I hope you realise that both Aion and GW are NCsoft games, right?

No idea how the situation is on the asian servers. Here's an update on the EU servers though:

uk.aiononline.com/board/notices/view

Your "contribution" was some anti-NCsoft ranting threads a few weeks ago. Hardly productive and hardly influential, unless you're deluded to think that the people on this forum have any kind of impact in the MMO world.

So if ... lets say for the sake of argument ... you bought some powerlevel services, deactivated the account when you didn't feel like playing and the powerlevelers reactivated and took advantage of it, it's NCsoft responsibility? Or if your computer is open like a cheddar cheese? Or if you fall for some scam sniffing email?

Do people realise that this game has two account passwords that ought to be different? One is the ingame password and the other is the account password. You only need the account password to activate and deactivate that account, nothing else. It should be kept safe and different for a reason. And if by any change the ingame password gets compromised, you can reset it with your account password.

It is possible that they may re-ban verified botters.

I hope you understand though that what you state is second hand unverified information. People are entitled to view with caution any unverifiable information, especially when it's not even first hand OP info.

uk.aiononline.com/board/notices/view

An interesting update on the status of the game and the current priorities.

You can restore mana and health fast by sitting down with comma (,) key.

Originally posted by Shol

...(Can Horde and Alliance play now all classes?)

They already can. You can also pay to switch sides on the same server (ie convert an alliance character to horde and vice versa).

That video is backed with a features list in the Korean Aion section. Some people bothered to do a translation, which you apparently missed. Not that it's your job to fish player made translations of a list that should be also localised for the west as well.

I see no difference with what Blizzard did with the cataclysm announcement. It serves two purposes, notify people about the upcoming game improvements and encourage people to keep on playing.

I love this kind of style, it's refreshingly different. I like TERA's even more over the board style.

The main market is where the majority of money come from.

1. You pretty much agree with me that they never bragged about 2nd place, as you originally stated. They haven't produced the numbers to verify that they achieved that goal, which is irrelevant to what you claimed. ie that they bragged about 2nd place.
2. I hope you realise that you are the only one parroting the 3.5M number the past few weeks. If you don't want that number used, stop advertising it yourself. Negative publicity is still publicity.
3. If you are correct and their financial records are not their own, they will produce them or face whatever consequences under Korean law.
4. xfire never showed absolute numbers. It was a wild assumption that the absolute numbers were correct because the percentage of MMO gamers using xfire were somewhat similar. For example, if 2% of EVE players and 1% of WoW players and 3% of LOTRO players were using xfire, it would be easy to assume that all percentages were 2%, since you more or less only had the EVE numbers to do a very rudimentary cross-check. Now, lets say that Aion percentage of xfire users are 10% instead of the 1-3% I mentioned earlier. It's easy to see how the double and triple percentage can throw all the previous calculations totally off. It's not that the xfire started becoming inaccurate, it always was. It's just clearer to see these days.
   (All the percentages I used above are made up and for example purposes only).

Lets see how things will fare in the length of time instead of cheering for a victory in one battle in the whole war against the gold-sellers/botters.

Hard to tell. It didn't affect me much personally, but I'm not much of a crafter or auction jockey. I do expect that number to increase again, despite the recent bans. Those gold farming companies don't lose money over bans, despite what some naive people believe. It's just a calculated set-back. The bottom line is that it's impossible to exterminate them completely, not when there are people who are willing to spend ludicrous amount of money on kinah (or gold or whatever).

What can and should be done is to contain them so as not to:

• Affect the true gamers with their farming antics and
• Affect the game economy by infusing it with excess collected raw materials.

Well, unlike other studios so far, NCsoft hasn't promised something in Aion that she didn't deliver. The game as it stands now is thin in PvE content (reminds me a lot of the early LOTRO days) and could definitely use some more flesh out, but all that were promised at launch are delivered. In this regard I'm positive about the implementation of everything we see in that video.

On the other hand, the problems that plague the game at this point needs to be worked on. The game is far from perfect at the current state, although definitely in a better state than most of the latest launches the past few years. The thing is, if people don't really like the game at its current state, why would they like it with all the additions mentioned in that preview video?

You're assuming too much I'm afraid.

First of all, they never claimed that they achieved 2nd place, let alone brag about it. They stated that they aim for it, big difference.

Secondly, I hope you realise that you are as much to blame as the people that started the 3.5M rumour. Your constant repeating of this number only adds up to its circulation, at least on this site. Bottom line, if you don't believe it to be true, stop advertising it.

Third, their financial records are their own. They operate outside the US, hence are not governed by the same restrictions like other US firms. They are probably governed by different restrictions however. In any case, Turbine hasn't released any subscription numbers, as far as I know, and noone jumped onto their necks to blame them for that. It's their prerogative to disclose or not any numbers.

Lastly, you should at some point remove the tinfoil hat regarding the xfire numbers and finally admit that xfire can predict trends (with some level of inaccuracy), but not absolute numbers. You (and others) just don't have the data necessary to make any meaningful comparison between the games represented in xfire stats, exactly because we don't know the percentage of the population of each MMO that uses xfire. If we knew that number, it wouldn't make any difference if all Aion copies sold were originated from xfire, because in that case the percentage would be 100%. Now you (and others) don't know that percentage and the early assumption that all MMOs share the same percentage in xfire statistics was already proven wrong, just by looking at Aion alone.

Well, Aion doesn't rely on gameguard. Not in the west at least.

Yes, seems like the pissing contest moved from the 1st place to 2nd place. Some people have to play the most popular game it seems, regardless on whether they enjoy it or not.

@Tyrantas

Well, the direct competitors are FF upcoming MMO, GW2 and Tera. I think it's pretty obvious from that video.

@Hrothmund

Aion is definitely doing better in EU than US subscription wise, pretty obvious from the number of servers necessary alone. The communities created also seem to be a bit better in EU, at least compared to what's described on these forums. Or maybe I was just lucky.