Fight on the Flag

With Phoenix Throne having little RVR as of late, and roughly 600 players who had committed to playing Aion, Fight on the Flag figured we’d see what the fuss is all about.

Aion is a beautiful game and the flight mechanic is awesome … or so I am told. I truly wouldn’t know much about anything past level 11 because I’ve literally only been able to log in for a total of 53 minutes of game time.

I started out fairly patient. Game launches are usually rocky in some way or another. But as my queues grew during the week (I live in the Seattle area and my guild is East Coast), I grew more and more frustrated. Thursday was the last straw for me. I’ve lost any shred of patience I thought I had. I had just spent 2+ hours in the queue, and when I literally had less than a minute to go to get into the game, I crashed. You can tell how upset I was by my exorbitant use of exclamation points.

Many blame the queue times on the AFK shops.

Since last Sunday, when the head start began for this game, I’ve spent a total of 15 hours in queues (yes I kept track). There are a number of bloggers who speak to the issue of solving queue times much more eloquently than I.

Bringer of Ouchies suggests a move from the EA Mythic playbook:

The perfect solution to this involves looking into how EAMythic handled it. They took the servers that were struggling with queue times and cloned them. Creating copies of everything, allowing people to choose between two servers that had identical copies of their characters. This allowed many to make a switch to a lesser populated server in order to enjoy the game.

Fortunately it appears NCSoft is making small steps to alleviate the queue. They patched this morning to allow AFK shops for only 30 minutes at a time. The writer of the ForTheLore blog appears to have mixed feelings about this.

Me? I say it’s a Bandaid on a flesh wound. I agree with both ForTheLore and with Bringer of Ourchies: More servers (other than the two that are planned) are necessary.

In other news, we created a guild. Unfortunately, the game is cutting off the last letter of our name:

Here’s to hoping that the queue times are going to get better.

I have never seen anyone utilize their class the way Khaevil can. He min/maxes in every way, using spreadsheets and dps logs to figure out the best way to WTFpwn the enemy.

I hardly believed my eyes when I saw he got more than 100k damage a minute in a scenario. See for yourself:

Yes, 5:09 minutes, 45 deathblows and 544,121 damage. Of course he’s being backed up by two healers when we go into scenarios, but almost any player who runs premades is bound to have a healer or two in their groups.

I am pretty sure when we started playing Warhammer that we never thought we would turn into pigs. Yet, here we are, one year after we bought the game and started playing together.

It’s made PVP… interesting. I can’t count the number of times my guildies have commented that this is probably the lamest live event Mythic has created to date. How did that office conversation go?

Dev 1: Hey guys, let’s come up with a live event to celebrate our one-year anniversary!

Dev 2: Great idea, how about we make a bunch of PVE content that PVPers have to complete in order to remain competitive! That’s how we celebrate the anniversary of our awesome, RVR game.

Dev 1: Yeah, and I just got done watching Deliverance, can we turn people into pigs too?

Dev 2: Awesome. Let’s do it.

Dev 1: As a bonus, let’s create a rare-drop pocket item that drops only in PVP and has no known practical use. The irony will drive our player base mad!

I’m pretty sure that’s how that conversation went.

In other news, FOTF continues to plow through PVE content to try to make sure we have the best gear available to us so we can PVP.

We had out first unassisted N’Kari kill on Destruction side, and it was a great fight. We one shotted her very quickly. Hardly anything went wrong though I am sure I can speak for the healers in that it was a difficult fight.