the net raiders

With a solid week of open beta under my belt, and the whole thing wrapping up rather shortly, it’s time to post some thoughts on the matter. In this first part of the discussion, I came into this beta with a summer of closed beta events under my belt. And while the game is amazing, NCSoft definitely had it’s fair share of snags once it introduced itself to a much larger population. I came down with a pretty brutal cold right about the time Open Beta occurred, so I was blessed/cursed with a good amount of time in the world of Atreia and really get a feel for AION, first hand, with a lot more people running around and clogging up the interwebz.
The Good
Let me first start off by saying that this game is beautiful. Yeah I know you all have heard that before. But it’s the honest to god truth. For those of you looking for a WoW /ragequit solution, you will find this as a welcomed change of pace from what you are used to. I was running the game on my P-7811FX Gateway Laptop, and while the settings were set in the middle, the frame rate, motion, and world in general was just a beautiful experience.

The game mechanics in itself are like a combination of World of Warcraft meets Soul Calibur. I say that because while in melee, your “position” actually effects how much damage you do, and how much damage is done to you depending on your current motion. So keep moving, it is to your benefit. Also it is important to note that in a single swing of the sword/mace/claw/staff, you can inflict several rounds of damage on a creature. So when I booted up the old Cleric, he was dishing 2 hits in a swing. Making to feel a lot like a fighting game in that respect.

The mana stones are something that I feel actually made a difference in my performance when I was grinding. Think of mana stones like socketable gems in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. Each item you get usually has an open socket, and depending what you find and trade for in the world, you can drop in stat enhancing stones to help you along. In the beginning of my Cleric’s career, I went ahead and put nothing but Mana Pool stones into my gear, giving me a nice supply of mana which I felt like it was never going to run out. Then once I got up into the teens, I switched to physical crit stones. The moment I did that, I started to feel the pinch from the lack of mana, but yet, my melee dps was taking more significant chunks off of the mob’s life. So a word to the wise, do your research on mana stones and really think about what it is you want from your character. Hybrid characters like Gladiators, Chanters will find this to be a difficult decision.

And speaking of grinding, one thing that I felt was a welcome addition was that the grinding really didn’t feel like grinding at all. This was something I just decided to roll through for about 2 hours, and really enjoyed. The key to this is the complete lack of downtime. Saying that, if you do encounter downtime in AION something is being done incorrectly. Once I started moving away from the “honeymoon” levels, I started seeing a lack in either HP or MP which caused me to stop. Saying that, sitting in this game is a bit irritating because the regeneration rate is awkward at best. A solution to this is to stock up your favorite HP or MP potions and chug one to increase regen rate while hunting. I found that keeping a steady pace of this was most effective for minimal amount of cash. The cash comes bountiful in this game, so when you start up your character, treat yourself to increase your kill speed and minimize downtime. Once you find your “grove” like I did, you will have zero down time. AION has put so much in your path to eliminate this that it would be advised to catch on to all the tools you can use as quickly as possible.

I could of course, go on at great lengths about the good. But alas my fingers can’t take that kind of abuse. Consider these my selected points of interest, and we can move on to the bad.

The Bad
There is so much going on in MMO’s that its not that hard to get everything right. And the first thing I saw was from levels 1-10. I found the whole “ascension” aspect of the game rather irritating. Not because it wasn’t fun, but just because… well… lets break it down into two parts.

1.So much god damn running. I mean you run everywhere. The time to level 10 really took a good chunk of time. And they have you running from one town to another with very limited travel options. And since you don’t have your wings, expect that set yourself on auto run and get a snack, because this just takes a whole lot of time.
2.Don’t start getting smart thinking that this is the time to grind to level 10 before you can ascend. Why is that? Because all of your EXP caps off at 99% of level 9…. you can’t get past that level until you ascend. So a person like myself, found himself in a “oh shit” position. Because I capped out, and then realized I had to finish all of the quests. This hour initiative I took to get a jump on the game, cost me another hour in finishing quests just to get to to the actual act of ascension. This really, really, irritated me. Definitely a mistake I didn’t make again when I started another character.

The second irritating part of this game, was well… the people. AION does have a feature limiting your use of regional chat until level 5, preventing any and all gold farmers from clogging the chat rooms. But complete and uttered shit talking that was going down in the regional chat was enough to just turn it off. Racial slurs, pwn talking, trash talking, you name it. It really didn’t take long for these kids to come out of the wood work. And it totally reminded me of World of Warcraft with the recent WoW-crowd looking to AION for “something else to do,” it’s apparent these guys are coming over to trash talk in AION. If you are a fan of this kind of thing. Then enjoy the first couple of months are going to be filled with this kind of mindless banter. Otherwise, do what I and many others did, and turn the regional chat off. It’s not even to say that this is AION’s fault. I think it’s just the timing of things that is going to allow this to happen.

The Lag
Holy God. Holy mother of God all mighty. What is worse than being stuck at home all Labor Day weekend with nothing else to do but play a super laggy game? Nothing. Nothing is worse than that. Everything started off fine, but about 5 hours into the beta, I started to “rubber band” all over the place. Couldn’t chat, couldn’t kill… for about a day this game was un-playable. And while NCSoft found ways to correct this problem, I fear that the worst I yet to come. Given, this was the point of having an open beta. And it’s probably unfair of me to judge the game so harshly, but I have never seen lag that bad, for that long, on such a large scale. Now that I am writing this a week later, the lag has all but mostly cleared up. But it makes me wonder if whatever corrections NCSoft applied to the servers is enough for the onslaught of people who plan on playing this game hardcore, come the official release game. NCSoft, be flattered, but be warned, 10 servers might just not be enough to handle the 300,000 + players that are going to hit this game. After all a laggy start could spell death in an industry filled with jaded gamers who are looking for their next big fix.

More on AION later guys. The beta is still going strong so I am going to go and get a little bit more of my fix before I start to write some more.