Aion

[Kifle]

Anyone playing it?

[Pril]

Not me.

[Kifle]

I don't think they allow russians anyway...

[Pril]

Please we probably wrote the damns software.

[Kifle]

Probably not... you can swim in the game.

[Dalar]

BURN. BTW, no, Aion is too much of a grind.

[Kifle]

Eh, all mmos seem to be a grind, which is why I liked WoW until the last expansion. I'm lvl 10 after some light playing over the weekend, and it seems to be ok for now.

I'm surprised you would dislike it for the grind aspect, yet you grew up on toril and want to play the new FF mmo.

[Dalar]

It's all perception and ultimately I did end up quitting Toril many times because of stupid grinds (FK).

Toril grind = find a ton of rares, but there's zones and small group content (sort of)
Aion grind =
1. At lvl 38, I had a quest to kill 100 Krall's for teeth, only one per corpse. Knowing I have to kill 200 Kralls which take me about 4 minutes to kill wasn't my idea of an MMO.

2. Groups were a pain in the ass to find because not many people went healer on my server.

3. The PvP system revolves around you never dying since each death = honor loss and it increases exponentially as you go higher. Meaning, if you're a Rank 13 (saving up points for a big item) and you die, you lose a fuckton of points compared to being rank 4.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cool game, it's just the grind fucking blows compared to any MMO I have played.

I assume FFXIV is going to have a horrific grind with minimal quests. So far I hear there is no chaining (exp bonus or somes hit) in 14, but it's so early and I only hear rumors. I'm mainly playing b/c my coworkers are going to, but who knows how long that'll last.

[Dalar]

By the way, DDO's grind is dumb as hell too. To get the best items you need to farm an instance called Shroud. It's a 5 part map. You can complete the first 4 parts and recall out for a chance to get an ingredient to make your endgame item. You can complete the 5th part (but be locked out for 3 days after) for a guaranteed ingredient. You need 25 endgame ingredients of the correct combination to get 1 item.

Other DDO items and WoW's itemization is random drops. It's very frustrating to do a dungeon 25x and never see your item drop. It's very frustrating doing a dungeon knowing you have to do it 25x. It's these kind of grinds that made me quit MMOs for a year or so until AoC came out.

So far, I've played:
AoC: quit because no established pvp system and pve was buggy
WHO: Quit because the grind from 30-40 felt pretty bad. Knowing I had to do well in PvP for 8 levels to hit cap when the main focus of fights were basically sucking everyone to one spot then aeing that spot was stupid.
DDO: Quit because I had to study for a test, but realized when I went back, the Update 5 didn't offer shit and I already had finished all the content.
Aika: I made it to 42 pretty fast, but my IRL friends lagged. We slowly saw that quests were "kill 40 of these mobs, 40 of those mobs, and come back". Then, the patch that came out that increased the level cap really killed the game. Lvl 50-60 with the most active players (we're talking about people who play 12+ hours) were even bitching about how they can't reach cap and have to kill like 25k npcs to get a level. _Fuck_ that.

FFXIV: Not sure yet. It's still very early and the NDA is still up. From what I've heard, the game isn't fantastic. I will play b/c it's the next hype.

[Kindi]

sounds like you prefer variety. never reaching max level = "grind" and reaching max level and exploring all content = "boring/pointless"

you'll never be satisfied for long.....

[Dalar]

You're right, I won't be. I actually prefer it this way. I tend to get sucked into video games and play them way too much and too often. It helps me quit those games. I'm not too sure what the perfect game is for the long run. All I know is there are new games that will be fun for a short period of time. Blizzard has a "next generation" MMO being announced at Blizzcon. It will be interesting to see what that means because WoW is really just the 2nd generation of MMO, FFXI, EQ, UO, AO, and AC, being the first.

[teflor the ranger]

Looks pretty cool, but isn't the grind standard on RPG MMOs? How else can players compare their peenz? I don't mind games with a grind, but it really just needs to be interesting, involving, and well developed at every stage of the game. Please god, no killing the same stupid monster 1,000 times.