Is there a lot of grouping in Aion, or is it another solo mmo?

There is a lot of grouping. You can do both but from what I've seen a solid party that knows what they are doing can kill and level faster than soloing quests. At least from 19-20+ but before then it's better to solo/duo.

it tends to be more group friendly. People running around solo everywhere at lvl 20+ tend to be meat for gankers. Entering the abyss without a group is a gamble; and its one that people most often lose.

Find a buddy(s) ;)

Lots of good content 13+ for groups and from my experience I have found good old skool group dungeon crawls to be fantastic for leveling up far more so that solo questing and a good old crawl is much more to my taste.

I'll confirm that 1-20 is good for a duo.  20+ best for a group of 4-6.

I am sure you would be able to SOLO in this game for some time but as someone else said this game is really only best if it is being done in Groups.  There seems to be a "necessary" balancing at the 18+ level in order to kill Mobs  your lvl or higher.  My past experience with NCSoft titles also gives you Exp bonuses for "maxed" parties and the like not for sure if they are doing that in here... they also use to give EXP penalties for significant differences in LVL's inthe same party.  There  use to be a rule in L2 that you didn't want to party with someone more than 3 lvls below y ou or 3 lvls above you or have a party that had more than 6 lvls between the lowest and highest.  Not for sure if that was "actual" but it sure seemed to be true.

Well on the Asmodians side the lv 17-19 campaign quest are group quest (solo ones but the mobs are elites) and you will not be soloing an elite at lv 17-19 (although at 21 its 20k xp duoing them).  So grouping happens and it just happens like it should someone runs into you and says want to party up and you say sure.   Ive seen it happen during CBT frequently.

There is no XP bonus for a max party that i noticed though.  If a mob gives 50k solo / 6 and theres your xp per group member is what i figured out during CBT.  Also there is a massive penalty for being to low level then the highest level in the group just not sure what the range is maybe 5 levels.

When I was a cleric in CB, I had no problem grouping or soloing.

 erm.. grouping is just about never the fastest way to level in mmorpgs. tho aion has some group quests, which give good experience, but finding a group to do them with might take too much time, making it highly inefficient to grind in a group. 

but that's just if you want to level up faster. generally, group grinidng in the abyss is done in small groups of 2 or 3. just to make sure u dont get killed by a solo ganker of the other faction.

if you were seriously hunting the other race.. most pvp is done in full groups of 6-12 people. considering the fact that u need a tank, a healer, and some good dps, its hard to make a solid team smaller than that.

in my opinion, aion is very group friendly. well in comparison to other mmos. its not terrible to level in small groups, and its easy to level in large groups by killing elite mobs.. which are monsters that are just far more powerful than surrounding ones and require a full group to kill. and of course, they give good experience even distributed amongst 5 or 6 members. grinding independantly in a group isnt bad either. useful for safety precautions and not a lot of lost experience. and for hardcore pvp, grouping is absolutely necessary.

I'd go as far to say that Aion isn't very solo friendly. However there is always your home zones but you can still be ganked there. I think it's foolish to grind solo in the Abyss, you'll end up being an easy kill for the enemy faction.

Thanks for the replies.

Well it sounds like Aion might be what I've been looking for.  I am so sick of MMO's where you can just go through the whole game alone.  Im downloading now and will give it a try.