Since Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert states that the NCSoft crew will be looking to blogs, websites, and the like for information on how to improve the game, I have decided to start a new series. I want to make it clear that while this will focus on the bad in Aion, it is a great game, and I hope to see it succeed. There is a great deal of good in Aion, or I would not be playing it, nor wasting my time with this series.

Problem #3 ~ Soul Healing

Here we have another problem. As we go down this road, you will start to find that many of these issues revolve around each other. This time it’s Soul Healing.

You might ask yourself, what is wrong with Soul Healing? Well, nothing really. It’s just repairing your gear, except you’re repairing your XP. The problem comes with the price.

Again, I am not looking for an easy game, or an easy way out, however, at the moment, Soul Healing does not scale well at all. By current standards, it costs nearly 16k to repair at level 29. At level 35 it costs 40k. This is completely outlandish. Why? I will tell you.

So, Aion is released. The company, NCSoft, isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. In fact, they are merely copying from all of the other MMOs on the market, or that have previously existed. Except in one regard. The economy.

For some reason, these guys think they know better than other MMO companies who have succeeded, learned their lessons, and have maintained a great economy. I can think of two of the top of my head. For some reason, NCSoft thinks that stifling the economy is the best way to have one spark, flourish, and survive. I want to stay out of politics as much as possible, but this is very similar to the current trend of being anti-capitalism, just because the cool kids on the internet are doing it.  However,  they don’t understand that this means they wouldn’t even be playing the games, using the iphones, etc that they have if it wasn’t for that very system. However, NCSoft thinks that by taking a very controlled and communist approach to the economy, it will thrive. Well it didn’t work in Soviet Russia, and hell, it didn’t work in Vanguard (even they lifted the amount you could list at a time), so why should it work here?

Is this to combat gold sellers? I don’t know, but back to my original point. Apparently some genius at NCSoft thought it would be a great idea to charge people an arm and a leg for soul healing in a very difficult and intensive game. A grindy game. A sometimes difficult pull your hair out because the bugged mob chases you through two zones game.

To go even further, this person thought it would be a great idea to choke how much a player could put in their banks by limiting space. Space, mind you, that will not allow for quest items. Quite frankly, since AOC introduced the idea, no MMO henceforth should exist without separate bag space for your quest items. But it doesn’t stop there. They next thought it would be a really great idea to limit your bag space, and while doing that, dumping tons of grey items, manastones, and crafting items on you. That’s aside from the normal items you’ll be picking up along the way. Last but not least, this incredible developer thought it would be best to limit how much a person could sell, which is affected by how much space you have.

In the end, you are full of junk, you have to vendor good items, you can’t make money on the broker unless you level 7 more alts to 10 for space, and you are now stuck with ridiculous Soul Healing bills.

Solution? I’m not claiming that I have it, but fix it. I would prefer to see Aion have more than 600k subs in the next few months.  So far as I can see, this is where the game is headed, no matter the hype. And as my loyal readers know from my predictions involving Blizzard, I am right 90% of the time. I hope NCSoft can prove me wrong. I really do.