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.
Apparently I am not alone, evidenced by this excellent editorial at MMOCrunch.
The Grind
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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