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Aion, 1 year after...
So, this month, on the 22nd, Aion completes 1 year of existence on the western markets and with the release of a new free expansion no less.
What are your thoughts about this year and about this game?
Contrarily to popular belief Aion became well estabilished on the market and it's still the 2nd most played MMO according to minute counting softwares like Xfire (for what its worth offcourse).
The new expansion is bringing many people back as well as new people and the game is experiencing alot of changes. In my opinion good.
All the problems in lauch have been adressed, there are no crashes, no botting, no gold spamming.
It seems to me that the game went over the expectations of many people and keeps going strong and growing. I cant think of a better time for people to enter Atreia
Comments
Thats why its always nice to have several factions in games.. Three is a good number too because if one faction is tottaly slaughtering the others then the 2 loseing can eventually make plans to team up and conquer the strong force until things changes.. And it jus makes the game so much more interesting..
Maybe if NC Soft added the Balaur as a 3rd playable faction it'd even things out ! lol if they did that + made miragents/fenrils less grindy i'd prolly come back xD
Currently Playing:
Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
The only problem with more than two factions is that you start to divide the playerbase into too many directions. Faction imbalance is just as likely to happen with 3 factions, the only difference is 2 can gang up on 1. The funny thing is, that's not what would happen ingame. Players wouldn't execute that strategy unless it was literally forced upon them.
One faction is always going to draw more players than others and on different servers the balance issues may be even more noticeable.
With two factions, if one is extremely overpopulated, there's only one alternative. Now imagine if Aion had 3 playable factions and Elyos was still 80% of the game (I know they aren't that high, we're using inflated numbers to make a point). Then all you have is two factions splitting 20% of the server population two ways.
Those people in the two factions with less population have less people to run content with, less people to play with in general. All you have then is a server full of people to play against.
Since WAR went live with 2 factions and failed people think 3 or more is the solution. It's not. You're still going to run into one faction severely outnumbering the other two, making the game that much harder. If you only had 2 factions and one is outnumbered, it's easier to solve that than to have one faction with a large population and trying to figure out how to make people play two other factions.
Developers need to figure out how to get people playing other factions. One way would be to quit drawing customers into the idea of one faction is good, and one is evil. Just have multiple evil factions, multiple good, or better yet, don't bring "alignment" into the factions at all.
DAOC worked because there weren't that many other PVP MMOs to choose from, and there were no other faction based PVP games. All other ones were FFA or guild-based PVP. Relaunch DAOC with the same mechanics and you'd have the same faction imbalance that every faction-based MMO suffers from.
whatever they have been doing wasn't working. when I played I was Elyos, server was Elyos, Asmos suffered from the taxes. They took it out on us by rift ganking the hell out of every lower leveled person. I quit, along with my leveling partner, because of that. I'm not sure if it is better or worse, but the server my friends and I played on no longer exists, and I have no idea what happened to my characters.
I never even got to max level because of the gank n spank going on. I would have liked to see the end-game content.
Well, the rifting nerf solves your first problem. 80% and 60% damage reduction against incoming rifters is a welcome change to combat the twinks who harassed the lower level population.
If the server your characters were on no longer exists, your characters were automatically moved and renamed to <ToonName><ServerAbbrev>, for example, SynthetickVZ for Synthetick-Vaizel. Free transfers are still going on to select destinations.
I'd be willing to give Aion another chance. I enjoyed the game quite a bit, but found that the Hairbakcs were a bit underplayed compared to the pigeons.
Finding a server with even populations or populations favoring your faction seems to be the best option, but finding out information can be difficult. Any suggestions for a possible Asmodian player?
~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
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good, good. I thought I heard something about rift-ganking being nerfed but assumed it was too good to be true. Before, it felt like the devs were designing the game for rift-gankers xD
thanks for the reply ^^
Nice opinion but i still think 3 works better then 2.. And i never even played WAR at launch so that is not why i think 3 is better then 2.. I think 3 (or more then 3) factions works better then 2 because all the MMORPG's i've played recently with 3+ factions have been extremley balanced compared to past games i've played like AION or WoW that only have 2 factions..
Eve is a perfect example of a game that pulls multiple factions off well and when you sign up for their military and start participateing in wars against the other faction EvE never makes it feel like theres one faction dominateing the other.. Ofcourse factions play a much smaller role in EvE because they are usually put on the back burner for player-ran corps.. But there is FvFvFvFvF (you get the point) in EvE if you decide to go the military route which a lot of solo players do..
Fallen Earth is a nother game i've played recently with multiple factions and i never really see one faction overpopulateing the others and lots of factions have formed faction-only guilds and participate in the faction vrs faction pvp FE offers and the clan i was in we had a blast doin so and it never felt like one faction overpopulated/dominated the other..
But the most recent game i've played is Heroes of Three Kingdoms and it has 3 factions and let me tell you its VERY balanced because of the multiple factions.. WU was dominateing the tomb wars for quite some time but recently the Shu + Wei have worked together and started takeing land back from WU and also stealing some of their players.. I guess some of the top legions from Shu+Wei met in vent and planned out a assault.. So now almost every tomb raid could be anyones game.. It also makes the politics and chance for backstabbing the other faction really high which is always interesting (i enjoy MMO politics lol.)
But yeah, i can tell you from my opinion i'd much rather have 3 + Factions then only 2 because if one dominates the other then it's pretty much impossible to get a head; especially in a game with AION where the population isnt growing; and the people that do join it now or most likley to join Elyos because of their domination on every server.. So pretty much you're stuck in a unfixable hole now unless NC does a forced transfer of players; which could be the straw that breaks the camels back when it comes to AION.. Jus' my opinion tho.
Currently Playing:
Rift + Starcraft II + Gears Of War 3 Beta
Sadly there is only one asmodian dominating server, all the others are dominated by Elyos, and when I say dominated I mean none of the interesting forts are up for the losing side ever.
The only good thing about a situation like that is that the losing side is never waiting for dredgion (pvp arena-style).
Balance will never be acheive in Aion, because there is just way too many Elyos players accross all servers, if they were to merge all servers into one, it would be 4:1 pop.
And unless NCWest smooth the xp curve you're not gonna make people reroll the other faction.