Letter to Ncsoft Korea

[Netcurse]

I've been following Aion for nearly 2 years and I am now about to reach level 41 as a Cleric. I've been playing MMOs for nearly 9 years now.

Needless to say, I'm also the founder of Curse.

Regardless of that, there are three issues I want to bring to the front page today that need to be addressed or this game will end up being a 300k subscriber game within 6 months, not the one-million+ subscriber game it should be.

Facts:

• Aion is a good game - very enjoyable and rewarding for the hardcore gamer.
• Aion will fail in keeping the crowd of casual gamers, along with those that can't stomach the grind.
• Aion's 3d engine is performing great, but tens of thousands of players can't play during fortress sieges because of crash issues.
• Grouping is not rewarding enough.
• Spammers and bots are annoying.
• It's about 15-20 days of played time to make 1-50.

Problems and Solutions

Leveling Curve:

• Why is 18-20 and 22-25 a pain in the ***? A decent amount of people quit Aion at that level fearing that the game will be a massive grind all the way to 50. 1.5 was supposed to remove any grind within that level bracket, but the way the elite difficulty and XP were nerfed made it even worse. 1 to 25 was more FUN in CBT than at release as killing the 4 dots elites was GREAT xp.
• I agree that 40 to 50 should be challenging. I would make 40 to 45 easier. At least lvl 45+ people can have fun in PvP in big level 50s battles.
• It is faster for dps classes to solo grind than to group up except for the campaign quests.
• Right now at 35+ you have a choice in doing solo PvE/PvP and group PvE/PvP. When we have a lot more 50s roaming in the abyss, the PvP part will become almost impossible. This will reduce the variety of gameplay even more, not to mention encourage botting.
• A lot of quests are just a waste of time right now.
• because of all this,leveling is not as fun as it should be.

Solutions:

• Increase all quest rewards by 15%.
• Increase XP from all elites by 25% to give an incentive for grouping. This will also create more stickiness in the game as people interact together, create friend lists and guilds. Add abilities to those elites to prevent rangers/Sm/sorcs from soloing them (pull, 10 seconds silence, snare immunity).
• Increase XP from all normal mobs by 15% (I realize that in a few months it will be much harder to find groups for lower levels, at that point you can probably boost solo quest xp.)
• Applying the above changes will reduce the 1-40 grind.
• Double the duration and effectiveness of rested XP.
• Increase drops from elite mobs.
• Reduce 1-50 to 10-15 days played time. Aion has a great PvPvE end game. Let people reroll toons without having them think of the countless hours of grind they will have to do to get to 45+.

Fortress Crashes:

Where is the communication NCsoft?
This is probably the top priority for the Korean engineering team. Why not talk about it? At this point it's useless to go to sieges if you have a high end pc, as you'll just chain crash. Funnily enough, low-end machines seem to be exempt from this most of the time.

Solution:

All the engineering staff should be working on this along with NCWest providing far more communication regarding progress/changes/fixes. This is a game breaking bug.

Spammers and bots

The latest patch reduced the amount of spam for sure. Good job guys, but we are still getting a few an hour. There is a decent amount of bots on all servers. It's really upsetting to see them, but yet fun to kill them.

Solution:

24/7 GM support. A spammer should be banned within 1 hour. Require level 20 for /1 and /3 chats.
Develop an in house anti-cheat program, this will benefit all your games.

Itemization of NTC, Fire Temple, Alchamia and Steel Rake:

When it takes 5-15 hours to level up, getting a nice blue drop is like getting your mother to buy you candy when you are a kid. It motivates you a lot. Long character progression in leveling should also translate to progression in itemization . There are no excuses that you can't get decent gear from these instances(at least 1-2 blues a run for the group and a gold 20% of the time.)

Solution:

Revisit the itemization of all instances pre-50.

Addons:

No offense, but the UI is poor. The chat is very not user friendly. Targeting sucks and is buggy, especially as a healer it will drive you nuts.

Solution:

Please bring UI addons faster and let thousands of volunteer developers fix it for you. Make sure the API is limited, so addons don't play for you like vanilla WoW.

In conclusion, the level curve needs to be tweaked and the grind needs to be reduced. Group play needs to be encouraged and players need to have the ability to make choices. Greater communication with the community needs to be established and maintained. UI addons need to be pushed along with itemization improvement throughout 20-45. One sticking point for western players is certainly spammers and bots, NCWest's stance on this needs to be far stronger.

Ncsoft Korea, you have not won in the west yet. Please look at these issues that are not considered end game for you in Korea if you want to win here.

[Aleste]

Nice to see the staff (or in this case: Management) actually participate in forwarding feedback. Hopefully, there are some Korean Devs lurking in here and taking the time to read this. Although i agree with the general analysis, i disagree with some of the suggested solutions.


Here are some game aspects of Aion that i believe require some adjustments or further development*



In the Short-term ( 30 to 45 days )


Issue 1: Smooth the leveling curve

Solutions suggested:

-XP gained from normal mobs remains unchanged

-Total XP gained from Elite mobs remains Unchanged

-XP gained while in a Group is adjusted to 40% for Elite mobs and 25% for Normal mobs

-Exp gained from completing Mission quests needs to increase by 100% for LVL 11 - 19 regions


Rational:

There is a steep increase in leveling difficulty at the 18 - 20 level range. An increase in Exp from Mission quests, combined with better Group EXP distribution will normalize the leveling curve and encourage Grouping. Better Group EXP will also alleviate many of the Grind complaints at later levels. Group grinding is a social experience, Solo grinding is not.


Issue 2: Better handling of Bot reports and in-game spam


Issue 3: Fix crashes that some people are suffering

Points 2 and 3 are already well explained by the OP.






In the Mid-term ( 75 to 90 days )


Issue 1: Lack of instances at the low to low-mid level range

Solutions suggested:

-"Barring the Gate" Mission quest for lvl10 Elyos and its Asmodian equivilant should be re-worked into a PvE instance. With mild difficulty, 2 or 3 Fun-bosses, and improved Loot.

-The final Mission Quests in Altgard and Verteron should be reworked into a PvE instance. With medium difficulty, 3 to 4 Bosses, improved loot. And introduction of the Balaur in a more challenging way than how it is currently. namely:

Elyos:

Sealing the Abyss gate

Asmodians:

Crushing the Conspiracy


Some of the lvl19 pre-final Missions may be adjusted to be finished in the reworked instances.


-Introduce a New instance for level range 22 - 24, with medium difficulty, 2 to 3 smartly scripted bosses, improved loot, and introduce some story elements. Players of the opposite faction may have quests that can be finished by entering the other factions instance.

Rational:

Reworking current quests requires less development time and costs less than introducing new instances. This will increase the number of PvE instances from the current 'None' to 3 at the low to low-mid level range


Issue 2: General interface improvements

-Find solutions to healer complaints.

-Smarter 'Select nearest enemy' function

-All of the UI components should be individually customizable

-An option to allow Full-detail player models in in the UI tab should be introduced as opposed to current low-quality ones.

-More options to control and Pan the camera during different actions (Flying... etc)

-Better Hotkey/Keybind system, Space should function as default for Jumping, and Vertical flying while in flight mode.



Issue 3: Introduce some new end-game content

*Will fill when i have some practical ideas*

[airtonix]

Originally Posted by Netcurse

Spammers and bots

The latest patch reduced the amount of spam for sure. Good job guys, but we are still getting a few an hour. There is a decent amount of bots on all servers. It's really upsetting to see them, but yet fun to kill them.

Solution:

24/7 GM support. A spammer should be banned within 1 hour. Require level 20 for /1 and /3 chats.
Develop an in house anti-cheat program, this will benefit all your games.

Level restrictions on chat may work at first. But they'll just create more annoying problems for new players.

When the spammers realise they can't use global chat till lvl20, they'll start setting up bots to lvl up to the threshold..

and since they'll realise those bots will be deleted fairly quickly, they'll organise trains and trains of bots to step up to fill the gap left by the fallen comrade.

So the end result is a starting zone of bots killstealing everything in site just so they can constantly advertise their cretenious services.

[Metallicmike]

while i do agree you have to comend the effort thus far, they ARE upping exp in some quests next mini patch and the West team are trying their best with the chat. Sure Aion right now is a massive time sink but i recon with a few patchs we will see change for the better... maybe then you wont have to spend days and days mastering your professions, or lose brain cells over grinding the same mob for hours on end.

[risk_]

/agree

go go ncsoft!

[Fallen87]

Read it some valid points some not so valid points.

You contradict yourself, you say it takes 15-20 days to go from 1-50 then you say that the grind is to bad and want them to raise the XP to make it even faster no thanks. Level caps should take time and effort to achieve and the grind isn't bad to me almost no exsistant in the lower levels I've done 1-35 on a Spiritmaster, and 1-30 on a Templar never once have I ran out of quest or things that I can do for experience. I played the Chinese Aion on Version 1.0 and did 1-37 on a Cleric and I can assure you that it was MUCH worse then what they have given us at launch for NA/EU.

[Netcurse]

Originally Posted by Fallen87

Read it some valid points some not so valid points.

You contradict yourself, you say it takes 15-20 days to go from 1-50 then you say that the grind is to bad and want them to raise the XP to make it even faster no thanks. Level caps should take time and effort to achieve and the grind isn't bad to me almost no exsistant in the lower levels I've done 1-35 on a Spiritmaster, and 1-30 on a Templar never once have I ran out of quest or things that I can do for experience. I played the Chinese Aion on Version 1.0 and did 1-37 on a Cleric and I can assure you that it was MUCH worse then what they have given us at launch for NA/EU.

I said that 1 to 25 was quicker in 1.0 because of the elite xp.

[Efekkt]

/agree

Hope someone takes notice of this, I really want to see this game be successful.

Though I think the leveling shouldn't speed up too much, just reanalyzed because like you said 22-25 is a pain and there's no reason for it to be.

[Salem Noctis]

couldn't agree more!

[Sardoni]

/agree

For me the wheels almost halted 35-ish. That's from an SM perspective. I do enjoy that it takes time to level, but at the same time when I get a quest that's new to me at 38 and it's worth 200K exp, I'd rather go solo kite an elite and get 250K exp.

Another disappointing find was at level 38; soloing a normal level 38 2 dot gave me about 22K exp. Soloing a normal level 41 2 dot gave me 26K exp. o.O

I agree, for the most part, with everything said here. It is constructive. The large scale battles I concur on as well

[peacenote]

Originally Posted by Netcurse

Addons:

No offense, but the UI is poor. The chat is very not user friendly. Targeting sucks and is buggy, especially as a healer it will drive you nuts.

Solution:

Please bring UI addons faster and let thousands of volunteer developers fix it for you. Make sure the API is limited, so addons don't play for you like vanilla WoW.

/agreed

As a healer, it does drive me nuts. I personally don't care if addons fix the issues or if NCSoft fixes them, but I would be SO HAPPY if these things were rectified. It is very frustrating when the game feels unresponsive, doesn't register what I do, and/or doesn't target properly. The game would be so much more fun to me if this was addressed. It drives me crazy that such a new, beautiful game sometimes acts like it can't keep up with me.

[tws]

I agree on all points to a 100%. I just hope they will read and consider all this.

[DarkBlade]

loads of good points just hope they have a look at it.

[Raindown]

/AGREE

I play limited amounts nights and weekends. I must say being 3X forever sux, plus I'm broke, plus I have a list of chores (i.e. quest log). The game is not fun, its a job. Group by far sux, in other great MMO (i.e. EQ 1) I was grouping at lvl 4 -> forever).

I think the damage has been done. Been playing Demon's Souls on PS3 and waiting for the next great MMO. NCSoft did not learn from Lineage 2 that high grind does not cut it in the US.

[Mikazuna]

Just finished reading, could not had put this better myself, exactly what this game needs

good thinking batman!