Aion Classic Eu

[Lucrecio Houle]

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

- 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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