Some of you may have noticed that I no longer post Aion videos. I have retired my Spiritmaster a few months ago and moved on to Global Agenda. Aion has some unique characteristics that I believe will prevent it from ever being successful in the western market. Sure it's grindy, but many people are okay with grindy. More than that, there is something unique about its grindiness that I have been wanting to talk about but haven't gotten a chance to (until now). I will attempt to paint a picture of Aion below, with key issues bolded.
Those who haven't played Aion may not appreciate what I'm talking about without some more background information about Aion's "endgame", "PvPvE" and "the grind". In summary, it takes a while to get to max level (50). In the time it took me to get to Level 50 in Aion, I could have gotten 3-4 characters to max level in Warhammer, and maybe 1-2 characters to max level in WoW (or 6 characters via the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses) .
The grinding in Aion is split in to what I think of as "grind buckets". Every couple of levels, you receive quests or get access to certain zones that place your character in a particular "grind bucket". The first grind bucket rewards you with Boots that give you +20% run speed. This is a tremendous advantage and necessary for PVP. You can either get your 20% speed boots via PVE by killing a thousand elite NPCs, or by doing Abyss/PvPvE stuff to get enough Abyss points to spend on the PVP version. The next couple of grind buckets involve grinding to obtain player abilities or grinding a few thousand more PVE kills to claim a nice gear reward. But almost invariably, every grind bucket requires you to spend money. Killing NPCs alone isn't enough --- the game often requires that you spend money crafting or buying some expensive item to turn in along with whatever crap you've been picking up from the NPCs.
Everyone in the same "grind bucket" may group up and keep each other company through the grind, to get whatever reward is associated with the bucket. The first few buckets may take days to weeks of playing time, while the last few buckets take months. When people graduate from one grind bucket to move on to the next, they usually never want to revisit the previous grind bucket. If you miss the train, or don't grind as fast as everyone else, you will be left behind and on your own. Throughout the game, people are constantly left behind in grind buckets, alienated and ultimately demotivated to unsubscribe. This may not be as apparent in games like Warhammer or WoW, because the grind buckets aren't as severe.
It was the "end game" grind bucket that killed me. You had to do things like kill thousands of silly NPCs. You had to wait for spawns all around the world at different times of day (there was a chance that they did not appear). You had to level a profession to Expert, costing insane amounts of money if you started the wrong profession (once you've started the expert quest on one profession, the game didn't let you change) and it involved standing in the crafting area for hours, just clicking on the 'craft' button. Then, you had to pass the Expert crafting exam by crafting a rare item that costs a lot of money or rare materials with a chance to fail. Many people's banks were bled dry by this point. But it's not over yet. The pinnacle of this chain's grind was collecting rare materials that came mostly from PVP zones. The drop rate was something like < 5% per NPC at a contested PVP zone, and you needed more than a 100 of them. For reference, I was getting one of them every couple of hours of playing. If you tried to cooperate with friends to farm them, you wouldn't necessarily be faster since you would have to split the drops with everyone. Needless to say they were expensive, so it was either grind them or grind something else to get enough money to buy them. But there's more. After you've collected all your rare items, you don't simply turn them in for your reward. You need to craft something with all of the materials, and THEN turn in the crafted item. What crushed my soul was the fact that you had a chance to fail at crafting the final item. I believe it was a 20% chance to succeed, 80% chance to fail.
Now that is ridiculous. Most people can tolerate a grind if there is a certain end in sight. If the end is certain, you know that any time you put in will bring you one step closer to your reward, and that you will eventually get the reward. It was only a matter of time. But once you place a random number generator at the end, it's demoralizing. If you are lucky, you could get it on your first try. But since it's random and each try is independent, you could be unlucky and fail 100 times. There is also a probability (even if it's slim) that you fail 1000 times. I wanted to PVP, not battle a random number generator.
Needless to say, I only focused on one character in Aion, which is a shame because one of the fun things of an MMORPG is trying out different classes/careers.
All this wouldn't make as much of a difference if Skill > Gear. If Skill > Gear, there will be less pressure to grind, and less reason for activities like botting and RMT to flourish. Unfortunately, Aion rewards grinders and encourages Gear > Skill. In fact, Gear in Aion is allowed to negate Skill so much that it's not even worth trying to fight sometimes because the chance of winning is almost zero. For example, the set bonus from completing the final epic gear quest bumps up magic resist so much, that someone else who has not completed the quest and has not received the full set bonuses has a slim chance of landing any magical abilities. Another example: if you are an Assassin with good gear, you can pretty much sneak up on someone, open up with some Combos that lead into stuns or a disable, and kill even tank classes --- all within the brief period of time that the player is disabled. You literally cannot do a single thing. Well... except go back to grinding.
But this points to another problem. Once you fall behind the gear race in Aion, it's almost impossible to catch up. The reason for this is that the final gear grind buckets requires "grinding" in a PVP zone. But since Gear > Skill, once you are outgeared, you will most probably be roflstomped in the PVP zones, and any PVP-zone-related quests will be inhibited. You will be unable to advance, while your opponents are free to extend their lead, causing the gear gap to widen exponentially. Not surprisingly, my guildie tells me that this is exactly what has happened on Zikel --- the entire "Core" (the highest-level PVP zone in the Abyss) is dominated by Elyos and Asmodians cannot do anything about it.
Ultimately, it wasn't just the grind. As much as I loved my Spiritmaster and PVP, the PVP environment in Aion wasn't that great. There are only a few ways you could PVP in Aion:
a) Rift into enemy territory
This required you to teleport to the enemy zone via a "rift" that would spawn at a random location in the friendly zone. At max level, you probably only had one rift that you could enter through every hour or so. The nice thing about rifting is that the zones are no-fly zones; and you don't have to suffer Aion's broken flight combat. The cons about this is that the rifts are not always available, and you need to pay for a resurrection kisk to resurrect in the enemy zone. Without a kisk deployed, deaths send you back to your friendly zone and you'll have to try to find a working rift again.
b) Go to the Abyss
This is an open PVP zone where everyone is flying most of the time. I typically stay away from this zone since flight combat sucks in Aion. This is also where all the artifacts and fortresses are, but I stay away from them too since they encourage zergy PVP.
c) Dredgion
Every now and then, action in the Abyss unlocks the Dredgion 'scenario'. This is an instance where you have human players on opposing factions fighting for similar PVE objectives. I like to play this whenever I can. The downside is you can only play one Dredgion game each time it becomes available.
I think the only reason I kept playing for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the Spiritmaster class. I still feel that they did a good job with core PVP combat (all else being equal). It was the world they wrapped around it, flight, their flavor of grinding, and how they let gear rule the world that sucked.
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