precept european multigaming guild

Oh the wailing and the whining, the gnashing of teeth and the crying of many tears for MMO’s long past. The story of Aion so far is a long winded epitaph to the MMO genre as a whole and the future of any other highly anticipated MMO launch.

As far as launched go, Aion was really smooth….if you could get past the monster queues. NCSoft were damned if they did damned if they didn’t. They chose not to adopt the route of GOA-Fail and launch 100,000,000 servers but launch fewer servers. Hence the queues which royally bit them in the ass.

Their real failure was to launch more servers quickly so that people didn’t get bought into their characters or too heavily invested…more about the investment part later.

So it launched, and like all new MMO’s it was shiny and much stuff was heavily hyped but we knew all of that already. We settled in for what was a reasonably punishing levelling experience.

Again many tomes worth of information has been written about the levelling curve. It is harsh, but it’s also how it used to be pre-WoW. You see MMO’s used to demand you experience all their areas they’d created for you to consume so they punished you with gold sinks, timesinks and long hard levelling curves.

Aion does just that. It gives, with the shiny areas, the locale, the beautiful graphics and takes away with the sheer amount of content you need to plough through to get to the next level. And it takes away again if you die…oh yes XP loss and cash loss if you die peoplce…yep punishment is back in MMO and dieing actually means something again and is no longer a travel tool.

You see despite being handfed these last 7/8 years, we’d unconciously grown used to all these things which took away our ability to think for ourselves. Of course a lot of people would say that’s  because games have ‘moved on’ but tbh I like it like this, I hate being spoonfed and handheld. Death should mean something…be damn grateful it’s not EQ death…oh imagine the moaning then.

So yeah I’m enjoying the ‘WoW generations’ whining, it’s amusing.

However that being said, if you’re running a guild, as we are, and trying to appease everyones tastes, time and expectations it is a big pain and so organisation and running things as best as possible are key.

So  how are Precept faring?

I’d say week one and two were pretty fractious with people who work being really annoyed that they couldn’t get through the queues vs people who’d either taken time off or are just plain slack powering ahead.

But then what’s new we’ve always had this and the story would be the same pretty much. We’d still have Clencher, Darwald (is he real!), Kellie and co blazing a trail whilst the rest of us caught up.

PvE – it’s ok so far, there’s things with abilities and some scripted stuff, more promised at a higher level so we’ll see how that gets on. But it’s PvE, I’d say it’s more enjoyable than WAR PvE but then that was never sold as having viable PvE content

Crafting – Oh the pain and cost! but the rewards are uber gear, so risk/cost vs reward are harsh but fair. But finally a return to crafting being a decent route to good gear.

PvP – Well so far it’s a mixed bag. There’s been epic…and I mean truly epic…amounts of people  on screen at once, the best being Western Siel fortress take which must of had well over 600 people on screen at the same time, and though I had to turn down my settings from Super High to High (I kid you not) I had none of the stutter, slideshow, crash crap I had in WAR when 40 people got on the screen at the same time.

So that was the epic PvP, there’s a ton of ganking with 6-12 man groups running round killing lonely people. Plus there’s a ton of 1v1 stuff with the stealthers wtfpwning or trying too…stealth does not equal win…shock horror!

Mostly all the fighting is in lower abyss which, despite the 3D (with flying) is pretty linear….Upper Abyss is pretty different, there’s multiple layers of scenery, and it’s very awareness driven. Don’t pay attention and die real fast.

PvP in general is a good blast but really relies on superb group synergy. Healing isn’t standing there hitting group heal, for example, decurse/debuffs are imperative to keep your group moving. We got rusty in WAR with the amount of RvE that went on post early days Burlok where we had a decent run. K8P we did ok but we’d lost most of the guild by then and were restricted to 2 or 3 groups tops. But in Aion we are really going to have to drag people up to a decent level again, so much more awareness. A decent 6 or 12 man team can hold off much much higher numbers if you work as a team.

So that’s PvP, it’s good fun currently, Fortress takes are epic in the extreme and there’s plenty of fun to be had elsewhere. There’s barely any RvE simply due to the way the maps are constructed, there is no safe place to hide away….

Overall we’re pressing on, we’ve defeated one world boss so far…Andre we’re coming for you soon…and more to follow. PvP we’re slowly making a name, took an Artifact over the weekend, screenshots to follow..

More soon.