Aion… not so polished?

With every new game that comes out you are always stricken with a sense of awe. It’s often called the Honey Moon stage, everything is perfect and wonderful and the game will never be better than it is right now. I’ve learned to love the Honey Moon stage and appreciate it for it what is.

I’m not sure how long the Honey Moon stage lasts; when I got married I only had a 4 day Honey Moon so I guess my E-Honey Moon has been far longer. (Unless I do hours played, then it’s probably far shorter) While I don’t think I’m officially out of the Honey Moon phase I think I’m at a stage where I can be realistic about a game, this one being Aion.

Before I’m willing to go any farther Aion is still fun for me. I don’t want this to sound more like blind Honey Moon fanboyism but my love for Aion really does appear to be more than a one month stand. It reminds me of my first girlfriend in so many ways, EverQuest.

That being said I do believe the polish myself and others have heaped on Aion is not fully earned. Compared to Warhammer Online it’s surely polished but as soon as I hold it up next to World of Warcraft it starts to seem less perfect. Aion has done far more things right and well than any other MMO since World of Warcraft has launched, that I can say without pause or preface.

Aion does however have a few noticeable issues, and 5 minutes on the forums will lead you to find out they aren’t isolated incidents. I will only be covering two issues here because they have actually affected me and are full fledged technical problems.

I can not for the life of me log onto the Aion official Website or Forums. I get an error saying that my login and password are incorrect. After going through the FAQ and 3 levels of support Customer Service has instructed me to delete my cookies. I did this at step one, thanks though NCSoft. I asked about this on my guild forums and was told that at one point even the NCSoft staff had issues logging into their site. (unconfirmed) I know this is not an issue with my PC or web browser. I use Microsoft IE at work and Firefox at home on two different computers with the same issue. I know this isn’t an in game issue, but your website is the first impression most people will have of your game.

My other issue, which seems to be far more common, can only be described as “rubber banding”. I will be kiting some NPC and as I run away I will occasionally warp back a few feet. If I’m running while a mob casts an ability on me, as soon as the ability lands I fly back to where I was at when the NPC started casting the ability. I’ve heard different rumors that this is caused by DSL connections (I have Cable) or from duel processors. It feels more like the client (my computer) communicating with the server properly.

I have a few other nitpicking issues but I’m going to save those for another day.