Aion Launch Above Expectations, Comparing Endgames

Aion NA Launch
After finally getting my stuff set up here and overcoming some technical problems last night, I was finally able to put this article up. Basically if you were a gamer and hadn't been living under a rock for the last week or so, you'd know that Aion was released and NCsoft came out guns blazing. How popular was it exactly? Well let's just say in the first 2 days of "head start" play where pre-order players could start leveling before the game was shipped retail, the more popular servers had anywhere from a three to six hour queue time just to log on the server. Just hope you don't DC, crash, or need to restart or you'll get put right back into the queue unfortunately.

Despite NCsoft's less-than-stellar track record of creating unpolished games such as Lineage, the release of Aion was very surprsingly clean and lag-free. In fact, the only complaint that I've had with it thus far are the server queues and how the server doesn't "remember" if you had been on in the event of  DC or something. Servers have never really crashed, there haven't been login issues, and they even helped tremendously with the newbie area leveling with their instanced leveling area design.

The one and only problem that I had, and this may apply to other people as well, was my internet limiting access to port 7777, which is the one Aion uses for gameplay (along with port 80 and 2106 for launcher and login). Initially I thought I might be screwed, but after some research and tinkering around, I went to Lowerping, used their provided proxy server and Aion servers and connected with port forwarding to 7777. Everything worked out perfectly and I can consistently play with a ping of under 50ms. This is useful for anyone else that might have filtered ports like from businesses or on college campuses. Another alternative to Lowerping is another server called Gamepath if you can't seem to get lowerping to work for some reason. Both work relatively identically.

Now that the game is officially street released, the rush to 50 is on and players across the world are sleep deprived as they try to get level 50 as fast as possible including Veex who went over 48 hours straight of leveling without sleep. Despite that, the last time I talked to him, he still wasn't the highest level on his server.





Comparing Endgames
People always ask me all the time what I think about Aion and how it compares to WoW. Although I think it's a little bit unfair to judge everything in Aion in relation to its WoW counterpart, it's hard not to do so or expect the public to do so because of how high WoW set the standard for MMORPG's. These days, it's either you can roll with the big boys (Blizzard) or you go the way of Warhammer. Although I don't think it's worth comparing every minor detail of each game, I do think that comparing their endgames is worthy of discussion.

For Aion, the endgame currently is waging war against both the enemy player faction and the enemy NPC faction, both of which you'll have to battle against in the Abyss (and beyond the Abyss). There are several fortresses and relics that can be captured and controlled in the Abyss, giving the holders of said relics bonuses if in possession of them, similar to DAoC and their realm-wide relic bonuses. For now, Aion's endgame seems almost entirely PvP oriented.

On the other hand, with WoW, the current endgame seems to be hard-mode raiding and arena. WoW satisfies in the PvE department for the most part as the devs are never short of thinking up new and ridiculously challengnig achievements to get to tide the raiders over, but for PvP, is the arena endgame going to hold up? It's pretty much a given fact that battlegrounds are hated by the majority and that the only PvP endgame is arena. Given this, with Cataclysm not having any arena changed announced as of yet, how do people feel arena will keep the PvP'ers playing the game?  I'm in the boat of people that play for PvE and PvP hence why I hadn't quit due to outright boredome a long time ago, but for the people that play purely for PvP, will arena continue to keep them satisfied?

It's really hard to say at this point. Darkfall is a huge bust as far as I know so the competition sits between NCsoft and Blizzard now and although I'm sure Aion won't be a "WoW killer" by any stretch of the imagination, you really have to wonder how many of the PvP population from WoW will be migrating over to Aion.