Aion Overload

I took it a bit easy today because I was really exhausted after getting home from work, however, I did manage to put in about 2 1/2 hours

I am what you would call a “Casual Gamer”. It wasn’t always like this, nooooo sir! I used to play my PSX/N64/Sega/NES/SNES until early morning, which is probably why I have such bad insomnia these days. As I progressed from consoles to computer, I found a home in Everquest. From there, I moved on to SWG. A year here, a year there, and I found myself bouncing between games, until WoW dropped.

After WoW came out, I put easily 9 hours a day in, and that’s even during High School. After HS got over, although I should have been doing something productive, I found myself in a raiding guild, putting in 18 hour days, 6 days a week. Now THAT’S a grind! Flash forward to today, and I’m now a casual gamer. I have too much work to do for my job and the freelance projects I work on to merit calling myself “hardcore”. But I digress, today is about Aion.

Let’s Log In

Well, as expected, I was hit with a queue, which was surprisingly not too bad, only about 400 people in front of me with a wait time of about 30 minutes. Quite glad we chose this server now after hearing all the horror stories from the other servers. So Dez, Mandi and I decided to run some quests. Dez and Mandi had already been leveling during the day to catch up, and were ahead of me by a level, along with a couple quests, but we went back and did the ones I needed to catch up.

I Chose SpiritMaster!

Yup! I decided on Spiritmaster because I’ve always loved pet classes but I haven’t played one for ages. In EQ I was a cleric. In SWG I was a TK but went Creature Handler for a while. In WoW I was a mage and warrior. So this time I wanted to play something that is a bit more support, but would also allow me to solo a lot since I’d be playing casually and may not be able to group as often as I’d like.

I went over and drop a ton of money on my new skills, and grabbed myself a fire elemental.

I paid good money for that mustache.

To Verteron.

Killing crabs, bandits, and all sorts of goofy critters, we got our asses handed too us by some GIANT ENEMY CRAB.

But that’s no biggie, cause it was quite hilarious to see a bunch of other people getting wrecked by him as well.

After about an hour, our quests started to get a bit wonky and out of sync, so we decided to take a look around the Sanctum and I decided to finish up any last quests in Poeta.

Finishing up some Quests

Back in Poeta, I only had a few more quests to do, including a yellow one. After grinding my way through the mine, I collected all the little trinkets and blew up the gate, woop woop. Afterwards, I turned in all of the quests and got a round of applause.

"Good Job" said the weasel demons.

Finally, I went back to Verteron to take a few snapshots, and man, this one really is something else. I gotta hand it to NCSoft for creating a pretty beautiful game. I love the elephant creatures in the background, they’re very Dali.

So that wraps it up for Day 1. GREAT SUCCESS!

Oh yeah, before I go, here’s something for you to think about…

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!

http://twitter.com/AionOverload

’nuff said

With the increased tension from all of the pre-order players, one of the main complaints that have reach the ears of NCSoft is that players are stuck in queue because others in game, going AFK while leaving their private shops open.

Private shops have a place in Aion, in my opinion. I like to directly interact with someone who is willing to buy from me, it adds a bit of salesmanship to the mix. However, the main problem is that people don’t get disconnected from being AFK while leaving their private shops open. To the shops defense, that makes perfect sense because it would be a bit stupid to set up a shop only to get disconnected 5 minutes later. The problem is that there are eager players that want to get in the game, that are stuck behind players leaving their shops open.

Over at AionSource, there is a very interesting thread going on about the impact of the private shops.

http://www.aionsource.com/forum/aion-discussion/63729-new-message-ayase-about-private-shops.html

On Twitter, aion_liv had some input:

aion_livRT @aion_ayase Private shops is a topic here, not sure what we’ll do yet, but it’s being discussed.

It seems that NCSoft is keeping their ears open to the community.

Although the shops have been working very well in Asia, they don’t seem to have transitioned as well over in the West. What will happen to Aion private shops? Who knows. As I said, I rather enjoy them because of being able to deal with people personally, without the robotic feeling of using an auction house, but if removing private shops mean that more players are able to get in the game, I’m all for it.

Be sure to go over to AionSource to add your opinion in the mix, but be polite!

It’s Day 0 Part II, and with the sever change, I was able to get a lot game play in.

The new server: Ispharel

The toon: Tihkal

Thoughts: Hell Yeah!

Beginning

On Day 0 I checked out the feel of the game for a few hours, which was right away good fun, however, I wasn’t able to queue into the server I wanted to play as, so I didn’t bother doing much.

Before I got home from work, I checked my Facebook, which Dez sent me a message saying we’re changing servers. Once I got back, I queued up for the server, which surprisingly was only a 4 minute wait. I created my two toons: Tihkal and Pihkal after the books written by Alexander Shulgin and his wife. I also had a bit of influence from METHOD Man

Upon logging into Aion, I began a few quests, actually reading the quest logs, which had a pretty decent story. This didn’t really last too long as I wanted to just level and check out what the higher levels were like. I also wanted to get away from the starter area, an away from the general chat trolling.

I began checking out the first area for the Elyos called Poeta. I really like the visuals in game, and each of the mobs felt pretty fresh for a change. It’s been almost 5 years since I’ve truly played a new mmo. After running around and getting acquainted with the UI and controls, I began to run some quests. After about an hour I was level 5 and pretty much had the controls down.

The first fun skill chain that I go was Flame Bolt I -> Blaze I. This started quite the killfest. Blazing through the mobs, I continued to grind out quests. Finally Dez logged on and I changed up channels to meet with him, which was about 1 level lower than me.

Around the same time, Keegan logged on to play as well, he was already level 11 and was mostly checking out how to fly and setting up a Legion, which we’re currently using SQUAAARE (inside joke).

What I noticed right away is that Aion appeals to the ‘big numbers’ crowd. Damage at low levels was already doing hundreds of damage.

Continuing on with the questing, I went into the later areas, such as the Daminu Forest and Kabarah Strip Mine. Each of the quests were no problem, but it still surprised me to see so many people dying to passive mobs, lols.

I decided to test out the private shops as well, setting up in Channel 1 with some of the green items I found from killing some rare spawns. These sales went pretty well, selling for a couple thousand. Sitting still was getting boring so I decided to continue with my quests.

Along the way, I saw a guy named SexualChocolatte (a lengthy black man, quite smooth with the ladies):

Mandi eventually logged on as well, creating a new character after we bounced servers a couple times. She’s a complete technoweenie, but we accept her.

At level 9, I received my…

Ascension quest

While running over to the Cliona Lake, I ran into another gentleman:

SUPERFLY!

He's a bad mothaSHUTYOMOUTH

So I filled up my vial and took it to the tree dude, I call him Stumps. He goes into some sort of seizure and tells me to go finish my quest. Cut back to a psuedo video where you’re flying around…

Weeeeeeeeeeeeee

Where you quickly dispose of 4 mobs. Then the boss comes out, which is quite easy, which also cuts into a cut scene…

Falcooooooooooon.....

OOF!

You got knocked the FFFF out!

It was a lot like this, minus the bike:

So you fall back down, and pop back out to do your quest. Which takes you to the Sanctum!

But that’s all for Day 0: Part II, I’ll tell more about the game tomorrow during the official launch!

Stay tuned!

Okay, so you’re fed up with general chat, who wouldn’t be? But you can’t for the life of you figure out how to leave general chat. Well, we got you.

How to Leave Aion General Chat

1. Right click on the All Chat Tab
2. Click “Tab Options”
3. Expand the “Channels” option (make the + a -)
4. Uncheck “Channel 1″ (this is General Chat)
5. Success!

So that’s another Aion Basic. Hope this helps.

Oh yeah…

Okay everyone, this one’s an easy one, but a lot of people are asking how to do it.

You have a group of friends online and you want to play with them, but you can’t see them! Well, that’s because you’re probably in a different channel than them. Aion uses a channel system to divide up the areas. In order to play with them, you have to change your channel to where they are.

How To: Change Channels in Aion

1. Click on the “Menu” button at the bottom of your UI
2. Hover over “Support”
3. Click “Change Channel”
4. Select your channel from the drop down
5. Click Move
6. You’re done!

It’s really easy, but posting this just incase you didn’t know it.

Have Fun!

Okay, this one’s pretty simple, but I keep seeing people asking general chat for this:

How To Claim Your Aion Collectors Items

1. Go to https://secure.ncsoft.com/login
2. Log into your account
3. Click on “Game Accounts”
4. Click on Aion
5. Under “Actions” click “Apply In-Game Items”
6. Choose your server
7. Choose your character
8. Select your items you wish to apply
9. Hit okay and now check your mailbox!

Also, don’t forget to apply your collector’s title to gain a stat boost as well!

That’s pretty much it, really simple, now go out and grind!

So, Dez decided that we’ll be playing on Israphel now instead. That’s no problem because we haven’t actually started our real characters yet. The change was due to the high queue times of Azphel, which was hitting the thousands. It’s no fun to wait more than 2 hours to get into the game, and having to play casually, I don’t get much time to play in the afternoons.

See ya on Israphel!

The Official Aion forums are now live!

Aion now has a set of official forums, and they sure are quite spiffy. The layout of the forums are really clean, divided into the various discussion points such as Aion Discussion, Class Discussion, Server Forums, Technical Discussion, and News.

So far there has been quite a lot of great input from the players.

However, I wonder how AionSource will handle the new forums. AionSource already has an established based, full of really helpful posts and users, but will they jump ship for the official forums? I highly doubt it. I’m sure most users on AionSource will stay there along with posting on the main forums.

The real question, is when will the drama begin. There’s already quite a bit of stupid posts and flamers, but that figures.

Take a look at the design:

After the first wave of spam/troll/stupid posts are done, I’m sure the forums will be pretty decent.

Something else for ya:

Over at AionSource, they’ve compiled a great list of all the known issues with Aion at the moment. These issues include Authentication Server errors, Server Full issues, Login/Password mismatch, and a ton of the numbered error codes.

No one said the launch would go smoothly, but it is holding up pretty well so far, seeing that over 400,000 preorders were made.

There are always launch troubles with any mmo, ranging from servers being down, to accounts being screwed up, but that’s part of the process I suppose.

So, if you have any issues with Aion, go take a look to see if your issues have been addressed.

Early Access Known Issues