aion_tamat: What is the biggest issue you have with Aion currently? Please keep replies constructive!

[Dareios]

Game/Server Stability (Reducing Crashes/Lag)

Bots (Lvl 40 bots and bots that flood the market with Aether, are you kidding with this?)

Customer Service (Adding forum mods)

Soul Healer (Example: Paying 50k because you fall to your death during a lagspike mid-flight is ridiculous)

[Ridelyn]

In-Game Presence/Petition/Player Reports - if GM's maintain an in-game presence of some sort, and are capable of responding to important player petitions immediately, I think a lot of these issues become a lot less severe. Bots, gold spammers, harassment, etc. can all be taken care of immediately, and the servers become a lot better place for us to spend our time. Reporting a bot or gold spammer should be a separate mechanism than a petition (there is autoreporthunting, but it doesn't really appear to do anything or get any results).

Bots - lots has been said on this. It is the single most distracting, discouraging, and disappointing aspect of the game right now. The sub-L10 chat restrictions solved part of the symptom, but is a huge restriction on legitimate players and needs to be resolved ASAP. Not being able to communicate in an MMO for the first several hours of your formative gameplay is extremely sad for a first time player to the game, and especially a first time player of MMOs. I do agree that in-game presence, and active removal of bots (even if it's just forceable disconnection, not even account banning, for a confirmed but first time offense), would go a long way on this issue.

Leveling - Don't have any problem with the grind, or with xp loss, or even with the Quest amount and XP reward at the moment. I think if Group XP is fixed that a lot of these problems will seem a lot less significant. The fact that grouping makes most classes level less efficiently is a large problem. Grouping should be encouraged for more than just getting those group quests done - there should be more incentives to be social. A small XP bonus (say a couple percent per group member, enough to be significant, but not enough to be exploitable on non-group content), and an additional bonus for elites (or other group content) while grouped would go a long way. Make groups more enticing, and more efficient than solo grinding, and the grind won't seem nearly long or boring.

Crafting - I love the work order system, and the fact that you can get all the way to 399 skill without actually having to make anything. However, it feels like there should be a skill-up bonus for creating something real, since you are burning real components and took the time (and money) to actually get them. The warehouse should be available in the crafting area (maybe restrict it to Expert-only). Once you learn a pattern you can't see the proc any longer. There may also be a way to guarantee a proc, either via alternative pattern rewards, or by getting so many successful procs and handing them in as a quest item, or using alternative higher-grade materials, or something. It shouldn't be cheaper than proccing, for certain, but it should be available (especially for like Weaponsmiths, who need procs on procs).

Rare mob/Bosses - There is nothing more disheartening than killing a rare mob/boss and having it reward nothing. The World-mob drop rate is probably about right for how often they spawn, but the instanced boss rate is ridiculous. I have seen Fire Temple runs where we didn't get any drop at all - nada from each boss in the instance. I'm ok with the yellow drop rate being where it is (I never saw one myself in many runs). If you are worried about people farming them for cash just lower the vendor value, the items are already non-tradeable. The fact that I ran Fire Temple regularly for 6 levels, and came away with next to nothing for it was very disappointing to me.

Travel - I love gliding, and I don't miss mounts. I do think that perhaps that most zones just don't have enough flight destinations. Once you have to go back uphill it's a long walk. For Abyss travel, flight time takes way too long to recharge - resting should also help the flight recharge time

Interface - no customization, lots of dialog boxes that need clicking for no apparent reason, quest dialogs which force you to scroll down (particularly annoying on work orders), a macro system that sounds like it should be great but works spottily, window positions are not saved, the chat window is clunky. The interface just needs more polish in general. Open more broker slots (either for purchase like the cube/warehouse, or as quest/level rewards), get rid of the personal traders (they are mostly used by gold sellers and to talk to the opposing faction anyway).

Game Mechanics - too much emphasis on the animations. They look incredible, but the fact that user input gets dropped while they are in progress is horrible, and makes combat (especially pvp and macros) feel kinda of squishy and unresponsive to me. An action queue of even 1 item would help make the animation lag seem a lot less apparent. The Abyss is only mediocre right now - lower level questing areas routinely just become unplayable for periods of time, and fort raids are not much fun: too many disconnects, the rewards are not consistent, and they have mostly just become 5-minute zerg fests with the defenders at a huge disadvantage. There is a lot of emphasis on consumables to make up for class deficiencies. Rubberbanding is really horrible in this game as well - not just that which results from network lag, but the fact that a lot of player abilities go off from where they were standing, but the animation continues through and doesn't affect the placement of the spell, is pretty crappy. For instance, if someone casts a stun on you, you will rubberband back to the time where there cast completed, even though there is a finite amount of time for their animation to complete afterwards and you may have gained a few meters running.

LFG - there is an existing LFG interface, but it's too generic and doesn't get used as a result. You should be able to not only set your status to LFG, but also set a comment (saying your only LFG for certain instances or quests, for example). There should be some visible indicator of your LFG status as well, like a title. Right now, everyone just spams LFG chat.

Legion - this needs to be refined along with the interface. The legion warehouse is pretty crappy at the moment.

Zone Channels - Rift zones only are capable of having one channel? Ok I can understand the pvp mechanic behind that, but the practical aspect of it is that the major quest areas of those zones become way too crowded and become just pvp farming grounds for the opposing factions.

Quest/Instances - A lot of quests lock out and prevent you from helping people after you complete. The L20/L40 campaign quests, for instance. I don't even understand the purpose behind this. The L25-28 Abyss instance was a great idea - excellent XP rewards with a decent lockout time. It's a shame more of this type of dungeon isn't in the game.

Anyway, not that I expect someone to make it to this page and actually read it, but I at least feel better for having said it. Safe flying.

[jurektajne]

Crashes

Bots

[Masculino]

1) Bots.
2) No incentive on grouping.

[Lesbica]

Crysystem.DLL Crashes
Bots

[Haleadrus]

50 main problems:

1) Bots.
2) More bots.
3) Is it a bot group?
4) OMG MORE BOTS? IS ANYBODY ALIVE HERE? HELLO?
5) OMG THIS IS MY QUEST MONSTER, YOU FREAKING BOT!!1!!!
6) OK, STOP KSING ME, I'M REPORTING YOU
7) NO MORE REPORTS?
...
...
..
.
20) Hah, now I will check the bots I reported a week ago... 15 LVS MORE THAN ME?
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.. ..
.
..
...
25) ...UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...
...
28) MOREBOTS!111!!!
.
36) Ok, bots are not here, I got my quest mob, will turn in... 8k XP?
37) So you ask me for repeating it 100 times for 8k XP each? Is it a joke?
38) OMG WE KILLED THE BOSS! WOOO... Loot: 200 Kinah. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...
..
...
..
42) HI? HELLO? 0100100001100101011011000110110001101111?
..
.

48) Soul Healer. Seriously, do what you want, make me sick, cut my wings, whatever, but PLEASE: don't touch on my XP when I die. It's really annoying losing XP after hours of grind.

49) Nice patch notes, now PATCH IT, DAMMIT!

50) BAN BOTTERS!

[liloo]

Just an ignorant question - was Gameguard a part of the original intent to handle BOTS, or is Gameguard more of a software-tampering protection?

I know it was taken out due to high demand, but I'm wondering of what we have left may be worse overall.

Just a thought -

Liloo

[Phoenix Pinion]

Originally Posted by liloo

Just an ignorant question - was Gameguard a part of the original intent to handle BOTS, or is Gameguard more of a software-tampering protection?

I know it was taken out due to high demand, but I'm wondering of what we have left may be worse overall.

Just a thought -

Liloo

The thing is gameguard was hackable so it did nothing to resovle the bot issue. All it did was get rid of potential customers who couldnt run the game due to game guard.

[Dythe]

Please stop the bots. As stated they take needed quest items. Kinah/Gold Sellers in the city or anywhere (what is a level 9/10 toon doing in Morheim in lvl 4 armor ) As for the Private stores , allow us to turn off chat bubbles . I can run through them but I hate to see all that screamimg bubbles on my way to the warehouse. These things are most discouraging in the game .
And start banning accounts that use those sites - "wow look at the 2 mil kinah I have all of a sudden ".
Ugh makes me wonder why NC Soft would put up with this to the detriment of the game over all .

[Cavalo]

7 Flaws that are REALLY annoying me, and in time, will make me quit the game. Not much time =/.

1- Balance PVP out. Doesnt matter how many disagree, melees in this game are no more then a meat shield, so why would anyone make a melee char that isnt templar? Melees have basically 0 slowing capabilities and CCs that depend on lucky + melee range, while rangeds have absolutely all imaginable CCs (every single one of em) and one more dimention in which to run in (flying), making melee unplayable. I've managed to kill gladiators 10 levels above my ranger's level, simply cause they cant do anything at all. Poison makes em unable to fly... so for 15 secs they must watch me hit em... and then slows, sleeps, etc etc... usually people come with the argument "but they own in mass PVP" yeah... mass pvp is known for favoring melee classes, of course... even more when they have 10m long twohanded weapons that mean "IM HERE, KILL ME!!" -.-


2- Instant skills not being instant. Its just annoying and makes no sense at all, and again its even worse for melee players. Everytime a gladiator uses his spin, he deals x damage and is rooted for around 3 seconds... for every single skill a player uses he is "rooted" for the duration of the animation. This can be "bugged" if you jump and use the skill while in mid-air, but in case you have a little lag, you will miss the point, get "rooted" while watching your animation of the attack, and if your melee, dying. If skills are instant, they need to be instant, if skill animations are a way to enforce global cooldown to the game, do it with global cooldowns that wont affect other areas of the game.


3- Im not 100% sure of how are boss fights at higher level content (lvl 50), but fights seens to be pretty boring. Bosses have millions of HP but they are all basically tank and spank. I see videos of people defeating bosses like Tahabata, and many others, and its like every 1 minute you get behind a pilar to avoid its aoe... then 1 min tank spank... pilar... tank spank... pillar... just boring, and much more gear/class dependant then PLAYER dependant. And, before someone says "but aion is PVP GAME, go back to wow", a MMO released in 2009 CANT be focused on just one front. Unfortunely, at this very moment, I consider Aion PVE worse then WoW's, and Aion PVP considerably worse then WoW's. So if its "pvp focused" they need to improve PVP like... NOW, cause mass pvp or player vs door to conquer fortress gets boring, real fast. I could say that the only reason im still playing aion is graphics, and, im very tired of wow for I played it for more then 4 years... aion with less then 2 months im already getting bored =/


4- Less important, but silly, and Im guessing silly to fix also, is the AH search. Man, whats the deal with it lol... so iron ore =! Iron Ore now?


5- Showing enemies level. There is absolutelly no reason to hide their level. What, the reason is "but you will know he is level 50 and not attack it if your lvl 30"? Well, for me thats another reason to SHOW the level -.- In this game where you can remodel itens, its basically impossible to know someone's level based on his gear, and PVP Rank shows nothing, since you buy an item and lose all your rankings... makes no sense to me. Also, Im not sure but im guessing that NOT, but level should play a role in calculating how much AP you get. Your level 25 rank 7, and kill a afk 50 rank 9... you get like 10 AP? lol...


6- Crashs... now that im using Windows 7 ultimate to be honest I still didnt crash, but with vista it seemed to me high quality textures were causing the crashs... well, I dont know, its annoying.


7- As for any online game... add more content to the game. Im not complaining about this at this very moment, Im not evel level 50 yet, however I can predict that if I were level 50 right now... I would be flying around the abyss killing people 20 levels lower with no challenge, and once in a while doing a long boring dungeon for some itens that may or may not drop (and may not drop anything at all)... no short term, fast thing to do... damn, I cant believe im saying it but, not even reputations to grind to get a cool reward... no arena to play... absolutelly nothing you can just log in and do in less then 1 hour. Actually, I could say that if there were Arenas in Aion, I would pay 6 months subscription right now.


PS: Just a comment, I see most everyone complains about bots... I really dont mind bots, theres just 2 things bots can do to hurt your gaming experience:

1- Using server bandwith, but really not enough to complain and say its my NUMBER ONE PROBLEM WITH THE GAME

2- Game economics. They really can hurt this area. However, I dont see that really happening in Aion. I am level 31 at the moment and I am very, VERY well geared (all blue itens, all socketed, +10 weapon...) and still have over 4,5 million kinah, which is more then enough, I could actually buy some epic itens with this money... what I mean is, with that many bots, its still easy to make money in this game, so no point in complaining about something that doesnt really cause a huge interference like game mechanic and etc...

[wooz]

1) Bots

2) Group Experience

3) I personally don't experience the crysystem crash... but it'd be nice if you'd fix it so we stop hearing about it.

[PlanB]

* Bots and gold sellers. Coming from L2, I heard ==spam== was around. Let him loose out there plz

* Flux drops

* Cost of healing, books, teleportation and general interaction with NPCs

* Inventory space

[Vicarra]

Originally Posted by Ridelyn

snip - excellent post.

This pretty much covers it, actually. Very well thought out and reasonable post.

I would just like to add though that if nothing is done about the rampant cheating people will not be hanging around like they did in L2 to give you endless second chances. The gaming demographic is much more aware of their consumer rights, and they expect certain levels of service.

In addition to which, a more active GM prescence on EU servers would be lovely. Right now it seems that customer support for EU is based on office hours that are more convenient to the US, which imo isn't good enough. I can't even submit a petition to report bots or game issues outside of your service hours. Why can't the petitions be submitted, to be looked at whenever a GM finally logs on?

What would be quite nice if a GM character would actually log on every now and again and stride around waving their banhammer in a scary fashion, rather how HGM =spam= did once on Teon last year. The screens of him running around Teon banning the bot trains (posted on L2blah) were awesome, and his chatting with the players who saw him actually let the community see that the GMs *do* do things other than drink coffee and look at lolcats. They do care - players just don't get to see it. (ps, suggestions for a starting point would be...any capital city...outside the warehouse).

As much as I despise wow, I was always very impressed with their prompt and courteous customer service in game. Heck, they even crack jokes. Presumably because you get to rate their customer service after they've sorted you out.

Surely even the community managers could log in occasionally on a "CM" character and interact with the players in game instead of "twitting" all day (yes, I'm aware it's called tweeting). No reason why they couldn't help ban the spammers.

At the end of the day, active policing on ALL your servers of the flagrant rule breaking is the only way you're going to solve the problem of people breaking the rules. Once people see that there is a zero tolerance policy on cheating, and that it's enforced, they'll be less likely to do it.

On the subject of boss drops from instances - increase the drop rates, but make the instances considerably harder. FT shouldn't be as nyerk easy to farm as it is.

[Hezulkai]

Originally Posted by AionSource

aion_tamat: What is the biggest issue you have with Aion currently? Please keep replies constructive!

More...

I just put my account on hold today. I'll most likely be back, there's a lot I like about the game, but a lot right now that I don't.

1) Customer service is invisible. They don't respond to anything, they don't get involved, there's no good way to reach them. Not even able to file a petition during the night is ridiculous. After 10pm, the game is more or less the wild west with no sheriff in town. The only way to get involved in the game fully is to get involved in your community, but even emptying my ignore list routinely, I've taken to turning off all the chats with all the sexist, racist, homophobic spew over and over and over. No good way to be involved in a community actively trying to drive people away.

2) Bots. The few minutes a day when the level 30 areas aren't being farmed by level 45 PvPers, you can't find a mob because of all the bots. They KS in groups, they leech XP and nothing, nothing, nothing is done. I assume they are, if not allowed, certainly encouraged as a legit leveling tactic by NCSoft.

3) Gold sellers uber alles. Half of the items for sale on the broker are being sold by shjhds, sifuhif and asdaasdasda. They buy out whole stocks of items and relist them for 10 - 100x the price. They spam for days and nothing is done. I can see a gold seller spamming trade in the morning, log on 12 hours later and they are still there. Their private stores with links to their websites litter the cities for days.

4) The crash bug. Everyone knows it.

5) Minor issue, the use of vendor items in crafting. I've gone down this route before. You can't make back the money you spend. Why do I need 1.5 milliion worth of high level gathered items and 12 million worth of vendor items. The average player looks at the broker and will refuse to pay more than 1.5 million because 'that's what the mats cost'. I would reconsider the disproportionate cost of the vendor items in high level crafting. Vendor bought crap shouldn't be 75 - 90% of the cost of the item to make. That only ends up discouraging speculative crafting (I'm not spending 10 million kinah on a speculative piece, or to risk making a worthless white item if it doesn't proc), and encourage loot use over crafted item use (loot item is 15% the cost of a crafted item and only slightly worse).

Anyway, there's a lot of good in the game. For me it came down to other players getting to dictate my time since I'm either a farmable commodity for the PvPers 15 levels higher than me that spend hours a night farming greys in lowbie zones, or I'm fighting bots. If other people get to decide how and when I play, they can bloody well pay for my account. Since I'm paying for it, and not having much luck playing, I'll step out and leave the gankers to farm bots in peace.

[Mackenzy]

Trying to keep it short. Couldn't get it down to just -one- issue, sorry.
If you're reporting these to someone higher up I'd suggest taking down everyone's top 3 issues, because I think others' are having the same problem.

1. Crashing

It doesn't happen on our computer with Windows XP and 1.5 gigs of ram. But on my laptop with Vista and 3 gigs I'll crash every time I load into the city if I don't quickly Shift+F12 and turn down all my graphic options. I love the graphics in Aion, please find a fix so I can actually enjoy them while I play.

2. Gold Sellers / Spammers

A better way to report them would help. More in-game GM's to monitor the problem more closely and to help ban people more quickly would help even more. A lot of people are using this problem right now to give Aion a bad name to potential subscribers...

3. Group XP

It's silly that my boyfriend and I had to un-group to kill things to gain more XP. (I say "had" because he didn't like the grind and the death penalties and he quit playing.)

The following is not urgent to everyone that plays the game (but I'd personally pay extra to have it added more quickly, so I had to throw it in =P):

4. Chat Window Opacity - Please Add Option For Completely Black Background

I'll copy what I posted as a comment on the 1.5 patch note preview on Aion's website (because some idiots were telling others to "L2Read" when they asked for this feature, when that is clearly not the issue:

"I play this game with severe back problems, so more than half of my time is spent playing from bed with my laptop on one of those hospital-like trays on wheels. One of the downsides to this is how far away, and how small, the screen is for me. It’s more than a little annoying to keep having to mouse-over the chat window to *almost* see the words without squinting."

Thanks for reading.