LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

So... I've been playing WoW for the past 4 years or so, with the same group of people..... it was really starting to get stagnant for me. And with the recent Lore changes that are coming with Cataclysm a lot of my in game guild mates had just had it, so we started shopping around for another game.

Saw that NCSoft was coming out with Aion, it looked cool, we played in the beta, it seemed cool, we all preordered and on launch day everything went to shit and has gone steadily down hill. It's just terrible.... so now we're looking to jump again.

Curious if anybody here plays LotRO and if they like it?

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:51 am Post subject:

What did you find bad about Aion? My kid's totally into it...

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:30 am Post subject:

You may find this fun

Dungeon Fighter Online

It's not as pretty as most of the MMO's but it's a fun game it harkens back to the old days of Video Games.

It's like a mix between Final Fight and Final Fantasy.

Only if you like Old Skool Gameplay and graphics but it's fun to me ^_^

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:51 am Post subject:

Well, 1 thing is that there are bots and gold spammers EVERYWHERE and NCSoft doesn't really seem to care. You report these guys botting, and you come back a week later and they're still there botting away. That might get fixed eventually, but based on their track record with the botfest that is Lineage II, somehow I doubt it.

Then I've got 3 or 4 legion mates that are getting the crysystem.dll crashes. So anytime they walk into a city, or try to go to the Abyss where there are a lot of people, they crash. But it's not just isolated to those times, those are the just the ones that guarantee a crash... they can just be walking around out in the wilderness all by themselves and boom, game dies. So that's a killer for them... luckily, I have not experienced this at all. And I don't understand how this game, which has been live in Asia for a year, never had this issue there. How do you introduce DLL crashes during localization? The theory is that at the time Aion was coded, the standard was 32 bit windows XP and that anytime the game wants more than 2 GB of ram, that's what makes it crash, particularly on 64 bit Vista. Because the problem is very widespread, yet hard to pin down. It happens to people with high end gaming systems with the best of everything and 12 gigs of ram, down to the guy that barely meets the system requirements to run the game. Regardless of what your video settings are, what your OS is (has been confirmed on XP 32 and 64 bit, Vista 32 and 64 bit, and Windows 7), whether you have ATI or Nvidia based cards, AMD or Intel processors... there's just no real reason.

The targeting system is just terribad.... I play a Templar IE I tank for my group, and trying to tab target through mobs that I'm tanking to use my taunts and skills on them is a nightmare. You'll tab through everything in the next 2 rooms before you actually get to another mob that is in front of you. And trying to click on a mob is even worse, especially if you have more than 1 melee character in there with you. You've got a big pile of players and mobs, and the players are jumping around (due to the attack animations that make you do things like flips, or jump up and spin around, etc... which while they do look cool, severely hurt click targeting ability). I hear the same complaint from my DPS as well, and we have had many incidents where mobs were pulled from the other side of a room because people accidentally tabbed to them and didn't realize. These are good players that never did such things in our time in WoW.

Me and my group of friends are big on PvE play... we were all hesitant to go to a game who's main focus was admittedly PvP. But were assured over and over thru interviews with developers and other people that had played in the betas that there was plenty of PvE content. But, now that we're in the game and all around level 38-40 we realize all the PvE we have seen sucks. They have this goofy thing where you can go spend 5 hours clearing an instance, and kill the last boss, and get NOTHING. Not money, not grey items to sell, just jack squat. Not to mention that the experience gained while inside said instance is also terrible, and you don't pick up trash items off the trash mobs to sell either for the most part. So I can level faster, make more money, and get better drops by just going to some area and killing regular mobs over and over.

Money is just a big issue. We saw that everything was expensive during the betas, but we all also had a lot of money coming in, but that just doesn't seem to be the case in live. I'm just broke, all the time. I'm level 38 right now... I've been grinding and questing non-stop, and just to keep my gathering skills up and buy training for my character is outrageous.

There was just a lot of things that looked cool on paper about the game, then you actually get in there, and it's not like they made it out to be at all. They claim you can level all the way to cap, and have plenty of interesting and exciting things to do, without every having to PvP at all. Except that there are constantly rifts opening into your PvE zones, and groups of the opposing faction coming out to kill you repeatedly. And it seems like every quest I get now leads me back to the Abyss, which is where all the PvP happens.

And when reviewing the game, I saw the thing about channels. This was the greatest idea I had ever seen. If you're in an area, and it's just too busy, there are 10 channels you can choose from, you swap to a different channel... and it's like an instanced version of the world. What they don't tell you, is that at level 20, those channels go away.... which is the point when they are needed the most. Anywhere that PvP can happen, they removed the channels. So all the zones are crowded as hell. They have these outdoor areas, with elites in them, and a lot of your campaign quests lead you into those. And with no channels, it's just a nightmare... you're competing with 15 or 20 other groups of people for the mobs inside, stuff is respawning on top of your head and wiping your group, morons are dragging mobs into the middle of your group so you can't tell what's what.

The crafting system is also terrible. It costs you a a lot of money to level it up, and it takes TONS of time. I'm talking like... I'm an armorsmith.... the other night I leveled my smithing from 265 to 299, and it took close to 5 hours and cost me something like 400,000 kinah to do. I mean... have it be a money sink, or a time sink, but not both. On top of that, you spend all your time and money leveling this craft... and then half the time you can't even get decent gear from it. Everything depends on procs. I can make a green item... which isn't that great... but if the moon and stars align, and it's the 3rd day of the month, and it happens to be a tuesday, I might MIGHT get a blue item from it. I have my entire legion funneling materials to me, and I still barely get enough to make maybe two pieces of armor before they're gone, and then neither of those procs into anything worth a damn, it's just frustrating as hell. Then, you go try to sell that stuff on the broker to maybe recoup some of your costs, and it doesn't even sell for the amount that it cost you to make it.

The gathering system is also pretty goofy. They have this pass/fail bar, thing... the bars kind of fight with each other, and whichever one wins determines the outcome.... and it will randomly just stall out and sit there... so it can take you 45 seconds sometimes to get a single gather off of a node (there are 3 from nodes on the ground, and 5 from Aether nodes up in the air). And it doesn't really seem to be affected by your skill level. I've been traveling through a zone where there are nodes that take lets say 100 skill to gather, and I'm at 299, so I run up to one, and the bar stalls out for 45 seconds like that. I won't fail, but it's just annoying. And it's even worse when you're gathering Aether. My level 30 wings give me 1 minute and 40 seconds of flight time... so with the bars stalling like that, sometimes I can't even completely gather a node before I have to land and recharge my timer, and it takes forever to recharge the damn flight timer. I leveled my aether gathering from 215 to 299 on Saturday and it took me about 6 hours. Having to compete with 20 or more people for nodes (there are very limited places where they spawn) and not having the ability to change channels. Or I can go tot he Abyss and gather there, and there are more nodes, but I get killed every minute or so if I don't have a whole group with me to watch my back. And the majority of the time is spent waiting on your flight timer to recharge... and in the Abyss, if you don't have any flight time, you're almost guaranteed to die anyways.

And on top of it all... the community in the game has to be the absolute worst I have ever seen. If you go to the official forums, or places like aionsource.com where the community managers from NCSoft also read/post and try to bring any of this up, you get bombarded by morons telling you to "Get back to WoW CAREBEAR Noob" etc. There are a lot of people unhappy with this game right now, I see more and more posts about issues like mine every day on the forum. And all the idiots talking about how they'll be glad when all the noobs quit, people go back to WoW, etc just fail to realize that by alienating and pushing people away, they're spelling the end of their beloved Aion grindfest. If everybody leaves, it's gonna go the way of Tabula Rasa and shut down.

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 7:22 am Post subject:

Interesting. My kid's on the European servers not the North American ones. Funny though, we tried the North American version and it crashed before it could even start up. In repairing it, I noticed that MS .NET got upgraded, so perhaps the problems are .NET related. The European servers don't seem to be crowded nor do I think they have a lot of spammers. But yeah, NC Soft doesn't seem to give two shits about Aion, which is unfortunate.

Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:43 am Post subject:

hmmm... could be .NET related I suppose. It really is a shame that they aren't paying more attention to the game. There are so many good things, they're just outweighed by the bad for me. It looks amazing, I really like the combat system, and the ability to dye your armor. The personalized legion cloaks, where you can show your own logo is very cool. Just a lot of great stuff.

It just kind of seems like they didn't bother to think about the differences between east vs. west as much as they should have. I know why a lot of things are the way they are... in the east, they pay hourly. So stuff like gathering/crafting/etc taking a LONG time makes sense, because they're trying to keep people hooked and paying, just gotta grind out one more level, etc... I think this is also the reason there is no visible clock in the game. But here, where we pay a monthly sub, they should have just gotten rid of all that stuff.

I don't know... we're going to stick it out until at least December and let everybody hit level 50 and see what happens between now and then. But one of my legion mates just ordered LoTRO and is checking it out for us to see what it's like. An expansion drops for LoTRO in December, so if everybody is still unhappy with Aion, and we decide we do like LoTRO then that's when we'll make our jump.

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 11:32 pm Post subject:

I thought I would come back and post an update to this. I did end up moving to LotRO and I must say, I'm thoroughly impressed. Turbine has done, and continues to do, a hell of a job with this game. I've got a level 65 Dwarf Champion and I've been loving every minute of it.

It's just too cool to be able to play this game and see everything that you've read about. The first time I ever went to the Shire I knew where things were just from having read the books. It's a really interesting approach that they took... you get to interact with the fellowship every step of the way, but you're not actually doing anything that the fellowship did. For instance... in the book you know that the elves reforged Narsil and gave it to Aragorn. In the game, it's YOU that is tasked with finding the pieces and seeing to the reforge, and you get to be there when it's presented to Aragorn. Or like in Crickhollow... the Nazgul come looking for Frodo, but Fatty Bolger was the one in his house. You get a quest to go and talk to Fatty Bolger and find out what happened, and then track the Nazgul, and you go to Farmer Maggots place, and see his hounds and talk to him and have dinner with him. You go into Fangorn forest, and see Tom Bombadil. There's a whole side quest thing that takes you into Goblin Town where you search for Bilbo's buttons and find Gollem's cave.

We've just been having tons of fun with it. I'd say if any of you are into Tolkien and like MMOs you should definitely check it out, it's just amazing. I'm in a Kinship called Irony and Spite on the Landroval server. 2 of my longtime mates from WoW liked it so much that after a couple of weeks they both sprung for lifetime subscriptions (You pay $200 and you never pay another monthly fee, pretty good deal).

Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:31 am Post subject:

I play lotro off and on, I've got a lifetime account since launch.. it makes a nice change of pace from other games Smile

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 9:19 am Post subject:

I got a lifetime too. But I have to split my game time between it as well as Dragon Age, EverQuest 2 and EVE Online. The latest is my newest drug. It's one of the most complicated games I've played. No. Complex is what I mean. Complex, intriguing and very very rewarding.

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 2:55 pm Post subject:

I just got the invite for the LotR MMO beta. Apparently they're switching to a free to play model. Too bad it's been too hot this summer for me to fire up my PC. I'm eager to give it a shot.

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 7:12 pm Post subject:

Lycander wrote:
I just got the invite for the LotR MMO beta. Apparently they're switching to a free to play model. Too bad it's been too hot this summer for me to fire up my PC. I'm eager to give it a shot.

Since it is going f2p you can still play for free. There are severe limitations to the free accounts, but one can play through the storyline completely with a free account. And besides, beta testing is like working.