I’ve been playing Aion for 9 months now. I love the game, but frankly…there have been some boneheaded moves that has its community up in arms. I’m not going to go into the grindy gameplay or how gank-style PvP makes folks want to ragequit, I’m going to talk about how ignoring the community is not a good thing.
I like to read the main forums and AionSource despite the complainers, know-it-alls and trolls mainly because despite it all, they tend to be on point about the problems. Quite a while ago, Asmodians complained that it seemed that Elyos have it easier with more world bosses and opportunities to achieve better gear. In a gear dependent game such as this, their dominating the Abyss main PvP area made it even more evident as abyss fort instances = more AP for better gear. If you are locked out from accessing it by the dominant faction…well…
A lot of people were initially turned off around launch by the slow response to goldsellers and bots, and then later by the twinking of alts (which I honestly think 2XP weekends only made easier) for full daeva geared 30 lvl rifters to make leveling a pain. As the months wore on, NA and EU servers across the board started to show a trend: the Abyss was green. I noticed that in the forums, those who commented on this were dismissed. The community started clamoring for server mergers hoping for a better balance and economy, but there were also some who said “If that happens, how will faction dominance be handled?”
As it turns out? Not well. Not well at all. After the merger, most of the servers are Elyos dominated except for one–Vaizel–which is Asmo. My original server where I started and my Asmos are, Israphel, which had been more or less balanced pre-merger, instantly became Ely-dominated. My other server where my Ely characters are–Vaizel–became Asmo-dominated. I could only sigh as I was screwed either way. But to add insult to injury in what they must’ve thought was a fun thing, NCSoft West had a “Dash of the Daevas” contest to be the first to achieve certain things ingame. On Israphel, that meant the Elyos taking Divine Fortress–one of the game’s most important–within 3 days, sending Asmos into a demoralization like no other. The same would later happen on Vaizel in reverse. And as if the stompdown wasn’t bad enough, NCSoft West offered free server transfers at the same time, causing folks to flee in droves to where their faction dominated. NCSoft West realized this and cancelled transfers, but damage has been done.
Is the game bleeding subscriptions? Probably. Is there an easy way to fix this? No, not really, short of starting new servers and begging people to go to them as they monitor faction numbers like they used to in the beginning. What about folks stuck on servers away from friends, legions and families though? Who knows. I love this game and really don’t want it to die, but it really boils down to a very simple thing: Who wants to be the loser?
Oh…here’s my theory about the NA server mergers: I could be wrong, but I think it had nothing to do with dominance/balance, but with the lore. They were grouped by the respective Lords. Ha!
