Enjoy yourself! :)

There's no free trial available on their website, hence, I haven't tried it.  I'm always suspicious of established, long-out-of-beta games that don't offer a free trial.  It makes me wonder what's wrong with their game.

Aion has vastly improved on the 2 "G"'s...the Grinding and the Griefing.  

Grinding: Now, I don't mind grinding, but it was just silly that I could get the same xp killing 4 mobs that I got for a quest that had me kill 10.  It wasn't even worth tracking down the quest givers.  Not that I was able to survive long enough to find them, which leads me to...

Griefing: With the ability to see players on the mini-map and maps full of narrow roads, and precious few flight-paths, there was no escape from those to got their entire $14.99 worth by destroying the experience of others.  And the roads were full of them.  Every few minutes people were killed and camped at or above level 25.  People would try to escape to a new spot, just to be destroyed on their way there against players that were fine-tuned killers, with a level 50 funding the entire gig. Many players were forced to huddle into the corners of the zones, unable to explore and experience Aion's beauty.  Most of them eventually unsubbed.

Me...I was done after 3 months.  

I recently returned to Aion and the game has been revived in my eyes.  People aren't able to grief as they once did - if they want to PvP in my lands, they better bring friends.  The quest xp has been shockingly increased.  I'm stacking quests and doing them now...I'm getting more reward for my time spent.

Aion's lore, combat and design have been solid from the start: they've now raised the bar on what were game breakers for me and many others.  Aion is in good hands. It's a good time to join Aion folks.

THis game is still terrible and still has massive amounts of grind, I can tell you from a non-biased stand point as I have an active account until January 17, 2011; that I regret paying for.

I played from it's release, the mechanics, player connection with their toon, the world, the dungeons, the Challenges are all very well done, and really they did raise the bar. 

Playing as a Templar, I felt intuned with my character, and styles and taunts etc felt intuitive, and it was fun to play......Then I hit lvl 50.

This is when you think, great I'm at end game lets do some PVP, and some end game PVE stuff.  Well I got slapped in the face with reality.  The gear disparity is so great, that you have 0 chance against someone who out gears you.  Then the crafting system of pot luck.  I took up weapon crafting, thinking I could make my guild and myself weapons.  First of all the component drop rate was super rare, for basic items you need to make things, let alone the items you needed to make your trial quest items that allow you to Master the craft and make the next stage.  Oh by the way, you must master a craft in order to get your Fenris armor, which at the time I stopped playing was pretty much top dog armor.

However, it's just pot luck to get all this stuff.  I know many people that got their Mastery on First attempts.  I however was not as lucky.  Hundreds of hours spent farming Kinah and flux, and ore, just for attempts.  After my 27th Failed attempt at the Blue level sword for my mastery, I just quit the game. 

Playing a Templar was slow going as is for 50 levels, then I get smacked by the crafting........and on top of that Super Low Drop rates on anything good, had players who bought gold, or had nothing else to do in the entire world, kings of the hill, while those of us that worked for what we got, were left wanting.

One other thing was the Lock out timers caused many clicks within guilds.  If you ran Poeta with a set group, you could not help out other guildies that might want to experience that part of the game later on.  Hell the drop rate was soo bad in there at times, that I would think they could have dropped the lock out timer all together and still had minimal people Geared up.

In the end, I liked the Game Engine, the Storyline, the Zones, the basic raw idea of it, but the Eastern Grind will never work in the west.  Our culture just doesnt' mesh with it.

P.S.  Oh yeah one last thing, The Flying PVP, was implemented poorly, and there are a ton of hackers that played on it's inception......not sure about now.

The grind in this game had my guild members dropping like flies.  Th exp curve gets stupidly steep once you hit around level 37.  Bosses in dungeons that don't drop loot, silly exp curve, bots and gold sellers, really put most of my guys over the edge in record time.  A lot of people who went back said the grind is still as mundane and boring as when they left for the most part.

@Paragus- I promise this isn't intended to be sarcastic or smartass, but doesn't your guild play Darkfall? Each has their own opinion on what grind is and what grind implies, but out of my 5 months subscribed to the game I can say it has just as much grind as Aion did. And I like Darkfall, by the way. My "grind" to 50 and to get decently geared took a lot less time than it has to get my character at Darkfall playable. And we're not talking 1on1 playable, I'm a realist, I know I'm behind the curve. But out of 6-7 guilds I was in (And on NA-1, there's not thousands and thousands of guilds to choose from) I still had a ways to go before they'd even let me participate with them in anything worth mentioning.

But Paragus, I've read a lot of your stuff, and while you're reply is on point and truthful to how it stood at launch, the game has went significant changes, changes you'd need to experience first hand instead of taking it from others.

The grind is greatly reduced, you get more XP from everything now, and 2.0 raised the quest turnins again.  The XP curve isn't all that noticeable anymore after 35, and the bots and gold sellers are gone. I see as much gold selling spam as I do when I log into WOW now. One every now and then, but I probably see one once a week, and they're shut down mostly before I can even report them.

Is it a complete 180? No, but it's getting there. And this expansion is a step in the right direction. But please don't encourage people to write it off from experiences from a year ago. It has changed, maybe not enough for some, but they are improving it.

They also stated recently they're changing more things for the Western audience now instead of just language and minor localization changes, we should start seeing more changes brought to how the West embraces the games.

I played Aion for the RVR,since I love faction conflict.I am a 5+ year vet of the best rvr game ever made...Dark Ages of Camelot.I drove several characters to level 25...and yes there was a LOT of grind.At 25 I got to experience the absolute mess that AION devs wanted to pass as RVR.I could not believe how awful it was.I will never go back .The game is an insult to anyone who actually pays money for the experience.

Its a bit better now but i dont agree with the level ranges on some of the solo dungeons.

I played the game during Beta and Launch through February of this year. I have not returned at this point.

Qazz commented that the grinding and the griefing are issues that have seen vast improvements.

I had heard about Quest XP reward changes, but not about any changes to their rifting, death penalty, armor/weapons drop mechanics (this is what allowed for the griefing in the first place).

How exactly has the griefing changed in this game ?

The main problem I had with Aion was that killing a single mob was a boring, boring thing. And you had to do it over and over and over again, there was almost no context to it; it was like looking at the gameworld and seeing right into its bowels. Yeah, most MMO combat is not renowned to be fun, but it usually has some context to make it bearable. Nothing in Aion gave me any context whatsoever, so it came across as some form of pure mediocre grinding. You almost had to group-grind to make it bearable, but oddly I found it was hard to get groups going when your friends weren't already online. 

I'm totally OK with griefing in PVP games, but the mechanics of the leveling process should not be so visible. I wonder if that's changed. Actually, I even wonder if questing would help with that at all.  

I played in beta and the first month it was out and I had enough quests until level 22ish? I'm not sure what people are doing to not have quests in the mid teens... but they were there when I played, they should be more than their now.

I quit because I'm busy. I'm not going to play an mmo regardless of how little or much the "grind" is if I have a life knocking at my door.

By and by, I liked it. I actually don't really enjoy questing as much as just grinding on monsters :P. 

I played beta and some time after release. It was fun for a while but then the Grind and Griefing hit like a train. I quit and never looked back.

Aion is a good game straight up, said it before I will say it again. There are problems ofcourse, not sure which problems remain. For me, I played for like 7+ months, capped 2 toons, maxed gear on a clr, and had some seriously great times doing stuff that was insanely fun, including sieging, rifting with a full alliance looking for the ooposing factions rares, fighting for hours over Menotios, and playing a ton of dredge and DP.

The main issues we had then was just that it felt after we did all that, the lack of motivation to do it again and again. At the time it felt like they should have had 2raids for alliances to PVE, at least another dredge type instance, and atleast 2 other DP type instances, and a ground abyss.

While the grind or griefing could be balanced here and there, there simply wasn't a reasons for a person to do it, cause in the end you would be simply grinding fort instances, dp, dredge and pvping when you could find it, and during sieges, every single day.

While other issues like ranged classes being powerful in the abyss, and zerg wins again could eventually be balanced, there wasn't enough to do to outwiegh all the issues for me.

I see they added a raid, and new zones and PVE instances, I think its a strong start, and I am interested but I'm not sure I can make the leap back in, I kinda feel like maybe in another year lol, after another big expansion.

But to those who haven't tried this game, its actually really good if you just enjoy it for what it is, and find a good solid group to play with.

I also unsubbed after I couldn't take the pvp and griefing any longer.  the grind was ok, didn't bother me to hunt random kills between quest vacation periods.  It was fun actually, until I got killed for the hundredth time by someone many levels above me, who I rarely even saw. (grief killing goes too fast to even bother finding out who killed you, or to even turn fast enough to see).

the game pre-pvp (lvl 1-20) is by far the VERY BEST GAME EVAR!!  but even that can be dashed to bits by the realization that you're simply providing fodder for someone already seasoned in the game.  The design of the game itself is what defeats itself.  you get a new player, he levels up to pvp status, he dies repeatedly, he quits playin.  Some players will weather past this but not many do.  the shock is so hard that it makes people walk away from a game they actually enjoyed.

The other thing... botters.  there was too many of them.  I was around to see many get removed but only to see twice their numbers come back the next day.  they were allowed to run for too long before ncsoft addressed the issue.

I played from beta to about 4 mos.  then I cried and left the best game in the world.  Really wish there was a pve option.

I've played from beta til now, and I have to say the game has gotten better and worse in different respects. The leveling process is still an elongated thing, but now there are so many quests or instances to do that fill the gap, that it feels like it goes by faster. The bad, the server population is severely imbalanced right now on a lot of servers. Primarily in favor of elyos. If more people would play asmodian and even out the factions, it would be more enjoyable pvp wise. 

That said, the expansion has been enjoyable for me, even though it's all pve and barely any pvp. The solo dungeons were a great idea, especially for the lower levels where it's sometimes difficult to get a full group, now that all the servers are mature (ie, most of the player base are 40+) and lowbies are often alts rather than new blood.