Um AIon should be removed from that list  as it won't be out till next year sometime. And you might want to actually try playing  before judging it. Beta footage is nothing to be used for judging the worthiness of the game.  Right now for all we know it could be an excellent game or crap won't know till it actually comes out.. Having actually played it some, I am going to lean more towards excellent game side of things, but will be reserving final judgement for the final product next year.

Originally posted by Wakygreek

 

I have to agree the most fun ive had in an MMORPG was in EQ ,1 when you basically had to group in order to level. Very few classes in tha game could solo unless you had very good gear.  And that was near impossible for a very long time. I hope that MMORPG's slowly go back to the you are requierd to group to level system.  However I dont think Aion will go in that direction.  Aion seems to be more like a Final fantasy in a WoW type enviroment. Which is a good thing considering WoW has some great art design, and im excited that they are taking the character art style from FF type art. Overall it should be a beutiful game, and I am hoping its gonig to be WoW/WAR/FF in one game.

Well Technically every class could solo from 1 to max level in EQ even pre-  Luclin. Now that being said for most classes soloing was not a realistic viable option as you would be mad trying to level up on LB mobs. And even for the soloing classes if you were in a good group you could typcally do better than you could solo. Soloing was for farming tradeskill raw materials, faction work, and cash farming more often than not. But looking forward to Aion myself. I was fortunate enough to play a bit at PAX and had a blast.

You need to actually read what is out there about the game. This game is actually more like a combination of  Final Fantasy XI and Everquest. The death penalty alone makes the game stand out don't even have to get to the flying.

heh was just about to post about this. I canceled more than a month ago and just got this yesterday.

The really dumb thing was there is not section for comments and none of the reasons they had listed as reasons for leaving the game were why I left. If they had really wanted to know they would have put in a comments section.

1. No death penalty

2. PVE that makes WOW PVE look like EQ1

3. Two different games one  for those who play during prime time playing hours and one for those who played on low pop servers or durring non-peak playing hours. Neither very good.

4. no real amount of RVR PVP only scenario PVP.

5 ultra linearity  and to much cookie cutter copy and paste work.

All the developers seem to have come down with a severe case of munchkinism.

Well Aion has been saying early 2009 for almost six months at least now. I always got a chuckle at seeing the mmorpg still list it as a 2008 release.

Yes all RPG games MMO and non-MMO are linear at their core. You are telling the story of  someone who starts out with humble begginings that ends up the hero saving the world yada yada yada.

Any GM/DM that is worth their salt will tell you one of the most difficult things to do is to get your players to  follow the path you want them to take so you can show them your scripted pieces(encounters). There are many ways to do that.  There are many t methods to  hide the linearity and they way to do that is to make it seem like the players choice that they go to place a or b and not that they were given a yellow brick road to follow all the way there.

What games like UO, EQ1 and FFXI did fairly well for the most part was hide the linear nature of the game so that even though if you stepped back and looked at the big picture and saw that yest the game is at its core linear, you didtn't actually feel that way when playing it. A lot of that had to do with mixing content of different level ranges in the same zone, how the zones were connected and designed. Other things that helped were rich fatcion systems very very different playing experience for different races.  All the tracks in Warhammer are pretty much identical even down to having an NPC quest giver that roams up and down  each track giving out the same type of quest with identical rewards. The NPC name and race may be different , but its just a copy paste job.  Playing a Dark elf in EQ1 was a very different playing experience  from playing an ogre or halfling.

Originally posted by safwd

Originally posted by Samuraisword

I like what he has said so i am just going to steal it and add a little.

Supposedly free to play games are the easiest because you just buy your way. Flat subscription based games where everything is earned in-game thru expended effort are always more difficult.

OP, basically all of the above that you mentioned. The expected age influences what the developer offers in terms of difficulty but it is a fact that the average online gamer is much older. Even in a game like Wizard 101 which is marketed and designed towards kids, I bet the average age of everyone playing is adult range.

The criteria I use to determine wether a game is difficult aka challenging, which is what I desire, are the following:

significant death penalty, usually hefty experience loss; I too like a good DP. Many now days just see it as a timesink but i see it as a method to get people to care in the game. I didnt want to die in EQ so i did what i had to do to try and keep that from happening, i didnt care if i died in WoW so i did alot of stupid stuff that got me killed. Fear is actually pretty important i think.

skill based system instead of class based system; I cant agree with this. I think a class based system can be challenging as well. Just create a class based system where everything isnt just given to you. Yes, you actually have to use that 2H sword before you are any good with it, you cant just pay a guy 10 gold and be a pro.

no instancing; I like this also. Instancing is ok on a very small level but i would just as soon have none.

 a game that rewards most experience to combat rather than quests; I would like a game that gives No experience for quests. Quests should be something that you do because you want to see what you get at the end or just because you want to do it, not because it gives the best exp.

realistic design including: believable travel not speedy travel clearly designed for ease, character weight capacity, no respecs available, no minimaps or arrows pointing where you should go, no stupid icons or glows indicating questgivers; This i think is a huge factor in the Challenge of a game. I dont want everything handed to me.

offering quests that require problemsolving not just tasks; Yes, please make me think a little bit on quests. All kill quests all the time gets a little boring.

PvP with player looting; PVP does add plenty of Challenge to a game but i would like the PVP to be purposefull and not just a gank fest. And im not too keen on full loot but some loot and all coin i like.

 

 

 

Couldn't have said it any better. Spot on.

Originally posted by DAS1337

Originally posted by peteski123

Originally posted by Meridion

Ok guys, I tend to defend this game usually, but what I encounter now at level 25+ is a joke:

Didn't Mythic state that leveling to 40 was - in this game - just the path to the real RvR/PvP experience that comes with level 40 and renown ranks? Didn't they say leveling was pretty fast?

How exactly does Mythic define the term "pretty fast"? granted, I'm on a mid (MID,  not low) population server and on destruction, so I can't constantly scenario away, and I can't finish public quests because there are no people for it and no LFG to ask for people to join in. So what I CAN do to level up is quests, uum, quests, and umm, grind. Kick RvR, even in a heated battle you gain only by slain enemies, which is a joke, because you get mini portions of XY from killing people and it takes for - ever to gain a level.And by forever I mean theoretically DAYS of played time. It speaks volumes that nobody even does it, leveling only through RvR, everyone, and I'm on an open RvR server, says they go back to PvE when a siege is over.

Now this boils down to: RvR in peak times when RvR happens, PvE most of the time. And PvE boils down to "finish all quests" and change to different campaign area.

Before I get to the meat of this rant, let me say that I initially didn't want to play all three campaigns simulatenously but am ultimately forced by this:

Why the hell on earth does level 28 take about 100 quests to complete? And there are not 100, there are 40 in one level-area, throughout all three campaigns, at best. The rest of the time you can see if someone - with luck - does a public quest. If not, you are screwed and doomed to grind - your teeth as well as mobs.

I don't know how it may be in high population wonderland where you can join a scenario every 5 minutes. But on a mid populated server I am literally forced to grind if I want to advance -> That's a JOKE, it defies all you, Mythic, said during the whole development period. You said one could level without grinding. Thanks.

M

 

rofl

what the heck has happened to propper gamers,

I made 25-30 in a couple days and I did just quests SOLO...  sheesh if you Really think its a grind you should give up mmo's as WAR is a joke with no real mature content and so easy to lvl even without scenarios its a joke

 

I guess if you have no job and your mom does everything for you... then you'd have 20 hours a day to play.  At around rank 20, quests only give you 2-3% of your level.  Now, maybe you could get to 20 in 3-4 days of being an uber nerd, but 30 is an impossibility unless you work for a leveling service, in which you work in shifts.

 

They need to drop the xp you get from scenarios.. so that you're forced to go out and PvE because you're renown doesn't go higher than your XP.  Which would help populate the RvR lakes in turn.

Heh leveling in this game makes WOW leveling look like a crawl, which it most certainly isn't. Just over 2 days played here and I am almost level 22. There are 2 reasons why I am not already in my mid thirties with the same play time. 1. almost no  PVP as I play during off peak hours and 2. I have taken some time to explore. 
 

To any oldschool vet who knows how to manage their time and maximize their experience per hour this game poses no challenge from a leveling standpoint.  Or any challenge at all for that matter.

What SOE got right:  Raiding. That is about it. EQ1 raids (anything Rathe council+) are the best by far suprassing anything else out there for sheer fun and complexity.

Their biggest problems are trying to nickle and dime their playerbase and releasing expansions way too often. Before I quit you barely had time to finish the content of one expansion before the next came in. And that was just the basic content. There was no time to really digest all the content most of the expansions offered and really enjoy them.  Thats the big reason I quit. 

I would also agree that Smedly is a big part of the problem. Nothing will change there until he goes.

Originally posted by _Shadowmage

I find scenarios are fun. And since I get more XP in 15 minutes in a scenario than running around in PvE as well as renown they tend to attract the people that want to level faster.

What I find annoying is - as soon as I run into a RvR area it pops me into the scenario queue. If I wanted to do a scenario I would have clicked that myself. Maybe they had an issue with not enough people doing scenarios so the queue time to get in was long so they added this in one of the hot fixes. Please remove it.

Being able to jump into any of the scenarios in the tier is nice. It would be better if the rest of my party came along when I join as scenario queue as a party. It seems a bit hit and miss at the moment.

Maybe gear is the issue - I find better gear at the renown merchant (and more of it) than I get from influence vendor (PQ's). So therefore I want to increase my renown as quickly as possibly and it seems scenarios are best for doing this at the moment.

I think you may have the autojoin scenario enabled. There is a toggle for it on the options screen.

Lets see if this can clear things up. Lets look at tradeskills in three very different games. EQ1, Vanguard, and WOW. First up EQ1. EQq1 had a tradeskill system that had a lot of depth and no complexity. Crafing in EQ1 was a matter of placing components in a container and hitting the combine button success was determined by a skill check against your skill in that craft. Simple uncomplex. easy to understand. It had depth though. A level 1 could log in and create items desireable by level 50's. Many low level products were used as components in subcombines of higher level recipies thus creating a market for low level items. Cfaters were largely dependant on each other as they rose in level. It was very often  difficult to level a craft without obtaining materials created by other crafting professions. Its biggest flaw was that many of the same recipies that were used to skill up were also recipies that created useable items. And so these items that normally would have commanded a decent price on the market were essentially worthless because everyone mass produced them to skill up.

Vanguard: Vanguards tradeskills were complex but had little depth. The crafting process in Vanguard was a mini game unto itself with its own stats. It lacked the depth of EQ1 though. While there was some minimal interdiscipline dependance and some items created at lower levels were used in higher level recipies it was nowhere near the scale of EQ1 crafting. The big problem with Vanguards crafting was in an attempt to fix the big issue of mass producing skill up items in EQ1 they accidently did away with a lot of the depth.

WOW: WOW crafting is simple and has no depth. The crafing method in wow is click the combine button is even simpler and easier than in EQ1. Very few items made from crafting are actually worth selling on the market and very few actually are used in by other crafts or other recipies. there is no failure in WOW crating only whether or not you get a skill up. Yes there are some crafts and items that are marketable in WOW, or used in other tradeskills, but nowhere near the scale that it was in EQ1.

Complexity refers to the mechanics in which the task is done, whether that is tradeskills, pve combat, pvp combat or raiding. Depth refers to having multiple avenues to achieve the same end the more possible ways to accomplish a particular task the deeper it is.

Should read some of the reviews of people who have actually played the game. It is most certainly not a WOW clone. Just the fact that it has a real death penalty alone sets it apart.  I have actually played it and loved every minute of it and I am not a big WOW fan. While it is still to early to say for certain whether or not this game will be good enough to hold me longer than any of the other recent MMO's it certailny felt different playing it  and I will be giving it a go when it goes live.

The layoffs are old news and had nothing to do with the Aion project. As for an earlier posters question about betal. there is not going to be any NA open beta. They will have preview events though.

Sorry did not mean to be rude. Going from a games like EQ1 (pre-POP) and FFXI where leveling to max level can take 10-18 RL months to games like this one or WOW  where you get to max level in a matter of weeks or days if  you really press yourself makes for a very different perspective on things.

Um sorry no leveling in this game is even easier than leveling in WOW which is saying something as it had the easiest leveling curve out there until now. If you think leveling in this game is slow you have never played a game with a real death penalty and long leveling curve. And if you are having issues leveling maybe you might want to consider playing something other than an MMO.

sorry leveling is uber rediculous easy in this game if I hadn't been taking time to actually explore I would be mid 20's by now and even worse off.  Have not pvp'd much, but then there hasn't been anyone to PVP against. And if you go back to tier 1 and try to pvp you get chickened so that is kind of pointless too.-

Originally posted by Erindal

I can argue with you. If you have a stand alone complex - then that's just you.

If you can't even find 5 more peoples to complete a PQ - that's just you again.

Who said that you will able to complete a PQ alone? or take a keep?

Full 6 ppl party is ENOUGH to complete ANY PQ in game. Sometimes we managed to complete it in 5 ppl.

Taking a keep... well you need at least 6-10 peoples to kill the Keep Lord depends of your skill. 2 Full parties should not have any problem doing it. But yes - ventrilo and yes - skilled players. That's 12 peoples... 6-12 peoples more to wipe or at least hold the opposite faction. 

Holding/defending the keep will be the problem for you always, but what a deal to take a keep then buy your gear and forget it till you need to get the gear again? 

So in the end of this... you need only one guild with 24 active players to have 4 parties for PQ's and dungeons and a warband for Keeps.

I don't see any problems with low populated servers and i don't see any Mythic's mistakes. But i see your fault in inventing non-existent "mistakes". That's just you and your un-social activities (you can't get 6 peoples to complete a PQ).

I don't think you comprehend what we are talking about. There is no one to group with can't very well group with people who are not there. If you can put together a group of six people when you are the only person in the zone you have some serious grouping skills.
 

I have 30+ hours of play on my charactter and am almost done with tier 2. in that 30 hours I have been in 5 scenarios and I queue up the very first thing when I log in. I have seen an enemy player outside of said scenarios 4 times total. For good chunks of my play time I am lucky if I see 1 or even 2 other people in the same zone as me. Not being able to group has nothing to do with being anti-social. You can't group when there is no one to group with.

Originally posted by Theocritus

     I think the only thing that will slow down WOW is time and some bad expansions......Just think how good Everquest would have been had they released expansions every 2 years instead of every 6 months.....

Took the words right out of  my mouth. That is the very reason I left EQ. Being in a server first type raid guild is very demanding and with an expansion out every six months you have just enough time to complete most of the major content in it before the next one hits. No time to actually savor the content and find all the neat little side quests and stories that were there. Towards the end It was just no fun anymore rushing from the content of one expansion to the next.  The core game of EQ was so solid that even with all the dumbing down SOE hit the game with over the years it was still a solid game from a gameplay point of view.

Biggest thing is a real honest to goodness death penalty. And having actually played the game I can vouch for the fact that it is not  a WOW wanna be.