October Aion Community Address (10/23/09)

[Falisa]

It’s been a month now since Aion opened its doors to players in North America and Europe. In that month, the growth of the game's community has signaled Aion's success. We've received an amazing amount of feedback, both positive and negative. We'd like to reiterate that we've been listening. We have been working around the clock toward solutions to the problems many of you have experienced.

You've told us that it's difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we're planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly "grind."

In this week's Eye on Community, we answered a question that a player had about client instability. In the reply, we noted that most of the claims stem from the infamous "Crysystem.dll error." We've been working with members of the community to identify the cause of the problem in order to find a permanent solution. Our development team is currently investigating, and will be testing a variety of different short- and long-term solutions. These include adding additional and improved display options to the Aion client, as well as system and memory optimizations.

We've heard your unhappiness about the chat spam and bots in Aion and recognize it as an annoying problem. We’ve taken measures to reduce the amount of chat spam you’ll be subjected to and have already seen substantial improvements in this area. We've been expanding our GM customer service staff, and we have also assembled a special team dedicated to hunting down and eliminating botting operations. It's obvious these activities erode your gameplay experience far too much to be acceptable. They also harm us from a business standpoint due to the RMT organizations' frequent use of stolen credit cards.

Many of you have asked us why we haven't spent more time communicating the specifics of our plans. The unfortunate truth is that the same people spamming chat channels and setting up bots are also reading our announcements. In order to keep the enemy in the dark, we cannot be too vocal about our plans to fight back.

We want you to know, though, that we're more dedicated than ever to eliminate chat spam and the use of bots. The good news is that you can help. If you see any suspicious player activity, report it. To quickly report these players, use the /AutoReportHunting feature by typing /AutoReportHunting while a suspicious character is targeted. It's important to note that this system will actually begin to penalize players after they've been reported multiple times. The more of you that use this system—the more effective it will become.

To add more specificity to what we're discussing here, early next week we're going to be releasing details about a game update that will go into further detail about how we’ll be fixing some of these issues, in addition to others.

It’s been an exciting month, and the future of Aion is full of promise. Please continue to send us your feedback and never forget that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

-The Aion Community Team

Atleast they are more responsive to the community than what I am used to from FFXI. Even if they can't fix things right away, its nice they are acknowledging everyone's complaints on a lot of the main issues.

Thought I'd start posting any kind of updates to the notice section for anyone who doesn't pay attention to these things (as I don't keep a close on this myself either.. just read this two days after it was posted). Anyone else can feel free to do this as well.

[Melchiah]

After 5 years playing FFXI, and being consistently dissappointed with SE customer service, I could just masturbate to an announcement like this after a month of the game going live. NCSoft should teach Remedial Customer Service seminars.

I love it.

[Hitoshura]

More EXP? I really hope they hold to that.

[Falisa]

Now when we get to 50 and they add in the more exp rewards we can be like "youngsters... BACK IN MY DAY QUESTS ONLY GAVE HALF THE EXP IT GIVES YOU NOW"

[Trocian]

More EXP? I really hope they hold to that.

Still not sure if the upcoming "EXP buff" everyone's going ballistic about is a general buff, or just a buff to the 15-or-so quests that were listed in the patchnotes.

It'll be fun to see then rage when all we get is an extra 15 million EXP from quests between 40 and 50.

[Arcana]

Well i kinda wish they'd give a STF Update style with how much kinah/players have been removed during the month.

[Meresgi]

I hope the xp thing is a major buff to all quests. As it is now, I just hit 42 and found 5 new quests, 4 of them group quests. That all together give 5million xp out of the 57million I need. I'm taking a break for a day after grinding 40-42 because I honestly hate the grind.

[Vile23]

When I was playing FFXI I don't remember seeing spamming at all. Is this just a new trend in all MMO's in general nowadays? WoW had a few morons doing it mildly in org etc.. but shit in Aion its ridiculous.

[Meresgi]

FFXI didnt have global channels did it?

[Vile23]

FFXI didnt have global channels did it?

No. But The 2+ years I played I don't member seeing spamming at all.

[Lebzile]

No. But The 2+ years I played I don't member seeing spamming at all.

You obviously weren't around for the Jeuno shouts wars before ToAU came out.

[Meresgi]

No. But The 2+ years I played I don't member seeing spamming at all.

What i'm saying is, with the use of global channels, spam arose faster. WoW didnt have too many global channels so you only really saw spam in trade chat while in cities. Since LFG is global and heavily used by players, its a prime area for RMT.

[Priran]

RMTs are only half of what is wrong with LFG channel. The other half is the idiots who think it's there for broadcasting the location of members of the enemy faction GLOBALLY (use /1 or, better yet, shut the fuck up because no one cares), for use as a chatroom, or a place to ask how to mine fishcorn.

RMT whispers and letters are so much more obnoxious than RMTs in LFG.

[Elesirdur]

Aion LFG is Barrens Chat all day, every day.

I got pretty used to WoW's system of only allowing players into the LFG channel when they are flagged as LFG in the matchmaking system. However, Trade just ended up being the global spam channel and 9 times out of 10 I did not connect to the Trade channel to avoid all the crap. Aion's LFG does need a serious revamping, but as another month or two passes and all the WoW kiddies run into the grindfest and actually challenging content later on, I'm hoping it'll get better. However, that's not going to stop new players from completely cocking it up either.

[Magewrath]

Well played to NCSoft, for doing their best to rid the game of botters and RMT. Personally it doesn't really bother me, as I came to the conclusion years ago playing FF that we can never really rid ourselves of them. Still, it's nice that companies are trying.

As for the exp. Well I guess I'm not really best placed to comment, as my highest character is 31, but I personally love the fact that it takes so long to grind. I feel much more accomplishment in that 'ding'. I hope they don't buff it too hard =/

[Lebzile]

but I personally love the fact that it takes so long to grind. I feel much more accomplishment in that 'ding'. I hope they don't buff it too hard =/

You're obviously a Korean at heart. The grind in this game isn't that bad, but I think I would rather grind out 10 sets of merits over getting from 49-50 Lol.

[Kerberoz]

The grind isn't any worse than oldschool XI. Remember 4k/hr weapon parties? lol

[Saga]

The grind isn't any worse than oldschool XI. Remember 4k/hr weapon parties? lol

Without a static, old school FFXI was a miserable grind. 3-4k an hour in Bibiki Bay at 70 was standard, some of the best EXP parties I had on my 66 NIN were something like 4.5k/hour in damselflies in Boyhada Tree. That shit was lightning fast then. At least with Aion you can solo your way to 50 if you really wanted to.

[Illumina]

A friend and I intend on going straight to 50 in a duo without worrying about instances or any other content aside from the odd [Group] mission here and there, so this really sounds appealing to us.

I'm glad NC is becoming more vocal toward the community, I was starting to worry they were becoming Square Jr.

[Olo401]

The grind isn't any worse than oldschool XI. Remember 4k/hr weapon parties? lol

<3 Moon!