Yesterday, I was thinking about canceling my subscription to Aion. That would have been unusual for me, as I’ve leveled to end-game in the past 3 MMORPGs that I’ve played (WoW, LOTRO, WAR).
I leveled my Aion Sorcerer to 33. While I found the class to be a fast leveler (relatively speaking), I wasn’t sure I’d love playing a Sorcerer at end-game. In addition, the overall pace of leveling in Aion has been an anchor dragging on me for weeks.
I started thinking about picking up my Chanter again, for the 2nd time. The problem? I deleted my Chanter 6 weeks ago, due to concerns about Chanter PVP, so that I could use the name “Taugrim” for my Sorcerer. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and with the level 42 ranged stun and level 45 HoT, Chanter PVP could be viable and challenging.
So I submitted a request on the NCSoft support site around 6pm PST. It was simply worded:
I deleted a 25 Chanter named Taugrim on October 5, 2009. I now play a 33 Sorcerer with the same name.
Please restore the character. I am willing to pay for this service, however, I am unwilling to level a character to 25 again.
If you can not restore my character, I may cancel my subscription, as I simply don’t have the time (full-time employed) to re-level again.
Thank you very much.
I wasn’t expecting to get a positive response from NCSoft in this matter, because the character had been deleted so long ago.
And I remembered the experience I had with WoW’s GMs, when asking them to restore one item. I had to talk to several WoW GMs to convince them to even consider my petition. It wasn’t a positive customer experience. It went like this:
WoW GM: you understand that you only have a limited number of restores for your account?
me: yes, I understand
WoW GM: you understand that you only have a limited number of restores for your account?
me: …
I didn’t actually type that last line, but the conversation got rather repetitive, until finally the WoW GM fulfilled my request.
So I was pleasantly surprised to receive a response within 40 minutes from an Aion GM saying that they would restore my Chanter. They asked for 3 names for the character, which I gladly provided, and an Aion GM restored my Chanter as Taugrum, just over 3 hours from my initial request.
I was impressed! The Aion GMs were prompt, professional, and helpful. And they have given me “new legs” in terms of continuing to play Aion. Now I have a reason to play, to get to 42 and make some narrated videos of a NA Aion Chanter fighting opponents of near level (i.e. not a useless lowbie ganking video).
Will I actually make it to the 40s with my Chanter? Who knows. At least I have a reason to be motivated about playing. I gained 2 levels since yesterday, and it will be interesting to see whether I can gut out the next 15.
Taugrim's MMO Blog 
Good deal! That’s good customer support. Your Sorcerer is so close to 40’s you just not liking it or think that the pvp would be too easy or not have enough of a different play style to keep you attracted long term?
My switching has more to do with my personality than with the Sorc class itself. It is a very good caster class implementation.
I’m more of a meleer at heart, and I enjoy having off-healing capability.
The one good thing coming out of trying both Cleric and Sorc, is that I won’t have as much envy compared to if I hadn’t tried them at all.
A completely off-topic question – why do you dislike WoW? (Except for the community, it can be decent on some servers / guilds). I don’t know when you’ve played, but now you can obtain most of the PvP gear from actual PvP (except the weapons, which you can get from an easy-ish 5-people instance) and there is quite a bit of variety in BGs, arenas and world PvP. Also one can level a character pretty fast, even without that fancy +exp gear (I leveled mine in 3 weeks while playing about 3-4 hours a day).
Not that I’m advertising, but just curious why you aren’t interested in it at all ^~
I quit WoW because I felt it was designed as too much of a treadmill:
– grind tiers of PVE content, which required a lot of raiding (used to do 3 nights per week). I’ve heard WoW is much more casual-friendly now, but I won’t be trying it again
– grind battlegrounds, with people deliberately giving up because it was more efficient from a points perspective if they were losing
– arena matchup outcomes felt too much based on class/spec as opposed to skill. This is not to say it required no skill. It’s just that old generalization about WoW PVP felt true to me: gear > spec > skill
– grind reputation
– grind daily quests to “keep up” in terms of coin
There were also problems with class design (too much role overlap between different classes led to real and perceived gaps in terms of tanking / healing / DPS) and gear (drops were too class specific).
Just to draw a comparison, when I switched to LOTRO, I found it to be incredibly refreshing, because:
– crit-crafted end-game gear was excellent. Not quite as good as raid-gear, but still competitive
– the same drops were usable by different specs and classes, because there was no +heal and +spelldamage
– players had a very different mentality. They were there for the experience as well as progression. WoW seems to foster a mentality about progression over experience
– there were clear roles for a given class
– each class had a lot more situational abilities, instead of face-rolling the same 3-6 buttons over and over
I know a lot of folks like the ability to spec a class for different roles (e.g. either a tank or MDPS or healer or RDPS). And that made it fun to a degree. But I found that that created a lot of problems too. I was really shocked by the degree of class/spec “racism” in WoW. It mirrored discrimination in real life.
Btw, I played WoW from summer 2006 to fall 2007 (18 months), so I was there for 8 months pre-TBC and 10 months in TBC.
Obviously Aion shares the same issue as WoW in terms of grindiness, and some would argue Aion is a lot more. But I think Aion PVP requires much more skill than WoW, because of the number of skills and counters.
Yep, these are the same reasons I quit WoW myself. To recap, now there are more viable specs (basically now each specialization tree is viable except for some rare cases, +heal and +spd were fused into a sindle stat), but the grind is still here, and doing the dailies is just ARRGH infuriating.
Didn’t understand the comment about the racism, lol. Are you referring to the fact that the players preferred some specs over the others? Well, that’s the power gamer mentality not exclusive to WoW – some people just want to have the single best (theoretical) character setup.
However the one (and the only) thing I disagree with in your post. You kind of have a point about gear > spec >skill (and not being able to play in the arena with my friends because they had the “wrong classes” was sort of bad), but lets’s look the other way around. It’s an RPG with different classes, and IMO RPGs are opposed to the notion of fairness because it’s impossible to balance all classes against each other (you can’t switch classes on the fly, DotA style), and finding class/spec combinations that work well in a team has its fun in it.
Actually, it’s kind of a “hardcore vs casual” debate, aka would you either battle as a team in a competitive environment or just log in and have some fun with your friends. WoW is obviously only for the people who choose the former :)
“Didn’t understand the comment about the racism, lol. Are you referring to the fact that the players preferred some specs over the others? Well, that’s the power gamer mentality not exclusive to WoW.”
I found the WoW population to be very narrow-minded overall.
Just to give you an example – our guild (Vanguard on Agamaggan) had the best pally tank on our server, a player named Madelynn.
Even 6-7 months after TBC had launched, a lot of PUGs were skeptical about having her MT heroic instances. Which was ridiculous, because tankadins had great tanking mechanics and she was a superb player with excellent gear. She made it a point to MT heroics for PUGs to help people realize things had changed.
But a lot of people still thought paladins were way behind prot warriors and bear tanks, and part of the reason is they never bothered to try having a competent tankadin tank for them.
“lets’s look the other way around. It’s an RPG with different classes, and IMO RPGs are opposed to the notion of fairness because it’s impossible to balance all classes against each other (you can’t switch classes on the fly, DotA style), and finding class/spec combinations that work well in a team has its fun in it.”
Understood. It’s not that so much. My impression was that WoW was designed for PVE first and PVP second. So a lot of specs and abilities simply had no function in PVP (e.g. Taunt). E.g. back in TBC, the prot and dual-wielding specs for warrior were far inferior to 2h arms warriors. And that was because of the game mechanics.
Now compare that to a game like WAR, where for any given class multiple specs were viable and effective in PVP. And almost all of the abilities have utility in both PVP and PVE. E.g. taunt and de-taunt work on players as well as mobs. I loved how relevant tanks were in WAR, including the 1h specs.
Indeed, the fact that WoW PvP was retrofitted was confessed multiple times by the developers. Actually, the game didn’t even have battlegrounds in the first place.
It’s just the amount of polish spent on the game made the PvP experience at least tolerable. Hell, if one could somehow fuse the polish and balance from WoW with all the good things in WAR, it could have been the best MMO evar <3
Did you have to pay to get the chanter back or did they so it for free. Just wondering because my guildee had a chanter he deleted too and has decided to remake a chanter because he doesnt want to play a ranger, but he doesnt get much play time so this might be something he could do.
They did it for free, no questions asked :)
Hey Taugrim,
WAR is shutting down Phoenix Throne (your old server) – Most of PT are moving to Iron Rock, on the Order side since Destruction completly dominate that server. We sure could use your swordmaster over there :-)
Come back to WAR, forget the grind and rejoin us. The battle are epic, the ennemy every bit loathable, and many older Destro have rerolled Order on IR – I am now playing a WH (Miladie) over there and enjoying every bit of it… even the corpse-jumping I receive like a badge of honor :-)
Skut
That’s sad to hear. PT was my WAR home.
The other odd thing is hearing that Destruction dominates on IR now. When I was on IR back in July, Order was the much stronger side. But the pendulum can swing.
I have no plans to go back to WAR, or at least I haven’t decided to stop playing Aion.
[…] and population in an MMO, and one of the worst things a lot of companies do wrong, or have no costumer support ability and or […]