Aion: Say goodbye to GameGuard (for now...)

"Hark! The Herald Daeva Sing. NCsoft casts GameGuard out from under its wing." Many an Aion player are rejoicing at the latest news out of NCsoft. The game will not be launching with infamous anti-cheating software GameGuard (GG). If you're unfamiliar with this software, it comes packaged with many Asian MMOs. Think of it as Warden from World of Warcraft or Punkbuster from your favorite FPS... on steroids. GG has probably been the number one complaint about Aion throughout beta and it appears that NCsoft is unwilling to put off any customers on launch day by potentially inconsistent performance.

However, this removal of GG will be only temporary until they can figure out a way to re-enable it without causing major issues. NCsoft just released one last patch before launch to banish GG and include a few more updates to the client. The level cap has been raised from 45 to 50. Players can now reserve 2 characters during preselect and create 8 characters in total during the head start period and beyond. Finally, channels will be set at 10 instances for the first two zones of each faction. This number will be reduced once players settle in, likely to reduce farming potential and maintain critical mass.

Reader Comments (34)

If you don't want to play a PVP game, don't play a PVP game. There's A LOT of PVE games out there right now, help yourself.

This really surprised me. Gamegaurd was giving me a hell of a time on my other computer, crashing my system completely. When the game crashed, gamegaurd would take out most of the other programs running in Aion's absence. It was even blocking my Logitech G-13 from functioning properly.

I avoided most of these problems by running Aion on my 64 bit Win 7 machine. Luckily I could afford to do this, but I could see how this would have put off someone on a mediocre machine that is just giving Aion a shot after work.

Good call, someone in NCSoft West deserves a promotion.

@Jack - I don't think this is the sort of game for you, then. The forded PVP is a pretty integral part of the gameplay.

I understand you not liking it, that's you choice, but not griping about it when there are dozens of other games out there that do not force PVP.

Just saying.

It's incredibly naive from a security point of view to believe that Gameguard can stop cheaters. Gameguard can't stop cheating because determined cheaters will simply write a hack for the game that tells the game gameguard is running when in fact it has been disabled. That is if this title gains enough popularity to actually attract that type of audience. Once the hack is written it just needs to be distributed via the web and updated for each patch in order to stay ahead of the game developers, then anybody with any level of expertise can have it.

There were gameguard hacks widely available for Lineage II and probably still are.

Mostly this is just another shameful consumer deception tactic by NCSoft. They're improving the product for launch to lure in unwitting buyers, then dropping something on them they may very well find totally crippling to their experience later on.

Ahh was waiting for you to drop in, its not a Aion post without your idiotic dribble now is it?
They have said they will only implement it again if it is fixed and causes no problems, gotta love your selective reading.

I never had any problems with Gameguard, but it did limit the functionality of a -lot- of software that had no effect on the game. I, for one, am glad to see it go.

And how will they know if it doesn't cause problems? They have to deploy it first en-masse to know that!

By nature, Gameguard controls your computer for you and treats you like a criminal. There will always be a subset of the total number of players who will be adversely affected due to the diverse number of hardware and software configurations present in the Windows PC market.

I for one am VERY glad to see it gone.

The biggest thing it comes down to, GameGuard did very very very little to stop even casual hackers on the Asian servers. And it had a very negative effect on many legit want-to-be customers (myself and my friends included).

While I realize not everyone had problems with it, it's not some isolated issue or a "if you don't try to disable or hack your game, you wouldn't have a problem" type of deal. Go to any of the beta fan sites. You'll see massive discussions and complaints about it. Almost all of the "Help, why won't my game run properly" discussions also traced back to GameGuard issues.

I like how they say that they will turn it off for a short time to work out the issues. Sounds more like they plan to just turn it off to get then extra people to buy the game. Cause they have already said its going to be turned back on.

Heck even Aion Korean version has its fair share of cheats and exploiters in the game. I can't wait to see NCSoft try and scramble to clean up after the cheaters. It's going to be a interesting game to watch from the side lines.

Their plan is probably to wait until it is fully compatible with windows 7. if you kept up with Aion news, you would remember a while ago NCSoft gave nProtect an ultimatum of "fix your software or we will drop it" nProtect's answer to that was basically a "no" I for one an very glad to see they are dropping it until it is fixed. for the longest time, I was running windows 7 32bit, so i had to disable gameguard to be able to play the closed betas. Gameguard is more of an annoyance, than any sort of hack prevention. it literally took me one look up on Google, a download of one program, and a double-click to disable gameguard.

I'm surprised they bothered with it. Lineage II is 'protected' by GameGuard... it's no secret what's happened in that game. The PC version of PSU also had GameGuard. It was also hacked to death for the first year or so, as GG did nothing against certain cheat programs which helped ruin that game.

GameGuard does nothing but inconvenience honest players. It's like DRM in that regard: people who want to get around it will, but the rest of us will still be treated like scum.

Woo kill that nasty program, its given me the most problems when trying to play aion

I pre-ordered Aion and spent a fair amount of time downloading and installing the beta. It would not play at all due to GameGuard. I canceled my pre-order and used system restore to get rid of it. Can't say I trust a company's statement that they will bring it back when it's fixed. Too bad, looks like a cool game.

Aion: Say goodbye to GameGuard (for now...)

Reader Comments (34)

Posted: Sep 18th 2009 12:33PM (Unverified) said

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Posted: Sep 18th 2009 12:24PM WSCopic said

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Posted: Sep 18th 2009 1:26PM TheRealStupid said

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Posted: Sep 18th 2009 1:47PM Marked said

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Posted: Sep 18th 2009 6:33PM Xii said

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Posted: Sep 20th 2009 9:24PM (Unverified) said

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