Your Aion Classic is unplayable.

[Shirene-DN]

This is a letter to NCWest management, even though it will never reach them, I felt the need to write this. Your Aion Classic is a shamble and bound to fail. I don't know how much of your staff knows anything about the game at all, my guess is.. close to 0. This is obvious by various replies from your support team, like they didn't even know about Inggi/Gelk "safe" areas and their replies on the subject in a ticket further suggest they know the bare minimum, about anything at all (their reply was that it was necessary for the opposite faction to enter the main cities in order to conquer them, and they replied this after "further checking").

I assume your support team has a few guidelines to follow and standard/common issues they are using as generic solutions. Citing NCSoft's (KOREA) team/executives, they are "tired" of supporting western publishers and the amount of work it gives them in billable hours necessary to help them in any little area.

As a veteran player who has played pretty much consistently since the 2009 betas up to 7.3, and having been in NA classic for a while, these are my thoughts on some key areas.
 

0. Classic with all the bad, none of the good from years of retail fixes

Over the years retail did many modifications to core systems that were extremally flawed and caused people to give up and abandon the game. You relaunched classic without any of all these necessary changes, why?

- Manastones: changed so that you don't lose socketed stones upon failure to socket
- +1/2/3 chance upon enchanting
- Chance to receive a few stones when disenchanting your enchanted gear, not just 1
- Batch socketing of stones, instead of 1 by 1
- Automatic skill acquisition
- Stigma NPC/shards modification
- Low level abyss gear stored in account wh to be enjoyed by alts
- Flarestorm key, at some point in 2.x they made it so that you don't lose it after being used
- Different levels of AP stigmas that you can't even resell to recover some AP
- Arena tickets not going into special cube

1. Low level stigmas

Back in the beginning we needed a ~long time to level up to 50, it gave us time to run instances and eventually drop stigmas that are -mandatory- in order to access our advanced skill trees which, without them, you can pretty much just sit idle in Sanctum cause there is very little else you can do in any meaningful way. Sorcerers can't either DPS nor PVP, Clerics can't either heal nor DPS, Templars can't even pull mobs, you get it. These stigmas are not a premium/plus, they are NECESSARY to actually play the game at all. No cleric will be invited to BT without it. No clerics = no groups. Your changes in 2.5 did nothing, these are still almost impossible to get unless you create another 10 low level chars and -try- your luck farming them for weeks or months, I don't think that's how you are supposed to play the game.

Cleric healing stigma: without this they can't heal high-end instances.

Cleric dps stigma: without this they can't DPS

Sorc DPS stigma: without this sorcerers can't dps

Sorc PVP stigma: without this, sorc can't effectively pvp

etc.

2. Drop rates

Even before the 2.5 mess this was a problem. Now it's just completely out of proportion. How can you still not fix this a month later? The server was already bleeding players, now it's just completely ridiculous. New players can barely even make it out of Poeta because nothing drops, and buying skillbooks is just out of the question, 10+ players just beg around for some kinah to even be able to teleport or get some skills.

Instance drops are also horrible, I've run 60 debil rushes (low udas) with 0 eternal drops, how is this 2x drop? it wasn't like this back in retail.

I really don't get the point of making drops so scarce, it's not like you get some gear upgrades and be done with it for the rest or your Aion life, this gear most often provides a very little bonus over lesser ones, and after a while new gear arrives that makes them obsolete, but in the current state of the game we reach that point without even 1/4th the gear we should have been using to properly participate in anything, almost everything is a struggle for most of the playerbase unless they play various characters and 10-15 hours a day to somewhat scale up a bit.

Let me show you a comparison of the broker between back in retail 2011-2013. These are real screenshots I took directly in the game in a retail NA server in those years.

Old retail (left) vs Classic (right):

Doing level 1-9 in Poeta, in retail I had full bags even before reaching the end. Classic? Those few armor items are just the default you get, not even drops.

 

Broker:

 

even MB 25s are impossible

 

 

 

 

 

Even MB 23 don't exist anymore

 

or magic acc.

Godstones back in retail: (now 200M, the one on sale sometimes)

3. Manastones and enchants

This further expands on point 2. These are NECESSARY to play, they are not a super premium. Without properly socketing and enchanting your gear you are just a much lesser version of your character. Again, giving players better, or much better/cheaper access to these, does not break the game or cancel progression. New gear comes after a short period which makes your previous set(s) obsolete. What people are forced to do instead is hold onto old gear because it's just impossible to work on the new one (what's even the point to struggle or work for something better when you know it's just gonna be worse).

4. Worthless season and event stuff

Most of the rewards from default pass and events are just worthless, are you aware of that? All these [Event] manastones, shards, pots, they are so few and consumed so quickly that they are actually a burden on your already extremely limited inventory, people just delete them.

[Event] (untradeable) manastones, same issue. You get many stones that are worthless for your class -> delete. EVEN if you would get 10-20 of them, still pointless, do you realize you need like 50-200 stones just to socket -1 piece- of gear? What's the point of these? And these 2-3 potions or scrolls from default pass? same issue, maybe if they were normal tradeable ones they could be a -little- addition, but back to the limited inventory issue: they are just a burden and we delete them.

5. Quna prices/wardrobe

Your prices for skins are ridiculous. $15-20 for a skin, and then you need another $10 for a slot to register it.. ??!! How does this make any sense to your financial department, the people who decide on these prices? It's like you are paying $300 for a pizza irl, there is absolutely no value. Unlock all the wardrobe slots for free, add more skins, sell them for $1-2, then maybe people will buy a lot. But $30-40 for 1 skin? there is no value in this, so people don't buy. If you have $50 a month to spend in the game but get almost nothing from it, you don't spend them. Your greed ends up with making $0 revenue from the majority of your customers due to these poor decisions.

6. Useless instances

What's the point of all these new useless instance? nobody is doing them, they are pointless.

- 3-ppl instance in Inggi: you get maybe 1-2K AP and a few useless level 30 instance balaur mats, so they remain in the mobs.
- Empyrean crucible: no usable rewards
- Solo crucible: no usable reward, just a little kinah from selling the supplements
- Unyielding BT: nobody can do it due to the issues mentioned previously (nobody can gear up to even try this)
- Padma: only few groups can manage this, and the reward? nothing. 1/30 times = 1 useless balaur mat. What's the point?

You know how many people are doing most of these instances? I will tell you: 0

7. AP trading/AP instances

Why do we have only 1 dredgion per day? it used to be 3 in retail. Why 1 ESO per week? 1 upper fort per week? You know who is doing these instances? the old veteran players who either purchased kinah online or sold a lot of drops over the run of classic (to players who bought the kinah). They are paying other players to join them and give up their share of AP relics so that it may be even slightly worth it to go.

Upper fort: average of 60K AP for a full group = 10K AP per week and player if not sold.
ESO: 5K-30K AP per player/week, depends if you duo or go full group.

You know in how long new players can ever obtain a full set of abyss gear, stigmas, etc etc etc like this? I will tell you: never in a million years, they save up for the next set instead. The only players who will manage to stay high up in the ranks to transform etc are those old veterans who are either buying the AP or AP-traded it in the beginning. Top asmo player in the ranks has 28 million AP, you think this is obtainable through legit means over the course of classic? No, it's not, never.

8. Inventory space/special cube

Further expanding on and related to the previous issues, inventory space is a major burden. Why are arena tickets not stored in the special cube as it was changed in retail? Why can't we unlock more slots? We had a lot more in retail over the years. People play with various sets of gear, specially clerics, armors, weapons, accessories .. another struggle to even make room for drops when you run some instance. Even the instance drops are mostly useless, those HP/MP potions, grey items and many others, people don't loot them. You check the corpse first to loot only the few pennies of kinah, this is just stupid.

9. Bots

The hoards of bots running around unbanned.. this is just so ridiculous, it baffles my mind that this is happening in an official server, people are speechless about this. Is it worth it making this extra quick money from their Siel sub over being able instead to keep the game running for years in a healthy server? Bots have in big part destroyed the server economy even before the 2.5 disaster, people quit over this, your customers quit over this, and your revenue as a business in the long run will suffer over this. People know you are not taking any action, they even run bots on their main chars, they even threaten you and tell you to go kill other bots, people even tell you they will farm X drop for you on their bot, there is no fear at all to get banned. There is no way you can't have 1 staff member go through the game on a daily basis banning these offenders, there is absolutely no excuse or technical hurdle to fix this situation, other than your wrong view over the financials of the company. Making a quick $ ends up losing you a lot of extra $ over the long run, this is basic business.

~

[Vadux]

I wish I could like this post multiple times. /clap

[Stormwing]

This one is well written. Good effort.

[Ellissara]

I basically agree with this as a recently returning player, and would like to highlight a few areas in particular:

The overworld drops problem that effects the economy and availability of stigmas is really bad. In particular, stigmas that are critical to progress the stigma tree should probably be available from NPCs from a standardized (if high) price, such as 10m kinah.

The other thing I would like to focus in on is the bots, which are obvious and infest later-game areas. If you have a staffing issue to deal with this, you could elect a very select few veteran players as unpaid volunteer mods, like the post writer, to go around and flag the bots for you; and then a paid staff member would just need to review these reports and action them. If those actions were serious enough, it would stop being worth it to bot, or at least do so brazenly.

[Shirene-DN]

Legion of bots afk in sanctum warehouse for hours, really annoying.

[VikkiVandal]

6 hours ago, Shirene-DN said:

Legion of bots afk in sanctum warehouse for hours, really annoying.

Okay, but in this particular instance of being by the warehouse (which has two access points) how are they really annoying you in this particular instance? Out in the open world, I completely get... here, just afk? This ain't it.

[Locke]

I agree with most of this. Support is AWFUL. Drops are awful. Prices are way too high. Daeva pass items are annoying. The only error is extraction does give multiple stones. I don't think this changed?

But I really disagree with your perception of end game. Do you know what the best offensive armor is for many classes in the game? 50e. Yes, that armor that came out in what, 1.0? It did not get "replaced" by new and better gear. It's dirt cheap. Only weapons and defensive gear got upgrades.

You can easily clear Besh Temple without stigmas. The vast majority of clerics are wearing DPS stigmas for it because it's a hassle to change and there's not much risk of wiping without them. Most groups clear every boss on the first try, with ease, except possibly stormwing.

You don't need enchantment stones as a new player. Only getting your weapon to +10 is worth it. You get very little benefit from enchanting armor unless you spend billions to +15 and have full GBG accessories. If you are a new player and you're not selling your enchantment stones for millions a pop, then you're royally screwing up and that's almost certainly why you're poor.

Same with medals. Everyone is going to sieges, right? The sapphires are still selling for 2.5m and I hope you're not using them. I've made billions of kinah just from medals. Even my alts can get them because nobody is going. I guess everyone hates money?

Manastones really are necessary though. If your dps are not fully socketed with the best green manastones, then their characters are going to be rubbish. This can cost like 500m with the current prices and is the biggest pain point. The only class that doesn't even need manastones for pve is cleric. This makes the crying over Splendor of Purification absolutely ridiculous. Other classes need 500m in manastones and cleric needs a 30m stigma? That's like three sieges worth of medals.

Any class with magic boost can use damage godstones, which are very cheap and possibly best in slot. Only melees get screwed. I see that people still aren't aware that paralyze and stun basically don't exist, coming primarily from Enraged Meno and fort repeats, which nobody does. It's easily the most rare drop in the game, so rare that I've literally never seen a screenshot of it. Compare this to retail, where I found two of them on my own before 2.0. This is actually a problem on a server with a low population, because paralyze is the only godstone that can proc against a transform.

Relax with criticizing the new instances. The three-person instance drops eternal belts, which look to be best in slot pve and tradeable. I don't know what the others drop but they're only been out a month. The hard truth is nobody does Unyielding BT because the people who play this game are rubbish. We have nothing but wallet warriors and afkers who give up immediately after a wipe. Literally the day that Padma came out, people were already trying to cheese it. Nobody has done the fight without dps racing it. Groups are clearing this daily on the first try but they're entirely comprised of geared sins/sorcs/glads. I've seen two eternal weapons, one eternal armor, and a few gold armors already. This is easily the highest drop rate instance in the game... it literally drops best in slot gear for a few minutes of your time. I can't even understand why anyone would ever complain about very quick fights without a dungeon, that drop best in slot gear, with loot rights that can be sold. Do you know how bad farming Taha was?

AP trading is not even needed in 2.0. You can farm bots until you're capped, queue-dodge instances, then buy forts. With that said, the asmos you're complaining about abused logging out with transform before it was patched. They were bullying people doing dailies 24/7, spying with alts on the other faction, and glide into the forts with a no-glide-zone around them. If they will do anything to possible to win, to the point of getting reported for it, then why not AP trade or hack too.

[Xsayax]

Quote

 

I don't know how much of your staff knows anything about the game at all, my guess is.. close to 0. This is obvious by various replies from your support team, like they didn't even know about Inggi/Gelk "safe" areas and their replies on the subject in a ticket further suggest they know the bare minimum, about anything at all (their reply was that it was necessary for the opposite faction to enter the main cities in order to conquer them, and they replied this after "further checking").

I assume your support team has a few guidelines to follow and standard/common issues they are using as generic solutions. Citing NCSoft's (KOREA) team/executives, they are "tired" of supporting western publishers and the amount of work it gives them in billable hours necessary to help them in any little area.

 

 

I am supporter of eastern games and anime as this is to be found profoundly spiritual, Aion is like that. Classic is like that, moreover it supports the constant and goes against, the current dying trend or fad, that insults the how shall we put this, ''relevant'' game players cosmetology....intelligence.

Its also,good to see the correct concerns about proper game play mechanics being referenced...but not in any negative or fatalistic, fashion about the game

Aion is a game about right turns-very much to do with vitality and life instinct, its to play, if one is to play a mmo, for the mind. Intelligent people cannot be passively entertained but gain something from everything  in experience.

As classic was made this is self evident, consider the integrity involved from the Eastern publisher. 

Aion, is intelligent, there must have been some upset due to fad, with player response unable to play the game, this is unwelcome. The response this, protecting the content, ie locking it off...in a contextual sense....ie: there you are....for love of the game. This could be rightly...also..satire.

Classic is Aion.

In summation the player base is, should stay positive, and thereby, working to encourage appreciation of Aion and positive thought is important. I know the publishers will resolve any issues. Things are not always what the appear to be to some.

 

Edited March 17, 2023 by Xsayax

[Vadux]

Edited March 17, 2023 by Vadux

[Disregard-DN]

95% correct. The only thing I will say is that if we had manastone drops like we used to in retail, we wouldn't need the manastone protection quality of life change. The reason why they eventually made manastones not break on fail was because manastones started getting so expensive that people refused to socket without using a felicitous socketing stone (effect: guarantees 1 manastone socket success.).

Also part of the reason why our manastones cost so much more is because of both bots and candy sellers injecting kinah into the economy. When you've got whales that bought 2billion kinah looking to socket gear, they buy everything and raise the standard for what things should cost. Though those prices are perpetuated by there being NO SUPPLY COUPLED WITH  OUTRAGEOUS DEMAND.  Just make instance non-boss monsters drop a lot and it will encourage players to full clear dungeons for drops, while greatly limiting kinah injection from bots .

[Mundane]

The game is nearly unplayable though for new players... It's very very very bad. Can't deny that.

[Funkula]

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder to keep it civil and avoid attacking each other. I've removed some posts.

Regards.

[Cyfur]

On 3/18/2023 at 4:49 PM, Disregard-DN said:

95% correct. The only thing I will say is that if we had manastone drops like we used to in retail, we wouldn't need the manastone protection quality of life change. The reason why they eventually made manastones not break on fail was because manastones started getting so expensive that people refused to socket without using a felicitous socketing stone (effect: guarantees 1 manastone socket success.).

Also part of the reason why our manastones cost so much more is because of both bots and candy sellers injecting kinah into the economy. When you've got whales that bought 2billion kinah looking to socket gear, they buy everything and raise the standard for what things should cost. Though those prices are perpetuated by there being NO SUPPLY COUPLED WITH  OUTRAGEOUS DEMAND.  Just make instance non-boss monsters drop a lot and it will encourage players to full clear dungeons for drops, while greatly limiting kinah injection from bots .

The manastone failure probability is set too high.

As Locke pointed out, the probability of rolling 6 successes in a row, is very low.

I find I use 50-100 stones to socket a piece of AP gear. Given the price/availability of manastones, that's absurd.

I am waiting for NCsoft to propose a solution to this glaringly obvious game flaw.

[Togs]

17 minutes ago, Funkula said:

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder to keep it civil and avoid attacking each other. I've removed some posts.

Regards.

So you please remind your superiors to stop ignoring everyone and give us some answer. Or they just gave up? Ppl could be doing something else than wasting their time here

[Shirene-DN]

2 hours ago, Cyfur said:

I am waiting for NCsoft to propose a solution to this glaringly obvious game flaw.

They did in retail, lower chance to socket but you didn't lose the socketed stones, much lower frustration. They didn't bring most of the good retail fixes over to classic, and the situation is much further exacerbated here with the loss of world drops, bots, low population, lower drop rate than retail.

[Eliseth]

The thing that makes it unplayable the most is definitely the manastone and enchantment stone prices. Even white crit strike manastones are almost 200k. How the hell are new players supposed to socket anything??

As for enchanting, when you get to the point in gear progression where you need enchantments, you just hit a wall. There's no way you can afford it, unless you farm BTHM sell runs, but guess what, you need great gear for that first, and so you're stuck. Also, selling untradeable instance drops is the purest exploit and should never be required as part of progression. If anything, it should be a punishable offense.

[Shirene-DN]

When you run BT 200 times and still barely drop any of your parts.. loot/right buying is the only option left. NC is to blame with the ridiculous drop rates we have on classic.

[Attestant]

If they say it's not broken, then it's not broken. They have the right to make changes to the game.

[Locke]

They removed my post that had nothing but manastone calculations. lol

https://mathcs.pugetsound.edu/~mspivey/Paper-kConsecutive_Revision_2final.pdf

 

68%/95%/99.7% of the data falls within 1/2/3 standard deviations:

6-slot gold: 25 manastones on average, up to 46/66/87 with deviations

5-slot eternal: 30 manastones on average, up to 56/82/108  with deviations

6-slot eternal:  51 manastones on average, up to 98/144/191 with deviations

 

The problem is the variance. On average, the number of manastones is reasonable... but it commonly costs 2x as much and somewhat rarely costs 3.5x more. Likewise, 1 in 8.5 times you'll socket a 6-slot gold on the first try.

[Shirene-DN]

4 hours ago, Attestant said:

If they say it's not broken, then it's not broken. They have the right to make changes to the game.

They don't have the right to sell a product or service and not deliver it after you pay it.

[Shirene-DN]

1 hour ago, Locke said:

They removed my post that had nothing but manastone calculations. lol

https://mathcs.pugetsound.edu/~mspivey/Paper-kConsecutive_Revision_2final.pdf

 

68%/95%/99.7% of the data falls within 1/2/3 standard deviations:

6-slot gold: 25 manastones on average, up to 46/66/87 with deviations

5-slot eternal: 30 manastones on average, up to 56/82/108  with deviations

6-slot eternal:  51 manastones on average, up to 98/144/191 with deviations

 

The problem is the variance. On average, the number of manastones is reasonable... but it commonly costs 2x as much and somewhat rarely costs 3.5x more. Likewise, 1 in 8.5 times you'll socket a 6-slot gold on the first try.

Those numbers are correct only if you assume their 60%/70% chance to socket is really a RNG generator, but it's not,  there are many other multiple hidden factors.

Stones needed on average after socketing 1 million pieces:

Quote

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
Var a,b,t,i: Integer;
Const iterations = 1000000;
begin
  Randomize;
  t := 0;

  for i := 1 to iterations do begin
    a := 0;
    b := 0;
    while b < 6 do begin
      Inc(a);
      if Random(100) >= 30 then
       Inc(b) else
       b := 0;
    end;
    Inc(t, a);
  end;

  Memo1.Lines.Add(IntToStr(t div iterations) +' stones');
end;

6-slot gold: 25
5-slot eternal: 29
6-slot eternal: 51

But now tell me how many times you've really managed to socket a gold abyss piece with just 25 stones.

[Ulti]

Hi , 
New player here.
Level 50 and dont have any of my class needed stigmas.
The drop rate situation is really bad.
I will mess around some more days but since the character cannot progress ,i will quit soon.

Sadly

[Attestant]

1 hour ago, Shirene-DN said:

They don't have the right to sell a product or service and not deliver it after you pay it.

No one is complaining about failing to provide service. Again, NCwest has the right to modify their game at any time as they see fit.

[Stormwing]

@Shirene-DN:
Is that Delphi? Been a while.

Edited March 21, 2023 by Stormwing

[Shirene-DN]

2 hours ago, Stormwing said:

@Shirene-DN:
Is that Delphi? Been a while.

Yeah