Aion: Tower of Eternity is fun if you have a spare eternity...
Yes, I have a short attention span. When I pay $50 for a game plus $15 per month, it grabs me. It's the game's job to hold me. Aion did not accomplish this task. After thinking about it, I have some reasons why Aion missed the mark:
1.) Grinding - I'm not above grinding. I've had to do it enough over the years that I know how to do it. Pull up the game on the desktop, pop a DVD into the laptop, and you've got at least two hours of relatively painless grinding. However, the game has to have different aspects of the game I can do that do not require grinding. From crafting to leveling, everything in Aion requires grinding. It gets old. From what I understand from my brother, level 41 has about three quests for it and the rest of the 63 million exp is all grinding. Sorry, that's not my kind of game.
2.) Broker Limits - This is similar to one of the problems I had with Final Fantasy XI (my review of FFXI). I know it's used to control the gold spammers, but when you limit the number of auctions a player can post, you limit the amount of in-game money they can make. When training at level 31 costs over 100,000 Kinah (Aion's in-game money) and quests are becoming fewer and further between, people need to make money. Everything in Aion is expensive! The devs did a good job of making sure Kinah was not a problem early-on, but as I passed level 30, between buying spells, leveling trade skills, and gearing my character, money is tight.
3.) Expensive Mail - Sort of along the lines of #2, but holy god it is expensive to use in-game mail in Aion! To mail a piece of armor to a friend or legion-mate costs almost as much as it would to just buy it off of the Broker. That is completely ridiculous!
4.) Instance Lock-Outs - I thought locking people out of instances after achieving a certain level was pretty lame. There are some nice gear drops in some of these instances, but if you can't get it to drop in 5 or 6 runs, then you're SOL unless you buy it off of the Broker. I guess they figure they make up for the instance lock-outs by not having very many of them. Instead, they have large zones with elite mobs that you wouldn't enter without a group. Of course, since it's not instanced, you're probably going to find several other groups in the area.
5.) Legion Membership Limits - Huh? Who thought it would be a good idea to limit the number of people that can join a legion? It's already bad enough that you have to spend lots of Kinah to expand your legion to allow more people to join.
6.) PvPvE - This one is probably my fault. I'm not a big PvP fan, and I knew I was taking a chance by buying a game marketed as being heavy PvP. That being said, it was also marketed as being able to successfully bridge the gap between PvP and PvE so as to be enjoyable for fans of each type of play. I think they failed. The PvPvE portion of Aion is simply PvP. Yes, there are NPCs involved in the PvP combat, but I don't think that bridges the gap or makes me, a big PvE fan, enjoy Aion. In addition, there are no pure PvE zones after level 20 or so. In fact, if your faction is pwning the other faction in The Abyss (the huge PvPvE zone), you'll find the losing faction camping PvE areas in the winning faction's "PvE" zone. They wait for you to engage your quest mob in combat then come and gank you from behind. PvPvE is pretty lame in my opinion.
7.) Training - No, I'm not referring to education or learning. I'm talking about the game mechanics allowing some jerk to gather up a bunch of NPCs, run them over to you, and have the NPCs all aggro to you once the jerk is out of range or otherwise loses aggro. Any developer that makes this possible in their game needs to consider whether tweens will be allowed to play. If so, I would make training impossible.
8.) Trade Skills - This is love/hate for me. I like the fact that you get exp for leveling your trade skills. Also, it's ok for me that you can buy all of the materials you need to level your skills from an NPC in the crafting area. That being said, it is expensive! And it takes a whole lot of time to level your trade skills, which is incredibly dull. Add to that your chance to fail to craft, therefore losing your materials, and crafting can be very aggravating. There are so many trade skills you need to level just to craft self-sufficiently that it's a huge time sink or you're going to find yourself buying from the Broker again.
9.) Respawn - It happens. In all games there is a chance you could get screwed by respawn. In Aion, it's a guarantee! When mobs respawn in this game, if you're in their aggro range, they immediately aggro to you. There is no grace period or few seconds of immunity for you to move from a respawned mob. This becomes a huge issue in the large, elite PvE areas. If another group went through there before you, who knows when or where respawn will occur? Plan for some expensive deaths.
I haven't played for about two weeks now, so I'm sure there are other things I forgot to mention. The bottom line is this game did not turn out to be as fun as I'd hoped. There are some great MMOs scheduled for release next year. Unless you have an abundance of time to kill, I'd steer clear of Aion.