www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A_tHT8D1kM

My wife and I bought the Aion collector’s edition and managed to get in to head-start before the main horde of players joined in later on in the week. It’s a great game so far, I must say. The attention to detail is very nice and the fights feel fast paced and dynamic.

In many ways it’s like most other MMOs in that there are a lot of “collect 10 of these”, “kill 5 of those” type of quests but it’s extremely well polished. It’s really nice to see a new MMO that actually feels finished. There’s a reason for that of course -- it’s been around in South Korea for quite some time now and is only new to the Western World.

What makes it different from other MMOs?  Well, it’s not repeating the same tired old orcs, elves and dwarves formula.  This time it’s basically angels vs demons where everyone gets to play celestial creatures… and we get to fly!  Not only fly but fight while flying!  The game seems to be quite PvP orientated, although I’ve had no experience of that myself.  I think they officially call it PvPvE in that there are 2 player teams, the Elyos and the Asmodians, and also an NPC team called the Balor.

Unfortunately we’re really struggling to play the game in Europe at the moment.  NCSoft have woefully oversold their capacity and it’s impossible to play unless you want to queue at login servers for anywhere from 2 to 4 hours!  I’m not kidding either.  For some reason they don’t have to queue in North America, China, nor Korea.  It seems Europe has been handed the shitty end of the stick on this one!

What’s even worse is that we can’t get any official replies from NCSoft staff as they’re currently unable to respond on the forums due to another technical issue, although individual NCSoft employees have apparently managed to get a few messages out on Twitter!

I have one other gripe as well.  The Aion support hours end at 8pm.  It’s like the GMs just go home and they don’t even leave a skeleton crew or even a means to leave messages.  If you try to send in a petition in these out of office hours, you’ll be asked to try again later.  This means that the general chat channels basically turn to hell after 8pm.  I’ve seen people nattering about child pornography and all sorts of inappropriate topics and nobody can report them!

Perhaps in other places in the world they just don’t have the same dire behaviour from their youth that we, in particular Britain, suffer from and so perhaps it’s not been a problem for them until now.  But it’s something that needs to be addressed very quickly in my opinion.  Some people have suggested using the ignore feature but I consider that a complete cop out.  People like that need punishing, not ignoring.

Anyway in short, Aion looks to be a great game but the quality of service that NCSoft is currently giving European players is awful.  I really hope it doesn’t turn too many people away from the game, but unfortunately the forums are jammed full with “Screw you NCSoft!” and “That’s it, I’ve cancelled!” type of threads.