Category Archives: aion

It’s spelt ‘Eon’, NCSoft.

I’m not terribly sure as to why you spelt it Aion.

You know, as in “It takes an eon for the game to load, longer than my computer takes to boot” and “It takes an eon to get into the game, if you’re lucky, otherwise it’s sometime around the heat death of the universe”.

Aion Queue 1Aion Queue 2Aion Queue 3Aion Queue 4Aion Queue 5

So that’s the status for each of the five available EU English servers. And yes one of them is “only” half an hour; shame it’s not the one where my character is.

And to all those who have said that this is the smoothest launch they’ve ever seen, of course it bloody well is, nobody can get onto the servers to stress them. I could solve all of the public transport problems in England if I only let ten people on to each bus and then thanked everyone else for their patience while they stand around for two hours to get on to the next one.

To think that NCSoft had the temerity to want to install nProtect GameGuard with their game, as if it’s the players who are the cheap cheating bastards. Talking of cheap bastards, what the hell gives you the right to open a browser up after I close the game down in order to pimp your products?

Cheap and utterly lacking in etiquette.

You know what, at least Aventurine had the decency to not let you buy Darkfall at all in order to keep their numbers down, rather than make you sit around adding up how much of your money you’re spending in order to watch a queue progress very slowly. I could do that at Disneyland, and at least then I’d get the opportunity to punch Donald Duck in the face.

Never mind, give it a year before NCSoft close it all down for no good reason whatsoever, eh?

I might just have reached the point where I’m allowed to log in by then.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Folk cramming themselves into Aion like spawning salmon, they realise they’re floundering towards a huge faction-imbalanced end game, yes?

As I mentioned in the above quote from Twitter, I’ll be interested to see how the end game for Aion pans out. At the moment I see a lot of frustrated people wanting to roll Asmodians but being blocked by general server queues or the balancing mechanics that NCSoft have in place; therefore these people are rolling Elyos instead, just to get into the game, because, as we all know, joining up with a faction that you don’t really empathise or connect with is always a strong foundation for a long and distinguished PvP career. It works for mercenary groups because they are rewarded handsomely to do so, I’m not so sure that there’s such an incentive in Aion.

And I have to question, on a sanity level, whether it was a sound idea to aim an MMO with an end game focus of PvP at a Western audience when one side looks like the offspring of Disney’s Fairies and a candy floss machine, and the other side looks like the resultant spawn of a blood-bathed orgy between The Crow, Edward Scissor Hands, Marilyn Manson and a Balrog of Morgoth.

They’d have been better off calling the game Care Bears vs PvP Nutjobs Online.

Top Gear.

Some say that she can lick her own back.
And that she once opened a coconut using only her thighs.

All we know is that she’s called The Trib.

She's called Tri Badism.

Oh, and she fights in leopard print leggings. We know that too. With two swords. And high heels. And… I’ll be right back…

It’s a very pretty game, and I don’t just mean the character designs and their outfits. The whole world (that which I’ve seen) is fabulously realised and very attractive. However, having dabbled only in the latest beta weekend – and then only finding time for about an hours worth of play – I haven’t had enough opportunity to play in order to know whether it’s that sort of forced ‘beauty pageant’ beauty which is essentially vacant underneath, or whether it also has a PHD in complicated surgery, likes rugby, a good pint of bitter, is able to name all the characters from Twelfth Night and can kick one’s buttocks in Soul Calibur and in real life.

So far it’s very much of the standard fare from what I’ve seen: not a bad thing per se, but I’ll be interested to see if it has any tricks up its sleeves beyond the accomplished starter area shimmer and shine.

Don't be deceived, she's the one that will be doing all the stabbing.

It’s certainly one to keep an eye on. To find out if that outfit gradually transforms into a full-on ‘Olivia Newton-John in the Grease finale’ number, if nothing else.