Aion "Actually it's not me, it's you."

Aion is a beautiful game, probably the most beautiful MMO out on the market. But just like an obnoxious girl, you have to balance out her sexual appeal to how willing you are to stand for her bullshit.

Aion. I love crafting in your game. It is a solid experience with a continual churning of mini rewards that make me feel like my time is well spent in upgrading my character. I love all the quirks and polish snuck into the world itself like hidden Easter eggs just waiting to be found. Every zone, many of the quests, NPC names, have little parts to them that can make you chuckle if you take the time. I love your ridiculous graphics that make my PC feel like it’s running a marathon, you are so beautiful. It feels like watching those old-school high-rendered next-gen top quality video game commercials, but this time the game play actually looks that way. I love how many different monsters you have in the world. I love how PvP is not an option, but a way of life.

All of that just isn’t enough compared to your bad side.

My video card is up to date, I have a dual core processor, sure I’m not as buff as I used to be a couple years ago, but you didn’t even know me back then! Aion is intended to work with PC’s like mine, but due to coding complications, or Something, the game has a major problem with dual core processors. Many players actually got better results by turning off one of their processors.

The problems range from frame rate spikes to rubber banding, which is basically the same thing as rollback lag, to just not working at all. These aren’t isolated incidents, many players have had to deal with these problems, and NCSoft suffers from a sever lack of support. Make that a lack of any support. They offer a forum where players can talk to each other about problems, but no one from their company actually chimes in with any assistance. Maybe that’s better than being told to delete your WTF folder for everything from lag to lost loot… but not really.

Now, there’s nothing worse than going out with your significant other, or maybe just someone you hope will be, and discovering bugs hopping off of them onto you and biting you. Okay, so that example is a bit extreme, but gold spammers and bots in Aion are just as invasive, if not as disgusting. You cannot enter a city without seeing a gold seller sitting somewhere, and you won’t go a single game session without having your chat box filled with at least a couple gold spammers.

The problem with bots and gold spammers further highlights the disconnect between the developers/community leaders and the players. In the most recent patch, players couldn’t even block gold spammers anymore, which means that their chat boxes were filled with gold spam endlessly. I hope NCSoft put the block functionality back into their game, and that it was just a bug, but launching with such an error really does make the game unplayable. There was a recent article somewhere, if someone else remembers where please put a link in the comments, which discussed how MMO companies typically take one of two stances: either an open community forum with developers or a closed one. NCSoft definitely takes the closed version; it was even mentioned in the article that way. It is a major turn off when you have a problem and you have no idea how to go about fixing it, and neither does anybody else, because it’s not your fault, it’s the games fault.

Other gripes with Aion are that some of the classes suck at soloing. Templars for example can’t solo worth a damn. If you want to solo, either take a high damage class or a healing class… oh wait, that’s actually everyone except Templars. So just don’t roll a Templar. Yet NCSoft is probably wondering why there is a tank shortage…

The final stake through my heart? The grind. I don’t mind grinding, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, putting in my time, scraping together the pieces in order to foster the growth of something fantastic. But Aion asks too much. The level cap should have been 30, not 50, because once you pass level 30, the experience needed to get from one level to the next is exorbitant, and it only gets work. Going from level 49 to 50 takes over 1 billion experience points. Someone did the math; it’s the same amount of XP you would need to get from level 1 to 45. A game that requires some grinding is okay as long as you’re enjoying yourself. A game that promotes bots to grind because there’s no way a human being in their right mind could sit through that much time is not a game you want to be around. Even if she makes the best damn cookies in the world.

And by the way, it's also a terrible sign when the company is already churning out another MMO that looks so similar to the one you were just playing. This guy at Massively.com is already talking about it, Blade And Soul, and honestly I can't blame her. Though I will disagree. Blade and Soul will be great for 2 months and then fail. If you want an MMO from NCSoft, stick with Guild Wars 2.