Originally posted by medmarijuana

Originally posted by Redcor

I think its official poor judgment on the server merges has people running for the hills. Let other mmo's look on this disaster as a list of things not to do. R.I.P

 Yes , the most played game in asia and europe really cares about whether or not less Americans play the game.  They probably hope they can shut down the american servers so they don't have to deal with them anymore.

    actually its not just the Americans, but also the Europeans, calling it the most played game in Asia and Europe is a bit misleading..  in Asia perhaps it is one of the top ones (debateable) but in Europe it definitely isnt. European and American trends are likely to be very similar.

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Originally posted by medmarijuana

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Originally posted by Redcor
I think its official poor judgment on the server merges has people running for the hills. Let other mmo's look on this disaster as a list of things not to do. R.I.P

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 Yes , the most played game in asia and europe really cares about whether or not less Americans play the game.  They probably hope they can shut down the american servers so they don't have to deal with them anymore.

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I'm starting to believe this is the case.

In some respects it would make perfect sense from a purely corporate view: less resources devoted to manage or allocate to a marginal, shrinking market that grows smaller each day in the West, new MMOs releasing they have to worry about launching/running, etc. All the while, they would still have their original main target audience, the East, still paying handsomely for content and happy with the hardcore aspect of leveling and merciless pvp.

A telling sign is that when new players (and some old ones) complained about the constant ganking due to gear/level differences and asked NCSoft to do something to curb it, what was NCSoft's response? Color coding, lol.

As if the people who enjoy ganking and killing players many levels under them would go "Oh, he's a low level target according to his color title. I don't think I'll kill him." Most people in AION just kill you regardless because youare of the opposite faction. You cannot leave something this serious up to "player's discretion" expecting them to "police themselves".

I have a feeling the Eastern market is okay with the level ganking, but Westerners don't like it and many have quit because of not enough controls. (did the AION East market get color coding added when we did? I doubt it)

Having to continually do those types of things to a different market (West) that is not growing (AION is not growing, it's shrinking) is taxing on a company. They'd rather have resources doing things to keep the growing/profitable bases strong; not please the weaker market.

It's almost easier to make a case for NCSoft wanting to shut the West down than to keep it open at times.

Originally posted by medmarijuana

Originally posted by Redcor

I think its official poor judgment on the server merges has people running for the hills. Let other mmo's look on this disaster as a list of things not to do. R.I.P

 Yes , the most played game in asia and europe really cares about whether or not less Americans play the game.  They probably hope they can shut down the american servers so they don't have to deal with them anymore.

And I still ahve the Aion Collectors set sitting on my shelf, only opened it to get the figure out of it.....

Originally posted by Obidom

And I still ahve the Aion Collectors set sitting on my shelf, only opened it to get the figure out of it.....

Yea NC Soft did one thing right.. They prolly made the coolest case ever for a video game.. That tin case is awsome.. i still have mine too, even tho i've attempted to sale it on craigslist a few times w/o any luck lol.

Originally posted by Hellfyre420

Originally posted by Obidom

And I still ahve the Aion Collectors set sitting on my shelf, only opened it to get the figure out of it.....

Yea NC Soft did one thing right.. They prolly made the coolest case ever for a video game.. That tin case is awsome.. i still have mine too, even tho i've attempted to sale it on craigslist a few times w/o any luck lol.

You have the standard edition which is a tin case...   my version of the game however is a large cardboard box with plenty of junk in it.

And who the hell buys a second hand MMO?!

Or were you trying to sell your account?

Laughing at you for getting zilch for that piss-poor excuse of a game.

And I even bought the collectors edition and played the full game some five days before the rest of you.

Bleh!

Aion China was dead before the US release last year, I know that b/c alot of us played the chinese version before the US was launched.    There are tons of free asian mmo coming out each year, there is no way for Aion to survive with high pay to play fee so most of the Asia sub are pretty much from Korea only.

Cutting off the appeals process one day before the free return weekend was dirty pool. It showed contempt for former subscribers, as though we are not real customers. Never mind most people who bought Aion will buy from NCsoft again, and a good number of us probably subscribe to some other NCsoft product, or at least play Guild Wars.

I didn't lose any names so I don't much care, but it tells me I could invest a lot of time in one of my characters, take a break to play something else, come back and find the name taken. (Then again, last time I did that my account got stolen and then banned, somehow without NCsoft's system informing me of changes to the password and payment information.)

I wonder how many people actually reupped this week. Personally three days just doesn't tell me anything. I'm not going to spend 10-15 hours of my weekend finding out if it's a good vibe or not. No one even talks in this game anymore. Was it just a slow part of the day? I guess I'll never find out.

Faction mmo's are hard to pull off,  Thats what I take from the game.

Originally posted by stayontarget

Faction mmo's are hard to pull off,  Thats what I take from the game.

It's crazy that DAoC was the last game (for me) to get faction-based PvP right. Maybe it was the third playable faction that did it, or the fact that the PvP areas were large enough that a you could hide a raid sized force in it and people could avoid getting steamrolled. That was old frontiers of course.

I think the fault wth Aion was that the abyss was open to all levels. That  is what made it unpalatable to those arriving late to the party. I was in the first wave(headstart - and still lost my name after the server merge NCSoft!) and still the abyss was a no-go place solo and that was before there were any level 50s.

Plus the Balaur were not the unpredicatble, savvy AI race they had touted to be. Not like the pesky Hibernians for sure.

Maybe they can look to the good things in games like DAoC(battlegrounds etc.) to improve this game and remove the bad things (grind). But I think it's too late to turn the ship around (again) NCSoft.

NCSoft = EPIC Fail

I bet they will find a way to screw up GW2.

I've played Aion CBT, OBT and Retail, and all I say is, Aion failed the moment they introduced the PvE maps. Aion is supposed to be PvPvE! Not a Fvcking PvE Game. The point system is crap, you lose more that you gain. Raiding became SO useless. We used to raid during CBT and OBT and we were having so much fun, and during retail all that fun was sucked out by ncsoft. This game failed me, I even bought the CE because I liked the game. Lack of End-game content, Just farm mats, sell in auction house and RMT.  Although I hated this game for failing my expectations, they won for the best background music in any of the 30+ mmorpg I've played.

About the merge - It was a good and bad idea because both servers needed more people, but it was a bad idea choosing the server with the best Elyos and merging it with the  server with the worst Asmo.

Originally posted by sadeyx

Server mergers are nessesary.

There are very few MMO's that dont end up merging servers.

 

Often the mistake is to leave merging servers too late.

Often the mistake is having too many servers in the first place. 

I think Op is refferring to the essential disregard for population sides with the merges.  If you were previously on an elyos dominated server, now your really fucked as an asmo.

Merges were fine, the part they screwed up was as follows.

1. Some of the servers merged caused a natural imbalance, and werent the best choices.
2. When they merged, they gave everyone a free transfer, however, they didnt restrict these transfers, so everyone bandwaggoned and we now have MAJOR side balance issues
3. Add on to this that they killed transfers before they completed, so you now have guilds and friends split and on two different servers...

My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.

I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why.  He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP. 

Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players. 

Originally posted by Kyleran

My son slowly, patiently leveled up his character to 50 over the past 9 months and just got their a few weeks ago.

I saw him playing WOW last evening and asked why.  He said Aion was getting boring and that since the server merges (which did increase player populations) his faction is entirely overrun by the other side in PVP. 

Unless the Elyos don't show, his side can't take a keep because they are buried under an avalanche of opposing players. 

I still play both wow and Aion, but currently I switched back to Aion.  I agree about the imbalance issue.  The good news is so does NCSoft...they are outright admitting that things are imbalanced due to player choices.  For the issues that have concerned me the most, they have been pretty good about addressing them.  For now, it's kind of a waiting game.  Although, on my server (I play Asmo) when we actually do take something we feel like we won the super-bowl! LOL.  Lot's of partying goes on because it's a rare occurence.

Of course, I feel the same way when the horde on my wow server actually take wintergrasp too :P.

"NCSoft = EPIC Fail

I bet they will find a way to screw up GW2"

Blah blah blah! do better =**

No suprise there. Since when has NCSoft ever produced a game worth playing? OH YEA! NEVER!

Fortunately ArenaNet is much more independent of NCSoft than the teams running their other MMO's.  GW2 will do just fine, like GW.