Few days ago we where witnesses of first Aion’s servers merge. By many people it was long awaiting moment, which had to bring a life back to low populated servers, for the others it was seen as begin of the end. To spice everything even more NCsoft made contoversial characters name change procedure. Result? Please read the following part of article.

What is your name now?

When population of players is gerring low, server’s merge is quite most obvious step from publisher side. It allow not only to lower maintence cost of servers but also gathering players from few servers on one – increasing it population which make it more fun for everyone – it’s easier to find a group or enemies to PvP with. So it’s looks like win-win situation for both sides, publisher and players alike. Well, as we can see nothing is so simple, even if some reasons are… insane.

So what’s the thing? First thing is characters names conflict. It’s obvious thing – when we merge two servers into one, it’s more then sure that we will find characters with the same name on both (gretting for all Legolas’s and Naruto’s ;P).
NCsoft noticed the problem pretty fast and decide to give every single player an item which allow to change character’s name for free – so you could say everyingh is fine. Well not really, the case is that many players decided to buy Collectioner’s Edition of Aion just to be able reserver a name for they toon few days before oficial launch. I’m personally pretty much attached to my nickname, so even if this problem doesn’t touched me i feel little disappointment from whole this situation and how it was handled. This could be done in many different and better ways, for example by giving some kind of compensation to those players which simply got cheated by NCsoft.

So there is a blanace or there is not?

Another thing which resulted in whole cry river at various Aion forums is server balance after merge. We are talking about proportion of Asmodian and Elyos players. I have to admit that there is nothing to complain off, because in most cases we got ideal ratio which is 50/50 (of course with some round-off). In worst case the ratio is 52% to 48% – which happened only at one server – Suthran, and in my opinion this is totally acceptable.

But as we can see some players have a bigger issue with this, reasoning that on some servers Elyos side took control over bigger part of Abyss. As we go deeper and deeper into the topic, it’s became quite clear that Asmodian side simply gave up and refused to fight there. Such situation we had on Spatalos, the server I play on. So instead of fight, some decided to transfer off the server to new one where “our side” have everythign under control… and we don’t have to fight at all… in PvP game, … in aread dedicated mostly to sieges and PvP fight… Well I don’t know how about you, but I personally failed to find any sense in this behave. We can only dream that in some near future tchnical progress will be such big that AI will be able to balance even our mental capabilities

To sum this up – merges where done, and from my perspective they are sucessfull. Increase of players amount peer server resulted in much nicer gameing expierience we get. It’s much easier to find group or an enemy on our or his own territory. What’s more bigger activity draw up new players to the game – which you can easly find out by visiting lowe level areas.
If there would be no nickaname problem – all would be almost ideal.

Browser games became quite pretty business those days, but when gigant such like Electronic Arts publishing one them we are 100% sure that it’s true. “So, what is that web game you talking about?” you will ask. Well, flirtatiously i will only say that we are talking about a game with “Ultima” in title… just to be sure you will read this entry to the whole end

Without a doubt I could point few people which most likely already soiled their paints from happines as they read this. Unfortunetly, all Ultima Online fans should abandon all hope… this game have nothing to do with UO except the mentioned title (used for sure to bring more audience to this game). Well, if you ask me – I would really whiped a person which is responsible for such idea. To bad they ruined opportunity to smuggle a little bit of Lord British into this title.

Anyway, let’s focus on solid facts. Lord of Ultima (LoU) is a strategy game, and in fact for those who knows browser games it tells almost everything. Association with games such as Red Dragon or Evony came to my mind on their own. For those which never heard about those titles – you are getting a town with low amount of resources to your hands, with one purpose only – dominate the rest of the world. If you do this alone or with others it’s your choice.
So you are developping your city. From gaining the resources by building woodcutter’s huts and mines to building military structures which will allow you to recruit various troops.
We can expand on two different ways – by founding new towns or by conquering towns of other people. The catch is that you can only conquer city with castle and what’s more to attack it you need to build castle in your town as well. This soultion allow us to define the way we wanna play the game. Focusing on economical or military aspects of the game, and what’s more we can freely adjust it in the oposite way simply by changing amount of economical and military towns we have.

Except of developing and expanding we can jon to alliance (or create one), we can trade with other players or we have possibility to raid some ruins or monsters which spawn randomly in neighbourhood (killing them allow us to gain various items). As we speak about the items, we need to mention about in-game shop of course. We can buy different items which give us some amount of supplies or simply shorten time needed for building structures/recrutiment of troops. But most interesting is possibility of hireing a ministry (associated with building, defence or war). A ministry allow us to plan actions he perform when we are offline – i.e. recruit some amount of knights as soon as we gonna have needed materials for them. It’s really nice feature but still not strong enough to destroy whole fun for those who doesn’t want to buy anything. In my opinion developers made it rationaly but still encouraging us for little shopping ]:>
In general there is not to much options to perform – for example there is lack of any science research system, but you don’t really need anything else to have fun for a long days.

The most briliant thing in Lord of Ultima is quite open gameplay. What do I mean by that? On every server you have a world divided on few big continents and it’s only up to you how you want to conquer them. You can try all alone (at very begin it can bring pretty good results but in time it become more and more diffilcuit), you can create or join alliance. You can choose agressive or pure economic or combine both of them and still have quite big chances to obtain your goal. You can walk by dead’s man bodies without care about anything else or you can engage into political life and gain power without rising any army at all.
And that’s the best thing in LoU – for a long time i didn’t had such a fun from tracking political movements of various alliances. we have full option here – we have non agression pacts, coalitions, payed mecenaries and blacmails. You can do anything to reach your goal and it’s fun – you want scream “hell yeah, open PvP rox!”. And it’s quite interesting that EA managed to combine carebears and hardcore mechanics in one game allowing to both type of players have fun. I don’t know what do you think, but for me it’s a quite an archivement.

Of course LoU isn’t a game without flaws. We have few annoying bugs like not 100% clear mechanic for calculating battle losses, we have reports which tend to don’t arrive sometimes. But in general this are not things which destroy your fun from playing this game. Sure many thing depends from individual preferences and people you meet in game, but i personally was charmed by this game and i’m recommeding it at least for a try.

PS. If you plan to give a try i suggest to choose one of newest serwers – it will guarantie that game is on early stage there. Of course you can learn game mechanics on any serwer and then get a fresh start on new server

Most of us had a hope that Aion gonna be spritual successor of Lineage 2 with great PvP concept and grindless leveling. And looking at Aion from that perspective… it’s dissapointing. It’s because Aion is missing an intensive (open?) PvP. Of course in Aion we have a lot possibilities to get a fight – unfortunately only in theory. We have sieges, rifts and of course Abyss – the problem is that everyone of those is missing something.

• Abyss is quite wast… and deadly empty place. It’s because it doesn’t offer almost anything to characters with level cap reached. You can meet there only people which have their 50level still ahead, or those who gank the first metioned ones.
• Rifts are really great feature – so what’s wrong with it? The same thing as with Abyss – it’s hard to find any players there. The only chance to get 100% sure PvP is to attack some enemy city, which of course limit PvP possibilities. Alos you will need quite a few team mates to make fight more fair, coz as soon as you show up near guards enemies will appear in great numbers in no-time.
  Of course you can try to find enemies in the field but it’s very flustrating when you find out that in last 2 hours you have had meet ony 1-2-3 persons.
• But the thing which dissapoint the most is… siege mechanic. Siege in Aion is simply zerg fight, without any sophisticated tactics it’s pure mass against larger mass. It had to be one of main features of Aion but in the end it became a nail into the coffin. Sure sieges are few times a day, they are random and it’s great – really, but also they are open to anyone without any restictions… which means zerg. The most funny thing about sieges is it was looking really great at the paper/concept but in practice it’s simply not working at all.

Well it’s not as bad as it seems, you just need to get used to this – to controll large amount of people, less tactical and more global wise. Rifts are still great and excting expierience, but if you want guarantie PvP you need to force attack a city. There also is a Dreadgion which shows true PvPvE mechanic – loved for ones and hated by rest. Definityvly PvP in Aion is different then in other mmorpgs.

By reading the part above you can get feeling that Aion in general is a fail, which is finally not true. Even if it have some flaws it’s really addicting mmorpg which offer a lot of good fun.

There is quite a few aspects that are done without a flaw:

• Grind: It’s really huge step forward in term of grindless gameplay. Generally speaking I would say there is no grind (xp wise) at all. In my opinion sometimes even you level little bit to fast. Specially when you completing all quests you can find out that you where is some specific instances only once or maybe two, because your progress was so fast and there is no point to visit them again. Thats why i’m quite suprised when i hear opinions acording to which Aion is grind fest and only hard work make you level. I cannot agree with such opinion – especially when most XP you earn simply by doing quests – there is no time for grind. Of course if you really want you can chose hard way… but the question is “in order to what”? Sorry to say, but some people are simply spoiled… for those only after successfull creation of avatar you should get mex level with epic grear. Of course there is a grind for gear afer reaching level cap. But it’s whole another story, and it’s nothing different then we know from any other mmo out there.
• About quests I mentioned a little bit above. They are divided into 2 categories (3 in fact, but the 3rd one “work orders” is only to level crafting skills). First – campagain quests, which push forward the story and second – normal quests from random NPCs. Both for sure are not the new definition of quests (with few exceptions) but i have to admit they are really nicely written and done. It’s good to acomplish them not only for large amounts of XP and items as rewards but also to get know the story behind them and to learn little bit about world we are playing in.
• Another thing is flying and gliding, which are 2 main features of Aion – both are done simply great. Even if free unlimited flying is available only in few areas and of course in abyss, then gliding is available everywhere. Both mechanics makeing PvP in Aion a very unique expierience. The abilities they gives to players make the tactics totally different from what we get used to.

Sumarizing. If in Aion you where looking spiritual successor of Lineage 2 then this tile can dissapoint you. Luckily for all the others it’s quite good and solid mmo with rich and interesting world as well as fun PvP. Not without the flaws but exciting for sure. What’s more important incoming updates Aion Patch 1.9 and 2.0 hope to bring new content as well as fix some existing, which mean only one thing – it will be even better.

Coz of this silence you could think that nothing interesting happened in mean time – nothing more wrong. Our clan survived little revolution and reformed from the begin. At this moment we are at selecting legion leader stage and after few fights amongs members everything going in good direction now. So stay tuned for more news.

Collectioner’s Edition contains:

- 6.5″-tall, hand-painted figurine of Aiva, a winged Asmodian Daeva
- Exclusive in-game items, including:
- Black Cloud Wings (gives 40 seconds of additional flight time)
- Black Cloud Earring (gives an HP and an MP boost)
- Special character title with stat boost
- Color dye to tint one in-game item
- Two character emotes
- Official Aion soundtrack CD
- Two dual-sided, full-color posters
- Full-color, trifold quick reference card
- Two game DVDs
- Game manual
- First 30 days of gameplay

I don’t know how about you guys & girls but I already bought pre-order pack with collectioner’s edition.