Everyone is prejudice against other MMO's

I’m going to vent. I have only written two sentences and I already know this post is going to turn into a QQ post. Never the less it has to be done. Last night I was in Ventrillo with all my friends that I have been gaming with since High School. Two of us in the channel play Aion and the other 4 play World of Warcraft.

As our nightly routine one of them asks how Aion is going, and I always explain what I’m doing and what is good or bad about it. Typically I’m always heaping praise on Aion though. Last night I told them I was enjoying crafting and making Kinah and one of my friends started making fun of my reasons for it.

First off he couldn’t understand WHY I wanted to make money. He didn’t grasp the idea that making ALOT of money in a game could be fun in its self. I told him a half truth and explained that I wanted a steady income set up before I actually needed one, which is partially true. I don’t want to wait until I need Kinah to try and make some. It would be too hard to invest Kinah at that point, so better to do it while it’s mainly trivial.

That was a semi acceptable answer by their standards… then I told them I also had fun crafting. Rather than asking me why crafting was fun they began to berate the game play and slow grind of the exp. I was told that the reason I liked crafting was because it was easier than leveling. Then one of my friends began to tell me how Aion was “failing” because all of his friends had already quit it. That didn’t make sense to me though because there were two of us in Vent who have been playing Aion for weeks and still enjoy it. I told them that a lot of people in the guild hadn’t got many levels over the weekend was due to a large portion of them rerolling to healers to help the guild and some PvP in the Abyss that took place.

I was told again that Aion was simply too grindy and it wasn’t going to last. How can people tell me a game is too grindy? They even went so far as to say the leveling was slower in Aion than EverQuest… really? How can any MMO veteran say that without bursting into flames? EQ literally took a YEAR on average to reach level 60.

I know my friends didn’t mean to offend me, but this goes to show the mindset of a lot of gamers. They immediately sought to find the bad in Aion, rather than the good.

At the end of our conversation I told them, as I do everytime they ask, that Aion will not steal players from World of Warcraft. It is however a place to go once you are done with WoW. Sure some people will go back when Blizzard releases new content, but I don’t think in the amount that most gamers expect.

The bottom line is Aion is arguably the highest quality MMO to be released SINCE World of Warcraft. Aion will truly be the test of whether or not another MMO can make a profit with A+ quality control.