Yarr

Typical lack of info from NCWest, so not a surprise. They seem to be little more than a pretend studio that just passes along whatever info NCSoft Korea deems their western players should be allowed to eventually know. Assuming more than just a few people are even left at NCWest anymore. Aion is a fun game and world, just has a terrible division running it in the west. Imagine if NCSoft got smart and let their ArenaNet studio run the game, as well as fix the RNG and do a true westernization of the game. Keep the good design work done by the Korean devs, but not have so many time wasting game cafe features; this isn't the Korean market.

Not to start a TERA vs Aion war, but after playing in this weekend's TERA event I was less than impressed with TERA. Aside from the ex-NCWest EN Masse crew running it in NorthAm, and the convicted thieves that set up BlueHole Studio, the game is exactly what I've seen Korean players say about it: pretty graphics, somewhat fun combat that quickly becomes a repetitive brainless mouse click-fest with occasional skill use, generic kill ten rats and FedEx quests with laughable lore, etc. On top of that the westernized voice-overs range from okay to embarrassingly bad. The characters look like they are made of water balloons, run funny, jump weirdly, etc. Maybe if you look at the game as a parody of Asian games (kind of a weird take on Final Fantasy mixed with Lineage) it makes sense? I might try it again when it goes F2P; and it will rather quickly. Would be funny if the NCSoft vs BlueHole/En Masse lawsuit in the west ends with them agreeing to work together, convert the game to F2P and then share the profits. Might actually be the best for TERA players in the long run as well,which would be a good thing.

@Sam not Spam - excellent idea on a weapon or skill for low levels that could hurt a high level player and maybe even kill them if enough low level players get together. With a long cool down and make it only useful to use against a certain level higher than yours, so you can't use it to one-shot similar level or lower characters. I've been on both sides of high vs low and honestly don't find either fun. It is frustrating to not be able to even damage a higher level, and I get no enjoyment fighting someone that can't really hurt me. Waste of time either way.

I've actually run GW on Win98. In fact on two machines running Win98. One had on-board graphics and could just barely run it (as in maybe 15 frames per second).

The other had a top of the line (for Win98 days) graphics card and memory. It took some tweaking but it did run mostly okay, which was pretty neat. That machine is sitting here on one of my desks and still has GW installed on it (I think). Guess it is time to uninstall it. :)

Wow, just had a look at the En Masse Entertainment bios page: all ex-NCSoft & ex-NCWest, and of course Aion players should recognize several of those names, and not for good reasons.

I'll check this game out when they've moved on to the next studio and TERA is F2P. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice... not gonna happen. :)

@Professer - they changed the interface a bit several versions ago, including new colors and such. You might try searching YouTube for the 2.7 official trailer (I think there is only a Korean version of it), which shows the new darker blue interface about halfway through the vid.

Questing and leveling is now super easy (too easy IMO, but I like killing stuff and the combat system so...). The quest line is basically the same, so it is linear, but they eased up on the grind, most needed quest items will drop fairly quickly now, although more so on the Elyos side than Asmo, which for some reason wasn't tweaked as much. I've been running some new characters through both sides and things are very different from the early days.

Question on your font problems, could you link to a picture of what bothers you? I know with certain graphics settings, especially with anti-aliasing and ATI cards, the main font would become very distorted and hard to read.

There are ways to change the actual game's font, but no telling if that violates whatever this week's rules on banning players might be, so that would certainly be try at your own risk. Then again, with the game going F2P you'd only be out your time if there was a problem doing that. I actually like the default Aion font and find it easy on the eyes and large enough for my aging eyes to easily read.

Good news on the crafting updates! That might even get me back to trying some again, as the insane RNG of getting anything decent from crafting pretty much completely put me off doing any, as it is often cheaper (not to mention the time saved) to just buy similar items off the broker.

@pancakewizard - your low FPS in those areas is very likely due to the combination of hard drive speed, graphics memory, and system memory speeds. If there is any conflict or slowness it will bring Aion to its knees loading/unloading textures in busy areas. You might also play around with the setting for loading other character's detail. Putting the game flies on a SSD (if you have the money for one, ouch) will (very likely) help with that, assuming again that the memory subsystems of your computer can make use of the SSD speeds compared to a hard drive. An expensive solution, to say the least.

There is software that will let you turn off all kinds of background programs and processes while playing a game that might help you out. Tweaking the graphics driver settings can often improve things and you might try searching forums for what others have had luck with on that.

Poll needs a third option: both

I play both about equally, probably because I think of them more as characters in a story, rather than it actually being a virtual version of me. Do people that have problems playing an opposite gender in games also have problems reading a story where the main character is a different gender? Or maybe they have empathy problems, which would explain some of the hatred, sexism, killing, and such, that a great deal of the human race seems more interested in than just getting along with each other.

Armor sets are often a bit different between genders, so that is another reason to have both types, unless you are the type that only plays a single character; in which case we altaholics pity you. :)

@Jef Reahard - agreed, I've been trying for years get even semi accurate information on MMORPG games and it is mostly impossible, other than just some general info on overall trends. Everyone considers actual numbers a trade secret and public owned companies carefully word their investor calls and quarterly reports to be void of anything even remotely accurate; blending in player numbers from beta and "free" weekends, sales from various divisions manipulated to make sure there is no way to determine any single game's actual sales, etc.

It would be interesting to know the real numbers, but I can see how people in general would abuse that. A small dip in players and "the game is dying"; don't have WoW numbers then the game is a failure, etc. Sad.

On topic, I'm was very surprised to hear this about Lime Odyssey. I wasn't really very interested in the game other than the strange name and kinda neat weirdness vibe of the preview vids, but I know quite a few Massively readers were looking forward to this and now it may never make it to release. Shame.

@Space Cobra - I miss my old Sony superBETA Hi-Fi VCR. That thing outlasted several VHS units and I sold it for almost exactly what I bought it for new! Last I heard it was still cranking along at a video production service. Ah, for the days when videos didn't seem to have compression artifacts all over the place, even if the resolution was a bit limited. ;-)

The reason digital won out was because analog only had two faction PvP, and digital is just a solo theme-park for casuals. :)

Very interesting. Still want to see actual game play and/or hopefully some type of Let's Play so I have some idea of what the gaming part of the Otherland is actually about, besides being based on a book series.