The Aion Experience - Part I

The Aion Experience: My Impressions So Far

A lot of people who I’ve played MMOs with have been asking about Aion, knowing I play it, and wanting to know my opinions of it. As I am a man who likes to talk a lot about things he enjoys, I decided to create this brief summary of my impressions.

Firstly, this is not a review. As anybody who has played Aion will tell you, the game has a hefty PvP-centric approach post level 25. As my highest level characters are a level 21 Elyos Spiritmaster and a level 22 Asmodian Chanter, I cannot comment on the PvP aspect of the game. But bear in mind that it is there, and it is a big chunk of the game’s premise.

Secondly, most of the ‘reviews’ of Aion that I have seen compare it to World of Warcraft. This is inevitable, it having the greatest market share with — at its height — over 11 million consecutive subscribers. Aion does a lot of things better than WoW, I shall say that now, but I don’t just write from this one perspective.

My actual MMO background starts off with Final Fantasy XI, probably one of the most hardcore of all MMOs in its heyday. I still believe FFXI does some things better than WoW and more modern MMOs, but that is by the by. The reason I stopped playing FFXI as much and went to WoW is the issue of time, and how long things take to do in the game, and that is my first point.

Aion is a game that will take you considerable time to play. By level 21/22, I am already up to around 1.6 million xp needed to hit the next level. Bear in mind that the level cap is 50, and the xp per level curve increases quite dramatically per level, and you can already see that it will take a lot of hard time and effort (based on my current experience with the game) to hit the level cap.

One of the things that I both liked and detested alternatively about FFXI was the enforced partying system. Without a party, you couldn’t do a whole lot past level 10. Which meant 65 levels of partying, pulling mobs, killing them, moving onto the next one, and so on. It was grindy. Very grindy. And yet, thanks to this enforced partying system, the community on Pandemonium server where I played FFXI was very tight. You really did feel like you were playing a massively multiplayer game.

WoW had the opposite effect, sometimes. With so many classes able to solo all but the hardest of “group” quests, WoW often felt very much like a single-player game with the odd grouped instance run thrown in should you be bothered. Even then, you never really had to group to get stuff done. This was more casual, and coupled with something as simple as giving xp for quests (something that FFXI has only really recently caught onto), was the main reason why I spent so much time levelling up characters in the game. Nevertheless, I feel that — apart from the few guildies and friends I made on Shadowsong EU — the WoW community is one of the worst communities I’ve ever met. And as a secondary school supply teacher, I’ve worked in quite a few dysfunctional communities.

Aion, then, puts a bit of the massively multiplayer back into MMORPG. I’d say about 80% of the content between levels 1 and 20(ish) can be soloed. Quests give (usually reasonable) chunks of XP, but there are significant benefits to grouping.

For a start, there are no hybrid classes in Aion. Your Templar is the tank, your Cleric is the healer. Rangers, Assassins, Gladiators are your dps. Sorcerers are dps and crowd control. Spirit Masters are dps through DoTs. Chanters are the class with the party-enhancing buffs. Yeah, Chanters can heal a bit. Yeah Gladiators can tank a bit. And yes, you can customise your character a bit through Aion’s Stigma system, which is the closest thing to talent points that Aion seems to have. But ultimately the class you play chooses your role. Don’t play a cleric if you want to frontline dps. Don’t play a Templar if you want to dish out massive damage.

This isn’t to say that you have to group constantly. For Templars and Clerics, it is certainly the case that it is beneficial and faster to kill stuff in a duo or trio or group, but it isn’t forced down your throat. You can solo. You just have to choose your targets carefully.

However, you WILL have to group at points. Around level 18 for both factions, there are a series of group quests: Black Claw Village for Asmodians, Tursin Outpost (I think) for Elyos. These areas contain elite mobs, who have far more hitpoints and hit far harder than your average normal mob, just like your Notorious Monsters in FFXI, or your Elite mobs in WoW. You WILL need a group to bring these down. A trio can sometimes work, but for maximum killing power, a full group of six is needed.

I like this. To the best of my knowledge, it is practically impossible to solo these quests at the level you get them. Now, it IS possible to get to level 20 and move on to the next zone WITHOUT doing these storyline quests but a) you miss out on a huge chunk of xp (the elite mobs give tons of xp, even in a full group) and b) it would mean a chunk of grinding out xp with boring repeatable quests (sure beats FFXI’s system mind you!)

So if you are an unsociable MMO player, Aion isn’t likely to be for you. There are dungeons in the game, and a massive flight-based PvP area which you pretty much need to group up for to survive — safety in numbers as it were.

Moving on. The classes seem pretty well balanced. They all have some interesting abilities, they all get fairly unique combinations of equipment to use, and the amount of visual distinction between them is pretty high. I’ll not beat around the bush: Aion is a beautiful game. Colour me shallow, but I take great joy in exploring a new fantasy landscape and taking in the details. WoW had me hooked on exploring for a long time, and while Aion’s game world is smaller in size that the multiple contents in WoW, its level of detail is breathtaking at times. I have a folder full of screenshots that is rapidly expanding in size, though I will say that many screenshots simply don’t do the game justice. Not only is everything pretty, but the special effects are awesome and the animations are really lovely and fluid. Check out youtube for some examples of that stuff.

The combat system is fun. And it has to be, because it takes slightly longer than you might be used to to solo kill mobs. On average it takes me between 10 and 20 seconds to kill stuff, but I admit I am not playing the main DPS classes so it may well be all over much quicker for others. Unlike WoW where you basically spam abilities as soon as they’re off cooldown, it is actually beneficial in Aion to weave your auto-attacks in between your abilities. Aion’s abilities work on a Chain Skill system. Here’s an example from my Chanter’s repertoire.

Hallowed Strike (level 1 chain) > Heaven’s Judgement (level 2 chain)

Or

Hallowed Strike (level 1 chain) > Booming Strike (level 2 chain) > Incandescent Blow (level 3 chain)

As you can see, using a level 1 skill opens up the option to use one of two level 2 skills. Heaven’s Judgement has a short-term stun effect, while Booming Strike opens up the possibility to add a third chain skill into the mix. This keeps the combat fresh, interesting, and quite tactical I’ve found so far.

Plus with the wonderful animations, I imagine Aion is actually quite fun to watch. Again, check out any HD videos you can find on Youtube to get a better picture of just how dynamic combat is.

The question, therefore, is “Should I play Aion?” and my answer to that will really depend.

Firstly, if you are a big crafter in MMOs, Aion has a very robust crafting system. It is easier than FFXI’s ludicrously irritating crafting system, but no way near as easy as WoW’s. It is, however, more rewarding. It creates gear that is up to 10 levels ahead (in terms of stats) than what you will be getting from mobs of the same level as you. It is, however, painfully slow at times to level, and it will cost you a big chunk of monies.

Secondly, do you like having a well-defined and rounded role for your character? If yes, you might also enjoy Aion (as well as a ton of other games on the market!)

Thirdly, do you like playing games that really push the boundaries of visual experience in the MMO genre? If yes, Aion is definitely worth a look.

I’ve really enjoyed my time with Aion so far, but as I’ve mentioned in past blogs, I’m not really a competitive PvP-style player, so my opinions of the game might change dramatically come level 25 and my first forays into The Abyss, the game’s major PvP hub.

Check back for (hopefully) a followup to this at a later date.

It’s Over Nine Thousa---oh. Hundred. Nine hundred.

So, the latest school term has begun and my week has been busy busy busy for several reasons.

Firstly there is all the kerfuffle surrounding new timetables and the like. (Also, am impressed that Word’s spell checker recognises ‘kerfuffle’ as a real word...) This week I managed to do the work of about three people through no real fault of anyone in the department’s: that’s just what has had to be done in order to get ourselves off the ground. Now we finally seem to have a fourth member of staff in the department, things will hopefully get a bit easier. Tuesday was especially horrendous given the second item on this list and the fact that I did a full day’s teaching. 5x 1hr lessons with all new classes and one bad lot amongst them could certainly have been worse, but yeah...

The second thing kinda informs number 1 and subsequent items. Several weeks ago I had a flu-like thing that left me really badly roughed up. Horrendous cough coupled with sore throat, runny nose, headaches, and constant tiredness thanks to lack of sleep due to coughing, which took a good two weeks to clear. Unfortunately I passed it on to Dad and, this last week, he managed to pass it back to me. After a seven week holiday in which I did zero shouting of any kind, being back at work has taxed my immune system somewhat and by 4pm on Tuesday I could do little more than croak. I spent Wednesday and today feeling clogged up and coughing and sneezing on a regular basis, making me feel horridly filthy and unwell, but at least it has eased off somewhat by the constant imbibing of water. My throat is still swollen, but I can at least talk now, and I just hope this holds up for tomorrow.

The third thing was the most financially ruinous. While I get paid tomorrow for the two days I did last week, a grand total of probably slightly under £200 after tax/admin fees, I have managed to spend £926 in the last 7 days. This is a lot, even for me, but in many ways it needed to be paid. Several bits on my PC were making noises that I’m certain they shouldn’t have been making, and the machine was starting to stutter and crash more. Having had a good listen in to the case I gathered it was the CPU itself that was starting to go, and if I was gonna have to replace the processor, chances are I’d have to replace the motherboard as well. Rather than wait for the thing to melt, potentially destroying data in the process, I decided to go the preventative route.

Browsing scan.co.uk I managed to snag myself a couple of deals on components, beefing my system up from an AMD 64 X2 5600 processor and 4gig RAM on a 3-year old MSI motherboard with a GeForce 8800GTX to the following:—

Intel i7 quad-core Nephalem processor at 2.6ghz
Gigabyte EX58-Extreme Motherboard
XFX GTX285 graphics card (with free copy of Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum)
6GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM

The new bits arrived yesterday at around 8am, waking me up from a fitful sleep. In fact, I’d probably only managed a couple of uncomfortable hours, but the thought of tinkering with technology spurred me on.

By 10:30am I’d got the case stripped out, the new motherboard, processor, heatsinks, graphics card et al installed, and I came to connect the final PSU-to-Motherboard connector and discovered that instead of a 4-pin connector, the motherboard needed an 8-pin.

Well shit.

Phoned up our local techstore and enquired about this new-fangled 8-pin whatsit. Apparently the higher end motherboards from the last 8-12 months have them instead of the old 4-pins.

“Do I just need an adaptor?” I foolishly ask.

“No Sir!” they reply. “It actually takes twice the juice as before.”

“So I need a new power supply?”

“Yeah. But we don’t carry the higher end ones in stock.”

Sigh. So in the end I had to phone round all the local stores to get one, and even then the earliest they could get it to me was today. Fortunately it was delivered early today so everything was, thankfully, up and running by about 1pm.

So add 1x Coolermaster M700 700watt modulated PSU to the above list.

In the end I’m very happy with the machine, which is running faster than ever; I’m just a bit miffed that I ended up paying so much for it because I didn’t wanna wait 3-5 working days — no computer over the weekend would have made for a very sad Jon, especially as I doubt going out on the town like this would be a very smart idea. Don’t want to give anyone what I’ve got (apart from the kids at school, but most of them deserve the pain! ¬_¬)

While I may be out of pocket for the next few weeks, I’m happy with my financial security; I’m also happy with my re-mastered PC, as well as for some of my friends who have had positive changes to their relationship statuses over the last couple of days.

Me next, I beg of thee! :-/

~Jon

September

I recall writing a blog about September last year, though I also vaguely recall I split it into three and it was halfway through October before I finished the segments. This year is different.

September has always filled me with ambivalence, a swirling mix of emotions both positive and negative that tend to leave me a bit spaced out until I get into the swing of things.

Work
This year will be the first year since I had my breakdown that I’ve been working in a school at the start of the academic year. A part of me — the part that values any kind of financial security — is pleased by this. Summer has been a slippery slope of expense, with various bits and pieces I rely on threatening to fail (looking at you, PC) or actually failing entirely (yes, you, Graphire4: though we had a good run, didn’t we!) As well as technical stuff, I spent too much money on alcohol. Sure I don’t really care that I’m spending money on the drink — I’m not in danger of becoming an alcoholic in any way — but my motivation for spending so much time in Chicago’s has been perhaps a bit skewed and, ultimately, foolish. Time will no doubt tell on that one.

Financially, then, things are on the up. 2 days departmental training and organisation this week, followed by 3 days per week until Christmas, and possibly after depending on the state of play at Pensnett in the coming weeks/months.

The downside to this, of course, is the work itself. Already I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get something as simple as a timetable and half-term-plan sorted out. The upheavals at the school are noticeable. There is a miasma of disbelief and an undercurrent of anger at what the establishment is enduring in these last few months of its existence. Shakeups to the established systems of the school are, in my lowly opinion, unwise. But perhaps that is what separates the Senior Management from the lowly grunt on the front lines. Maybe their vision for what the school can be in its final year will be a triumphant swan song. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that splitting a GCSE class between three teachers and trying to get a coherent curriculum going is fundamentally idiotic, and difficult to even try and put into practise. Yet that is what much of today was spent doing. Trying to work the hodgepodge timetable to not disadvantage the students’ learning.

I do go on.

Television
As with last year, part of why September excites me is the new lineup of television. I’m not going to go into a big list like I did last year, but two shows I’ll certainly be checking out this autumn are Supernatural and Castle, both of which premiere within the next couple of weeks. The latter, especially, I find very inspiring as a writer, and hope that the stories will continue to fuel my own imagination and creative process over the next few months.

Writings
Speaking of my creative process, I recently received feedback from a couple of proofreaders of the almost final draft of novel #1, with its finalised title of “Chains of Memory” (assuming a publisher doesn’t change it). I’d say its 99% done now. I’m tightening up a last few scenes and then knuckling down to get it sent off to agencies. Publishing is a fairly arduous and lengthy process, so even if somebody snaps it up, it’s likely to be 12-18 months before it gets spotted on the shop floor. Expect excited blogs/twitter/facebook updates should the unimaginable happen however!

While I’ve been polishing that one with my finest literary chamois, I’ve also been hard at work on the sequel, “Chains of Time”. The second novel is a real change of pace, as well as setting (and time period, as the title might suggest). So far I’m thoroughly enjoying having the creative output, though I admit the going has been slow due to distractions over the summer and the lack of an actual deadline for me: yet another reason why I should try and get a three-book deal signed. Publisher pressure is a great motivator, so I’m told.

Distractions
As I mentioned during the holidays, I’m prone to hoarding games. I tend to start playing them in a burst of vigour and then peter out after a few hours. I play games for stories, not the exciting and dynamic whatever systems that games these days try and show off. Artificially lengthened games where the story pace is slow and there is, for example, a lot of wandering down darkened corridors, annoy the hell out of me. A game that is 8-10 hours long is just perfect for my attention span, and while it may seem outlandish to pay £35 or whatever for a game that long, I put it into perspective that I spend more than that on alcohol on a night out, and at least I can sell or trade the game in after I’ve finished with it.

During the course of the holiday I went back and finished Half Life 2. I bought HL2 way back when it first came out, and got bored of it about a third of the way through. Since friends very kindly purchased me a copy of the Orange Box via Steam, I decided that I would definitely have to finish not only HL2, but its episodic successors, creatively titled Episodes One and Two. And I’m glad I did. As the games are now pretty old, my slowly dying PC didn’t struggle running them at maxed settings, and the atmosphere they evoked, and the stories they told (while a bit linear) were definitely more in tune with my more mature gaming sensibilities these days. I also finished a couple of other games, made some headway into others, couldn’t for the life of me get Crysis to run for more than a couple of minutes without crashing, and tried out Return to Such&Such MMO offers: Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning all threw freebie time at me, though I admit it took me longer to download the clients and install than I actually ended up playing the games. Nevermind.

I think that is enough on games.

Looking Forwards
As you will know if you tend to read my blogs with any regularity (there’s what, maybe 3 of you?), I’ve been trying very hard since my breakdown and back injury to stay positive and look forwards to a brighter future. This has obviously been fairly difficult recently due to the economic crisis, but I feel I am making some progress into getting life back on track.

Ideally I would like to move out into a place of my own sometime within the next couple of years. As much as I love the free rent of living at my parents’ house, with both brother and sister having now moved out, I feel a bit like the odd one out these days. This is, in many ways, a ludicrous feeling to have since I spent eight years in Lancaster and the North West, but nevertheless I shall be twenty nine years of age in January and I simply don’t like the idea that come thirty I may still be here and alone.

Obviously I don’t mean alone in the sense of people surrounding me. I run into people all the time, it being the very nature of my job, and me being an inherently social person (despite the time I spent chained to the PC or my netbook). But I am committed to the idea (and, I would hesitate to add, probable fact) that if I wish to move out, I have to find one of two kinds of people to interact with.

Either I need to find a small group of friends willing to rent a place together. Or I need to blunder about blindly in the hopes of finding a girlfriend, an endeavour that I continue to be awful at.

I’m still not particularly sure what the problem is in this regard. A lack of confidence and self-esteem may be part of the problem, but recently I’ve been finding it easier to talk and flirt my way into at least friendships with women whom I would consider quite attractive. I suppose my main failing is a complete inability to tell if women are interested in me in that way. I’ve always kind of fallen into relationships, without any real kind of dating process, so I’ve never really asked women out, or chatted them up at bars, or whatever the accepted social norm is (if there even is one).

I’m not exactly a bad example of the gender, either. I’m smart, I’m savvy, I have a certain kind of dry wit that perhaps has limited appeal, and I’m not altogether unattractive, though a couple of trips per week to the gym might help improve self esteem in that department.

I think maybe I get entangled in the “What ifs”. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. The “If I ask her out, what if she’s not interested. Will we still be friends? Will she etc etc” quandary.

My notion of relationships is a bit of a slow burner, I suppose. Taking time. Romance. None of the cheap, quick sex and its over that many of the men I see out and about on the weekend are so obviously after. I’m sure I can’t be too unusual, the this regard, but again, an inability to read if people like me as a friend or as something more is a huge mental and emotional hurdle to try and overcome.

It’d be so much easier if people just told me, but then there may be issues of a similar kind from their point of view, and I am nothing if not cursed with huge amounts of intellectual and emotional empathy for other people (thanks for that legacy, Mom).

I meant for this to be a fairly positive diatribe. Don’t think I quite managed that did I? The message to take away from this, should you care, is that I am getting better with all this. Even so far as to ask somebody out, though nothing has come of it yet. This at least shows an improvement in my confidence. Some would say a huge improvement considering me and my crippled emotions.

(Speaking of which, there has been no improvement in my recovery of so many lost memories from before my breakdown. I find sometimes that fragments of times and events that I don’t consciously remember seep into my dreams, but they always leave me somewhat disturbed upon waking, as you might expect.)

Fin
I think that that will do for me splurging thoughts, feelings and beliefs onto the page for now. I always have a tendency to feel embarrassed about what I write after I’ve posted these irregular monologues, (it’s one of the reasons I don’t spell check/grammar check/read through them) but I am not so easily embarrassed these days it seems, though I sincerely hope people don’t think ill of me for voicing my thoughts and opinions in this way.

We all need our outlets, after all, and when I cannot use analogies in my novel writing, this is the purest option left open to me.

~Jon

Data Disaster

I had this blog all planned. It was going to be a happy, shining blog, reminiscing about the evolution of television from the mid-90s. This would have perhaps shown my age, and how I’ve dated as badly as a mobile phone in a music video, but I wouldn’t have cared. Mid-90s TV formed the foundation of who I am today!

But alas this is not to be, as other stuff happened before I got to write it. Let me explain.

I’m sure any of you that use computers as much as I do run out of space eventually. Hard disks can only store so much data, and they start to slow down — or “chug” — the closer to capacity they come. Now while TV show release dates ARE changing so that the UK is getting new series closer to their US releases, I still prefer to watch the shows I like straight away. So I download them. I also tend to watch them when they finally do air on British TV. I also tend to buy the box sets (the collector’s 5-series DVD set of Andromeda is sat right behind me, for example. Yes, I plan on watching it in a marathon of poor special FX and Kevin Sorbo-ness.) This is my thinly veiled defence against “zomg he is pirate! Yarrr!” or something.

Some of these TV shows I like to store to watch again and again until the DVDs are released. Things like the Dresden Files pilot episode, which — at approx 2 hours long — was very cool, but not out on DVD and only available in the US on Sci-Fi. I watch it now and again to remind myself what it is about the series (and the books) that I love so much. But it’s over 1gig worth of file. These all add up. So I store all this kind of stuff on an external HD to save myself from a chugging computer fate.

All was going fine with this plan, but now DISASTER has struck.

I have a very simple, 250gig external HD, which I’ve used to back up pretty much everything from the last 7 years or so. In fact, when my sister was moving out, and I was having the big overhaul/tidyup, I actually went through many of my old backup CDs and tried to consolidate the data I have onto the external HD. And now, via an application of Sod’s Law, the external HD has decided to screw up. Connecting it in Windows makes explorer hang. Trying to access anything on it makes explorer hang. Interacting with it in any way (except one, more on this in a moment)...you guessed it... makes explorer hang.

There is 232 gig worth of data on this drive. Granted more than a bit of it is TV programmes that I haven’t deleted yet (I’ve got the DVDs now). Some of it is Anime. Some of it is Doctor Who. I think some of it may have been the Sarah Connor Chronicles actually. Either way, a huge chunk of it is TV and I would in no way miss any of this stuff – well, apart from House S4, but that’s out on DVD this month so that’s fine.

What I will miss, if I can’t retrieve it, is photos, work, silly things that — retrospectively — I should have backed up elsewhere instead. I never even thought about it. That annoying “What if the external HD fucks up?” question. I certainly didn’t expect to have any problems with it only 6 months after I bought it, but considering my run of luck with external storage devices, I should have known better. The sad fact is that, while I have plenty of copies of a lot of the older stuff knocking around on CD — I didn’t throw ALL of them away in the clear out — there’s a lot of stuff that I simply don’t have backed up elsewhere. This IS my backup device, after all. It was a purchase designed to ensure I didn’t have to spend hours backing stuff up onto DVD.

But now it seems I may pay for that error of judgement with the loss of a considerable number of irreplaceable items. This makes me a very sad panda.

This is not to say all hope is lost, however. I currently have a programme scanning every single sector of the drive in the hopes of retrieving as much of my data as possible. I started this scan at 6:05am on 9th August 2008, and at 2:22pm on the 10th August 2008 as I write this very sentence, the scan is 39% done. It’s a slow one, and I live in fear of a powercut, or the cable to fall out, or something that will cause me to have to start the whole process all over again.

I’ve pondered if it’s worth it. How much of the crap on that drive do I ever actually look at?! But that isn’t the point, really, is it. Because I know that as soon as I give up on attempting to retrieve this data, then I’ll need some of it. This, really, is the problem with the digital era. Nothing exists “for real” until you make it real. Photos are a collection of pixels until you print them out.

A big chunk of the backed up stuff — probably 5% or so — is PSD files. My artwork, in the many stages of work-in-progress. I save all of those just in case I want to go back and change things, or steal elements for another painting, or use portions of them for something in web design. There’s several gigs worth of these, as PSD files are pretty damned hefty, that I don’t have backed up elsewhere. I COULD have burned them to DVD, but I didn’t. I relied on one device.

Never again! It seems I will have to add even further to the clutter that is my workspace by adding a second external backup drive to the mix. A smaller, more robust one, for critical backups of stuff. I may also need to add a third HD into my PC itself. All to ensure that, if I have critical data, if I do manage to recover the stuff that is important to me from this buggered HD, then I’ll have multiple copies of it just in case another Data Disaster happens again.

Let this be a lesson to me, and to you too!