Poop Doesn’t Count (Aion Fail 2)

First a very funny and safe for work commercial regarding swearboxed in the office:

Speaking of swearing, I did a lot of it last night.  I finally did get online in Aion and play a bit, but by then I was tired and grouchy and didn’t last long. I really don’t understand the problems that they’re having. Lag I can forgive – that is a common problem that you expect in a beta. I’m assuming a gazillion new people came on for open beta, and if it hadn’t been laggy I would have been surprised. So I’ll forgive them for that, and a few of the isolated crashes which were probably due to server stress, server reboots, etc.

Game Guard has always sucked major ass, and its problems seem to be getting worse. When you can’t authenticate and the game crashes (which it does time and time again), you are left with GG running and you have to do a full reboot to get rid of it. You can see it in the system tray, but you can’t right-click it or see it in your list of applications that are presently running. This is a new problem, so GG seems to be getting worse rather than better. I know that NCSoft is probably trying to overcome the bad reputation that Lineage II earned them, where supposedly it was just bots everywhere you looked – but surely there are better ways than this.

Game Guard also prevents Logitech G15 keyboards from working properly – which means no seeing who is speaking on Vent, etc., no clock, not to mention no macros.

The thing that really pisses me off is the instability of the 1.5 client. I really don’t understand that – it’s been live in Korea for some time now, hasn’t it?  I was under the impression that this update would bring us current with the version presently live in Korea. It doesn’t feel like a stable live client, it feels like an extremely fragile and buggy beta client. Some of the major gripes:

1. Crashing if you fail to authenticate.
This is just poor error handling, as far as I can tell. If the server is down, or you time out, surely there should be error handling in place that gives you options (try another server, a message regarding too many concurrent users,  a message that you can’t log in) without simply crashing the client.

2. Wierd UI Problems.
I personally didn’t have a lot of issues with these, but I heard that a lot of people did. A friend experienced a problem with having a ghost HUD on the bottom if he switched it to the top.

3. Being stuck in combat.
This drove me mad last night. I was continually stuck in combat, and couldn’t rest – nothing would shift it. I was afraid to reboot the client once it had decided to play nice and let me play.

4. No XP for Quest Turnin.
Again, I didn’t experience this personally, but a friend turned in three big campaign quests and didn’t get any XP for it.

So, a very frustrating night, and quite worrying. How stable will the game be on release?  Hopefully we won’t be playing this version of the client, because it has major issues. Right now they’re dealbreakers, and hopefully they’ll figure them out.