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Aion Servers To Merge, XP Grind Softened
Massively reports that NCSoft's fantasy MMO Aion will soon be getting a round of server mergers to balance player populations and shore up in-game economies. A newsletter from Aion producer Chris Hager also brought word that character transfers will be an option starting in June, and NCSoft will be "offering them to all of our players for free for a limited time." This is happening in the lead-up to the game's 1.9 patch, due on June 2, which contains a number of measures to make the XP grind a bit less harsh (among other things; patch notes). They're creating more quests, increasing XP rewards from existing quests, and implementing a system that "grants you experience bonuses as you continue to play."
It always seems to me the Asian mmo's require more grind than a lot of the western mmo's. It's why I've avoided aion entirely and will most likely continue to do so. I'm not even sure it will continue exist a couple years from now. Still it's a pretty game, I think only eve has better graphics in terms of an mmo, granted space isn't super hard to render.
I played Aion some, but didn't continue after the free period, it just didn't manage to hook me and there's also time constraints these days. Grind is really not the issue though, don't really understand what is everybodys rush to the max level. They should just make the journey there enjoyable. I guess the problem there is that to be effective in PVP you have to be max level. I remember back in the original EQ the leveling was nightmare compared to modern MMOs, but who cared, you played for fun, not to reach top level!
Exp. boosting weekends? Making the game easier? These things sound good on the surface but they're ultimately MMO suicide. This is because MMOs live and die by the perceived value of in-game achievements and items, and that perceived value is dictated by two major factors: how difficult they are to achieve in game, and how valuable you perceive in-game achievement to be to other people. This is fundamental to why people play MMOs at all: Players play MMOs to feel powerful and special.
Firstly, nerfing 'the grind'. Players bitch and moan about it but in the end, if there's no grind and no other challenge, then levelling up becomes meaningless. If the best items are trivial to obtain, then why would players care about getting them? Players only value what took time and effort to acquire.
Secondly, server mergers are THE death knell of any MMO. Why? Because no matter how it's presented, a server merger is always interpreted by the players as "lots of people are leaving the game". The main reason you play an MMO is that everyone else is playing it. If everyone leaves, who is going to admire your shiny epic gear? Players only value things that set them apart from others. If there're no others to admire their achievements, why bother?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I played WoW for about a year and a half after release, then put it aside for personal reasons, the foremost one being that I'm a flawed person with an addiction-prone personality!
Played and liked Guild Wars for two years, played and liked Age of Conan for two months, but I'm beginning to see a sameness in nearly all MMOs. Of course each will have their slight variations, but in the end ever subscription MMO is trying to beat Blizzard at what they do best (except Guild Wars...that game marches to the beat of its own drum).
Until a MMOG offers something revolutionary and enjoyable, they might as well name every single one "Not WoW", because that's how their potential customers see it.
I had the same thought... didn't Tabula Rasa (another NCSoft game) go through these same measures a short time before they closed up shop? Server mergers, more moves to bring people in... free periods of time... collapsing down to only a handful of servers, then close.
It's sad that we lose portions of the gaming world, some storylines that have the potential of being interesting, when online gaming servers close. I know TR had the initial potential of being interesting from the intro vid... yes, gameplay was a little poor, but the storyline had some potential. I think though this is possibly the start of the end, whether long (a few years) or short (maybe half year) of Aion.
Nah. This is one of those MMO based announcements. It was supposed to be the MMO that killed WoW, lots of people switched for all of about 2mo, before they realized that the grind was so heavy you needed to dedicate your life to it. Not as bad as FF or anything, but plenty bad enough. The reality is everyone has been spoiled, for lack of a better word because of WoW. They know playing it, that if you stop for 3mo and you're way under the gear cap you can run heroics and get the gear. If you only want to play for 2hrs a week, you can, and still get somewhere at the end of the game without grouping with anyone.
Om, nomnomnom...
Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests. The timesink is still there, it's just that instead of kill 500 boars, you have to do 50 quests, each of which involves killing 10 boars. It's less monotonous but it's still there.
As for server merges - when has WoW ever had a server merge? They've used an ongoing series of free transfers to try and balance out realm populations, but I don't recall servers ever merging or being shut down even when this would have been the sensible technical solution. As long as you maintain the illusion of a stable population, the population is likely to stay stable, but any hint of a sudden population drop can easily trigger a wave of fickle players to quit, making the rumoured ghost town a reality.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Actually the stereotypical "Players" you describe with their wants & needs and what they value are only the Achiever kind of player in the Bartle Player Type classification (here).
The Explorers, Socializers or Killers do not necessarilly derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks.
Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying.
The truth is that, in MMORPGs, grinding based game-playing is a cheap way for publishers to create time-sinks in the game instead of spending money in creating real content like areas, dungeons, boss encounters, story quests and others.
While most people that played MMORPGs in the time of UO and the like were willing to live with it (since there was nothing beter), nowadays, there's plenty of MMORPGs out there with massive amounts of content for players to enjoy (in my personal experience, both current WoW - it was worse in the past - and LOTRO are very good in that aspect).
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
I find it amazing that people are taking it so well: First round of quests in first wow expansion basically undone all precious work players did in vanilla by giving up "kill 10 boars" quest rewards beter than stuff that took months to grind. Knowing that once developers release new content, you will be kicked down to average joe level should feel pretty shitty.
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Anyhow, you can theoretically play Guild Wars as single player, but but us not really average MMO, which coincidentally peaks character power about ~ 10% into game storyline, making it a bit more dependant on "having fun" than "boosting ego"
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
No mention of that, Chris?
After Lineage 2 sank under the groaning weight of bots and hackers, didn't you pledge to deal with that issue from day 1 in Aion with a dedicated bot/hack hunting team? How'd that play out for you?
Oh, and how about the the promises about cracking down on egregious gold farming, and the blatant market in bot-grinded accounts? Got all that sorted did you? Like you said you would?
Speak up Chris, it's all gone a bit quiet.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Lol, server balance. Tell that to my toons I have on Cho'Gall Alliance side. Been there and /who at 8:15PM server time on a Friday night and there was 39 players on Alliance side in the entire world. Seen as few as 5, with me dual-boxing two of them. But Blizzard says there is no server imbalance.
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
They generally don't quit for one of (or a combination of) a few reasons:
1) They've already invested a lot of time into a character, and they don't want to throw that away.
2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it.
3) They're playing for the end-game raiding, which for many people *does* provide enough enjoyment to balance out any grind.
4) They're playing for the PvP, and they enjoy that enough to balance out a grind.
5) Hope springs eternal, and they suffer through a current grind because looking toward or getting that next shiny really is that much of a reward to them.
I've personally experienced all of those at times (1 a little less so), and I've definitely seen them in people I've played with (I don't play MMOs anymore).
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Those haven't been killers for WoW, but that may be because WoW got it "reasonably" right to begin with.
Aion, on the other hand, had a brutal grind initially, driving away all but the most hardcore. Releasing a broken MMO and fixing it later doesn't work - see the epic failure of Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. ToA destroyed the game, and by the time Mythic accepted that fact and fixed the problems, their subscriber base had already been decimated.
Too many MMO developers are reactive "we're losing subscribers, fix it!" rather than proactive "WoW is clearly successful - how can we compete with them without being a clone?". Once you're already losing subscribers, it is too late.
I find it amusing that Aion planned to fail from the beginning - They refused to provision enough servers initially because they planned for their populations to drop like a rock, citing Warhammer as an example of "overprovisioning" when in reality, underprovisioning gives your game a perception of being laggy/buggy/badly executed and refusing to address it makes you look like an asshole to your customers, both of which are a killer to MMOs, and Warhammer was underprovisioned initially and just had a shitty game that couldn't retain a subscriber base. The reality is that at least 50%+ of MMO subscribers try a new game because their friends are trying it - If their friends have a bad experience, others won't even give the game a chance. As frustrated as I was with the grind, I was going to continue giving Aion a chance until two of my hardcore gaming friends quit - with them gone, there's no real reason for me to grind.
It says much about the sad state of MMOs these days that said hardcore friends have taken up, of all things, Mafia Wars...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying."
This is how a non-grindy MMO like WoW appeals to the achievers...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests."
That's not exactly what they're doing, what they're doing is providing a fixed amount of effort required to get to the level cap where the majority of players congregate. The biggest reason to play an MMO is the social aspect (raiding, pvp, even role playing for some people). The 'grind' gives you something to do, as a backdrop to supporting the social aspect. "Bill, do you want to come kill this dragon with us?" "Yeah, i'd love to, need to go get my widgets first though". The 'grind' is there to reinforce commitment to your character, and give you a sense of accomplishment that you share with other players.
Threadcapping MMOs is easy. A GM can give you "Sword of Awesome + 1million" with a few keystrokes, but it would be meaningless. The joy comes from participating in a shared environment, with a common set of rules, that emphasizes social interaction. You don't 'win' Wow or Aion, you go there to have fun.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
One might suggest keeping such indignant retorts and demands (addressed directly to the game producer no less) to the Aion website News comments section.
As completely ignored as that comment section is by the GMs, to say nothing of Chris Hager himself, it's at least a degree of separation closer than posting a reply on slashdot.
Just saying.
"2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it."
Experience boosting weekends and speeding up the grind allow new players to catch up with their friends who are at the level cap so that they can all go raid together. Without server mergers, you may have servers that are so low in population that you can't always get enough people together for a high-end dungeon, so server mergers can help to increase social interaction on low-pop servers by putting you in contact with more people. Heck, I remember people playing on low-pop WoW servers starting forum threads asking for their server to be merged with another for just that reason.
If you don't have the social experience in an MMO, then you may as well go back to playing single-player RPGs. Stuff like this does actually matter on occasion - some of this stuff might get the Aion players who still want to stick around a better chance to hang out together.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Make it sound like it's irrational for people to want to get to max level, while you overlook many of the common reasons for doing so.
1) Many games put more work and emphasis in end-game content, so players feel like that is where they need to be in order to really get what the game offers. It's where the content that lets players set themselves apart by something more than levels occurs (such as high level pvp, raiding, getting the best gear, etc).
2) The older a game gets, the player population tends to be clumped on the higher level end instead of lower levels, making it harder to find groups at lower levels.
3) Often new people join because of friends, so now the new person wants to be able to catch up with their veteran friends.
4) Many MMO's include Player vs. Player combat (even if just optional). Quite often, there is a desire to be higher level in order to have an advantage against other players.
5) Many MMO's include Player vs. Player combat (deja-vu?)... Quite often, players want to get to a higher level in order to defend themselves against higher level players preying on the weak.
6) MMO cultures tend to equate game achievements, such as level, with your skill. It's flawed, but it still exists.
The reasons may not apply to you, and you may not agree with the reasons, but there certainly are many reasons, at least a few of which are completely reasonable.