Changes this month

Since closed beta #5, a few developments have been keeping me a bit busy on the Aion front. The beta legion I began with Gheist has come together quite nicely with a solid team of players. We have begun a temporary forum, and while we still have ventrilo to yap on, you people's have real lives and such to tend to. Anyway, we're going to settle on a domain name here soon, and move our work off of my buddy's private hosting. We captured some footage of making mischief, but sadly, no PVP footage yet.

We were held up last weekend by some level 30 Elyos players who were fighting in an area called Morheim. The Asmodian players starting in that area are level 20, so a good 10 levels below them. The Elyos team was trying to score enough abyss points to buy their Abyss pvp sets. Having never gone toe to toe with a level 30 before, my level 20 Assassin jumped into the fray with 5 buddies (yes, 6 on 1) and stared at the "miss", "blocked" spam and watch all of our stuns get resisted. I mean really, who wants to watch a video of you at your luckiest crit of 20 damage meanwhile the opponent's making alphabet soup with your legion name?

It was a bit disheartening that we weren't of level to put up a good fight. What was annoying is that it seemed like these players were preventing us from leveling. Throughout the weekend, we managed to climb to around level 24-25, but didn't complete a lot of the campaign quests we were working on in Morheim. Later, I had a chat with the opponent who was farming Abyss points on lowbies. She was cool - very nice and helpful in answering a lot of my questions. It's hard to pvp against players 10 levels above you, so naturally many people gave up quickly. Being a PvPer at heart, she complained that the Asmodian players were just disorganized and didn't want to pvp. She also didn't seem to care that she was preventing beta testers from getting to content, and possibly even leveling to the point that we could give her a good fight in the Abyss. We had a great conversation, and I hope this weekend I can dig deep down in my soul and find the constitution required to grind out 6 more levels, so that I will have a better chance of retribution!!

At the heart of the matter, I love PvP. I'm not great at it, but I enjoy it. Regardless of whether it was in an MMO like WoW or WaR, or in a text based game like a mud. Player killing makes things interesting. When retail Aion comes out, bring your best; Anytime, anywhere. I dare you. No, I triple dog dare you, if you've got the nads. For beta, I want to dip my toes in the water, bug report and spell check. Giggle when I see an NPC referring to himself as 'her' or vice versa.

I'm not too worried about it. It is beta, afterall.

Oh, I couldn't resist this warcraft video. :)

(Edited: Less QQ, more objectivity!)