Too bad I couldn't ask him quesions because there are three I would like to ask:

1. Are you guys aware you have a forum and do you ever plan on using it for informative purposes, communicating with players, and using stickies so people don't post the same issues/questions over and over?

2. Is someone looking into the issues a lot seem to be having in fortress battles such as constant crashing or serious lag even though they are using a pc at the recommended settings the company said was neeeded or better?

3. Followup to the bot quesion: So if you do have these tools in place to catch botters is there some serious work being done to improve these functions or hiring additional staff seeing how some have gone on botting for weeks now even though they are being reported?

I'm really enjoying this game but the level of support I'm seeing it get from NCSoft is very dissappointing and there are some areas that need looking into sooner rather than later.  It's a good game, but it could be a lot better even in it's current condition if more of an effort was made by NCSoft from a customer service/support angle.

Originally posted by macmall

Name me ONE MMO that didn't have bot's at release? You don't like cheaters? Holy shit your up for a rude awaking son, the whole world cheats dude, look around! From baseball to wall-street they all cheat,lie and steal don't fool yourself.

Its a game too btw, its not life and death and its just $60 so get over it man.......

The game is great and if you let Bot's ruin it for you, its your own fault man. There will always be cheaters in every game no matter what, the key is to ignore them and have FUN!

If ppl cheat let them cheat, your not a cheat that's the only thing that matters dude, they have to live with the fact that there not good enough so they have to cheat......if you ask me I would not want that on my shoulders.........

I would rather finish last and not cheat then be first and cheat:P

In all fairness, he does have a point though.  You're right that there are people that bot in all of these game but right now it is out of control in this game least on my server.  I'm still playing the game and enjoying myself but NCSoft needs to start cracking down on these guys. They're everywhere and there are some that I have seen running around now for two weeks that I somehow doubt I'm the only one reporting them for botting.

It's not like it's difficult to spot most of them.  I know they need to investigate to ensure someone they ban is actually botting but give me a break.  Frankly, the way they're handling things between their forums and in game it seems to me they are currently understaffed for what they need to accomplish.

Definitely agree with this one.  Seems almost like you have a 50/50 shot of even getting a green item from a boss mob kill let alone something better.  Rather weak to go through something and kill one or more bosses and no one walks away with anything to speak of.

Especially the rare boss spawns in areas.  Hehe, was helping some guildies run through Eracus Temple the other day and we were fortunate enough for two of these bosses to be up.  One had nothing on him and the other had a green material crating item that dropped.  That was it.

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 maji

I don't quite get the point of this thread.

So the OP says: WAR was hyped up and then bashed, AoC was hyped up and then bashed, Aion was hyped up and then... well, now many people dislike it as well.

So what? It's always the same. Games get hyped up, people get excited, believe everything they see, and if they don't know something about the game they simply assume that the best possible thing they can imagine will happen. Of course people get disappointed.

 

Or you say WAR is bad, AoC is bad, Aion is good?
Then what? Saying that I can't decide wether I like Aion or not unless I played it is not quite true. As an analogy: if I dislike bananas and I dislike cucumber, and someone hands me a cucumber-banana salad, then I probably can say that I won't like it even before trying it, simply by combining what I know about the subject with the experiences I had and drawing my conclusions.

 

Telling people to ignore everyone who says something that is not all sweet and sugar about the game, and buy it nonetheless, is no good advice. The game is not perfect, it is having it's issues, and it is for many people not MMORPG-heaven. So telling them to ignore everything that's no hype or praise and buy it nonetheless is something between a bad advice and an attempt to make them waste their money, IE spending their money on stuff where they don't know if they like it or not.

 

I'm not saying Aion is horrible, I just think the way things turned out is nothing new. Lots of hype, and then many people realize it's not as great. Sure, for some it's perfect, for many it's not, as with most games.

 

Yeah...but these forums?  Give me a break, whether it's to the positive or negative people are so emotional over this game that someone interested would be better off staying the hell away from here because neither side, for the most part, is really being impartial.  I agree with your sentiment but frankly much as I like coming here to pass the time and this site can be good for getting the drop on some info in relation to a game you may be interested in; far as coming here to decide if a game is for you or not?
 

Yeah, good luck with that one.

 There are a few around here that give an honest go at how they feel about the game whether it's what one would consider recommending the game or being dissappointed and forewarning others of what to expect.  Most though are throwing around either complete bullshit or severe exaggerations. Hell, some of them haven't even played the damn thing or very little if they did at all.  It's rather apparent from some of their comments.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

You're being a bit silly here.

I can't think of one major MMO title in the past 10 years that has withheld patches internationally. WoW comes to mind, but it's been well publicized that the delay in releasing WotLK in China was due to their slightly odd laws rather than being the choice of the developer.

No, I'm sure that any patches and/or expansions that Aion gets will come to the NA/EU markets too.

The OPs concerns seemed to be more in regards to the lack of customer service and NCSoft's seeming inability to adequately deal with the problem of spammers and botters on the NA servers and provide technical support via websites/forums, etc.

That's a pretty valid concern, imo.

Don't mind Zorndorf.  He's probably just still pissed his topic about how Cake Mania was the best selling pc game per Amazon.com  was deleted.

Originally posted by junzo316

That didn't take long for them to return.  It seems they need to find a more permanent solution to the gold spamming.  It'll be interesting to see what they try next...lol...It's becoming like a soap opera.

It's not like this is the first game to go through these problems.  Of course, it would be nice if for once a goddamn company was proactive rather than reactive, but I give up with these compaines any more actually setting up these types of things ahead of time or listening to people that warn them to have things in place before they go live.

Originally posted by FastTx

They need to disable the use of those characters in Aion.

Definitely agree.

Originally posted by heartless

^^^ is the first thing I saw when I logged on earlier today. The chat was being spammed nonstop. Besides that, I see a lot more private shops with gold buying information.

It isn't nearly as bad as it was but given time now that they found a way around it probably will get just as bad. NCSoft is going to have to tweak their chat code to block them out too as well as those now using .net in their message to get around NCSoft's last "fix".

They seriously need to consider having a separate chat channel for the starting areas and not allowing players to send tells or have access to any of the global channels until after they complete all the campaign and the ascension quests in the starting area as well.

Originally posted by //\\//\\oo

Games like AoC might have failed, but they tried to do something new with combat: 

I really don't see what was so special about AoC combat.  It used combos like a lot of other games do any more.  The only thing that stood out to me is at the time I hadn't really encountered many other games that used collision detection which made things interesting in PvP since you could actually strategize more how to go about attacking or defending.

Hell, some classes like the pom I played didn't even have hardly any combos.

I do miss fatalities though.  Even though the pom, since you mostly casted your way through killing, was rather boring.  Some of the other classes had some pretty sweet ones. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say Aion is something new either.  When I think of something new and varied combat wise I think of games like TCoS.  Granted the game failed horribly but from a combat perspective it was definitely something different compared to the norm.

Originally posted by jonezi92

Yeh i ordered the game a few days ago after waiting a few weeks at the results and im impressed, many haters and many fanboi's but. I'm just going to ignore them and focus on what matters for me not other people and just go for it :)

 

I love PvP and by the sounds of things im looking forward to PvP'ing a Temp/Sin

Hope you enjoy it.

Yeah, really hard to get a fair impression of this game from these forums.

Originally posted by Timzilla

I don't think that's it at all. Many of us enjoy grinders when they are interesting and fun. The game play in WAR and WOW is actually fun. Each toon has a variety of skills to use and the game presents a variety of situations for mixing skills. Aion has maybe 2 or 3 hotkeys that you repeat over and over again for every encounter. It's boring. WAR lets you feel like you're playing the end game right out of the box. Aion leaves no doubt that the end-game is where the game begins, only you have to waste your time grinding for a month or more before you get to play it. Oh, and woe is he who ain't there first because he'll get owned by everyone in front of him. There's no cultural bias in preferring to play something that's fun over something that's not fun.

I use a lot more than 2-3 hotkeys in fights.  Sounds like you're talking about the early levels to me not how the game is in general and you do get the ability to mix up skills later on through the use of stigma stones.  Granted the trees in Warhammer and WoW allow for more room to mix and match in my opinion.

Gameplay in this game is just as fun as it was in WoW.  Better than Warhammer in my opinion since you don't have cc out the ass although I do miss that in Warhammer you could PvP from the start.

...and I'm not in front and seem to be doing just fine in PvP so not sure where you're getting that at.

Originally posted by Sacfed

 Just play with your friends in your guild, and think of bots as mob crowd control.

Really not an option right now because there is only one other player around my level and he refuses to do quests unless they are specifically at his exact level.

I'm not going to preach doom and gloom here, but I can't completely dismiss them either.  They do make it hard to complete quests in areas that they swarm over and considering how much higher level they are than the mobs they're killing you can't even ks from them much.  Not to mention the adverse effect they're going to have on the economy if this is allowed to continue plus I don't want to see people get frustrated over this and end up quitting the game.

I really enjoy this game, but it would behoove NCSoft to get cracking on these knuckleheads.  I'm not saying they aren't but there have been quite a few I've been seeing running around for quite some time now that are still at it. I report them but I'm starting to wonder what the point is because there are a few I've seen for at least a week now that are still out and about.  Hell, the asmos on our server (I play Elyos) even know who a lot of them are now because they can tell from how they react (or lack thereof) when they swarm through a rift and attack.

Originally posted by popinjay

I actually did this to a Cleric who tried to gank attack after while I was near one of our forts we controlled. I used Inescapable Judgment on the cleric when she got too close, and pulled it right into our guard's aggro range and she got toasted bad... and quick lol. Since I didn't kill her, I know her bill was heavy. The only caveat to this is that if you are overly concerned about PvP rankings (which I am not), you possibly suffer with point loss and your name won't be up in lights on the forums as "E-peen of the Month" or whatever accolades come with it.

You don't incur xp debt when you die to the opposing faction's guards.  It's treated the same as being killed by another player.

Originally posted by parrotpholk

 However from a purely economic standpoint it sucks because it runs off all the OMG I have no time to catch up crowd.

Eh, long as enough stay for them to still put an effort into fixing problematic areas in the game and adding content I'm perfectly content iwth the "OMG I have no time to catch up crowd" moving on so technically that's still a positive to me : P

Just kidding though, I get what you mean.

Originally posted by Timzilla

 I kinda want to give Aion a chance, but already canceled due to NCSoft supporting RMT.

Wtf?  Where do you people come up with some of this shit?

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Let me first state that I loved this game and beta, and enjoy every aspect of what it could be. But having a 35 cleric, realizing that it wasn't for me and now a 31 ranger.

The amount of bots have become so ridiculous that it is becoming very difficult for legit players to even level up or complete quests. The game world in AION already suffers from being a bit small in comparison to most games, factor that in with the overabundance of bots that take up more than their fair share of the virtual real-estate, and you have a recipe for disaster.

I've been playing MMO's back since UO and have never seen a game with such a high bot:player ratio as AION. It's quite obvious to almost every legit player that the issue has skyrocketed out of hand, and is beyond past the point where it should have been adressed. I play on the Siel/Asmodian server and on my 31 ranger am having severe difficulty even finding mobs to grind because EVERY spot is being camped 24/7 by bots.

I find this very disappointing because I enjoy the game very much, and don't even mind that it's a tad grindy. However, I probably woln't be resubbing because the bots have become so overpopulated that the game borders on being unplayable.

I have to agree.  The amount of bots is really getting out of hand.  They really need to get something going on cracking down on these players.  I was in Herion the other day and granted it was really late but I was the only live player in the jungle/swamp area. 

It was quite entertaining though, I will say, when a rift opened and asmos came pouring in and killed the bots over and over again because they kept insta ressing and running straight back into the slaughter over and over again.  I actually encountered my first aether gathering bot last night as well : /

Originally posted by raykor

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.)
 

1.  You're joking right? Unless they recently changed that game the amount of roots, snares, stuns, etc.  was downright hilarious in T3/4.  A hell of a lot more than Aion, and you could be killed without getting off a skill in Warhammer.  I did it many times to players as well as had the favor returned to me so not sure where you get this from.

2.  No argument here.  While I think the leveling curve in Warhammer was a bit too low their system allowed you to get into PvP from level 1 and the variety of zones made it a lot easier to contemplate rolling alts.

3. I'm not going to argue over which game is more gear dependant over the other one.  They both are.  Trying to say one is better or worse than the other because one relies on it more or less is silly to me.  If the gear didn't matter at all that would be one thing but both games are dependant on itemization so really a wash here.

4. At least the server isn't crashing like it did in Warhammer with the big fortress battles.  Other than that seems like major deja vu to a point when it comes to large scale warfare in both of these games.  Warhammer's solution was limiting how many people could participate in the battles among other things.  We'll see what NCsoft has to do.  Right now performances in the sieges is a lagfest but it wasn't any different in Warhammer either and like I said least the server doesn't crash which is more than what EA accomplished in the first few months of that game.  Pretty much a wash either way right now far as I'm concerned on this point too. 

Originally posted by Sovrath

 

One of the things they can do is pull enemies to them. I can't tell you how many times i've seen the enemy try to lure us into range only to have one of them come a bit too close and the Templar pull him right into us. Slowly but surely they realized that they were vastly outnumbered due to attrition.

I love that ability of theirs.  I don't play one myself but I will say in PvP they are really nice to have around and they are hard as hell to kill heh

Originally posted by Swanea

When I order beef with two sides, I sure don't expect the five people next to me to yell as loud as they can non stop, to buy their two sides instead, and than when I get up to move, 10 more people do the exact same thing.  And than 20 more if I go some where else to sit.

It's silly to ignore how bad gold sellers/bots are in a review at this time.  If they fix the problem (LOL), you could edit the review.

He mentioned that in his review and said it needed fixing asap so not sure what you're going on about and it's his opinion of how he feels about the game.  Just because you feel differently doesn't mean he's "lying to himself".

Some of you need a serious reality check on this notion that just because you feel a certain way about things everyone else should as well.