Mirei-KT

And this is why you don't play on patch day.

Cyan speaks in front of 2000+ "people" during the BnS streams on a monthly basis, so that argument doesn't exactly fly.

4x Mirash - 5, 10, 5, 5, 10, 5, 5, 5 4x CoE - 50, 10, 5, 10, 10, 5, 25, 10

MxM launched in the West first, presumably as a testing run to gauge interest for other regions. There were plans for a Chinese version iirc, but those plans never made it into anything concrete like a public alpha or beta. There hasn't been any news on that for over a year now either, so the whole thing was probably scrapped. Rumor has it a couple dedicated folks are working on a private server, but with the whole City of Heroes private server thing still fresh in everyone's minds it'll be another few years before anything appears on that. If ever.

Nah, they just got reallocated. Or rather, they are doing exactly what they were told to do: focus on Blade & Soul. When Blade and Soul's senior producer (Jonathan Lien a.k.a Babbletr0n) and its CM left the team NCWest didn't hire new people, they just reallocated what most know as the Aion folks (Cyan, Hime) to it. Cyan was already writing up much of the BnS website articles and patch notes anyway, now he also does the content streams with Hime so yeah. Aion is on maintenance mode anyway until its inevitable closure, so why not? Just for the record, BnS is not exactly the promised land either. Game went from 32 to 2 servers within 1.5 years, and bar a few couple hundred dedicated players/whales the game is just about as dead as Aion. It's all about introducing new gear gaps and money sinks with ever-increasing grinds. It's clear where NCSoft/NCWest's future lies (mobages), and once a game is no longer profitable they'll pull the plug without second thoughts (hello MxM - 6 months). In the past Aion was one of NC's big titles, but now? 6.0 deleted half the game, a lot of the 6.0 monster models and other assets are 1:1 copypastes of existing Blade and Soul assets (someone still has that image?)...you can imagine the rest. 6.x just turned out to be a bad patch managed by worse companies, that only was brought into existence to secure more funds for their upcoming mobage titles.

People said the same during the Tia Event. NC's reply was to put Omegas and Temperings up for sale and guess what, a good chunk of the community instantly did a 180 and started buying them in heaps. I wouldn't have high hopes for this since hypocrisy is a thing and they know it. I'm honestly starting to think they've already set a deadline for when Aion PC is set to shutdown, and are just trying to bring it about quicker while trying to squeeze out some last bits. People supporting the game or not may not make any difference anymore at this point.

There is also a craftable box of transformation contracts (normal, 62 types) that seems to give between 2~5 when opened. I haven't seen the singular contract option mentioned in that table yet.

It's a bit of a mixed bag to me. It breaks with the very concept of event instances (doable by anyone due to equalized gear/stats). While I agree with the idea of awarding keys proportional to gear, it feels weird to just leave the fresh 76s out of the equation here. Especially when we just had "that" survey and, y'know, the point of the 6.0 update was to make the game appealing to newer players to begin with? It would have made more sense to attach a daily quest that gives players a 1-day gear set (or at least some purple pieces) so anyone can get the minimum needed to make the thing relatively worthwhile. The starter gear (Lakrum) is a no-go, and even full CoE is not a guarantee to anything beyond the final boss based on your class, ultimately making the whole thing kinda pointless.

https://aion.plaync.com/board/hotissue/view?articleId=836949 Images in the link, you're encouraged to run it through a translator as well. I've written a small tl;dr summary below.

It seems to be a cross-server region, yes. It's probably safe to think of it as a temporary new Panesterra with the Tia Eye event treatment.

Cyan and co. are busy preparing for tomorrow's Blade&Soul content stream, cut them some slack. The Aion staff got re-allocated to NC's flagship title for the West and now essentially has to manage 2 games at once, in case you had missed this.

If you seriously thought or expected they were going to play Santa and just hand out a Legendary contract to anyone but the 1% top whales you need to go get yourself checked. Maintaining the gap as much as possible is the main form of income here, why would they kill their business? Last event was good, you could get ~3 or more random ancient contracts if you flower farmed it up, so now you get a mediocre event again. And probably another two or three after. Such is Aion life.

2 days capping an alt on EK has earned me more than 6+ months of regular play on KT. I get the intention of wanting to help out the new/returning players stuck on EK, but let's be fair. The majority that was still playing ~2 weeks after EK opened were alts of KT/DN mains, and it's mainly this group that will stand to benefit. Not a very well thought-out decision if you ask me.

Same issue on the Asmodian side. Seems to be recent, maybe something broke after the latest patch.

More like Aion2 (mobile) is coming. 6.0 is here as the transit or "bridge" between PC (now) and mobage (future). It sucks but we've got to accept NCSoft decided to follow in Blizzard's footsteps. It's all about the mobile market now: less effort, wider audiences, and more profits. PC titles are either killed off (Wildstar, MxM) or kept around for a bit longer to try and entice players for the mobile versions. After many years and lately many disappointments I've made up the balance myself, and realized it is time to move on after 4.8, 5.0, and now 6.2. For some trivia, check "Games" on NCWest's website here. There used to be like 6 titles. Now there are just three left, of which one already has a mobile version and the other two were announced recently.