Aion has been great so far but NCsoft is about to lose every Oceanic player

Aion has been really good so far. The server stability has continued (even through sieges), and although the end-game is a bit more zergy than I would have liked I'm still enjoying it just as much as when I posted my last article (even though leveling is still a bit of a ******* pain, up to level 41 personally).

The only problem is that NCSoft just banned 70% of the proxy services available. This includes LowerPing, Gamepath, Wowtunnels, Smoothping, and I'm sure there's more that I don't even know of. I assume the reason was to quell botters, farmers and spammers who connect through these IPs to mask a global IP ban, however the majority of people who use these IP's are Oceanic based players trying to reduce their latency from 400-800 to 2-300.

I'm going to say it straight up, Aion is unplayable without some form of proxy service. WOW actually wasn't too bad, with the algorithm and decent internet I would normally get around 2-270 ping without any proxy service (and around 140-180 with). Absolutely not ideal, but something you can put up with for battlegrounds, PVE, and low rated arena (lol). Because of Aion's server locations however, with GREAT Internet, Australians will be averaging around 400-450 which considering the game is already not extremely high-ping friendly with its lack of spammable snares and the Z axis (flying) -- good ******* luck actually doing anything but mindlessly tab targeting in fortress sieges.

So. What does this mean for the Oceanic player base? Well right now there is still a couple of IPs working (LowerPing WOW East servers for one -- only around 20-40 more ping than the Aion specific ones), but if more people migrate to them then they'll probably just get banned too. This will honestly snowball into I'd guess around 50% of the Oceanic player base quitting (and 100% of the melee), which would further snowball into further Oceanic people quitting because all of their friends / guild are, and then pretty much everyone else since the Oceanic server will be dead and they'll be no one to play with.

Judging by server queues in peak time, I know that there are at least 10000 active Oceanic players (and there's easily a LOT more, but this is minimum going on facts). 10000 subs at $15 a month = $150000 (a month) that NCSoft would be losing if they decide to keep this change just to quell the gold spammers and farmers. I just hope that they realise it really isn't ******* worth it in the next day or 2 before half the Oceanic playerbase ragequit.