of the ingredients should be lower and/or the price of the final product higher. But there is too much crafter compared to the demand.
- group: I agree on that, there isnt enough group thing, and not much interest to group: the xp is a lot higher in solo or duo, infortunatly.
Anyway, have fun in WOW (I still play it sometime) and see you later maybe; tks for all the informations.
Tynu
that is sad , however post ur WoW info incase i think of playing it , i'd sure need a guild like you.
ReplyDeleteWe're on Nagrand, Horde. PM anyone in the guild RoF for information!
ReplyDeleteZOT COME BACK!!!!!!!!!!!! =(
ReplyDelete/Sigh... Gets back to WoW... On which server do you play? :D
ReplyDeleteI've enjoyed your vids Zot /bow. Lol I can never get to lvl30, I get bored and reroll all the time.Now that I can't reroll any longer I'll just have to bite the bullet and level to 30 and beyond. Btw I used to play horde on Nagrand before I quit, I may resub and look you guys up, you might need a disc Priest:) Oh and I blame you Zot for the over abundance of Sorcs on Nezaken >:[
ReplyDeleteHehehe... well, the server stats say 13-14% of the population of all realms are sorcerers and nezekan is no different (14%) :)
ReplyDeleteHey Zot, it looks like things are getting better in your server and Elyos owe more forts than Asmos! :D
ReplyDeleteI think Abyss won't ever be balanced, because we are all humans and once one faction starts to do better than the other its more than natural one faction feels defeated and starts losing interest.. but somehow, balance always shifts.
Happened the same on my server, Asmos started rulling the Abyss and we Elyos were helpless, things changed and now they don't see the interior of a fort for weeks. We are even working on the upper Abyss forts (our server is new) and all they can do is try to mess with our fort assaults. :)
zot mate, is it realli worth me gettin aion? Im thinking of it but ive heard some realli good things and bad things, I played wow for 3 years and i liked it in most sense but i quit some time ago, i want to start a mmo again, either it being wow with the new patch 3.3 or aion. So what would u sugest? and im a pure pvper so is aion a good mmo pvp game?
ReplyDeleteWell WoW's 3.3 patch has changed the face of the game really, with the incredible LFG changes. So that's worth coming back for in itself xD
ReplyDeleteAion's worth buying though, if you want a change. As I said it entertained me for two months (and I can resubscribe in the future as more content is release) so it's well worth the dough.
OMG don't do this to us :'( You can't quit, it's just wrong.
ReplyDeleteWatch this vid (its in Russian, but you'll understand it ^_^). Its about what gonna be next in Aion http://aion.ru/next
I hope it will give you some kind of motivation to play.
Anyway, almost every sorcerer on Russian official server knows you. I play character Zota (Russian prototype, hope you don't mind ^_^) and asmodian sorcerers just run from me. Even then, it doesn't trouble me to get cursed every time I come to Rift.
We all hope you'll come back and kick some bad asmodians asses again ^_^
From Russia with love (sorry for my crooked English)
Wow, that's humbling :D
ReplyDeleteI do intend to come back to Aion at some point. It just won't be for quite a while...
http://powerwiki.na.aiononline.com/aion/Korean+PTS%3A+March+3rd+Test+Server+Update+1.9+Announcement
ReplyDeleteNo new content still = just another red flag the devs don't know what they're doing.
ReplyDeletethnx, I'm a former wow gladiator and was wondering if I should try something new to help relieve that wow itch. seems like eventually, most just relapse to their horde or alliance.
ReplyDeleteit was really interesting to read and watch ur posts :)
BE pld, an interesting choice hehe. good luck w/ ur relapse ;D
Zot whats your main on wow ?
ReplyDeleteAt the moment, Zova (warrior tank) and Zottle (tree) on Frostmourne-US.
ReplyDeleteHey. Aion 2.0 is released, whats you opinion of it if you have read about the improvements?
ReplyDeleteLOL, my first notice in Devs idiotism is 1 man instance "Haramel" with lvl 18 to 22. it has 2 hour cooldown ??
If you do it first time exact when you hit lvl 18 you will be lvl 19 when you handle in the quests etc. Then cool down on 2 hours. OK now you do your krall quests and hit
lvl 20,5 in 3 hours with the quests there.
Time for second round in Haramel and you hit 21 when you are done. Done 2 times and 3 or more lvls more and when you are 23 you are banned from it :D
What are they thinking about? not with their brains in any way because player are fu mad about it.
Brilliant idea
Playing sorcerer lvl 25 atm :D looog way to go
NCSoft are incompetant twits. I saw hints of incompetance in the betas but refused to acknowledge it. Live came along and I tried as long as I could to believe it'd all get better.
ReplyDeleteI now know better, so why the hell do I keep coming back every so often to dip my foot into this cesspit of a game? :\
Three things would have made a better Aion:
- make a fully fleshed NA development team to take NA Aion on its own direction, only sharing base assets with Korea
- hire competant people
- delay release to finish up the game's initial content
But, of course, they went the cheap way and now their failing game is paying for it.