Quote:
Letter to Ncsoft Korea
I've been following Aion for nearly 2 years and I am now about to reach level 41 as a Cleric. I've been playing MMOs for nearly 9 years now.
Needless to say, I'm also the founder of Curse.
Regardless of that, there are three issues I want to bring to the front page today that need to be addressed or this game will end up being a 300k subscriber game within 6 months, not the one-million+ subscriber game it should be.
Facts:
* Aion is a good game - very enjoyable and rewarding for the hardcore gamer.
* Aion will fail in keeping the crowd of casual gamers, along with those that can't stomach the grind.
* Aion's 3d engine is performing great, but tens of thousands of players can't play during fortress sieges because of crash issues.
* Grouping is not rewarding enough.
* Spammers and bots are annoying.
* It's about 15-20 days of played time to make 1-50.
Problems and Solutions
Leveling Curve:
* Why is 18-20 and 22-25 a pain in the ***? A decent amount of people quit Aion at that level fearing that the game will be a massive grind all the way to 50. 1.5 was supposed to remove any grind within that level bracket, but the way the elite difficulty and XP were nerfed made it even worse. 1 to 25 was more FUN in CBT than at release as killing the 4 dots elites was GREAT xp.
* I agree that 40 to 50 should be challenging. I would make 40 to 45 easier. At least lvl 45+ people can have fun in PvP in big level 50s battles.
* It is faster for dps classes to solo grind than to group up except for the campaign quests.
* Right now at 35+ you have a choice in doing solo PvE/PvP and group PvE/PvP. When we have a lot more 50s roaming in the abyss, the PvP part will become almost impossible. This will reduce the variety of gameplay even more, not to mention encourage botting.
* A lot of quests are just a waste of time right now.
* because of all this,leveling is not as fun as it should be.
Solutions:
* Increase all quest rewards by 15%.
* Increase XP from all elites by 25% to give an incentive for grouping. This will also create more stickiness in the game as people interact together, create friend lists and guilds. Add abilities to those elites to prevent rangers/Sm/sorcs from soloing them (pull, 10 seconds silence, snare immunity).
* Increase XP from all normal mobs by 15% (I realize that in a few months it will be much harder to find groups for lower levels, at that point you can probably boost solo quest xp.)
* Applying the above changes will reduce the 1-40 grind.
* Double the duration and effectiveness of rested XP.
* Increase drops from elite mobs.
* Reduce 1-50 to 10-15 days played time. Aion has a great PvPvE end game. Let people reroll toons without having them think of the countless hours of grind they will have to do to get to 45+.
Fortress Crashes:
Where is the communication NCsoft?
This is probably the top priority for the Korean engineering team. Why not talk about it? At this point it's useless to go to sieges if you have a high end pc, as you'll just chain crash. Funnily enough, low-end machines seem to be exempt from this most of the time.
Solution:
All the engineering staff should be working on this along with NCWest providing far more communication regarding progress/changes/fixes. This is a game breaking bug.
Spammers and bots
The latest patch reduced the amount of spam for sure. Good job guys, but we are still getting a few an hour. There is a decent amount of bots on all servers. It's really upsetting to see them, but yet fun to kill them.
Solution:
24/7 GM support. A spammer should be banned within 1 hour. Require level 20 for /1 and /3 chats.
Develop an in house anti-cheat program, this will benefit all your games.
Itemization of NTC, Fire Temple, Alchamia and Steel Rake:
When it takes 5-15 hours to level up, getting a nice blue drop is like getting your mother to buy you candy when you are a kid. It motivates you a lot. Long character progression in leveling should also translate to progression in itemization . There are no excuses that you can't get decent gear from these instances(at least 1-2 blues a run for the group and a gold 20% of the time.)
Solution:
Revisit the itemization of all instances pre-50.
Addons:
No offense, but the UI is poor. The chat is very not user friendly. Targeting sucks and is buggy, especially as a healer it will drive you nuts.
Solution:
Please bring UI addons faster and let thousands of volunteer developers fix it for you. Make sure the API is limited, so addons don't play for you like vanilla WoW.
In conclusion, the level curve needs to be tweaked and the grind needs to be reduced. Group play needs to be encouraged and players need to have the ability to make choices. Greater communication with the community needs to be established and maintained. UI addons need to be pushed along with itemization improvement throughout 20-45. One sticking point for western players is certainly spammers and bots, NCWest's stance on this needs to be far stronger.
Ncsoft Korea, you have not won in the west yet. Please look at these issues that are not considered end game for you in Korea if you want to win here.
che dire .. concordo in pieno sullìxp .. dei gold seller sara' che sono abituato me ne frego... dei Bot son troppo basso .. dei region spammer , vabbe' ci si mette na pietra sopra..
