Overly Positive

If there’s one thing that destroys MMO enjoyment, it’s the inevitable hamster wheel, the leveling ladder, the idea of “grinding” – repetitive activity that is needed in order to advance.

There’s a lot of people who dread the MMO grind like they would if a ferocious tiger burst through their window and proceeded to munch on their heads. The funny part is, the aforementioned tiger might be a preference to the tedium of killing the same mobs over and over and doing the same quests ad infinitum to gain that next precious level. Combine this with the usual annoyances and bugs you might find in an MMO and it’s a recipe for not disaster (which if you’ve seen any disaster movie would at least be different), but boredom.

The most recent example people can provide is not-so-much-Eastern-MMO-anymore title Aion, which, once you get into the 20′s, seems to be an excruciating exercise in leveling. The fear over not having enough experience-boosting quests and the seemingly insane amount of grind necessary to get to the next level has led to some folks I know scrunching their faces in what I can only describe as a cross between Oscar the Grouch and Bill the Cat. I don’t blame them, really. Seeing that you need millions of experience til the next level can be pretty disheartening.

Still, not surprisingly, I’m pretty non-plussed and most of the time am happy to grind away even though I feel the pain sometimes, myself. A lot of it is due to the “multiplayer” aspect of MMO.  Having others to play with, talk to, and yes, even complain about the endless grind helps it go by a lot faster – and if they are close to your level, grouping is a great way to make the bars fly by. I’ve also taken to being sociable in chat channels, watching for the usual laugh-worthy commentary, and putting in my two cents when appropriate. Sure, going in and saying “hey, it could be worse, you could be being eaten by killer zombies with fangs” in the midst of an MMO chat throwdown isn’t always effective, but it does help when you are hurting for something to distract you from leveling.

Really it comes down to enjoyment and engagement. It might seem like a “duh” move, but if you are really feeling like you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel to the next level and you are pushing a boulder up a hill, take a break, relax, watch some really bad reality TV – anything to take your mind away from it.  It might seem like you really need to login for 12 hours a day to level, but trust me – 3 hours of fly-by grinding will be much more effective than 12 hours of your mind feeling like mush.

After reading my post about Aion, a few of you IM’d me wondering about how my experience has been so far with things. Well, I thought you’d never ask! Here’s what’s happened to me so far with Aion:

Sunday

2:05pm: After foolishly assuming that were I to logon to the Aion client before 2pm and SPAM the authentication that I’d get in, I re-login. Seeing that my servers are available, I choose one, and immediately remedy the fact that my good friend Kristen, with her twisted sense of humor, had reserved my names for me but gave me atrocious-looking characters as a result. I change my character to someone that is not female and a midget with hideous pink hair and save him. As soon as the character screen comes back, I crash.

2:15pm: I login to Aion again, and am put into a queue of 1700 people. Not too bad. I click away from the client to answer an important email about a project at work. Basic summary in lolcats speak: HAY GUYZ I CAN HAZ $100,000 QUOTEZ, MONEY PLZ.

2:20pm: I click back to the client and notice it is a washed out grey and also not responding. The next five minutes are spent trying to end the Aion client task, as the Aion intro song is reaching “It’s A Small World” status in my head.

2:30pm – 4:00pm: I spend time trying to get into the queue for Azphel, only to find out that the queue has a queue and that there are too many players assaulting it. While trying to do this, I write two columns and generate a couple of wildly Positive articles for the blog.

4:00pm: I get into a queue of 3400 people, estimated wait time: 3 and a half hours. While I look to see that feathers are still floating down on the Aion title screen, I boot up Tales of Vesperia for the XBox 360. Yuri and friends go from level 35 to level 42, and I discover most boss battles in Tales are won with SPAMming overpowered abilities on buttons while circle strafing, creating a somewhat authentic MMO experience as a substitute.

6:30pm: Triniel, the server I’m trying to get into at the time, suddenly reboots, allowing me to somehow skip past the queue and login. I quickly craft up a toon and get into the game. Old friends are found and the leveling grind in the newbie area begins. It’s worth noting that in the first 5 minutes, I counted 35 WoW references, 15 overly done Internet references, and 1 ironic individual who complains about the stupidity and immaturity of the MMO community. The individual’s name is “Pedobear”.

7:15pm: I drop into Multiplaying‘s vent for their Aion guild, Ataraxia, where within 5 minutes I feel guilty for having joined them in WAR and failing to logon. Despite feelings of epic failure at being too casual for a casual guild, many jokes are had.

7:30pm: I finally find an Aria herb spawn that isn’t currently being farmed by everyone on the known earth. As the bar reaches the “Success” end of things, I lag out, crashing. The Aion client happily loads the uber-slammed Aion webpage as I struggle to stop the client from assimilating my computer’s resources. I fail, my computer decides resistance is indeed futile, and I decide to cut my losses and reboot.

7:35pm: I get into the queue – this time it’s 2700 with an estimated time of 3 hours and 50 minutes to get on. During this time, I use Remember the Milk to put in all the tasks I have to do during the week, subtly burying “do the growing pile of laundry” under 50 other things. I also order Mexican food, eat it, and realize 6 Steak fajitas cannot be eaten in one sitting.

10:30pm: My client crashes at 560/3000. I decide sleep is the better part of valor.

Monday

5:00pm: I settle in with re-heated fajitas for another grab at the queue. Estimated time for Azphel: 2 hours and 30 minutes. Reheated Mexican food and reading up on season openers for favorite TV shows takes up this time, as well as being sidetracked into finding more Korean pop for Overly Positive in the future.

7:00pm: My queue is at 1087/2000, and my Internet connection restarts, forcing me back into a queue for 2 hours. Heroes is watched, and faith is restored in the show’s writing being even better than previous seasons’. I also follow up for Curse on two proposals, moderate threads on Warhammer Alliance, and take note of media header issues that need to be solved. Fajitss slightly disagree with me, but details are spared for this entry.

9:00pm: The queue for Azphel reaches 200, at which time the Aion client decides the waterfall sound needs to loop endlessly at 120% volume while crashing. After reaching the queue again, I am looking to enter in 3 hours and 30 minutes.  I edit together more video footage from a wedding gig I did and find an appropriately sappy love song to put behind the vignette I’m working on. The playback of the video combined with the Aion theme song makes for a mix that sounds curiously like sugar bears and gumdrops being chewed.

11:20pm: One of my friends, already level 13, decides to IM me with the message “LOL DO YOU HATE YOUR LIFE”. I decide not to answer with “fdsafjdsewkjfker” and instead coherently talk about logging in next Sunday instead. Virtual hugs are issued over my supposed plight, though in the midst of this, I find an even better and more cheesy love song to put behind my wedding video. Frantic edits are made until I fall asleep at the keyboard.

Tuesday

6:00am – 7:00am: After realizing I have keyboard-shaped indentations in my face, I take a quick shower and settle into Aion for a quick ninja-play session. With no queue on Triniel, I login and get myself to level 9. During this, someone steals my crate of ore while I am fighting a mob guarding it. As I proceed further into the mine, I notice this person desperately fighting off 3 Tursin creatures. After healing myself, I decide now is a good time to test the emote features. I issue waves, smiles, and bows at my new friend as he is quickly mauled into Tursin-coated Jell-o. Somehow, he doesn’t seem happy that I was playing a positive cheerleader for his struggles. Strange.

5:00pm – 7:30pm: I settle into an Azphel queue of 2200 people at 3 hours, but the client refuses to advance past 1100 for 35 minutes and I am forced to restart and try another server. My queue is 3200, with a 4 hour estimated wait time.

7:35pm: I decide a little housework is in order. I clean out my work inbox, send two emails about critical items that need to be done the next day, follow up with game developer contacts on interview prospects, and IM with friends wondering why I haven’t been in the game yet. Dishes are done, trash is taken out, kitty pans are cleaned, and a working revised project plan for wireless at work is crafted.

11:00pm: I finally get into Triniel, and complete my Ascension quest, putting me at level 10. By this time, however, I’m exhausted from all my housework, and a quick nap turns into passing out for 6 hours.

Total playtime: 2 hours and some change

Total queuetime: more than 2 hours

Productivity: up 125%. I wrote business mails, typed up some thoughts for blogs, managed communities, and did some work outside of work. Thanks Aion! I need to try to play you more.

Anyway, the moral of this little long-winded story is – if I can somehow remain a bit upbeat despite all of this, so can you. Trust me – there are things that you can do to make your life in Aionqueue a bit better, even though you’d much be preferring to fly around and listen to your toon speak a spell thousands of times. Silver linings, folks.

Today is the formal launch of highly-anticipated fantasy MMO Aion from NCSoft. As predicted, launch day is filled with the usual rush to get into starting areas, level up toons and try out the newest entry in the MMO genre, with the result of lag, crashes, and most of all, queues for getting in that by some reports are up to 10 hours.

Now, it’s obviously really easy to get upset over having purchased a retail copy of the game, wanting to login with friends who might have gotten a bit of a head start, and finding that the next time you can login might be next week. But as always, I invite people to think about this as a good thing, not a bad thing.

The first is obviously the fact that high demand is a good sign for the game’s long-term life. Sure, it might be crushing to think that when you’re level 4, everyone else will be flying around at level 18, but the good thing is that MMO’s thrive on people, and if this is any indication, Aion will have plenty of people to be around in these first couple of “honeymoon” months after release. Once you do get in, provided you don’t crash, the experience should be a crowded, positive one.

There’s also the whole Darwinistic nature of MMO releases as well, where the strong survive. In this case, it’ll be the ones strong enough to survive having to look at a queue of thousands for a few hours while doing something more productive, like eating, practicing yodeling, or watching the latest Keeping Up With The Kardashians.  Those that can’t handle looking at Kim Kardashian‘s backside for a few hours, people who are in it just to try the game out, and those that think the game isn’t enough like WoW will probably be gone in due time. These will thin the servers out sometime, leaving those, like yourself, that are at least invested in trying things out for a few months.

And what about balance? People looking to get their game on a lot quicker may move to servers with less of a queue, and in some cases these people will be parts of whole groups looking to move to another place. The population will be spread out a bit more, hopefully impacting a bit of the inevitable faction imbalance that will happen in Aion’s 2-faction setup. For every person not willing to grind up the first few levels out there, there’s always going to be someone will to roll 6 different alts and speed-level them up to par. So this, too, will be an outcome that will reduce the queueing.

Really, all of this points to long-term ideas on the part of NCSoft, and a recent interview from MMORPG.com seems to verify this (thanks to Syp from Bio Break for the link). They’re counting on the inevitable loss of subscriptions due to tourism and nerdrage, and they are counting on  individuals and groups moving servers in an attempt to fill everything up with a balanced amount of players. They’re also counting on people like me who can see the positive side of things, calm the masses down, and eventually get folks coming back when things aren’t so hectic. NCSoft’s cautious approach to server status reflects learning from other MMO launches and what was shown with their server numbers.

Trust me – even I get a little mildly annoyed at having played only 2 hours as opposed to waiting 18 in queues (or entering queues) to get into the game. But that’s ok, folks. As with everything, you can always fill the time with something else, whether that is with other games that strike your fancy (I’m currently dying a lot in Tales of Vesperia), or with thinking happy thoughts. I’d suggest a nice little fantasy where your Aion character is kicking over some other player who decided to go AFK with their personal shop to keep themselves logged in. I hear money comes out with enough good punches to their pretty faces.

Happy launch, Aion players.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock as a fantasy MMO player, you know that this weekend marks the beginning of the Aion open beta, which is slated to last all week for everyone to try. The client weights in at a hefty 8 GB and you can feel free to grab it from the Aion official site’s handy dandy link.

Aion’s been the darling of the MMO world lately, mostly due to its vaunted stability and mostly lag-free environment. That hit up against Murphy, his law, and the very real idea that there are a lot of interested potential Aion players during today’s first day of open beta. Reports of constant lag, high population servers unable to handle simultaneous connections, and crashing due to a variety of issues are surfacing, and the usual open beta angst has begun in earnest, seeming to verify that yes, even Aion’s stability is indeed, mortal in the face of geekdom.

I want to say that people should definitely relax, that it isn’t the end of the world, and that there is of course light at the end of the laggy, crashy tunnel. The most important reason being that an open beta is still a beta. Beta is meant to uncover problems such as this, to create a more realistic environment where potential problems can reveal themselves in a public audience. In closed beta the testing is more focused, but that doesn’t mean that the testing ends there. A stress test is also part of an open beta, a way to see if the infrastructure can hold up among a bunch of folks all logging in at the same time. The period is used to gauge stability issues and then make adjustments prior to the real, actual, launch of the game. The same goes for game-breaking bugs, crashing, and lag, all of which can be dealt with during a long enough open beta period.

Many of Aion’s crashing problems also seem to revolve around its implemented anti-cheat software, Gameguard, which is currently causing players to exit the game prematurely due to an error it throws thinking it’s being modified. In this respect, Aion players can also take heart, as this particular problem is third-party, and not related to the game itself.

Really, the biggest reason for Aion’ers to feel better about this situation, rough as it is, is that the developers have been through this path once before already, as the launch of the game in the Asian market no doubt had some of the same issues during its own open beta. The benefit of that experience is certainly being brought to bear here in the NA/EU launch of the game, so there’s a little bit more reason to have a bit of faith in NCSoft East.

Me? I know better than to play an open beta on its first day, because they all end up being like this, so even though I’ve got an obligation to at least try the other faction’s starting area so I can write about a future article, I think I’m fine sitting back, relaxing, and not stressing about the commotion too much. If you’ve got Aion in your plans, and are discouraged by this recent bunch of bumps in the road, don’t be – it’s all a part of the rocky road towards any MMO launch.