Aion Stuff

This post is kind of all over the place since I’m bored after yet another leaver dredgion, so try to bear with me as I throw some random thoughts out there. Anyways, I’m positive every person has noticed the trend lately, and by lately, I mean over the past 3 months. Your friend list gets less active, less populated, and people often disappear. Sometimes they’ll leave a sad goodbye, sometimes they won’t even saye a word. Just from my friend list alone, here are the people that I haven’t seen in over a month:

-Aeria: Awesome sorc I met and was higher level than I was at the time
-Fauzool: Nice guy, good assassin, heard something about him selling
-Illya: Wolf Pack GM, had a mutual respect for each other even if not always seeing eye-to-eye
-Impulse: Elyos 2nd level 50, amazing Ranger, good friend, quit a couple weeks after getting 50
-Serabelle: Awesome and nice cleric that supposedly quit because all of her friends quit, too
-Tialya: My best DAoC friend; reason I’m on this server, quit because of the grind

My friend list is relatively small and the number of people that haven’t been on in 7-14 days or so is at least three times that amount. Legions are collapsing every day due to member inactivity, economy is inflating due to lack of population and bot bannings, and I believe Lumiel is still the only server yet to capture an inner upper abyss fortress (krotan, miren, kysis). And at this rate, I doubt it will ever happen unless they’re nerfed.

Are server transfers meant to be the saving grace? I wouldn’t hold my breath. No one worth mentioning would likely ever move an established legion to a dying server who’s fortress and gear progression is incredibly far behind. Not to mention with transfers delayed until an indefinite time in 2010, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw things implemented from the "vision" video trailer in before we see transfers… and I honestly don’t expect to see that stuff in for a while. So what’s my point here? Well believe it or not, I’m not trying to just say "dead server is dead." I’m trying to not only see if other people are experiencing the same here and how to best approach what we have left.

My daily routine used to be to log on around noon, catch a quick entry dredgion if it pops still for me, do a dark poeta, farm miragent crap, or patrol abyss for a few hours until the evening dredgion and fort vulnerabilities come around, do those, then run fort instances or screw with Asmos in abyss until the midnight dredgion and log off. Any time I ever spent rifting was futile as all we ever saw were bots and lowbies. Only one time ever we got some high ranks out (Kaz, Rykia, and a sorc) and that wasn’t even fun because we rolled them 3v3 every fight (chanter, sorc, templar). Abyss is completely dead and void of high level pvp now unless you gank people that are farming guards and for some very strange reason, Asmos exclusively roll 6-deep now to farm elite guards and nothing else. So I have the option of either saying f it, too lazy, or to make a group and roll them. If we do decide to make a group, the groups farming the guards usually leave after 1-2 wipes at most and then Upper abyss is once again empty for a couple hours until the next Asmo guard group forms.

Moreover, it’s pretty terrible how you can advance in this game’s PvP system entirely through PvE. I won’t say I didn’t do more than my share of pve crap to rank up (I hadn’t farmed guards since 3-star officer though unless I’m maxing my DP), but at least I always go out to the Abyss every day, find some people to start fights with, go rifting to Beluslan when there’s no action there, and go and tank every significant fortress raid that Elyos ever does here. Almost every single other officer plays the complete chicken **** route of never showing their face in a contested area ever since they get 1-star. Let’s take Sica for example: he very literally never leaves Terminon Fortress unless it’s for Dark Poeta or Dredgion and after that, he sits in Terminon until the next dredgion, and then the next, and well, you get my points. He’s probably the only person that I’ve seen ALWAYS online when I’m on and when I log off (although I’m not super active lately). Isn’t this a PvP game? People can say whatever the #@$% they want about playing smart and not dying when you’re pushing Governor (since an AP-loss death exceeds 10,000 at the highest ranks), but avoiding any real consequential PvP entirely is stupid.

Miragent armor is also stupid. Congrats on level 50, you can now get some of the best gear in the game as long as you do mind-numbing repeat quests ad nauseum. Then when you hit the nyerkblock that is the legs piece, you get to play with the lovely RNG system to see whether you get it on the first try or have to spend 50mill+weeks of farming to get the rest as a gimme. TLDR: this armor takes no skill to get, is available to everyone once they hit 50, and everyone will have it after a certain amount of time. Again, dumb system.

Killing legendary bosses only to loot a white armor flux is dumb. Clearing Theo Lab all the way to Trioan for him to have a completely empty corpse is dumb. Dredgion mobs linking aggro via proximity is dumb. Both forms of dispel are overpowered and also dumb in this game. One dispel to remove every single debuff on a player? SM’s able to dispel people’s level 50 4k DP abilities in 1 button press? Aerial combat has to be the worst idea ever conceived from a melee point of view. In fact, melee in general in this game is asinine when you have bosses that seemingly love to test how many rez stones you brought by randomly instagibbing your melee. Transformations are dumb: even with 175k hp, multiple AoE disable and damage abilities, at the end of the day, I’m a melee class and can be kited in aerial combat just like any other melee. And caster transforms…. well talk about useless.

Alright so I have 900k AP finally and can almost get an Elite Greatsword. How does it stack up to my Menotios one that I got 2 months ago almost? Well, it has worse base stats in every category, no HP, same pcrit, no attack, and gives accuracy in return (because that’s a hard stat to find), and gives the 10% damage boost in PvP. So from a PvE standpoint, it’s entirely inferior to mine and from a PvP standpoint, I lose a little in every single area including HP only to gain 10% damage. Alright so my 1k crits will start doing 1100 instead. All at the measely cost of farming out 122,000 points more than Governor even requires. Cool game. Even moreso that to transform, I need to blow 5,000 abyss points (requires 10 seeds that cost 500ap each) to turn on Godmode for just 10 minutes. Oh and it has a 2 hour cooldown, by the way.

Chanters are a worthless group PvP and solo class. AoE fear is ridiculous, and Asmos get too many shafts (level 50 sm dp pet, holy punishment equivalent is terrible, no bosses to farm, etc). I could go on about this stuff all day really but it would be in vain. NCsoft doesn’t care nor listen to the American playerbase whatsoever. Maybe it’s because their North American staff can’t even speak proper english? Wanna know how I know?

That was sent to me in all of its grammatical glory on Sunday when I was out of town moving. I mean, really? Was it typed in another language and google translated or what?

Something needs to be done and fast. The game is on it’s last hinges already in North Amerilca, less and less people log on each passing day, and no one is going to wait around for 6 months to see a content patch or server transfers. In fact, when I first saw their exp boosted weekends and other changes recently, my first instinct is that they’re getting desperate to hold customers because they know their game is dying. It’s exactly what happened in Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot. I don’t know what it would take exactly to fix things enough so that the mass exodus of people quitting stops, but I do know that this server will be completely dead unless each faction (and maybe both together) start working together to get **** done instead of all this selfish BS that goes on (at least on Elyos side).

Defend a fort because it belongs to your faction; dont be a nyerk because your guild didn’t get the last hit on the Deity and you don’t control the fort so you won’t defend it. Attack a fort to help expand your faction and open instances for people to get exp, balic items, and AP. Speaking of forts, the inner 3 upper forts in order of least difficult to most goes Krotan -> Miren -> Kysis. This server has realistically attempted Krotan once ever by Asmos who took 1 hour to get the boss to 50% then wiped at around 47% due to boss AoE and our flaming #@$%, and one raid on Miren ever when we got the boss to about 75% and noticed everyone chain dying to his ridiculous AoE. I think it’s safe to say that this server will never conquer these fortresses until the forts are nerfed or unless both sides work together. If Asmos do in fact want to work something out with doing upper forts cooperatively, feel free to PM me here because I think it might actually spice up the game to have the 3 inner forts swap places a lot (as we all know forts are much easier when player controlled than balaur).

If you don’t wanna read that all, the TLDR version of it is that this authentic Korean product has absolutely no enjoyable end-game and I wouldn’t be surprised if they begin server merges soon unless they can fix a lot of things (aerial combat for melee is by far my biggest gripe) and add actual content with desirable replay value.

P.S. To Frawst of the Asmodians: You rock. I love you. If you know Frawst, please deliver this message (or deliver it even if you don’t).