Several of us are on our last legs in Aion. Khaevil even vowed to never play MMOs again after this experience.

An obvious question: What now? This has caused me to look back at Warhammer. From my previous post you would think we would never, ever go back. But time has changed the game from when we last played it.

The BIGGEST thing that killed Warhammer for me was a lack of people to fight. That rationale is no longer an excuse:

This screenshot from Gorfang was taken on a Sunday morning, back when we used to think all of the Destruction were in church. My account was still open so I thought I’d check things out. Order on Gorfang is now seriously outnumbered, out-organized and outclassed.

My second point in the aforementioned post is that Land of the Dead forced people to PVE to keep up with everyone else. While this is still true, there is some sad news on the PVE content front:

Mythic has had some pretty massive layoffs in the creative department:

Mythic laid off 80 people today (Nov. 9), which is about 40% of the company and responsible for 90% of the content. According to a friend of mine who left before this happened, they’re putting Warhammer into “maintenance mode.”

I say sad news because I hate to see anyone lose their job. I am not happy they have lost their jobs at all. While some say “maintenance mode” means that the game is dead, Organdonar has a more optimistic outlook:

If they aren’t adding new content then they aren’t fucking up the game.

Yes, this still leaves LOTD in the game, but frankly if we had not played Aion and stayed in Warhammer we might have most of that gear by now and we wouldn’t have wasted our time with so much PVE. With the creative team mostly gone, this means they won’t add more PVE content to the game anytime soon. Then all we have to do is wake up and PVP. Awesome!

Lastly, my third complaint (Mythic was slow on server merges) could be resolved soon. From Massively’s interview with Jeff Skalski:

Q: Would it be better to merge servers again?

A: Yes and no. Merging a server affects a lot of people, and some players rejoice while others get upset about the change. It’s a tough call really. Right now we’re closely watching Dark Crag and Phoenix Throne. Both have passionate players on them, but we wish the populations were higher. With the recent release of 1.3.2 ,we’ll be holding off on any merges until we get a few more weeks of data. Then we can make final, informed decision if needed.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Where does that leave us? I am sending out my recruit-a-friend invites to members as I can (I only get one per day, how lame is that?). With the recruit-a-friend invite we get 10 free days of game time to check it out. (If you are interested in an invite, send me a PM on the forums and I will add you to the list.)

Yes, the PVE is boring. It’s so boring that one of our most patient guildies in the world (i.e. Mr. “You need to suck it up and grind, quests are a waste of time.”) has all but quit the game.

The only reason I personally haven’t given it up yet is I see the potential (and I have a bunch of wicked cool guildies to suffer through this PVE grind with).

Does anyone know when that experience boost patch will be in? Some guildies say since we are months behind Asia in patch cycles, we will be waiting quite a while. I hope they fix the experience grind issue sooner rather than later.

Read the parts of Massively’s write up that I agree with:

It was still a shock to many Westerners to only get half their level from quest XP and the rest from setting up camp and killing the same beasties over and over again for the remainder. Again though, NCsoft has been listening to player concerns and the latest patch notes indicate a massive quest XP boost coming soon.

…

It’s not that I’m adverse to putting in effort to get something, but Aion’s grind just seems like unnecessary punishment. I realize it’s a PvPvE game, but I’m just astonished that they gate the PvP with 25 levels of bland PvE.

Our model today is Mistin, a Spiritmaster in <Mile High Club>.

Look at that daring outfit! He’s ready for a night at the club, perhaps as a backup singer for The Smiths.

Yeah, not much going on PVP wise except for leveling. We’re sticking with it, though, because we see the potential.

Aion — the game where you fight mobs and fight to stay awake at the same time!

A group of us hit 25 this weekend. My god, is the grind long and boring. We wouldn’t even bother if we didn’t see the potential in the game though. The flight is pretty cool but I think a few of us are on the fence about how much effort this is worth.

That’s why I haven’t posted much — who wants to stare at a few pictures of the level grind?

There, happy? Now stare at that picture for about 10 hours and you get an inkling of what we’re going through.

One more quick note, we’ve changed our guild name. <Fight on the Fla> wasn’t doing it for us. We are now <Mile High Club>. I’m not going to visit the URL to determine whether it’s taken or not. I’ve got safesearch off.

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.