Aion: The PvP and the Grind

Alright. In Abyss you can fight other players (and mobs), with every kill giving you Abyss Points. If you die, you lose a portion of your Abyss Points. The system seems fine at first glance, but you can grind to the fourth PvP rank just by playing PvE and the higher rank you get – the more punishing the system gets. Near full rank player getting killed will lose thousands of points, but scoring a kill on a low rank player will only gain you few hundred. This encourages players that gain higher ranks to avoid PvP, since the loss/gain ratio is hugely  imbalanced. In World of Warcraft you did not lose any points for getting killed, this on the other hand made players have little regard for dying – and ultimately – throwing themselves into the meatgrinder quite easily. There must be a balance somewhere, but I’d reckon having too huge penalties will only kill the joy for PvP. Also there are no tiers in the Abyss, meaning lvl 25 players will have lvl 50 players ganking them for Abyss Points. This problem will only grow once more of the player base reaches the level cap, and making it notorious for any players that get a late start into leveling, say for example, early 2010. I hope changes are incoming to address the situation.

As for the Grind, I’d hope NCSoft would have thrown more endgame baits along the leveling. An instance before 25 for example, a miniatyre Abyss for lowbies? What hooked me to WoW was getting to run instances after a mere few hours of gameplay and trying out the BattleGrounds. I thought “Hey, this is cool! I wan’t to do this at levelcap and fast!”, and I was hooked. Aion hasn’t sparked this in me, atleast not yet, and from what I’ve read in IRC and different Blogs, I’m not the only one with the problem. I can’t help but to feel that it’s a bit risky to spend a lot of hours on a game only to find out that the endgame might be lacking, but in this case as I’ve not invested any money myself, I’m putting it aside in terms of research and will continue further.

Going deeper under the skin

The past week I was quite busy so I had less time for actual gameplay, and instead of leveling too much ahead on my Templar (lvl 24) I played a bit more on my Chanter (lvl 16) in order to catch up to Eero and Rami, since I’m hoping we’ll take on the Abyss and the first instance together once they get closer to lvl 25. I also spent some time digging around how to optimize my client since I was experiencing FPS drops in larger areas even thought my PC isn’t that old. I think every WoW player recalls Shattrah city in Burning Crusade expansion and Dalaran now in Wrath of the Lich King. Both are small towns, where both factions are cropped together in a no-fighting zone full of merchants, banks, battleground NPCs and so on.

First impressions

So we began our weekend lan with Eero and Rami and it didn’t go down without problems. We got to the actual playing on Saturday since Eero got delayed on Friday and after reinstalling Ramis OS which got infected by a trojan downloader, due him expecting me to have a hardware firewall.. pfft. Oh well, after the hardships it was time to start playing the character I already created on Friday while waiting to get started.

Blog online

Alright, we’re online! Later tonight I’m starting the project plan with two of my friends who are also taking part in this report. We’ll hopefully have Aion installed before  the weekend and are planning to start the game together. After that I’ll start posting weekly about my experiences in Aion and how they compare to World of Warcraft, a game I played since the United States closed beta test up till autumn 2009.