October Aion Community Address

(Original Article)

It’s been a month now since Aion opened its doors to players in North America and Europe. In that month, the growth of the game's community has signaled Aion's success. We've received an amazing amount of feedback, both positive and negative. We'd like to reiterate that we've been listening. We have been working around the clock toward solutions to the problems many of you have experienced.

You've told us that it's difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we're planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly "grind."

In this week's Eye on Community, we answered a question that a player had about client instability. In the reply, we noted that most of the claims stem from the infamous "Crysystem.dll error." We've been working with members of the community to identify the cause of the problem in order to find a permanent solution. Our development team is currently investigating, and will be testing a variety of different short- and long-term solutions. These include adding additional and improved display options to the Aion client, as well as system and memory optimizations.

We've heard your unhappiness about the chat spam and bots in Aion and recognize it as an annoying problem. We’ve taken measures to reduce the amount of chat spam you’ll be subjected to and have already seen substantial improvements in this area. We've been expanding our GM customer service staff, and we have also assembled a special team dedicated to hunting down and eliminating botting operations. It's obvious these activities erode your gameplay experience far too much to be acceptable. They also harm us from a business standpoint due to the RMT organizations' frequent use of stolen credit cards.

Many of you have asked us why we haven't spent more time communicating the specifics of our plans. The unfortunate truth is that the same people spamming chat channels and setting up bots are also reading our announcements. In order to keep the enemy in the dark, we cannot be too vocal about our plans to fight back.

We want you to know, though, that we're more dedicated than ever to eliminate chat spam and the use of bots. The good news is that you can help. If you see any suspicious player activity, report it. To quickly report these players, use the /AutoReportHunting feature by typing /AutoReportHunting while a suspicious character is targeted. It's important to note that this system will actually begin to penalize players after they've been reported multiple times. The more of you that use this system—the more effective it will become.

To add more specificity to what we're discussing here, early next week we're going to be releasing details about a game update that will go into further detail about how we’ll be fixing some of these issues, in addition to others.

It’s been an exciting month, and the future of Aion is full of promise. Please continue to send us your feedback and never forget that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

-The Aion Community Team

Busy Busy

So, like mentioned before, I fail at blogging often. Lately, though, a large part of it has been due to some hectic changes and events going on offline.

My fiance moved back here, we had to find him a job, then we discovered his license has been suspended for a while but he was never informed of such and the drive back here kind of wore out a few bits of his car - the tie rod bushing, the brake pads and the rear break drums. So while everything is fixable, it's going to take two weeks, and I have to drive him to and from work till we hear back from the state of Utah about his license (btw, never move to Utah, it sucks).

My disability hearing was set, much to everyone's surprise as it's been less than a year from the denial, but it's taking a lot of time to finish paperwork, set up the last round of medical appointments on top of regular/ongoing medical appointments and get me back up to the point where I'll actually be able to attend said hearing since one of my recent specialists basically blew me off and avoided treating stuff.

I've been reading a lot, because the fiance has the Earth's Children series, and on days I have appointments or running around to do, I tend to be tired after and relaxing on the couch or the bed tends to be nicer than at the PC. When I do have time and energy to use the PC, I've been playing Aion, though I took advantage of the City Of holiday weekend special - they reactivated all the retail+ accounts, and it was a nice break from re-doing most of the same things in Aion.

That's the bad thing about being involved in a beta. You do a lot of the same things so many times that by the time the game releases, you're really sick of the starter stuff and get highly frustrated before getting to new content.

Regardless, I signed up for the chance to beta test Star Wars: The Old Republic and will be impatiently waiting to hear from BioWare on the matter for who knows how long. ^.^

During the moving of the fiance, we basically stopped role playing in the Harry Potter sim sets in Second Life. There were a couple of uncomfortable RPs that people were trying to push even though they weren't wanted by either of us, and we kept being disappointed by most of the "leadership" of the sim. In the end, we decided to drop it and focus on Aion and reviving our SW:TOR RP sessions, since Tony's time is cut down (comparatively) by work; off-time will probably be spent in City Of or more casual aspects of Second Life that don't demand so much face time.

That's basically what's been going on. I'm going to set aside Mondays (unless there's an event in Aion) to update this thing, and maybe add back in Friday reviews once I'm in the habit again. ^.^