Couple of screen shots from test server. I like the armor much better than the other MMOS. Yeah there are some big swords but it fits with the Korean style games. I am loving the game so far. As others have mentioned the graphics are great but the lack of lush terrain does make the game feel a bit dated even with the awesome armor models and detailed mobs.

The game is petty polished IMO. Better than alot of others on the market now. I imagine that the itemization is something they are looking into.

right now my favorite part of thegame is the diversity in the characters. There is a huge range of sizes and shapes. I made a medium build toon and sometimes I will be in a city and feel like a giant because everyone around made these tiny 2 foot elven looking things, and then a group of 14 foot clown faced guys will come in and make you feel like a dwarf.  If you are looking for a MMO where you want your toon to be different this is it.

The glowing effect on some toons is a build up of power points from killing stuff without dying. there are several levels denoted by color of the glow.

There are a number of graphic options to turn down spell effects but yes, Aion is a flashy gear driven game. There are unique pieces that you will want to acquire. I happen to like gear driven games more  than the skill level based ones. The combos and movement system are cool and add a new dynamic to play. The deck system is also kinda new, guild wars works from this concept explicitly but adding it into the mmorpg scape is cool too. I havent played a ton but from what I have I like it. I think it is miles ahead of AOC, and warhammer. I cant read Korean but for it to still be entertaining me says quite a bit  for the game.

I am not a fanboi but have followed Aion for a long time. I tend to watch many mmos from the shadows and letsl be honest. Most of the recent MMOS have been really bad. WoW has set the standard so high now that any game releasing without polish, full endgame content and a robust combat system just gets destroyed by the gamers. Some recover and most dont.

Aion allready has polish and endgame content  from what I have seen. That alone is huge. Launching it in the other regions first is very smart. The east is far more tolerant of the glitches and what not than the west. By the time it releases here it will be slick and worth your time.

Even when hitting the Korean servers from the USA the gaemplay is exceptionally fluid. That was a huge eye opener for me. I was ready for lag fest but they got the network code and server setup nailed. Maybe thats part of the crytech engine, who knows. 

So it does copy some elements from several games, but it also has some unique aspects to it that I feel make it worth the time. I had written off fantasy games after being sick of wow but Aion is going to get my sub without a doubt. The community so far is also great. Who would have thought. Oh and Liv...wow

Im playing on both KR Retail and Test servers and it doesnt feel like a grind fest. I cant really tell you about the quality of the quests but they seem on par or slightly better than  what is out there today. I have not tried to do any of the big armor quests / crafting exercises yet but that might put some people off.

I just dove in, waiting on account activation. Yay! I havent ever been this excited to play a game that I cant read, lol

The more I see the more excited I get. Cant wait to play this one. Looks like it mihgt keep me busy for a while, yay! I like the pvp component and that it rewards the side who maintains the forts. good stuff.

Originally posted by BigfootSean

Your network card is not going to give you any considerable jump in performance by going to pcie vs PCI vs integrated on board and probably, for home usage ISA was enough. I do like the concept of these things but for anyone in the market for a $200+ network card you really dont need it. You can get any of the following upgrades for the same or less money: 

• 8gb Ram - $160 or less
• Quadcore Proc - $180
• VelociRaptor Hard Drive - $180
• Radeon 4870w ddr5 - $170
• SuperClocked GTX260 - $200

IMO any of those items would vastly increase framerate and reduce percieved lag more than the killer nic. With the price point of the items above (and they are going to go lower due to economy and all the politics in Tiwan/china right now)  I just dont see the value in the Killer product at this time. If they put it at a more reasonable $50-75 I might think about it as an option. Even at that you can buy a 4gb memory kit for less than $70 right now. 8gb of ram lets you turn off your swap file in windows which will give you a noticable increase in performance.

With older machines that get a lower ping 200-300+ms the card might and I stress might help. The reviews on sites like new egg where you see what real users say are very mixed. The big improvements appear to come from those with older rigs.

I also wonder why you dont see more up toi date reviews of this product if it is so awesome.

 

Wanted to reply to one thing here - you've listed a quad-core processor as a fix to framerate or lag.  The problem is this: you can't "out-core" lag.

Since networking is a kernel-level operation, there are two things that multiple cores can't address:

 - networking is always run on core zero (first core,) with no ability to farm it out to the other cores through better optimization

 - when games look for a network packet, all the cores have to synchronize, thereby halting the game for a time while they wait for the Windows Network Stack to pass the kernel over.

 

So we essentially have machines today that are hundreds of times faster than they were ten years ago, but still halt at the same rate.  It doesn't matter that your machine can handle orders of magnitude more instructions - if it still gets thos instructions choppily, it's going to behave choppily.

Thanks for the opportunity to reply!

The whole point is that 2ms of ping time , or 5FPS increase is trivial at best, even more so in the MMO world. The other options would offer you a better overall game experience.

This horse has been beat by the best reviewers in the industry and the killer nic / technology never offers more than a blip on the radar of improvement. Come back here with some reviews from the MMOs that we all play. Hell send me a card, I sub to about 6 paid MMOs and several free ones. I will be glad to review the card with honest results and send it back. Ill even post a video of performance improvements on YouTube and buy the card if it impresses me. Otherwise, the reviews are in from the big boys and they say... dont waste your money.

Originally posted by BigfootSean

Originally posted by Hashbrick

The problem is, is people think this "magical" card is just going to obliterate lag which as someone stated is wildly thrown out of context and is no general definition anymore. At any rate as the technology is now the performance is minimal and barely noticeable. You want better performance get a better ISP nuff said.

Want to jump in here really quick - we've never said we can fix all lag - you should be wary of people who say that they can.  However - we can fight lag in at least one of the places it lives and where it's pretty big - on the client.  By bypassing the Windows Network Stack, offloading network operations from the CPU, providing per-process packet prioritization through the network processing unit and providing direct hardware interrupts to the game the instant packets arrive, we see a 20-30% performance increase in online games, not only in latency, but also in framerate.

If it were magic, it would fix the Internet, and it can't do that.

Yet.

Why havent we seen more real world and hands on reviews of the products recently? 

I think this from Anand sums it up;

"This is the real irony of the Killer NIC as the systems that show the greatest amount of improvement (in a very limited number of titles) belong to owners that would never consider spending $279.99 on a NIC. Those who can afford the card are probably running system specifications in which the game performance improvements would never be noticed. In fact, we could simply overclock our systems by 5% or a little more and end up with the same frame rate improvements. That leaves a very small audience of buyers who would potentially purchase the card for the gee-whiz factor or the professional gamer who has the ability to take advantage of a 1ms or better improvement in ping rates in Counter Strike: Source or could tell the difference between 58 fps or 53 fps in F.E.A.R.." 

The deal with Dell / Alienware is good for you guys though. Not sure how much margin you had to give away for that but you will probably sell alot of the cards to the "maximum" crowd. Tons of those XPS guys just config the box with every slot full of whatever is the most expensive and buy it. The same crowd that buys into physics cards and what not.

As for the reviews you posted, no self respecting gamer believes anything PC Gamer says because they will review anyone highly if you buy add space. I hadnt even heard of computer power user, probably a reason for that. Oh yeah! "Sandhills Publishing Company ".

Originally posted by Antipathy

Originally posted by fmnch35

Loken kills 128,688 people a day

That's the statistic which really impressed me.

A single 5-man boss getting that many kills! I know he's one of the nastier 5-man boss, but even so... Loken really isn't that difficult for any half decent player, even on heroic.

Simple Strategy 1: All stand in a tightish group in front of the boss. Mark the tank with a triangle. When Loken does his nova thing, the tank runs away and everyone else follows the big floating triangle. After the nova, tank heads back to the boss and everyone follows.

That wasn't so hard was it? There's an ever simpler strategy that works if you have a decent AoE healer and competent DPS:

Simple strategy 2: All stand in tightish group in front of the boss. Healer spams AoE heals. DPS like crazy. Kill the boss before the healer notices how hard his job is.

(note - strategy 2 doesn't require raid gear, just the right healer class (priest/shammie) and competence).

 

Pretty much a core concept of all encounters in wow. Dont stand in the "Blank"  : insert - fire, acid, lava, nova, flame breath, tail swipe, lightning ball, tornado of saws etc.

Moving is a very difficult concept for some people.

Originally posted by Kyleran

OP, you may have purchased your timecards from ISK sellers instead of legitimate timecard vendors.  If so, you probably got a discount price which should have been your first clue.

I know people who bought ISK from sellers and only punishment they got was illegitmate ISK was confiscated.  No ban, or other penalty.  It sounds like you might have rude, hostile or abusive, hence they tacked on extra time on to your initial 7 day ban.

Actually, in Iceland they probably don't have to be fair about their accusations, they can outright ban you and who can you really complain to? BBB of Iceland?

I suspect there's more to the story.

 

I actually had a friend suffer the same fate. He bought his time codes from Shattered Crystal, the same place I get mine. They are authorised to sell them. Anyway he was buying them and selling at a lower isk cost to those in his corp as rewards for PVP and mining ops using the website tools. CCP said that because of the rate of his activity he was a ISK seller, stuck all his accounts billions in the negative and refused to discuss the issue with him. The only way he can play now is to buy hundreds of dollars of time codes, sell them online at market rate.

I have no problem banning people for buying ISK outside of the process but I do take issue with CCPs extreme lack of transparency in dealing with the situations. They wont talk to you or allow you to apeal the issue. Your only chance to get your account back to a positive status is to buy MORE timecodes and trade them for ISK on their own website.

If they are going to charge you with a TOS voilation they should be able to provide proof and allow for an apeals process.

In another case,  a corp mate was killed by a person using an exploit. When he reported the exploit, CCP actually banned him. He had escalated the issue to a senior representative because he felt that the primary agent didnt help him. Shortly after escalating the issue his account was banned and the ticket closed with no response.

This was all before they put in the new player advocates but there has been a long history of stories like this. EVE has cheaters and lying CSRs running  rampant. Unfortunately some of the largest perps are actually the Devs. Its quite well known if you follow the game history or forums much.

Being that it is their game and all, dont expect any sympathy from CCP. It is their sandbox and they will do as they like and they do! They have a legacy of not giving a shit about the players, esp since subs jumped.

/sigh

If only combat were really like that in the game. Great vid  thanks for links.

I was thinking of buying a Korean retail key and playing that one. I have heard there are some english speaking folks doing that now and  it isnt too hard to figure out. Would be nice to be able to get ahead when the International client launches. Any thoughts?

I find 8gb to be helpful in Vista. It allows you to turn of disk paging which is slower than memory paging. I have noticed that overall my system runs much better on 8gb over 4. With memory as cheap as it is now there is no reason not to have it.

Several months ago when 8gb would have set you back over $400 no it wasnt worth it. Now that you can have it for less than $150, yeah its worth it.

Good Stuff. Looks like fun. May have to wade through all the Korean text and give it a shot. Dont think I can wait until Q3/4 to play :D 

Hope all the music isnt like that though.

Originally posted by mlauzon

Well, you can see my computer specs in my sig...so you know I have a high-end machine.

I am still not a big fan of onboard anything, so would I get the Ultra version of the card...maybe; I don't plan on doing triple crossfire -- yes my mobo actually supports it -- and so I have a PCIe slot free to possibly get an add-in card.

 

cant wait to see the ping benchmarks. i guess the real test will be if 20-30ms is really that noticable in any of the games. If I had your rig I wouldnt waste the $$ on it but I am curious. If the thing could take my pings from the 20s to the single digits I might think about it too. Or if it offered 10-20fps under heavy population evniornments like cities in most major mmos, or raid events.

My box doesnt really compare well to yours but I have

8gb viper ram 4-4-4-12
q6600 @ 3.0ghz
Saphire 4870 1gb

And I dont find lag to be much of an issue for me. Seeing as how you ahve pretty much topped everything else out I guess the lan card is about all you could stick in there besides maybe water cool and overclock the shit out of everything. :) 

Originally posted by mlauzon

 

---

Originally posted by slipline

This is the most unbiased review I found and they cant find a reason to spend $200 on it.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/1/
This is such a marketing scam. $200! 

---

 

Look at the date of the review, they are reviewing the original PCI cards, I am not defending BFN, just pointing out any reviews you find will be for the original cards and not for their new PCIe XENO series.

 

Your network card is not going to give you any considerable jump in performance by going to pcie vs PCI vs integrated on board and probably, for home usage ISA was enough. I do like the concept of these things but for anyone in the market for a $200+ network card you really dont need it. You can get any of the following upgrades for the same or less money: 

• 8gb Ram - $160 or less
• Quadcore Proc - $180
• VelociRaptor Hard Drive - $180
• Radeon 4870w ddr5 - $170
• SuperClocked GTX260 - $200

IMO any of those items would vastly increase framerate and reduce percieved lag more than the killer nic. With the price point of the items above (and they are going to go lower due to economy and all the politics in Tiwan/china right now)  I just dont see the value in the Killer product at this time. If they put it at a more reasonable $50-75 I might think about it as an option. Even at that you can buy a 4gb memory kit for less than $70 right now. 8gb of ram lets you turn off your swap file in windows which will give you a noticable increase in performance.

With older machines that get a lower ping 200-300+ms the card might and I stress might help. The reviews on sites like new egg where you see what real users say are very mixed. The big improvements appear to come from those with older rigs.

I also wonder why you dont see more up toi date reviews of this product if it is so awesome.

Bounty systems always seem to get exploited. Friends cash in on them and split the rewards, or some other exploit is found making the bounty a form of money farming itself. I like the idea of gaining access to the players vault or something. Possibly tapping into their complete network of traded assets, seeing with whom they trade and what they trade. Thus allowing the bounty hunter to hunt down the asset trail as well.

It would suck to be on the recieving end of this though and I think it would only appeal to the hardcore and RP gamers. I do love the idea though. Today bounty systems do suck, ill agree with that.

Originally posted by Salvatoris

As a network engineer, I can't believe these guys are still in business.  This card is unnecessary and overpriced.   You can get a decent gigabit NIC for a fraction of the cost and I guarantee you will not be able to see the difference.   If your system is so low on resources that the NIC can't do it's job, you could better spend your hard earned cash on a RAM upgrade. 

Most people have a NIC that can handle 10x the throughput of their internet connection... and even if you were to waste your money and buy this overpriced card, are you going to be able to talk your ISP in to upgrading all their network equipment too?  We are talking about a couple of milliseconds response time here, and even that is being generous IM-professional-O. :)

I guess the market for their cards is people with more money than brains.

couldnt agree more with this. this card wont do squat to eliminate network lag unless it can fix all the hardware between you and the game server.

most all PCs and Laptops these days have gigabit cards on them. I have the highest throughput option from my internet carrier 18mbps / 1.5 mbps. Even with it pegged on speedtest I cant utilize more than a few percent of the onboard cards real potential.

This is the most unbiased review I found and they cant find a reason to spend $200 on it.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/1/

This is such a marketing scam. $200! For real? Do yourself a favor and upgrade your video card, processor, or buy some more ram.

I think you could just make money selling flashy "PIMP" PCI cards. I think the only thing that sells these cards is the chrome K  that reflects some neon from the cold cathode or whatever. PCI fog machines, thats what would really reduce your lag. The fog would make the air more dense and thus improve cooling of the components allowing for better performance. I swear. In a week bet these babies are on sale somewhere.  

I'm not sure how you can say a company that bans cheaters by the tens of thousands, takes gold selling and bot selling companies to court is somehow in bed with them. 

The company that creates and supports in game mechanics to allow RMT in their games sounds like they are the ones in bed with the gold farmers.  Considering they actually get a percentage of the farmers gold sales now it sounds pretty clear to me who is in bed with who.

 

50,000 accounts is a grain of sand. When you have a game with upwards of 10M active subs 50k accounts wont make a dent in the gold market.

There is more than just a demand for the gold that Drives RMT. There is also a demand for money to pay for the subscriptions by folks who see opportunity. Almost all of the RMT sites have programs allowing people to sell currency  to the establishment in exchange for hard cash. I have several friends who did this once they maxed out their characters. Rather than roll new toons they would just farm gold and sell enough to pay for their account(s).

In EVE they figured out that this was one of the primary drivers of the market and so they tapped into it. You have tools within the game that allow you to make ALOT of money. You can trade your game money for game time codes. No real money has to change hands. The high level player plays the game and is rewarded with free time. The one buying the time does have to pay for the time card so the company gets a cut too.

In bed, not in bed doesnt really matter. The true point is that RMT is so engrained in MMOs now that there is very little use spending time and money to combat it when everyone can benefit.

I agree all the /tells for gold suck but if Blizzard really wanted it gone from the game it would be gone. I stand by my opinion that you will only see more systems in games to allow for it and control it, not eliminate it. There is simply too much money to be had.

Originally posted by risenbones

It's an interesting start.

What I would like to know and something that could make or break my interest in the game is....

Do the gangs control territory?  If my gang sets up shop somewhere and defeats all commers for a period of time does the gang get some kind of benifit like increased income from drug sales or access to some kind of better manufacturing.  If so is there a way we can get NPC guards to defend our ground against other raiders and could we improve them somehow.  Otherwise I fail to see the point of paying a monthly fee for a FPS game with a prettier server selection screen.

/agree

Territory control tied to resources and the ability to modify your home turff would be exceptional. When I say modify I mean Grafitti wars and things that make it obvious who the area belongs to. Would be great if they allow creativity to take place in the game as well. upload your own logos and such.

Sounds like a great idea, looks good. The instances worry me and the name, come on...change it. No name is ever "set" until it is mastered on CD and printed on the boxes.

I find the whole notion of RMT to greatly mirror the debate of the war on drugs. You cant really win either way and the cold fact of the matter is that it is here to stay and will never go away. There is such a market for the stuff now that both sides actually make more money leaving eachother be at some level. Think about it, if drugs were completely legal, how many cops would be out of work? Without jobs how will they continue to buy their own drugs? 

In the end RMT is not evil. Does it step afoul of the "spirit of gaming"? Perhaps if you go by olympic rules that ban doping. The fact remains that the company is pushing its drug of choice, your subscription to the game. They have no issue taking that money for doing little more than keeping you entertained. You could argue that once they start to profit from it, it violates the spirit of the game. There in lies the rub.

The publisher and manager of the product do not want to get cut out of profits. The RMT businesses drive a ton of subscriptions. We hear of these sweat shops with farmers working 24x7 on hundreds of computers, running multiple clients per box. They must have active subscriptions to make the trades. Those add up to tons of bucks in the pocket of the publisher. There is very little true interest in stamping RMT out. They thrive off of eachother now like conjoined twins. Cut them apart and you risk both suffering, or dying.

Games like EVE online figured out the whole RMT issue long ago. They embraced it, just not as  in your face as SOE has done. The real goal of RMT as a game system is to integrate it into game play with security that protects the buyer and seller while making both use an active subscription.

Time is money and as long as it takes time to make money or gain items in a MMO you can be sure that someone will make a market for it. I dont think you will see RMT go away.

The last part of the whole discussion; and one that I find horribly funny, is how some gamers will allow a game company to release crap products, shoddy support  and take them for hundreds of dollars only to then maintain the idea that SOE or Blizzard has (or should have) some higher moral code when it comes to RMT and the spirit of gaming. WTF? They could give 2 shits about you.

In some way they try to make you think they are better than the "illegal gold farmers" (btw its not illegal at all) because in reality they want to be the one selling it to you they just havent figured out how to do it right yet! As long as it appears like it is BAD they have an open market and profit off the entire situation.

Get real, its all about the $$ yo