Aion

NCSoft West Executive Vice President Lance Stites has penned the July Community Address to all Aion players. In it, he reveals that producer Chris Hager is unavoidably out for a few weeks and then goes on to talk about the Aion team's work over the summer.

The Aion team has announced that all free character transfers are suspended until further notice. The team indicated that it the server balance issues need to be re-evaluated before restarting the character transfer service.

NCSoft and Aion developers are inviting former players to come back to the game for a free weekend of play. The Reactivation Weekend begins on Friday, July 30th and runs through Monday, August 2nd. During the weekend, players will be able to take advantage of double XP as well.

The first free expansion for Aion is set for deployment on September 7, 2010. Called Assault on Balaurea, the expansion will be available digitally and in stores in North America on September 7th. The expansion will be digitally available in Europe on September 7th and in stores on September 10th. Retail versions will feature an in game pet as well.

Aion will be taken down in order to merge European and North American servers beginning tomorrow, July 14th. The downtime is scheduled to last 13 hours for each time zone but devs have a plan to bring smiles back to faces once everything is back up and running again. The event is called Dash of the Daevas. Devs have a LOT in store for this ongoing event.

Aion developers have announced that the anticipated server merges will take place later than planned. Now set for July 14th, devs indicated that the delay was implemented to deal with any issues arising from characters with the same names being placed on the same server.

Players have long awaited details on the planned server merges and character transfers for NCsoft's Aion, but no longer! As part of Aion's June community address, the Aion development team has revealed that server merges will take place on July 7, 2010 and the character transfer service will begin the following day on July 8, 2010.

This week's Eye on Community features the usual Q&A and community links, and also focuses on the updated Refer a Friend program announced this week.

Aion servers are up, and version 1.9 is now live, following an extended maintenance period beginning at 4:30AM PDT this morning. For those of you rushing off into Atreia to check out all the new goodies, you might want to take a detour first and check out the hilarious 1.9 intro video put out by NCsoft today.

A new video has appeared on YouTube depicting the many new pets coming to Aion as part of version 2.0 aka Assault on Balaurea.

NCsoft has announced that the game servers will be brought down tomorrow morning at 4:30AM PDT for an eight hour maintenance to deploy the hotly anticipated version 1.9 update to live servers.

Aion producers Chris "Kinslon" Hager and Lani Blazier are joined by Community Manager Andrew "Tamat" Beegle to discuss the features coming to Aion in version 1.9, which is currently on test servers and scheduled to go live next week.

With version 1.9 hitting test servers tomorrow, Aion players are already looking ahead to version 2.0 which has been on the Korean public test servers for a little while now. Aion version 2.0, now known as "Assault on Balaurea" will feature eight new instances, pets with a variety of functions ranging from storing items to assisting in crafting or even acting as guardians, several zones set within the lands of Balaurea, a raise in level cap to 55, new flight mechanics, and more!

Chris "Kinslon" Hager has delivered his May Community Address letter where he discusses the upcoming 1.9 patch, the status of the free server transfer service, the 2.0 update, and even server merges.

Who's ready for another Double XP weekend? Iron Man 2 can wait, gotta make the levels! Beginning tonight at 8PM EST, Aion players can enjoy double experience through the weekend, ending on Monday, May 10th at 8AM EST.