It’s that time of year again. Love is in the air, suicide rates are spiking, and businesses everywhere are lying and trying to take advantage of you. Some companies are spending millions in television advertising to convince you that buying pajamas on the internet will get you laid. Or perhaps the woman you desire will finally surrender to you once she sees that you’ve bought her a teddy bear that cost more than the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2? What about diamonds, or the boxes of chocolates where you only end up getting one or two bites of the one you really like? Maybe a really expensive, super-special arrangement of flowers from that guy with the commercials who gives off the distinct impression he might be considering marriage someday in the state where they make the pricey teddy bears? That’s not likely to do it either.
The brutal truth is that the only people guaranteed to be stimulated this evening are the flower shop owners and Hallmark store managers. Plus, in the opinion of this aging writer, if you’re having to pay for it you’re with the type of chick you might as well try and get the money back from once she’s refilled your health meter. Instead you need to keep your Modern Warfare 2 NVGs turned on and eyes peeled for the type of girl that cares more about a players Mana then his gold. A woman who’ll start an Army of Two with you and always give her all playing Co-op even when you’re wounded and it looks like you won’t have ammo enough to make it to the next save checkpoint.
Remember when the Playstation 3 launched and Sony execs tripped all over themselves to say things like consumers were confused over all the SKUs of Xbox 360s, only to introduce a fleet of new PS3 SKUs? Remember when Sony execs criticized Microsoft for having two different models for Xbox Live in Silver and Gold? Funny how things change.
Kaz Hirai of Sony has officially confirmed that 2010 will bring a paid subscription to the Playstation 3.
During the presentation, which emphasized Sony’s plans to make its game business profitable in the next fiscal year, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai confirmed the plans. “We will be building upon our current free [PSN] service offering with premium content and services to start the subscription model,” he told attendees.
Perhaps to assuage PS3 owners’ fears that they would soon have to pay to play online, Hirai issued a subsequent statement indicating the present level of service would remain gratis.
“SCE will further increase sales by offering users new entertainment through the combination of hardware, software, peripheral, and PlayStation Network,” Hirai said in a statement given to British outlets, such as CVG. “Especially in the online area, we are studying the possibility of introducing a subscription model, offering premium content and services, in addition to the current free services.” (Emphasis added.)
As of press time, US Sony reps had not offered Hirai’s statement or further clarification about its subscription plans for the PlayStation Network. Luckily, though, the “current free services” currently offered on PSN include online play, Facebook integration, and Netflix video streaming. On Xbox Live, both of those features are only accessible at the Gold membership level, which costs at least $50 per year.
I try out every MMO that comes along and Aion was no different. I managed to get my character, a Chanter, up to level 32 before finding myself completely bored. Gold-sellers clogging up chat channels, more automated ‘bots than actual human players, and a near total lack of cohesive content at the mid-to-high-end levels meant the game quickly degenerated into a gruelling grind-fest. Not my idea of fun.
It seems you can’t read anywhere about Aion without reading about the grind, and this blog has been no exception to that. That being said, it has to be mentioned because this is probably the first of several pitfalls that is going to be cause people to throw in the towel.
This is a graph that fairly accurately plots the experience points curve in Aion at each level that was made by a member of the community here. As you can see by the graph, right around level 35 the amount of exp needed literally makes the graph look literally like a wall. Often times when you read on various forums about people saying the grind is fine, make sure you put it into the context of what level they have made it to. Now to be fair, the amount of exp needed by itself is not necessarily the problem as you start to enter your 40’s, but the way in which questing starts to play far less of a role.
When I hit level 42, I quickly completed all of the new quests and looked down at my 60 million exp bar to see only about 10-15% of it had been filled, leaving the remaining 50 million to be obtained by pure mob grind. Now I am well aware of an upcoming patch slated to increase the quest exp and mob exp, but I think the problem goes a bit deeper than that. There is a real lack of quest content that becomes painfully obvious at the higher levels. Quest content is very good at masking grind in other games, so the lack of it in Aion at this level range really only adds to the pain and tedium.
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