Yeah, yeah, a big shiny gold +2 Armor of Uberness and all those sorts of things matter in games but I have always thought that it is really the little things that make a game something you play for a either a few weeks, months, or years.  So far Aion is a good game with an fun and interesting world.  Yeah, to world could be a bit more wide open but such is MMOs these days and it is not Conan type linear so good enough.  Combat is interesting enough and balance seems good enough to get up adn going and see how it shakes out.  But for all the core goodness of Aion there are those peripheral issues that are often clunky, incomplete, or just sub par.  I compiled a wish list of ten small things I would want to see addressed soon to take the game from good port of Korean grinder as we know its roots to be to possibly great NA/Euro in its own rights.  Now, before you flame by little things and say they matter not compared to class balance and blah, blah, blah I am not suggesting the following are the keys to millions of subs, rather, I am saying the following are the things that great games will have along with those other things.  It is just hard to spend months playing a game and all that time if you are always fighting small little UI issues or other such clumsiness.  So it is in that vein I offer these 10 things.

(paste from Aion boards):

1) Window position remember between play sessions and a way to copy keybinds, game settings, and window/UI layout to another character.

2) Mostly the UI is good as far as default UIs and even though there is a nice upper and lower option on the layout both pretty much suck position wise.  We need the target and player vitals to be movable like the group vitals are so we can choose out own layout.  This is a small thing but I wouldn't even consider PvP with the two mucked up layouts offered now both of which put vitals, skills/actions, and the gameplay in the screen center as far apart as possible making taking them all in at once very difficult.

3) Chat kind of sucks.  Why reinvent the wheel here - /t, /r to reply to tell, and other such common shortcuts are missing or otherwise slightly different enough from the norm to be a pain and for no reason.  Include all common ways so chat is something you can do without thinking.  Also, private channels, they disappear when you log out - they need to remain persistent to have any use whatsoever - this is a major social element needed especially for those of us not inclined to join big guilds who want to join several smaller guilds in a common channel of our creation.

4) Queues, they seem to be improving so keep on it.  Other than 5 - 10 minutes here or there queues are not really acceptable these days I don't think.

5) Combat doesn't end when combat ends, this is very annoying and needs to be fixed.  Also, auto attack doesn't auto attack - it seems it breaks when you use a magic skill instead of a melee skill.  Either way it should work without fail.

6) Downtime between fights, OK if you want normal non combat recharge to be slow I can live with that.  but if you are sitting and resting then it should charge back up decently fast (mana too, no reason mana should take 5 times HP to recharge).

7) Attackable structures in game are only attackable with melee - fine for the non Sorcs but annoying anyways.  Anything that attacks should be able to attack these things and if you must do 1 HP dmg per hit no matter what then go ahead I suppose.

8) Gold spammers, fix this now no matter what it takes.  Not sure if it is the game's Korean roots but it is already to most spamtastic MMO ever and I have seen some spamtastic MMOs.  Sorry to burden you guys with this but that is what you get the subs for, fix it.  At a minimum we need a report spam and a block user on right click (and not a limited block ten and it is full I mean block one name so I never have to hear from it again period.

9) Right click.  Maybe NCsoft folks are all MAC users where you are not allowed two buttons on your mice because Steve Jobs has a bug up his arse that someone else stole that idea before he could steal it but in the Windows world, you know the 98% of the world that matters, we have this second button called right click.  HaHa, sarcasm off - you get my point already I am sure but right click avatar or name or item or whatever should ALWAYS give me all relevant options I could want for that right clicked thing (i.e. whisper to friend, add to friends list, block, report, invite, etc, etc, etc).  Right click is good, mmmkay.

10)  Remember me?  How about a remember me option on the web site / forums and on the game login.  Why type in my username each and every time I open the game or visit the site - annoying.  And speaking of the website, good work on the new site overall but it really is bugged up in many ways.  Firefox compatibility is pretty lame and a myriad of other issues I won't bother to specify other than one, forum subscriptions (you know the page you have in most forum user profiles that lists threads you have started or replied in - really necessary on a high volume board).

11)  And a bonus small thing?  HIGH QUALITY TEXTURES.  Aion looks pretty good and all but the textures are terrible even jacked all the way up.  I can understand you wanting the game to scale and all but for those of us who can handle it we need high quality textures as waht is in game really makes it look like a WoW landscape with modern MMO elements added on top.

A well rounded list and i'm very keen to see if the next patch will bring a few fixes along.

I'd like to add another point which is the lack of flow in combat since the actual execution of a spell or any ability sometimes seems to interfere with the animation of the action before.

Often times one can't fire the next spell/action right away. I.e. when your character is moving and you stop to cast a spell, the transition from running to casting is somewhat choppy. It makes the gameplay less fluid and UI clicks less responsive as the client seems to need a noticeable split second to actually end action A and start action B. Say the client is a tad sluggish managing the "collision" of two actions.

Think of

Running-> Stop -> 0.1 -> 0.2 -> 0.3 -> Casting instead of fluidly Running-> Stop-> Casting

I notice this alot playing my healer where i'm constantly in some sort of a "stop'n'go" movement.

Honestly, out of that whole list - the textures thing bothers me the most.

Don't remember in what topic but some guy on this site posted a texture tweak that will make them look great but you also have to remember that this will probably increase your latency in the abyss.

Originally posted by AgtSmith

Yeah, yeah, a big shiny gold +2 Armor of Uberness and all those sorts of things matter in games but I have always thought that it is really the little things that make a game something you play for a either a few weeks, months, or years.  So far Aion is a good game with an fun and interesting world.  Yeah, to world could be a bit more wide open but such is MMOs these days and it is not Conan type linear so good enough.  Combat is interesting enough and balance seems good enough to get up adn going and see how it shakes out.  But for all the core goodness of Aion there are those peripheral issues that are often clunky, incomplete, or just sub par.  I compiled a wish list of ten small things I would want to see addressed soon to take the game from good port of Korean grinder as we know its roots to be to possibly great NA/Euro in its own rights.  Now, before you flame by little things and say they matter not compared to class balance and blah, blah, blah I am not suggesting the following are the keys to millions of subs, rather, I am saying the following are the things that great games will have along with those other things.  It is just hard to spend months playing a game and all that time if you are always fighting small little UI issues or other such clumsiness.  So it is in that vein I offer these 10 things.

 

(paste from Aion boards):

1) Window position remember between play sessions and a way to copy keybinds, game settings, and window/UI layout to another character.

I agree to an extent with this but it doesn't bother me either way.

2) Mostly the UI is good as far as default UIs and even though there is a nice upper and lower option on the layout both pretty much suck position wise.  We need the target and player vitals to be movable like the group vitals are so we can choose out own layout.  This is a small thing but I wouldn't even consider PvP with the two mucked up layouts offered now both of which put vitals, skills/actions, and the gameplay in the screen center as far apart as possible making taking them all in at once very difficult.

 UI is perfectly fine imo, you just need to get used to it. However I'm sure future versions will allow further customisation. WOW was very rigid when first released too if i remember right (to use a common example).

3) Chat kind of sucks.  Why reinvent the wheel here - /t, /r to reply to tell, and other such common shortcuts are missing or otherwise slightly different enough from the norm to be a pain and for no reason.  Include all common ways so chat is something you can do without thinking.  Also, private channels, they disappear when you log out - they need to remain persistent to have any use whatsoever - this is a major social element needed especially for those of us not inclined to join big guilds who want to join several smaller guilds in a common channel of our creation.

 I'm sure they will improve the chat system further with future updates, it hasn't bothered me so far though tbh as I don't currently play other MMOs to compare it to.

4) Queues, they seem to be improving so keep on it.  Other than 5 - 10 minutes here or there queues are not really acceptable these days I don't think.

 I fully agree with this point, I've rolled on 2 servers and both seem to have 1000-3000 in the queue at peak times (UK).

5) Combat doesn't end when combat ends, this is very annoying and needs to be fixed.  Also, auto attack doesn't auto attack - it seems it breaks when you use a magic skill instead of a melee skill.  Either way it should work without fail.

Agreed, but the same happens in other MMOs, its hard to make such a complex, big game, completely without bugs. Again I'm sure they will be tweaking this over the coming patches.

6) Downtime between fights, OK if you want normal non combat recharge to be slow I can live with that.  but if you are sitting and resting then it should charge back up decently fast (mana too, no reason mana should take 5 times HP to recharge).

 I haven't had a problem at all with this. buy some food.

7) Attackable structures in game are only attackable with melee - fine for the non Sorcs but annoying anyways.  Anything that attacks should be able to attack these things and if you must do 1 HP dmg per hit no matter what then go ahead I suppose.

I would agree with this, but this fact doesn't bother me.

8) Gold spammers, fix this now no matter what it takes.  Not sure if it is the game's Korean roots but it is already to most spamtastic MMO ever and I have seen some spamtastic MMOs.  Sorry to burden you guys with this but that is what you get the subs for, fix it.  At a minimum we need a report spam and a block user on right click (and not a limited block ten and it is full I mean block one name so I never have to hear from it again period.

 Gold spammers will never be removed fully, they exist due to demand.

9) Right click.  Maybe NCsoft folks are all MAC users where you are not allowed two buttons on your mice because Steve Jobs has a bug up his arse that someone else stole that idea before he could steal it but in the Windows world, you know the 98% of the world that matters, we have this second button called right click.  HaHa, sarcasm off - you get my point already I am sure but right click avatar or name or item or whatever should ALWAYS give me all relevant options I could want for that right clicked thing (i.e. whisper to friend, add to friends list, block, report, invite, etc, etc, etc).  Right click is good, mmmkay.

Don't care...

10)  Remember me?  How about a remember me option on the web site / forums and on the game login.  Why type in my username each and every time I open the game or visit the site - annoying.  And speaking of the website, good work on the new site overall but it really is bugged up in many ways.  Firefox compatibility is pretty lame and a myriad of other issues I won't bother to specify other than one, forum subscriptions (you know the page you have in most forum user profiles that lists threads you have started or replied in - really necessary on a high volume board).

 Again this isn't a bother, use a browser that remembers log in info anyway to speed this up.

11)  And a bonus small thing?  HIGH QUALITY TEXTURES.  Aion looks pretty good and all but the textures are terrible even jacked all the way up.  I can understand you wanting the game to scale and all but for those of us who can handle it we need high quality textures as waht is in game really makes it look like a WoW landscape with modern MMO elements added on top.

This one is something I would love to see, hope they listen and give the users what they want...

The part not going out of battle is intended like that by ncsoft, clicking X will put your weapons in the pockets and you will no longer be in combat.

Aion is different then wow if you click on a skill FIRST you need to grab your weapons and THEN use the skill so it's intended like this and is better when you will start pvping in the abyss.

Originally posted by bloodaxes

The part not going out of battle is intended like that by ncsoft, clicking X will put your weapons in the pockets and you will no longer be in combat.

Aion is different then wow if you click on a skill FIRST you need to grab your weapons and THEN use the skill so it's intended like this and is better when you will start pvping in the abyss.

I didn't know that, good tip will  try that...

I'm really sorry if following hurts your feelings, but none of those are IMO needed.

To me it's refresing to learn a new way to do things (for example that in/out of combat) instead of repeating old patterns in a new graphical environment. New is new and everything that is different is good for the sake of change.

It's different way of doing something, not worse or better.

Yeah, I've never figured out why MMOs don't take the things that work and incorporate them.

Right click report for gold spammers is golden.

Reinventing the wheel for the sake of it is just dumb, and honestly can be worse.

On the argument thread about graphics, someone posted a modPak for the textures, so I guess it can be done.

--

Of course that you can mod an MMO should worry most folks. Not talking about the UI mind you, but the textures, voices, etc. Makes you wonder what they can't mod...

Regarding point 5.

Auto-attack turns off if you are stunned, knocked back, or interrupted in some way. This is not always obvious, but certain abilities or effects will turn auto-attack off. This is intentional.

Originally posted by AgtSmith

Yeah, yeah, a big shiny gold +2 Armor of Uberness and all those sorts of things matter in games but I have always thought that it is really the little things that make a game something you play for a either a few weeks, months, or years.  So far Aion is a good game with an fun and interesting world.  Yeah, to world could be a bit more wide open but such is MMOs these days and it is not Conan type linear so good enough.  Combat is interesting enough and balance seems good enough to get up adn going and see how it shakes out.  But for all the core goodness of Aion there are those peripheral issues that are often clunky, incomplete, or just sub par.  I compiled a wish list of ten small things I would want to see addressed soon to take the game from good port of Korean grinder as we know its roots to be to possibly great NA/Euro in its own rights.  Now, before you flame by little things and say they matter not compared to class balance and blah, blah, blah I am not suggesting the following are the keys to millions of subs, rather, I am saying the following are the things that great games will have along with those other things.  It is just hard to spend months playing a game and all that time if you are always fighting small little UI issues or other such clumsiness.  So it is in that vein I offer these 10 things.

 

(paste from Aion boards):

1) Window position remember between play sessions and a way to copy keybinds, game settings, and window/UI layout to another character.

 

2) Mostly the UI is good as far as default UIs and even though there is a nice upper and lower option on the layout both pretty much suck position wise.  We need the target and player vitals to be movable like the group vitals are so we can choose out own layout.  This is a small thing but I wouldn't even consider PvP with the two mucked up layouts offered now both of which put vitals, skills/actions, and the gameplay in the screen center as far apart as possible making taking them all in at once very difficult.

 

3) Chat kind of sucks.  Why reinvent the wheel here - /t, /r to reply to tell, and other such common shortcuts are missing or otherwise slightly different enough from the norm to be a pain and for no reason.  Include all common ways so chat is something you can do without thinking.  Also, private channels, they disappear when you log out - they need to remain persistent to have any use whatsoever - this is a major social element needed especially for those of us not inclined to join big guilds who want to join several smaller guilds in a common channel of our creation.

 

4) Queues, they seem to be improving so keep on it.  Other than 5 - 10 minutes here or there queues are not really acceptable these days I don't think.

 

5) Combat doesn't end when combat ends, this is very annoying and needs to be fixed.  Also, auto attack doesn't auto attack - it seems it breaks when you use a magic skill instead of a melee skill.  Either way it should work without fail.

 

6) Downtime between fights, OK if you want normal non combat recharge to be slow I can live with that.  but if you are sitting and resting then it should charge back up decently fast (mana too, no reason mana should take 5 times HP to recharge).

 

7) Attackable structures in game are only attackable with melee - fine for the non Sorcs but annoying anyways.  Anything that attacks should be able to attack these things and if you must do 1 HP dmg per hit no matter what then go ahead I suppose.

8) Gold spammers, fix this now no matter what it takes.  Not sure if it is the game's Korean roots but it is already to most spamtastic MMO ever and I have seen some spamtastic MMOs.  Sorry to burden you guys with this but that is what you get the subs for, fix it.  At a minimum we need a report spam and a block user on right click (and not a limited block ten and it is full I mean block one name so I never have to hear from it again period.

 

9) Right click.  Maybe NCsoft folks are all MAC users where you are not allowed two buttons on your mice because Steve Jobs has a bug up his arse that someone else stole that idea before he could steal it but in the Windows world, you know the 98% of the world that matters, we have this second button called right click.  HaHa, sarcasm off - you get my point already I am sure but right click avatar or name or item or whatever should ALWAYS give me all relevant options I could want for that right clicked thing (i.e. whisper to friend, add to friends list, block, report, invite, etc, etc, etc).  Right click is good, mmmkay.

10)  Remember me?  How about a remember me option on the web site / forums and on the game login.  Why type in my username each and every time I open the game or visit the site - annoying.  And speaking of the website, good work on the new site overall but it really is bugged up in many ways.  Firefox compatibility is pretty lame and a myriad of other issues I won't bother to specify other than one, forum subscriptions (you know the page you have in most forum user profiles that lists threads you have started or replied in - really necessary on a high volume board).

 

11)  And a bonus small thing?  HIGH QUALITY TEXTURES.  Aion looks pretty good and all but the textures are terrible even jacked all the way up.  I can understand you wanting the game to scale and all but for those of us who can handle it we need high quality textures as waht is in game really makes it look like a WoW landscape with modern MMO elements added on top.

Glad to say that I pretty much agree with what you have written here Agent, nice post.

Originally posted by Senadina

Regarding point 5.

Auto-attack turns off if you are stunned, knocked back, or interrupted in some way. This is not always obvious, but certain abilities or effects will turn auto-attack off. This is intentional.

It seems to happen consistently when you use magic, so if you are in melee then use magic you stop auto attacking.  There is nothing different enough in Aion to justify the way auto attack works so inconsistently in Aion is all I can say.

Originally posted by bloodaxes

The part not going out of battle is intended like that by ncsoft, clicking X will put your weapons in the pockets and you will no longer be in combat.

Aion is different then wow if you click on a skill FIRST you need to grab your weapons and THEN use the skill so it's intended like this and is better when you will start pvping in the abyss.

Having to manually end combat with the toggle combat action/hotbar is annoying, it should auto end of a couple secs at most.  Remember that combat is not just about weapons out or not (and for some class there are no weapons to even pull out), combat is a state and the switch should happen automatically to indicate to the player the status of that state.

i love this insane game

any gamer learning new stuff yet

HELL YA

the problem ,lot of those mecanic are learned the hard way

skil interrupting auto attack (good luck trying to find info about it somewhere

NIIICCCCEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Yeah.  Hey, I can understand on key core elements if you want to do X where everyone else does Y or Z.  But on things like I am talking about here there is no reason to do different than what players expect (i.e. no standard shortcuts in chat like /r to reply or whatnot).  In fact, good design dictates that you adopt common expectations where possible and in this regard Aion has problems.  There is not very much good info in game to teach about the things, core or otherwise, that are different and there are a great number of things outside core elements that are simply not intuitive or accommodating of players experience and expectation.

I hate to say it because it is the critique the haters toss around insultingly but the game has too many of the 'Korean Grinder' remnants to reach its great potential.  Good news is that the big stuff is good and just in need of these little type superfluous fit and finish type things to get there (provided normal development and management is on par with what you would expect).  It is like getting a great meal at a restaurant but reaching for your fork and seeing it is dirty and maybe the floor or tables is not cleaned.  Minor thing in terms of the difficulty of doing it right but the kind of small detail that overshadows the great meal.

I will add another thing, this one a core combat element so not such a 'little' thing.  MOBs have got to be adjusted/fixed so they have to follow the same line of sight and range rules as players.  It is terrible how much MOBs get to cheat in this regard and it breaks PvE in many cases as it is.

Mostly good points I think. But I'd exchange them all for just one thing: no addons.

Well, there are no add ons so not sure how you trade something not in for something already in.  ;-)

Multiple examine mouse-over windows plopping right on top of each other.

Another not so small thing that I have noticed quite a lot of, stick points all over the world.  This one is pretty bad in terms of a game that has been played for some time, even bad for a brand new game.

i love no add-on

i revove coord and map,and add first person view only server

Yea the gfx are horrid in this game and the sub-par gfx are a gamebreaker for me. I've seen better textures in WoW. (I have a evga gtx295 so I'm maxed out at 1900x1200)

I don't get why, if the game is capable of higher settings, they don't allow us to use them. This is one of the reasons I left WAR, the forced slowed animations at distance drove me nuts.

Sorry to say, but more I play the worse this game gets and the more I it seems like a Korean Grinder with a little lip service slapped on for the west.  Finally, nearing level 19 I get to an area where I can fly and fight, go figure that in a game where so much was made about flight.  What happens?  MOBs bug out and reset if you fly - but they keep aggro many times so they just go to full health why you are now weakened and mostly screwed as the fight continues with them reset and you as you where.  It is getting bad fast, I still maintain it could be a good game but it is more and more seeming that this is a game made for a different player base and MODed, roughly, to work here.

Hehe-the gold spammers have found Aion! I can't tell you how many "whispers" I'm now getting from the gold spammers! They just need to go away! They are nothing but annoying! Aion is not hard to make money in-or-to level

Here is another major annoyance, and one of those things that is so hard to believe it got live like it is.  First, the game client will not remember even your account name so you must type that and your password in each time you login.  Also, you auto join the server you last played on and there is no way to change that behavior.  The fun part of this stupid setting is that if your server is down you get to sit and wait like 5 to 10 minutes for that last server you joined to time out so the client can, now you would think I would say let you choose another server but no, so you can watch the game quit to the desktop.  So rinse and repeat and again you are screwed.  No way to join another server if the server you last played on is down???  It is kind of comical really.

Originally posted by dominia

Honestly, out of that whole list - the textures thing bothers me the most.

You can tweak the graphics through Nvidia control panel.