Posts by Reykt

Bouncing back on the language topic, I mean... Did you guys play ANY other multiplayer game recently (apart from WoW, which has enough players AND still can layer people from different servers if needed, to keep language based servers)?

This is pretty standard nowadays and was the safest way to go, unless you wanted to end up with servers getting empty real quick, moreover in an unbalanced way depending on the language.

Everyone in the same boat is also the most fair solution towards communities who would not have gotten a server for their language (let's say Spanish for ex).

Easier to open a second server in case the first one goes barbecue every night than having to close and merge because 2 servers out of 3 are empty after 2 months.

Quote from Galeas

There cannot be any other conversation with me about this topic at the moment since there is nothing new to talk about unfortunately.

All the information I have on this topic have been communicated recently already Whenever there is something new, it will be communicated too as always. I will not wait to read a question about classic to communicate about classic if I have anything new. The day there is something, you will all be informed in the best possible manner.

I'm well aware of that, and I tend to often take your side on these things because I think I quite understand your position.

Yet I still believe it is important to insist from time to time, especially if we get closer to the thing, because what you need to understand (and when I say you, I mostly think about Gameforge as a whole, not you specifically) is that adopting your usual communication route with Classic as if it was just another big patch isn't a good idea, like at all.

And by that I mean : waiting the very last minute to say "Hey we're finally getting Classic, it's releasing in a week or two and it is going to be like this, with this economic model, bla bla bla". This leads to you not allowing yourselves to adapt to any critical feedback you should need to not literally just kill the product within days or weeks like NA did.

I'm not saying this is how things are going, but just in case, I prefer to talk about it now, because it might. But if it isn't, then great, and I bet you're already taking into account the feedback there is here to try and avoid what sinked NA, and will do your best to ensure the product is the best version you could deliver to your players.

Remember, this is probably your last attempt at having a somewhat healthy playerbase / population on the current AION product as we know it, given the current status of retail, and the absolutely unknown status of both AION2 & the potential AION Remake (which you might not even end up distributing, so...).

Why is it that the only real converstation you're having currently here is with someone taunting you by discussing TOS, like this is in itself completely out of topic...

Especially when more information about the actual topic is what people expect the most from you.

I mean come on Galeas, you stated yourself that you guys "made progress" and that more would be shared "during the summer".

Of course it can still all be suddenly scrapped and cancelled but at this point you're not doing yourself a favor by repeating the same message for 2 or 3 years now... (yes, I know you don't have the right to say more, but there really isn't any reason why).

Quote from Zergie

Quote from Sleepyhead

CLASSIC HYPE!!1! IT WILL BE SO GREAT AND AMAZING THAT PPL WILL QUIT LOSTARK AND WOW AND FINAL FANTASY AND EVERYONE WILL PLAY IT, JUST WAIT AND SEE IF YOU DONT BELIVE IT!!! POGCHAMP

You just mad. Don't play it, others will enjoy it.

He's just being realistic, those games are popular and do well, for a reason. Classic would have done better if released earlier and that's a fact, like, literally.

Now let's not deviate too much unless you wanna get this moved again into Spam

I don't play this game anymore, I just lurk on the forum from time to time, seeing what's up and maybe waiting for classic but not hoping too much.

One thing you guys need to realise is that NC just does the bare minimum to keep retail alive even on their side, they have other bigger games and projects to work on; games that will/do generate way more income arguably too.

When is the last time any suggestion written here has actually been applied in a reasonable timeframe to make it actually useful?

Unless it is a gamebreaking bug that requires a hotfix and Gameforge pushes for it, the truth is that if they even listened to their own players before us, we wouldn't have to ask for so many changes, so why even bother?

Just "enjoy" the game in the way it is presented to you, this is really the only thing you can do, otherwise you're mostly wasting your time and energy. If Classic actually comes then nice, bombard them with feedback again, maybe we can avoid some of the mistakes that made NA "sink", but we're not there yet.

Galeas just does whatever he can, which, in this case, isn't much I'm affraid. Even if he actually forwards 100% of the feedback for the game and events, and everything lands on NC side, they just don't really care, and why would they? Anything that they'd have to adjust is for a version of the game that is several months old and that won't be relevant by the time it arrives here in most cases.

PS: Yeah Galeas in a sense I hope you've got some other games to work on aswell because man working on Aion EU right now must be boring.

Well Galeas might have explained a bit more on Discord, basically there is nothing Gameforge can do on their side to fix this issue (as far as he knows, he's not a dev), RU's got the same problem, so we can assume that once it is fixed for RU, it should be good for us too. And it's probably better that GF doesn't try and waste ressources on a launcher, given the... hum, history with some other projects.

Now another problem is that he also said GF won't do much in the meantime to further "prepare" the launch of Classic, simply because they just don't know how long it will take, and if Classic is still "worth it" as a project by the time it is ready (which is understandable if it takes them another year...).

So yeah, I agree it is somewhat a non-update-update, and I just don't understand how it was so hard to tell us this on the get go ; but still, the worse thing is that pretty much nothing was done on NC' side since this issue was acknowledged, so here goes NC "wanting" to give you and RU Classic...

Quote from Sleepyhead

I mean, they are still there, and didn't turned off servers yet despite the fact that since over 2 years they:

kept poorly managing their game(s)

were milking players via RNG boxes (and events)

kept totally ignoring any players feedback

provied close to no support to the game (considering quality of the patches)

And all of that while still wasting money on CMs- which isn't very needed given they do nothing with player feedback anyway and they could easily automate posting maint info

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And don't even allow them (the CMs) to give the information people are asking for. Yikes

Quote from Babydots

just downloading and making a char on NA I noticed when installing they put Europe in the loc options.

its very sad GF does not want to give the players an update

It's always been like that, except that when you select "Europe" you don't see Aion anymore, because, well, you're not supposed to. So, nothing new.

Anyway, here is the day people can pre-download Aion Classic in NA and create a character in advance so they can have the name they want. Still absolute zero nothing from Gameforge, and that is absolutely baffling. They have one week left, then it's too late, definitely.

I can't blame Galeas because this is most likely not his fault, but god, just take a few hours of courses in communication/marketing and you know that you can't do worse than what they are doing right now.

Siel's Aura is just basically the same as in Korea by the looks of it.

Quote from Emeryne

That doesn't eliminate the technical problem. That just means that this problem doesn't affect NCsoft NA.

Let's make a guess, NCsoft changed the login mechanism. The new mechanism is not compatible with the in-game login system still being used by GF, in-game mechanism which is not used by NC-NA for years now.

That's a technical problem, which has an impact on the client, a potential impact on the servers, and may imply the creation of a new launcher for which NCsoft may not be mandated to give GF.

That's just one idea among others...

One way or another, all technical problems are a question of money.

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Indeed, in theory you're right ; still this is extremely laughable because it really shows that if both sides were willing to make the effort, those problems would have been solved a long time ago (it's been MONTHS with the same excuse).

So yeah, keep going this way Gameforge, you already missed the optimal window to announce classic anyway, won't change much at this point.

Quote from Setsuya

i dont know how it is on other servers, on odin we just do 1 fortress each faction so there is no pvp ongoing. everyone wants their glory points and it is too risky to inc the other fortress. so the only good thing is, glory points are built up faster, but I would not call it an advantage

Oh indeed, I see, not very fun either for you.

Yeah on Ragna Ely we're taking this risk in Gelk by forcing PvP in order to try to take both forts. We mostly succeed (mainly because Asmos have less people, are less motivated and are way behind in terms of xforms for now), and if we don't we get one fort anyway. For Inggison, they barely try and they just never get one of ours, so we do it just like the other days, and we end up with 4 forts at best, 3 at worst.

I would not mind having 4 sieges and leaving it as it is right now IF Bassen and Prades were PLAYABLE.

I mean really, those are player limited, to 192 for each faction on each fort, and yet it succeeds to run worse than back in the days with my 2010 non-gaming laptop for Katalam sieges (and there were waaaay more people for sure).

I know it's not the case for everyone, but it creates an unfair gap that is not always technically explainable, because it happens for people with decent (if not excellent) machines too.

Other than that, I think the times and days are fine, even tho there is no such thing as "Defence" with sieges nowadays, which is a bit sad.

But anyway, with the remaining population it's already really hard for some faction to take anything else than their Inggi/Gelk fort on Sunday and Tuesday, and this is not the kind of change that will solve anything, it will just make it even more boring.

EDIT : I think just removing the Friday one is not a good idea, it was creating a bit of variation and actual PvP outside of the Divine, because let's face it, it's mostly PvE otherwise.

The complaining factions are doing so because the servers are unbalanced, not because the schedule of this Friday siege is made different.

NC was never great at balancing classes in this game, and now, instead of just sticking to the usual, they try something new (which I can't really blame) but completely break and change one of the core mechanics of the game (the DP system) and the way it works with skills in general that were not DP dependent before, and you expect it to be fine?

It is even more critical for us European, because we never get the small balancing patches throughout the weeks the same way they do, and if we miss one, we have to wait for the next big update.

Which means that if they try to improve this new system but are a bit slow in the process (assuming they listen to the feedback they have from the korean players who just hate it, which is far from garanteed), we might miss the changes at first and will need to wait longer.

But anyway, actual "PvP" is long gone in Aion, and feedback isn't really a part of NC's vocabulary.

I am not saying they are not responsible, but here we are absolutely not talking about 6.x or later related issues, so this has nothing to do with how they used to manage the game before.

Now yes, you can worry about how they will manage Classic, I do too, but saying they will f*ck it up because they did everything wrong compared to NCWest since they took over the game from them is false ; same goes for saying that the name "Gameforge" will make Classic fail, as if the name "NCSoft" was any better nowadays, spoiler, it's even worse, so...

Quote from Babydots

They reason many left Aion and the facts are true is when NCsoft gave the game to GF to run it that's when things really started going downhill. GF had such a bad name at running games. I remember the NCsoft forums at the time when they told the player base GF would run EU and it was not nice.

And that is going to be a major issue with the classic server players just don't like how GF do things and they don't hear what the player base are saying.

The facts are that only Gameforge currently has the rights to publish the "Aion" game product as we know it, and Classic just being an older version of this product, the contract applies and therefore GF will run Classic in EU, or we won't have classic at all. Unless they change the contract, but I doubt NC wants to go this route, it will not benefit them.

I may be wrong, but Aion servers under Gameforge were in a really good state during 3.X and 4.X, and the game only started to see actual p2w elements with serums being in the shop and so on, and that was not GF's fault, but NC's at first, for bringing them into the game and into their shop. Yet this kind of items were not cheap and it did not destroy the game instantly. So I completely disagree with people saying that Gameforge's managing of the game was a disaster during those times. The Gold Pack system was a good idea at the start and allowed a lot of people to actually play the game for free.

If, as a player, I really want to try out Classic, I'm not going to cancel the download of the game because I just saw the Gameforge logo. It would be completely stupid, or it would mean I did not actually want to play it.

Quote from notmyaion

That´s only your opinion. The people I know and heard of who switched to p-servers haven´t switched because of patch version reasons, they switched because they didn´t like Gameforges policies.......

Oh, so you're telling me that most people who switched on p-server only did because of Gameforge policies and not because of the game itself that just became worse over the years (= version), and that your sample of people "you know and heard of", is representative of a large portion of the playerbase ? Then why are there multiple p-server with different versions that open (and close) every year? And why are 99% of these servers opting for a version before 4.8 ? But yeah, nothing to do with the patch I guess.

Gameforge has the opportunity to do this thing right, by adopting a business model that could very well look exactly like what was the good old subscription model by NC. Who cares if it's called "Gold Pack", as long as they don't bring veteran rewards and [...] ? The GoldPack system was fine at the start, and people could afford it. Now we don't have a clue about what they will do, so we can't really say anything.

Now for the second point, unless you were kinda trolling, language based servers still exist (aka Odin & Ragna, even tho the content is mostly on cross serv anyway) and they have nothing to do with language packs and translation, even more when we speak about an old version of the game where everything was already done and translated in multiple languages.

What I meant is that if the demand is high enough, GF could again do German, French, Spanish and god knows what servers if they want to, because some players don't speak English and want to play only with people speaking their mothertongue.

But as Aura and Kayiane said, we believe it would be a major mistake, because it may work at the beginning, but when the hype fades away, these kind of servers will rapidly become empty and then Gameforge has to chose between keeping them on their own empty, or merging them with the others ; but we know it's always too late when they do that, and we end up with [International] servers anyway, except that those might be in bad health by then.

Whereas if we only get a few [International] servers right from the start, these problems simply don't exist, and people can still play with whoever they want within the server, if they want to do a French legion, so be it, nobody will have a problem with that.

Edit by Zapiel: Profanity.

There are tons of reasons for people to switch back from p-servers to classic when it comes out (if the version suits them obviously): it's official, it feels way more authentic, you are more likely to meet more people but also friends that could come back for a while, there should be a way bigger playerbase overall, with everyone starting again at the same time, etc. And, let's imagine, if a small p-server sees its playerbase divided by two, then the rest will follow.

Now of course it might have less impact on other p-servers with a completely different version (let's say 4.6 hum), but still.

And this is also the only interesting way for GF to actually take back the playerbase that moved to those P-servers, because we perfectly know that they cannot kill every one of those servers with just a snap.

Now about the impact on Live servers. I strongly believe there is no such thing as "new players" anymore, so classic or not, the playerbase will eventually become smaller and smaller anyway, untill it just dies, it's unavoidable. Especially knowing that 7.9 (the only future version we know of) has only started to point its nose in Korea, with potentially a recycled Pangea of some sort, so NC is even slower and even more lazy "working" on Live content, so much that we might never get an 8.0.

I guess there are still people enjoying Live, but most of them must be already on the train with gear and content and P2W and etc. Everyone that is somewhat late in terms of progression will probably quit and try out classic, because there is no middle ground at all, you're either fully geared or you get destroyed without standing a chance.

If the trend is the same as it is in Korea, and we have reasons to believe it is, Classic will work, no doubt, but for how long? That we can't tell. And there are lots of key questions Gameforge needs to answer: like will they chose language based servers (which I think would be a major mistake, but it's only my opinion and I can totally understand people not willing or not able to speak with other communities that don't speak the same language).

Anyway, we know it's in the pipes, and it will probably happen, unless Classic Korea just fails and is deserted after a few weeks, which is still to be considered.

Quote from Aura

Now that it's been developped in Korea it's all about gameforge. And I suspect them to wait and see how it's going in Korea before doing anything.

And it perfectly makes sense. Because yes there are 10k players on almost each server + insane queues, but this is the free week, they need to see how many people will stick to it and actually pay there, and for how long (thus why Galeas mentionned a 6 months delay).

It can seem long, especially when we know that all the translations already exist, therefore we may think that there is not much work to do. So they could probably release it here way sooner if they wanted, but from a company perspective, they need to be sure that this is a good move, so they will wait a bit to see how it is going on there, so that they can talk about which business model would be the best for their EU audience.

Now, given the current success in Korea and also within the EU playerbase (yes, Gameforge has to be aware of the number of people who tried to play in Korea, paying GoldPacks worth of money to get their hands on multiple accounts that would end up "banned", and trying so hard to find a solution, just to play Classic), Gameforge might just speed up the process. Especially when we know that Korea is barely getting 7.9 yet, it's the perfect time for them to focus on the Classic release.

Quote from Galeas

Getting another version seems impossible that's the reason why we never had a classic server sor far, that is not going to change, no support = no version. I think that actually many many people love the game around 1.9/2.5.

And I also think that A LOT of people also loved the game during 3.X and 4.X (before 4.8 and all the mess that came with it, maybe even excluding 4.7), this was YOUR (as Gameforge) prime time and when the servers were at their best.

Now of course as you said, no support from NC = no version for you and us, and that's perfectly understandable and normal.

But once koreans reach 2.7 and are stuck with it, what will happen (IF their server is somewhat alive and everything works correctly, economically and population wise) ? I don't really know if those versions are the ones that they enjoyed the most, and if today's players there even played back then, but we can imagine that NC changes their mind and provides other versions after 2.7 if their playerbase really asks for more.

Anyway we can only just "talk" about it, and see how it goes. The good thing tho is that with a 6 months or + delay, it allows Gameforge to see if the project is working in Korea. If yes, then cool we might get it, let's hope without any P2W if they can find a good way of selling cosmetics to compensate / or just stick to the monthly subscription system (even though it might not be the best for us, idk tbh). If not, then they can just stop working on it.

I know that if this fails in Korea, it doesn't mean that it will fail here, but if we're being realistic, the server dying there means the support stops, and unless GF makes a specific agreement, the support will also stop for us, so they just won't take the risk of investing time and money for it to die within the year of release.