How to prevent AION from dying again

[Masterobiwon]

I want to start by saying that this is a suggestion to NCsoft, and I strongly urge them to consider taking action if they wish the game to outlast its predecessor. They should hope that it will. Even if Aion 2 is released, there are those who will play Aion if it is maintained and continues to be a good game. This is how they would (and in my very strong opinion should) go about doing that: 

---Execution--

1) First, NCsoft must try to rid the game of bots, which I know they are currently working on. Next, polls must be sent to players regarding the release of new updates.

2) In order for an update to be passed, the community must reach minimum of %70-%80 approval. This allows NCsoft to continue releasing updates or creating additional content and/or areas, regardless if it has already existed in the past or not.

3) There needs to be transparency on forethought of updates, at least 30 days notice.

4) There needs to be a front man/woman that reaches out the the community and interacts with them frequently on a personal level. A good platform for this is Twitter.

 

---Pros---

1) Community engagement will allow for new ideas to be heard (if/when applicable)

2) The community feels a sense of care from NCsoft

3) NCsoft retains customer satisfaction at a very cost-effective incentive

4) The players feel like their voices are heard

5) Players have something to look forward to and a reason to continue playing

 

---Potential Cons---

1) People with multiple accounts will affect voting and can skew numbers

2) If only a select few of the community are polled and updates passed are based on those select few instead of the full community (this is usually prevented by enforcing that the final decision must receive the %70-80 approval requirement), there will likely be lashback. This is easily avoided by involving the entire community in decisions.

 

 

-------------------------------

I want to hear your suggestions. Please let me know what you think of this proposal, or if there is anything that needs to be added.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

**RESERVED**

[Odow]

I just want an ETA on 1.5, starting to be bored already, you can rush adma and bakarma within an hour and half, then what do you do ? nothing 'cause it's impossible to farm in abyss due to the debalanced faction, also we need dredgion to start allowing dominated faction to make a bit of ap because the gap in catastrophic right now.

[Masterobiwon]

11 minutes ago, Odow said:

I just want an ETA on 1.5, starting to be bored already, you can rush adma and bakarma within an hour and half, then what do you do ? nothing 'cause it's impossible to farm in abyss due to the debalanced faction, also we need dredgion to start allowing dominated faction to make a bit of ap because the gap in catastrophic right now.

I would not say it is impossible to grind reshanta, but it is annoyingly difficult right now.  It would be worth working on crafting right now or pvp accessories.

I expect dredge to come soon.

They've got to come out with something new soon to keep people occupied. Let's be honest. The leveling for most players would have been a lot slower if they hadn't added the tiger candies to the game. That said, a lot are already 50, and I feel for those players.

We will probably see Miragents soon too, but most people don't care to get that gear at this point anymore. It was too frustrating the first time.

[Masterobiwon]

And there's always the option of leveling an alt

[Shoenfein-DN]

Why are you expecting them to do any of these things?  It's Aion Classic.  This was all so predictable.

I had no interest in Classic.  The nostalgia is always better than reality. The bots - that's Classic Aion.  I was incredibly optimistic to think they were going to suddenly roll back to the old service standards.  And the cap-fatigue was so obviously going to be a fast issue.  Everyone has favorite things from the old days, and will want patch updates until they get there.  It's brand new, and people are already bored and griping about content updates. 

NCSoft ultimately "fixed" the bot problem by killing the economy: no more crafting and very limited off-broker trading.  They lazily tried everything else from bot reports (ignored), and the "Possible Bot" titles over the heads of bot toons.  At my peak pain point for bots taking up the good spots in the Idian Depths and reports being ignored I checked NCSoft's revenue reports.  They were bringing in $6 million per month on Aion, globally. They could have afforded to pay a couple of people to watch for the bots the rest of us could easily see, and ban them.  Instead, they broke the game for the legit players to try to irritate bots (computers) that don't feel irritation.

People got excited about the nostalgia and took a break from DN.  They will return to find they're on KT, their estates are gone. They may have lost the rights to their toon names.  Many will most likely quit, reducing the population there, another notch.  The cross-server PVP maps were already dead.  The merger isn't going to help that.  The merger will only make more players unhappy, and drive the franchise closer to death in the NA region.

This new release may have "Classic" slapped on the label, but the same company is running things that's running "New" Aion (to borrow Coke terms).  Why anyone thought the company was going to magically different just because they rolled out an old version of the software is beyond me.

 

[Menta]

Well, it completely depends on who has been put in-charge to run things. By who, I mean specifically who, and their ideas and motivations for the game. Even though NCSoft have a predictable reputation which automatically makes people's hearts sink when a good game returns run by the same people, will they continue making stupid mistakes? <- A good question, most will say yes, but the future could yet surprise us. AION is a good game, the development team have made mistakes, but I respect them bringing back Classic. It gives them another chance, and maybe some degree of hope for those that liked old AION that the development team will not screw it up.

Successful game development these days involves interacting with a community that are more switched on than before and for them to stick around they need to feel valued and listened to, keeping them in the loop is a good start for this and taking on feedback. All of your ideas are based on these principles.

But it's also important for the developers to not meet unrealistic changes. For example, changing the way the game is from the original intention, changing and removing certain content from the game are moves that I hope will never happen with classic because major changes like that are what destroy a game and will not earn revenue, or albeit, revenue that could be earned.

Changes to rifting, gear, skills, abyss, mass areas of the game, those kind of things needs to be left alone. The only time they need to be touched are if there's some technical problem with them that is impacting game play. They are designed the way they are for a reason and it is backed up by the lore of the game. Fix the problems and keep them the way they are.

Players will always have something to complain about, you can't make everyone happy, but when you are losing members and you have here a player that has good solutions to improving the game and it's community and economy, you need to listen to that, Aion Team.

[Masterobiwon]

 

35 minutes ago, Menta said:

Well, it completely depends on who has been put in-charge to run things. By who, I mean specifically who, and their ideas and motivations for the game. Even though NCSoft have a predictable reputation which automatically makes people's hearts sink when a good game returns run by the same people, will they continue making stupid mistakes? <- A good question, most will say yes, but the future could yet surprise us. AION is a good game, the development team have made mistakes, but I respect them bringing back Classic. It gives them another chance, and maybe some degree of hope for those that liked old AION that the development team will not screw it up.

Exactly. I am one of the hopeful ones.

35 minutes ago, Menta said:

But it's also important for the developers to not meet unrealistic changes. For example, changing the way the game is from the original intention, changing and removing certain content from the game are moves that I hope will never happen with classic because major changes like that are what destroy a game and will not earn revenue, or albeit, revenue that could be earned.

I hope NC sees this comment more than almost any other here.

39 minutes ago, Menta said:

Changes to rifting, gear, skills, abyss, mass areas of the game, those kind of things needs to be left alone. The only time they need to be touched are if there's some technical problem with them that is impacting game play. They are designed the way they are for a reason and it is backed up by the lore of the game. Fix the problems and keep them the way they are.

I would not mind some very minor changes to some quest text, like when the Reshanta NPC tells the player they should go solo a guard tower, but I echo what you say:

Rifting, gear, skills, abyss, and mass areas of the game need to be left ALONE.

My suggestion is specifically geared toward that, actually.
When I mentioned "if/when applicable," it should be a BIG if.  And if there is ever a problem where players get "bored," this would be the time to consider those things, and in doing so, be EXTREMELY cautious with what they do, as to not tarnish the classic feeling.

The added benefit to adding new areas in this way (if it ever happens - and I am okay if it does not) is that NC doesn't have to go in to old code. They can write new code and not affect the game as it is. 

 

Thank you for your kind words,

Obi

Pivoting a game from its original intention is best done in the development phase only, and I am personally SO happy to see Classic back. 

NC - Thank you for what you do. This was never meant to be a critical thread, but a productive conversation. 

That said, think critically. 

[Menta]

I agree with technical fixes and slow tweaks to improve certain aspects of the game which are completely failing what they were orginally designed to do.

I personally hope we see a lot of bug fixes because there are things that are just broken in the game.

For example: in Asmodae, mobs that are invisible but can see the names of like the box monsters in Altgarde, some mobs reset when you fight them, getting stuck on terrain, skills breaking because of terrain like Ambush (if you have a plant in the way of it's teleport, it will deselect the enemy target and your character will have their weapon put in a put away state), Areas of the UI need to be fixed so that text are not overlapping text fields and actually fitting in the space they are in. Amongst other things related to this, it would be good to see these things fixed.

Population imbalances are always a challenge to manage with a game like this, but it's possible. In the mean time we just need to allow the player base to decide what to do there with some encouragement. Azphel or Ariel used to bless everyone with a small buff to give the underdog faction an extra edge during fights. It would be nice to see this come back to help this too. This issue isn't really a killer thing with the game. Sure it makes the game challenging for the race with the least population but people are still playing, and lots of incentives to help balance it is a good way to help this.

Instead of doing server mergers, market the game so more people join and play. Now there's another idea to increase revenue. The focus needs to be new players and existing players, not sales and numbers. Sales and numbers come later, naturally.

What gets me the most at the moment is that the thing that makes money with a game are the in-game purchases like cosmetics. Cosmetics are a huge seller in games. AION has hardly any cosmetics at all, and there is not very much variety at all. This is a real turn off for existing players. This is a game on it's return - bring out a lot more options more quickly, people are expecting there to be more options here. Add more stuff in and do it with good variety, not little bits and pieces. There are armour skins, I would love to buy that the original version had long ago but they are not available in classic, why not? Allow this because it does not impact game play.

[Shoenfein-DN]

6 hours ago, Menta said:

Well, it completely depends on who has been put in-charge to run things....

Players will always have something to complain about, you can't make everyone happy, but when you are losing members and you have here a player that has good solutions to improving the game and it's community and economy, you need to listen to that, Aion Team.

Granted - and in agreement on both of these scores.

It doesn't "feel" to me like it's a big team of folks thinking through the logical outcomes of decisions, and it seems like the plan-of-action for Classic is running parallel with Retail. 

I'm 100% outside observer, here - I don't play Classic and never will, and this ban problem doesn't affect me, but I'm watching how it's playing out in the forum.  I'm cynical by nature, so when one person says they were banned for no reason, my kneejerk reaction is on the side of "you probably did".  But these complaints just keep coming, and NCSoft is locking the threads, and now locking threads questioning why they are locking the threads.  It's starting to feel like a miniature revolt.  

Classic matters.  The last revenue report for NCSoft stated that Aion got a revenue boost from the release of Classic - after plummeting from their top earning title to their lowest earner.  So it gets launched here, with a predicable impact on Retail, ostensibly in hopes of having the same revenue boost here - and we're watching them murder it almost in real time.  They've already reduced Retail to one server - which is going to be a thin population still - and from what I'm reading it's close to needing to reduce Classic to one machine.

I feel bad for @Kibbelz who has taken over Cyan's thankless job and takes the brunt of the nerdrage directed at the people that actually make the decisions.  Yes, there are always complaints in everything - not just gaming, but gaming as well.  However, I still (barely) remember when the forums were full of guides (I wrote one myself), and build strategies, discussions on PVP rotations, howto guides on fighting bosses, leveling crafting, finding materials for crafting Balic skins and siege schedules.  There's virtually none of that anymore.  Classic is barely out of diapers and the forum is wall-to-wall complaints that are being ignored, or even locked.  There was a time when the forum was interesting and an extension of the game itself.  That's not a thing anymore.

[Masterobiwon]

5 hours ago, Menta said:

What gets me the most at the moment is that the thing that makes money with a game are the in-game purchases like cosmetics. Cosmetics are a huge seller in games. AION has hardly any cosmetics at all, and there is not very much variety at all. This is a real turn off for existing players. This is a game on it's return - bring out a lot more options more quickly, people are expecting there to be more options here. Add more stuff in and do it with good variety, not little bits and pieces. There are armour skins, I would love to buy that the original version had long ago but they are not available in classic, why not? Allow this because it does not impact game play.

I guess my main complaint with this is the inability to reskin purchased skins. Because I absolutely love paying twice for no new content!

 

6 minutes ago, Shoenfein-DN said:

I still (barely) remember when the forums were full of guides (I wrote one myself), and build strategies, discussions on PVP rotations, howto guides on fighting bosses, leveling crafting, finding materials for crafting Balic skins and siege schedules.  There's virtually none of that anymore.  Classic is barely out of diapers and the forum is wall-to-wall complaints that are being ignored, or even locked.  There was a time when the forum was interesting and an extension of the game itself.  That's not a thing anymore.

I really miss the comradery that we used to have as factions. In fact, what I see more of now, is an excess of greed. There are players who oversell items forcing others to do the same in order to afford those items. I am not sure how it is for asmodae, but elyos level 42 skill books are brokering for 6-8mil. Absolute insanity.  Anytime I receive a stigma drop, I always greed roll for the intention of selling on the broker for 50 kinnah. I wish there were more of this amongst allies. Maybe there is, but not for myself from what I see.

The best we can do for now is stay positive, and be loud, and hope our voices are heard. We must be thankful to the staff for what they are trying to do to better the game, make sure our suggestions and complaints aren't paper-thin or selfish, and hope that the community is heard. That is why I chose to speak toward a solution, rather than a fix for my own personal problems.

There are two types of personalities: Proactive and Reactive. I pray the former is listened to, even with the large amount of reactiveness. 

NC PLEASE DON'T TURN YOUR HEAD AWAY FROM US. We want this relationship to flourish.

we. love. this. game.

**edit - " Anytime I receive a stigma drop" means IF it is a greed roll, I always go for it. Because we should be helping each other, supporting one another, building a strong community, and hoping the devs wish to do that with us.

[Neferupito]

On 8/4/2021 at 9:40 PM, Masterobiwon said:

I guess my main complaint with this is the inability to reskin purchased skins. Because I absolutely love paying twice for no new content!

 

I really miss the comradery that we used to have as factions. In fact, what I see more of now, is an excess of greed. There are players who oversell items forcing others to do the same in order to afford those items. I am not sure how it is for asmodae, but elyos level 42 skill books are brokering for 6-8mil. Absolute insanity.  Anytime I receive a stigma drop, I always greed roll for the intention of selling on the broker for 50 kinnah. I wish there were more of this amongst allies. Maybe there is, but not for myself from what I see.

NC PLEASE DON'T TURN YOUR HEAD AWAY FROM US. We want this relationship to flourish.

we. love. this. game.

**edit - " Anytime I receive a stigma drop" means IF it is a greed roll, I always go for it. Because we should be helping each other, supporting one another, building a strong community, and hoping the devs wish to do that with us.

It's such a small change but loot being FFA in all instances really shocked me. I'm a SM and I have to play melee if I want any of those white drops to sell to the npc, it's insane. Broker manipulation was always a thing, but always the same name buying coins 7000 to resell them 12 000 is such an unneeded inflation. If you make prices higher, you'll have to pay more for your stuff too, dumbass.

As for guides and banter, I sure miss aionsource forums. Even aionarmory db, when you visit it with web archive, was filled with helpful comments on quests/items. I did my part here, shared some stuff I found/made, 0 answer. This isn't the old internet of forums anymore.

[Masterobiwon]

1 minute ago, Neferupito said:

It's such a small change but loot being FFA in all instances really shocked me. I'm a SM and I have to play melee if I want any of those white drops to sell to the npc, it's insane.

As for guides and banter, I sure miss aionsource forums. Even aionarmory db, when you visit it with web archive, was filled with helpful comments on quests/items. I did my part here, shared some stuff I found/made, 0 answer. This isn't the old internet of forums anymore.

Or the old YouTube for that matter.

[heydarling]

its already dying/dead tbh

i've been an aion player since launch.  i've taken a few breaks over the years but been pretty loyal to coming back and seeing what they've done to screw it up now. 

first of all, making this pay to play, awful mistake.  people already paid for the game once,  spending 45 bucks per month on a game just to enjoy all its features is a slap in the nyerking face.  aion, was not that popular to begin with.  star wars mmos has 800 times the player base and charges the same amount. 

their greed is going to kill this game faster than their stupidity did the first time.

 

i remember back in 09,  every single person i know quit aion after the first week because of how poorly the game ran and leveling performed at launch.

they truly do not give a nyerk about you, your needs, your wants.  they're only going to add/remove things that either inhibit their money making,  or enhances it.

 

do not for one second think anything you suggest report or complain about on here gets read by anyone other than your peers.

 

 ncsoft doesnt care about you, me, aion,  they care about making money and thats LITERALLY it.  once aion stops making  money for them, they'll kill it with fire as soon as they can. 

i didnt even get to end game this time and i dont see myself coming back.   the subscription alone makes it entirely not worth it. go play the star wars mmo.  its far more fulfilling.

[Arnika]

First of all, they shouldn't repeat the same mistakes that practically killed AION.
The same mistake that game developers keep repeating is getting paid quickly now, only to lose more after a short time due to players leaving for the same reasons, that brought short-term profit.
The players did not come to AION classic to find themselves in the "broken" well-known AION , but they came for what they miss.
In my opinion, AION what lacks the most, is PvP rankings that would allow duels of players and groups of players who are of a similar level of equipment plus combat skills. "More PvP" where well paid players could kill leveling characters like mobs are killed, brings income now as payers buy equipment and makes leaving those killed who have no chance to defend themselves. An arena that would select players with a similar ranking would be beneficial for everyone.
And if we're talking about nostalgia, for me the best version would be the one that introduced Ingilson, Gelkmaros and Silentra Canyon, and the one when Tiamaranta was opened, but without accelerated leveling. For those who want to have "max level" in duels right away, you could create an arena version or a PvP instance (like Dredgion), where the player would get whatever equipment he wants and only the player's skills would decide.