It has been one week already. We know every game has a rocky start. There are always bumps along the way, which is ok.

You can expect some bugs, and some server downtime. And on this level, I must say that Aion has performed well. I have seen worse starts of MMO’s. On this part I must say that NCSoft did a great job.

But, there where bumps, and there still are. Everybody that players Aion know knows about the queues. When you log in at peak hours, that is from 14.00 till 23.30 (gmt+1 time) you will end up in a queue. Depending on the time you log in this queue for our server (Spatalos) can last up to 4 hours. On another Euro server I even heard of waiting times of 9 hours. At a certain time players found out that if you opened up a private store, you could go afk for 24 hours without being kicked of the server. Since then the stores are referred as AFK-Shops. So players logged on in the morning, then went to work or school to find their characters still sitting their with the shops open. Result, thousands of people waiting in the queue for people that won’t log off. Very, very frustrating.

(picture Kalin made of my character)

NCSoft was pretty fast to handle this issue though, they put a timer of 30 minutes on  the shops and thus solved this problem pretty ok and fast enough. But it didn’t fix the queues. There are still queues when people get back from work or school. Last week I was pretty ill (swineflu) so I had some playing time.

This week I started with work again and I know that when I arrive at home and log back in, I will be in a queue of at least 2 hours. Next issue is the whispers from goldsellers. At the moment, Ayase from NCSoft replied with: You can put yourself on ‘invisible’ on the friendlist and thus not get whispers from goldsellers. He probably means this as a temporary solution while they work on a real fix, since if you put yourself on hide there, you can’t be found by people that are searching for your class to invite to their party.

I have also heard about a guild on our server on the Elyos side, that is pretty high in the rankings. This guild is run by some bloke who has a very rich father (something to do with oil) who buys unlimited amounts of gold. Which of course causes bots and goldsellers to thrive on that side of the server. I dunno if there is anything NCSoft can do about it. Damn I thought they blocked all Russians. Must be using proxy or something. 

Last issue to mention is bots. I haven’t seen any yet. But some people think there are bots. People got reported as bots when they are grinding a specific route and of course using the same skills after eachother like one normally would as well. I mean, you place them in your bar to make best use of them. And yes, me and my wife grinded their for like 5 hours to get from 23 to 25 to enter the abyss finally. Some guys whisper you, but when you are on a roll, you are not gonna invite other people to your grinding spot. They even said that bots ignore a mob when they see another player targeting that mob, which of course is not true. So people tend to see bots even when there are none. I have grinded on the normally bot-populated areas, and with normally I mean where I saw them grind on the Chinese servers. 

To be honest, at the moment the only problem that bothers me from the above is the waiting queue. NCSoft will have to fix this ASAP. If they won’t, they will loose customers really really fast. Which of course will fix the waiting queues, but is no real solution. 

I logged into the game on Sunday evening. Our goal that evening was to at least get level 10 and start the guild, to get the Infinity guildmembers invited. At the end of the night, we where a level 2 guild already, so we easily reached our goal + more. The days after we raised in level and ended yesterday evening on level 28. Of course there are already people level 40. I have spoken to some of these high level players, and practically all of them admitted they used leveling/grindingbuddies. So that when they where sleeping, someone else took over and thus got them higher level much easier. So I think 28 is pretty good. I also got my gathering skill at 148 and the cooking on 199. I won’t do aethergathering before level 30, cause without those +40 wings, it’s gonna take to much time for sure. We got our guild in the top 50 list. Highest place was 38 yesterday, today though, we went back to 45. Just wait till we have more then 8 level 25 players. Then we will see how fast we can rise in level. We had a great achievement in Elysea. As you know, we are Asmodians. At level 19 we get a quest called “vanishing potion” or something like that. The quest takes you to Eltnen in Elysea. The quest expects of you to return straight after you end up there. But of course, this was not the plan. We went to do the quest with 16 people at the same time, and cause some mayhem in Elysea.

We had some great runs until the Fluffy Elyos destroyed our Kisk. We ran trough the desert to finally discover 75+ Elyos following us. There we took our stand and killed many of them. It took them ages to take the remaining 15 Infinity members down.

It's to damn hot in Elysea for Asmo's

Greetz,

Saint