1.5.0.x - 10/24/09Follow

Depends on whether or not this does anything.

I'm having 2 main issues with Aion at the moment:

1 - Lag. Connection issues abound and the way the client handles them are absurdly bad. You'd think they designed the game with the intention that everyone always has a perfect connection to everything all the time.

2 - Spam. This bothers me less, though it's starting to get worse now that I've filled my block list and I have to start unblocking RMT that are potentially still there in order to block new ones that are definitely there.

In regards to the second one, clearly the status quo is unacceptable. MMO companies since the dawn of time (or at least the dawn of RMT) have invented ways to keep them under control. Some of them bad, some of them ineffective, some of them passable.

There are some key points to remember when trying to deal with this problem:

1: You will never get rid of them completely. It's impossible.
2: Creating rules doesn't affect people who make it their business to break your rules.
3: You need to not ***** the legit players.

These are difficult guidelines to work in because it honestly looks like there's nothing left. The most effective deterrent to RMT I've seen is a good staff of active GMs. This is something Aion currently doesn't have, so if that's what's going in on this patch, cool. If not, I guess we wait to see what they drop instead.

The RMT spamathon is a new (i.e. recent) problem for Aion so I can understand it taking a little while to find a way to control it. And NCSoft's latest efforts on this front have been respectable.

The lag is not a new problem, a few hundred people have been telling them about that one since the US closed beta, a couple of months before the actual retail launch. This, to me, does not constitute a new problem but a problem they have to already know about (because we told them and they do seem to listen to what people tell them) and have done nothing to correct.

After further testing I've reinforced my original assumption. The amount of latency isn't actually the issue, especially with how much data traffic Aion generates (I was getting about 120 Mb/s downstream just standing in the middle of Verteron Citadel doing nothing). The issue is the way the client handles latency, instead of only reacting to things that are impossible (someone hacking their way across the universe for instance) the client reacts to EVERY disagreement between the client and server about where the player is located in the game world. This leads to an embarrassing amount of rubber-banding as well as other issues. Not to mention the too-frequent handshakes between client and server further serve to increase traffic between the two, for every player on the server, for every server on the network, thereby increasing overall latency because of traffic congestion over the entire network.

I'm not suggesting this is an easy problem to fix, but some effort in that direction would be appreciated; I'm getting very very tired of closing my wings over a perfectly solid platform only to then rubber-band back out over the open sky and fall to my death.

Can turn off player names too in the options, in case you didn't know. Makes the game a lot less cluttered.

Improving their network infrastructure would be nice, but it isn't really the underlying problem. The real issue is the way the client handles the lag it has and the client/server relationship that it involves. Simply improving the performance of their servers and network will help but it won't solve the problem, the problem is in the software itself.

I'm pretty happy with the filters they've implemented thus far. While one or two enterprising RMT sites have devised ways around it and are still alive on the global channels, their message is so badly garbled and difficult to read it might as well not be there, anyone who's going to strain their eyes to read that was already interested in buying kinah. The private store ads, whispers, and mails still exist. On principle I wouldn't mind a way to turn off private store ads even absent the RMT issue, just because they annoy me (personally I liked the way FFXI handled private stores a lot better)

NCSoft is making progress, I just wish I could play the game properly... someday