Originally posted by sacdeep

The combat mechanics are too static and clunky: far too many abilities root the player in place, there aren't many instant attacks/spells, and animations run long and prevent subsequent abilities from firing (example: a player casts a spell and it takes affect, then 0.5-1.0 seconds later the player is finally free to start the next ability or maneuver due to the long animations - in many cases even the next step in a skill chain is delayed because of this).

You know it's bad when abilities and effects are so slow that you often find yourself being struck by an attack that your opponent started one or two seconds previous, with you being a good ten-or-twelve body lengths away by the time it goes off. And no, this is not lag, it's by design (one of the most recent patch notes points this out).

I honestly can't believe this game is nearly two years old after witnessing this. It's 2009. This shit wouldn't have cut it in 2003.

This wasn't the case when I was playing Spiritmaster (in ChiOB and WestOB) and certainly isn't the case on my Assassin (lvl33).

But I did witness a lot of this kind of character behavior in WAR when I played it from OB for about a year (SMR40RR49, AMR40RR46, BWR40RR43).

And to those saying Aion is too much work and too little fun to play, to me it works great. WAR was like having sex with a prostitute, fun and no commitent. None of those characters I played felt like "me". Now I'm developing feelings towards my character in Aion and don't even plan to make an alt. To each their own, Aion does it for me.

Originally posted by Guillermo197

 

ROFL! The spam filter did nothing. It took the spammers less than a full hour to work around it and spam even harder.

At least on the EU servers it is worse as it ever has been.

They keep claiming that they banned bots. Just like they claimed it back then in Lineage 2.

Yet I still see more and more bots all over the place. Some of them I already see botting for weeks!

So give me a break. NCSoft isn't doing anything! Hence, they still don't even have 24/7 GM support. Even worse, here in EU we don't even have GM support at all!

Maybe you should have a look at Aionsource.com . Spam and botting is still the main subject of discussion there.

And people are getting more and more fed up each day.

After coming weekend for most of us the first 30 days is up. And I think it's going to be very quiet from next week on.

Cheers

Well, what can I say, before I'd log i and my chat would whiz by with gold seller spam and now I may get 1.

Do I need to actually fraps me logging in to prove that chat is not whizzing by?

Even the glyph like spam posts seem to have vanished. From my personal experience I concur that the spam filter works perfectly.

Originally posted by Xasapis

I didn't feel the need to grind levels to PvP once I reached 25. I even participated in sieges, which were a lot of fun both attacking and defending.

As for rifting, I don't know why people complained about PvP mixing with PvE. You can avoid people enemies rifting very easily. Perhaps the main reason is because they are more into spy objectives than actually grieving the enemy territory.

WAR PvP was great, but the server I was playing died under my feet. Aion population on the other hand doesn't show any sign of dropping in the same manner. Perhaps it's just too early, or perhaps the population retention rate is just better.

  Erm, you can't even hit the fortress mobs/higher level players on level 25. So basically you were just sitting there leeching other peoples kills :P

My main is a cleric. So the others were having the benefit of getting healed by me ;)

I've recently rolled a templar as well, but he's nowhere near 25 yet. I'll let you know how he plays at 25 when I reach the Abyss.

Hehe, clerics are always useful unless the enemy kills them :D

Originally posted by sacdeep

The combat mechanics are too static and clunky: far too many abilities root the player in place, there aren't many instant attacks/spells, and animations run long and prevent subsequent abilities from firing (example: a player casts a spell and it takes affect, then 0.5-1.0 seconds later the player is finally free to start the next ability or maneuver due to the long animations - in many cases even the next step in a skill chain is delayed because of this).

You know it's bad when abilities and effects are so slow that you often find yourself being struck by an attack that your opponent started one or two seconds previous, with you being a good ten-or-twelve body lengths away by the time it goes off. And no, this is not lag, it's by design (one of the most recent patch notes points this out).

I honestly can't believe this game is nearly two years old after witnessing this. It's 2009. This shit wouldn't have cut it in 2003.

All of these points can be refuted by watching a single Aion PvP video on Youtube. And yes it is lag because the patch that allows magic attacks to go off even if you are far away isn't even live yet. It's in testing on the Korean Test Server. There is a patch that may help you because of the settings aion uses Windows by default basically increases your ping by 200 . Turning this setting off reduced my ping from about 250ms to 40ms. I've noticed a huge difference since.

Not compareable. Aion smashes WAR like a bug when it comes to RvR (see what I did there?)

Currently level 34 in Aion and from my experience I had a lot more fun pvping in Warhammer than I have in Aion. You can go into specifics and mechanics all you want but in my opinion Warhammers pvp was a lot more enjoyable.

Originally posted by arenasb

Currently level 34 in Aion and from my experience I had a lot more fun pvping in Warhammer than I have in Aion. You can go into specifics and mechanics all you want but in my opinion Warhammers pvp was a lot more enjoyable.

Certainly from Level 1-25. I lasted a year playing Warhammer. Almost exclusively by leveling alts to mid-T2 and then rerolling.

I wouldn't have lasted 3 months with Aion. Play half the game to qualify to be ganked? Pass.

Originally posted by arenasb

Currently level 34 in Aion and from my experience I had a lot more fun pvping in Warhammer than I have in Aion. You can go into specifics and mechanics all you want but in my opinion Warhammers pvp was a lot more enjoyable.

You think so? Man, I really disagree.  If anything, the way this game plays out to me is as fun as Warhammer was in the early tiers of the game.  Not any better but not any worse.

In fact, much as I liked the scenarios in Warhammer I'm glad this game doesn't have those so people are continually fighting all over the Abyss in areas the way it was meant to be in Warhammer until people realized it was much easier and productive time wise to simply do scenario after scenario.

However, they do seem to have issues with fortress battles just like Warhammer.  I was hoping someone would finally have this together if they had it available in game.  Apparently not, so unless there is other ways for them to fix the problems they are probably going to have to go the same route Warhammer did far as limiting the amount of people taht can participate in them.

Originally posted by raykor

I don’t have much PvP experience in fantasy-themed MMOGs as I’m not a big fan of the whole auto-targeting style of combat. Nonetheless, I love MMOGs and the lack of a decent PvP-centric Sci-Fi title convinced me to give WAR and Aion a test spin since both claimed to offer a strong focus on PvP.

There are a lot of possible comparison which could be made between these two games but I only want to address the actual PvP combat.

I tried WAR at release but only played for two months. There were plenty of mistakes made with that game BUT I was very surprised at how much fun the actual PvP combat was. My main made it to 33 and I leveled several other classes into the high teens and a few into the 20s. In those two months, I spent dozens and dozens of hours in the RvR lakes and scenarios and while there were certainly some class balance issues, the actual PvP combat was a blast!

I remember following the development of WAR and reading that there were several very important decisions being made to ensure a fun PvP experience.

1. Losing control of your character. The WAR devs said they didn’t like it when players lost control of their characters during PvP combat and I agree with them wholeheartedly. Now sure, WAR had plenty of knockbacks, roots, and slows but no sleep, fear, or stun-locks. In Aion, you can die in PvP without ever being able to fire-off a single skill. Aion is swamped with abilities that cause you to lose control over your character and I can’t say I enjoy it at all.

2. Level difference. War did a good job of offering a fair PvP experience for characters of all levels. I had a crapload of fun in tiers 1 & 2 with a variety of characters. Aion is the classic race to reach high levels so you can gank players that are much lower than you. I realize that this is a temporary problem until the majority of the playerbase reaches the level cap; however, given the extreme level grind in Aion, this will be a problem for quite some time. It also makes the prospect of leveling alts very unappealing when an army of 50s will dominate the Abyss.

3. Gear dependence. Gear in WAR mattered but not nearly as much as it does in Aion. There are some incredibly game-breaking golds in Aion and that doesn’t even begin to address the incredible grind required for Abyss-level gear that gives even greater advantages in PvP combat. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to throw at this game, you should fully expect to face players with significant gear-based advantages and you will lose a whole lot more often than you would if it were based primarily on your skill.

4. Performance. Aion is currently experiencing a big problem with a memory leak in the Cry engine. I have tried to participate in several fortress sieges but it turns into a 10-15 FPS slideshow that crashes the client in short order. (Yes, I have a strong PC and anyone familiar with the game knows this problem has nothing to do with a user’s system specs.)

 

The bottom line for me—your mileage may vary—is that after five weeks in Aion, I have had very little fun PvPing whereas in the same timeframe in WAR I had a whole lot of fun. I’ll probably keep playing for a while and see if it gets any better but at the moment, I feel like I am just grinding in hopes that a fun game will materialize somewhere down the line.
 

So what's your story?  Are you a WAR fanboy or getting some compensationr?  Cause your post is ridiculous.

1.  WAR is notorious for overwhelming CC which evaporated whole warbands.  How about those Bright Wizard AoE disables & stuns which made you stand there frozen unable to do anything for 5 seconds (or more).  I do not think there is any other game which took it to an extreme that Warhammer did.  Which by theway, was 100% contrary to what the developers promised.

2.  I do not even know what your point is.  In Warhammer you had to progress and had no way to stop, really.  The final goal was city sieges, so yes, there was a race to the top as well.  Especially once you hit level 30s, which is where the fun wore off so you pretty much had to try to hit lvl 40 for the endgame.

3.  There is little difference in gear dependence in the two games.  The only reason one would even perceive a difference, is because gear itemization in Warhammer is borderline retarded for many of the classes.

4.  This has got to be joke.  Aside from the CC/AoE nonsense, Warhammer is even more notorious for its horrific performance.  Do you know the main reason why so many from War flocked to Aion?  STABLE CLIENT!  Warhammer's client is a joke (although I heard they finally made a decent patch to fix it).  Forget 10-15fps, the game would be at sub 5fps when two warbands collided.  Crashes were common.  How about the server crash that a certain Order guild used to exploit on Dark Crag by flooding the zone with low levels whenever they started losing ground?  Please.

The bottom line is that you are either lying, blinded with fanboy love for War OR are relatively new to Warhammer.  You must be still having a blast in T1 and T2, which is, a blast.  But it only last so long and the rest of the game is still kinda fail. 

I do hear they are making progress, and while a part of me has some hope, I highly doubt they will make enough progress to save the population.  My old server, which was the top one at the beginning of summer, is near dead. 

Originally posted by Hydroblunt

So what's your story?  Are you a WAR fanboy or getting some compensationr?  Cause your post is ridiculous.

1.  WAR is notorious for overwhelming CC which evaporated whole warbands.  How about those Bright Wizard AoE disables & stuns which made you stand there frozen unable to do anything for 5 seconds (or more).  I do not think there is any other game which took it to an extreme that Warhammer did.  Which by theway, was 100% contrary to what the developers promised.

2.  I do not even know what your point is.  In Warhammer you had to progress and had no way to stop, really.  The final goal was city sieges, so yes, there was a race to the top as well.  Especially once you hit level 30s, which is where the fun wore off so you pretty much had to try to hit lvl 40 for the endgame.

3.  There is little difference in gear dependence in the two games.  The only reason one would even perceive a difference, is because gear itemization in Warhammer is borderline retarded for many of the classes.

4.  This has got to be joke.  Aside from the CC/AoE nonsense, Warhammer is even more notorious for its horrific performance.  Do you know the main reason why so many from War flocked to Aion?  STABLE CLIENT!  Warhammer's client is a joke (although I heard they finally made a decent patch to fix it).  Forget 10-15fps, the game would be at sub 5fps when two warbands collided.  Crashes were common.  How about the server crash that a certain Order guild used to exploit on Dark Crag by flooding the zone with low levels whenever they started losing ground?  Please.

The bottom line is that you are either lying, blinded with fanboy love for War OR are relatively new to Warhammer.  You must be still having a blast in T1 and T2, which is, a blast.  But it only last so long and the rest of the game is still kinda fail. 

I do hear they are making progress, and while a part of me has some hope, I highly doubt they will make enough progress to save the population.  My old server, which was the top one at the beginning of summer, is near dead. 

I played Warhammer for a year, and your analysis of its problems is a sound one.

Originally posted by Timzilla

I think if you had played well into T4 in WAR you might have different take. Stun-locks and CC in general was one of the top 3 or 5 reasons we bailed on WAR. True, you did get to play some awesome PvP in that game for 32 levels or so. The best pvp in the biz, imo. Then you got rewarded by having your game turned off at level 33.

Perhaps, but like I said in my post, I only made it to level 33 before quitting WAR. I never experienced any of this massive CC in the first three tiers.

My post is a comparison of my personal experience PvPing in both games in the early levels.  During the first six weeks in each game, I had an absolute blast PvPing in WAR and very little fun in Aion.  Obviously, the experience is likely different for others but this is my experience.

Originally posted by Dreken

As far as gear dependence I think Warhammer's was worse as you needed to have as much gear from a previous instance or renown rank or you would get an automatic stacking debuff that would cause you to take more damage in the next instance.

I didn't do many dungeon runs in my two months in WAR, but I believe this "ward" system you are referring to only applied to PvE instances and as such is not at all relevant to my comment about gear dependence in PvP.

Originally posted by Dreken

As far as PVP the RVR in Warhammer was extremely broken (I only played for 9 months after release so it may be different now.) It was near impossible to lock down areas on the map even after capturing all the capture points and keeps. I remember spending an entire weekend trying to lock down Praag and we had every point captured and didn't lose one for 10 hours yet the bar to lock down the zone never pushed through to actually locking it down. Also trying to attack a keep that was defended was pointless as the defenders even half the size of your force that was attacking was more than enough to defend a keep successfully because of how overpowered defense seige weapons are especially the burning oil which led to the sad trend of guilds and pick up groups only capturing undefended keeps. The funny part of that is for our server that my guild would coordinate with the opposite faction via the server's IRC channel and just keept rotating on capturing undefended keeps for renown farming.

My post was not a comparison of each game's RvR system.  I agree with you that WAR's RvR system was very broken and is the number one reason I quit that game after only two months.  But whenever I did manage to find some PvP action in WAR, it was a whole lot of fun and THAT is indeed the point of my post.

I was not comparing RvR design but rather the actual combat experience in the initial six week period and for me, WAR's was a lot of fun and Aion's is not nearly so.

Originally posted by Aleste

1- Dont even compare Aion's perfomance to Warhammer's performance, and dont bother comparing them graphically either. Warhammer is well know-known to perform poorly, you only need to check there forums and make a census of Performance related opinions. A recent poll at Warhhameralliance stated Client/Server performance as the thing that is mostly in need of fixing in addition to Class balance.

If you were to tell me that WAR performed poorly for you and Aion runs great then I have no reason not to believe you.

In WAR, I could participate in open-field skirmishes of 30-40 people with absolutely zero lag and in 100+ player sieges with only minimal stuttering.  I never crashed a single time.

In Aion, my screen begins to stutter with only a handful of enemies in the area and turns into a total slide-show with the eventual crash at every single fortress siege.  Needless to say, PvPing is not very much fun under these conditions.

This is how the two games have performed on my personal system.  It is a fact and not open to debate.

It is also a fact that I am not alone in this experience as it is well documented on many forums and has even been acknowledged by the NC Soft staff.

Originally posted by raykor

Originally posted by Timzilla

I think if you had played well into T4 in WAR you might have different take. Stun-locks and CC in general was one of the top 3 or 5 reasons we bailed on WAR. True, you did get to play some awesome PvP in that game for 32 levels or so. The best pvp in the biz, imo. Then you got rewarded by having your game turned off at level 33.

 

Perhaps, but like I said in my post, I only made it to level 33 before quitting WAR. I never experienced any of this massive CC in the first three tiers.

My post is a comparison of my personal experience PvPing in both games in the early levels.  During the first six weeks in each game, I had an absolute blast PvPing in WAR and very little fun in Aion.  Obviously, the experience is likely different for others but this is my experience.

I agreed with Timzilla, War is as horrible as it can be for a PvP game prior to patch 1.3.2 which was too late for me.  T1-T3 was NOT that fun, don't understand why people said "It's so much fun" when you are just running around like a headless chicken with limited skills and most of time just try to leech xp and RR out of a SC or RvR rewards.  6 weeks in a game is not LONG enough to compare anything.  I played War for a year and it was NOT that great.  Why did I play for a year?  Because I like my guild and we all moved to Aion.  Is Aion that great?  No, but it's acceptable, now we are at 40s in Aion.

Originally posted by teco221 

T1-T3 was NOT that fun, don't understand why people said "It's so much fun" when you are just running around like a headless chicken with limited skills and most of time just try to leech xp and RR out of a SC or RvR rewards.  6 weeks in a game is not LONG enough to compare anything. 

....

Is Aion that great?  No, but it's acceptable, now we are at 40s in Aion.

Some people like country music and for others techno is the bomb. To each his own.

For me, Tiers 1-3 in WAR were a lot of fun with regards to the actual PvP combat. But remember that I quit in only two months so I was already keenly aware of WAR's many shortcomings—particularly the whole RvR system.

I am at level 38 so far in Aion and hoping it gets better but my post was motivated by my growing apathy towards the game. I am reaching the point where I don't want to log on and the extremely bad performance issue (at least for me) might be the final straw if it is not fixed soon.

Originally posted by sacdeep

The combat mechanics are too static and clunky: far too many abilities root the player in place, there aren't many instant attacks/spells, and animations run long and prevent subsequent abilities from firing (example: a player casts a spell and it takes affect, then 0.5-1.0 seconds later the player is finally free to start the next ability or maneuver due to the long animations - in many cases even the next step in a skill chain is delayed because of this).

You know it's bad when abilities and effects are so slow that you often find yourself being struck by an attack that your opponent started one or two seconds previous, with you being a good ten-or-twelve body lengths away by the time it goes off. And no, this is not lag, it's by design (one of the most recent patch notes points this out).

I honestly can't believe this game is nearly two years old after witnessing this. It's 2009. This shit wouldn't have cut it in 2003.

Exactly!  The actual combat experience—besides being extremely laggy for me—just doesn't "feel" right.  My primary PvP experience is in FPS games but I was very surprised at how fun the combat in WAR was.  It was very fluid, and while I was often slowed, rooted, or knocked back, it all felt very manageable.  I was never being slept, feared, chain-stun-locked, or flung up in the air completely incapable of doing anything but just watching the screen.

Originally posted by FastTx 

There is a patch that may help you because of the settings aion uses Windows by default basically increases your ping by 200 . Turning this setting off reduced my ping from about 250ms to 40ms. I've noticed a huge difference since.

Where is this magic patch because my ping—when NOT lagging—is 250-400 ms.  Granted, I am playing from the West Coast and I know the servers are all on the East Coast so I figured this was the best I could do.