Aion 2

Everyone has been game hopping with all the recent releases and western LOA is finishing themselves off with a system worse than elixirs. A shame none of these alternatives look like they will last long term despite the KR graphics.

Its not nearly as bad as people say and its not amazing, guess a good qualifier would be its mid. I dunno what qualifies as a mobile MMO, because I have never played one. The only notable mobile aspects I can guess at are the UI and some controls within that UI. Almost everything else feels like a typical MMO at launch. Horrible monetization definitely isn't mobile only.

Action combat feels alright, complete with iframe type dodge if timed perfectly. Though that's mostly luck with such horrible ping.

They have some serious server issues though. Though it seems mostly the TW version, as the KR versions seems to just stroll along with zero problems(or so I hear).

Mob AI can be weird at times, as they seem to want to spread out to all hit you side by side, instead of just stacking up on eachother. Can make some of the AE abilities with a smaller radius miss some mobs if you charge say one off to the left/right edges . Probably doesn't help you are constantly moving around them trying to get the back bonus, so they keep repositioning constantly.

Boss fights are at least fun, well as much as they can with these pings and being a melee(so many 360 abilities around bosses). Dungeons so far are very linear, and groups just run past trash to objectives/bosses. In this aspect its very different(so far) from a typical mmo, where you cleared packs of trash as you worked through the dungeon to each boss. Groups only kill if its required, otherwise they run around the edges and avoid it, straight to an obj or boss. Since mob aggro is a small circle around them or a area in a cone out from their eyes(the way they are facing).

One thing I do hate is the time it takes to gather and craft. Like the first aion it has the weird success/failure bars, that fill up randomly. So it can take a good while just to gather 1 time or craft 1 item, unless you get lucky and proc the full bar. And the gather nodes have 3 tries on them each.

Between this and WMM, I got all my asian fix in.

If you played Aion 1, you likely have some fond memories of PVPing in the Abyss. There was a decent RVR balance and Sieges (while super laggy for me at the time) were still pretty awesome from a scale perspective with some interesting tactics available for certain keeps.

Here is an example circulating of someone who paid money to buy power and what that looks like: - this isn't fair, fun, or interesting. It's pure 'my wallet makes me nigh unkillable'. The best Aion 1 contrast would be some of the transforms that were available, which were limited from a time duration and had significant risk for the player transforming in that if he were killed the amount of AP lost was significant. There is no risk here, just pure "spend more money if you want to compete".

The required double passes to match progression and use trading is atrocious and predatory as fuck. Lets keep in mind the source of that statement: me. My tolerance for spending money in a game is way higher than 99% of the Western audience and for me to find it bad means it's pretty fucking bad. For all of it's flaws, Aion 1 had a lot of good concepts (hi2u Dredgion!) that would be interesting to see implemented in a modern game. This is mid level action combat with a UI clearly designed to be more intuitive on a phone than on a PC which would be criticized if we were in 1999.

Voldeth said:

If you played Aion 1, you likely have some fond memories of PVPing in the Abyss. There was a decent RVR balance and Sieges (while super laggy for me at the time) were still pretty awesome from a scale perspective with some interesting tactics available for certain keeps.

Here is an example circulating of someone who paid money to buy power and what that looks like: - this isn't fair, fun, or interesting. It's pure 'my wallet makes me nigh unkillable'. The best Aion 1 contrast would be some of the transforms that were available, which were limited from a time duration and had significant risk for the player transforming in that if he were killed the amount of AP lost was significant. There is no risk here, just pure "spend more money if you want to compete".

The required double passes to match progression and use trading is atrocious and predatory as fuck. Lets keep in mind the source of that statement: me. My tolerance for spending money in a game is way higher than 99% of the Western audience and for me to find it bad means it's pretty fucking bad. For all of it's flaws, Aion 1 had a lot of good concepts (hi2u Dredgion!) that would be interesting to see implemented in a modern game. This is mid level action combat with a UI clearly designed to be more intuitive on a phone than on a PC which would be criticized if we were in 1999.

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Yeah this kind of p2w will kill it fast. Can't imagine the money dropped by people like that. If it takes 10-20 to kill a guy, people will leave in droves. I dunno how he doesn't get bored of it after a couple hours. And this is only a week after launch, you would take how many months to catch up just playing normally, why bother when whales will jsut spend more to stay ahead.

A lot of the things tied to subs just cant go on, trading/market, even the amount of extra runs of dungeons you can day is extreme(and who knows what else, I didnt dive that deep into it because I never plan to buy it). Hell just the fact there are 2 on top the free one is crazy.

3 things they need to figure out before they release over here, their monetization, their UI and the server issues TW is having.

Again time will tell but NCsoft doesn't exactly inspire a lot of trust. Will it just end up like so many korean games where I level to max, do a few end game activities and then never play again without giving a cent. Or something like Lost ark, BDO or even archaege where I put 300+ hours into over the months/years. I think I only did ~120ish in T&L. The ones that lasted , the first 3, I actually gave money too.

Springbok said:

So does this mean you're done playing and can't give us carries at end game? Damnit....

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Let's not go that far, I just got 2.4k gearscore on my Templar and my Chanter box is getting up there at 1.6k. I offer very competitive pricing too and you don't even need to deal with the AI translation bot that is clearly capturing everything you say.

Too bad about the p2w garbage. Expected, but still disapointing all the same.

Some streamers I respect say the combat is good. Still going to try this when it hits the west. The video's I've seen bring back strong memories. Doubt I'll last more than a couple of months though. Get some pvp in before the whales totally destroy that part of the game.

Grim1 said:

Too bad about the p2w garbage. Expected, but still disapointing all the same.

Some streamers I respect say the combat is good. Still going to try this when it hits the west. The video's I've seen bring back strong memories. Doubt I'll last more than a couple of months though. Get some pvp in before the whales totally destroy that part of the game.

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Their monetization is a bit worse and will make the game pretty much DoA in the West past the novelty of a new game, unless they make some changes. The Subs are Server specific, but account wide on that Server. The Passes are Character specific, which is simply mind boggling, even more than having 2 in the first place... both with a premium track.

I'm just glad I don't have strong memories of Aion 1, or I imagine I'd be as tilted as he is. I do recall Aion 1 being significantly harder, with areas designed for groups. Haven't seen that here in A2 yet.

NPC dropped cosmetics will make people rich. You can obtain a skin of every piece of armor in the game by extracting a material from it (destroys the item), but aside from quest given stuff, there is only a 25% chance of getting that skin. Yet, if you are 5 lvls above the mobs you're killing the already low-ish drop rate takes a nose dive. Once you hit 45? You only have 1 loot pool across the entire game (supposedly, though I think those drops just get added into every mobs drop table at a higher chance). All those revealing armor pieces sell for millions now, at least on Nania.

Springbok said:

Gone through mid 20's on a bunch of toons on both factions - think the black wing guys have a much more interesting and fun onboarding, and the quests seem much better dispersed. Landed on chanter as the ping was pissing me off on sin. Chanter is breezing through the content. Should hit 45 today, playing on english asmodian tawain server.

One thing I really like in this game is the mount/pet system. Incentivizes grinding random mobs to see which are mountable, you can farm dozens of really interesting looking mounts.

Game looks fantastic, runs great. Most of the dungeons so far are pretty straightforward.

Monetization is insane, as mentioned. I switched up to a different server and lost my battle pass? Multiple subs if you're playing both factions? WTF? Koreans are cool with this shit? This should be f2p with amazing skins in cash shop ala most chinese games. Will keep playing because it's a pretty fun, good looking, well optimized experience so far. And boobs.

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They will change the monetization eventually, but in a way that will still allow people to whale so they can praise their epeen.

The Aion 2 subreddit is full of rage atm due to the Devs adding a flagging system, which if I understand correctly, you can choose to be PvE flagged (on by default) while still take a Rift into the other factions territory. The people who are most upset about this remind me a lot of the BDO players who claimed to like open world pvp (but never went to Arsha). These people just want to grief others whenever possible.

Springbok They changed the pet grind with todays patch so that it takes 50% less pet souls to max it out, and I think they made all pets Account (Server). They also changed Feathers so that you don't need to get all 560 or so to max out. Each feather now counts as 4, if you exceeded the cap you get the excess back as upgrade crystals (I forget the name).

The Black Market vendor decided to sell a low level piece of armor I had wanted, finally. So now I can run around wearing a plate bikini like a Castanic in Tera, lol. Oh, it is actually true that once you hit 45 every mob has the same loot table, which is really odd. All they needed to do was add the Gold drops to each mob.