XX0wnsXY (Becca) is a girl gamer geek. She’s hardcore, boys, and regularly beats out her male counterparts in various games she plays. She’s been a part of our community for quite awhile now, and has contributed insights and commentary in the past when we’ve talked about various games.

Becca emailed me today, with the below review/guide for her new favorite game Aion. She took the time to write a very comprehensive piece for all of you, so I wanted to post it in full. Credit for the below goes entirely to Becca!

This is my first MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role – Playing Game). (I used to be so against RPGs, but this one has swayed me). So, my review is submitted from a new user’s point of view. I would really like it if anyone with past MMORPG experience can reply and offer an experienced point of view on the game. I think the two contrasts would be interesting.

So the game is called Aion (”Eye-On”). It is, as I said, a MMO-RPG. It’s categorized as PvPvE (Player vs. Player vs. Environment). It’s been out in Korea for a year or more, and was released in the US a month ago.

The story line, in simple terms (although they go into great detail in multiple cut-scenes throughout the game, with awesome graphics):

A world of peace began to crumble after some of the race called “Draken” rebelled against the God “Aion”, and in turn, a huge battle broke out and the world was shattered in to three pieces. These events became known as “The Cataclysm” (Kat-a-Cliz-em) This created three races: “Elyos” (good) who live in “Elysea”, and Asmodians (Evil) who live in Asmodae, and Balaur -(The Draken renamed after their rebellion; not a playable race, NPC’s only, and are hostile against both Elyos and Asmodians, (which plays into the PvPvE.) who reside in the Abyss. The third piece, known as the “Abyss” is the space between Elysea and Asmodae, where both factions gain access at level 25 and begin the true PvP (Player vs. Player) aspect of the game.

You are able to choose which faction you would like to be at the start of your game. You begin your game by choosing one of the 4 classes, Male or Female; Warrior, Mage, Scout, or Priest. I, personally, chose to start as a Priest. You can customize your characters appearance greatly (from hair, skin, eye, and lip color, to extremety thickness, voice and much more).

You begin your journey in the “starter area”, which is different for each faction, of course. You level from 1-9 with simple quests that help you get acquainted with the various menu options and NPC’s. You also become acquainted with your current skills and abilities. Along with that, you become acquainted with the game’s travel systems, which are:

• A Flight Transporter – Allows you to pay a fee to fly (on a winged animal of some sort, very cool looking) to your destination. The graphics are awesome during flight.
• A Teleporter – You simply pay a fee and jump into a portal – and your game loads into your destination.

You can bring up your map by pressing “M”. It will give you a full overview of the area you are in, along with surrounding areas. You can press “N” and a smaller, more transparent version will appear, which is convenient while walking/flying and still needing to see where you are going. When you are grouped with other people in the same area, they will appear on the map as blue diamonds.

You will also become acquainted with Soul Healing and resurrection. Should you die along the way (and you will, believe me), you will be given the option to return to the place where you last bound your soul (You bind your soul to obelisk’s in major cities), or you can choose to wait (up to 30 minutes) and ask for someone to come resurrect you. Chanters and Clerics have the ability to resurrect. There are also resurrection stones that can be bought and acquired during quests that can be used on another player.

If you are not resurrected, you return to your bind point, and beside you will be a Soul Healer. For a fee, you will be healed of soul sickness (this makes your movement slow and you are unable to fly/glide) and you will recover your experience that you lost. The amount of experience lost depends on your level. The price of soul healing goes up the more times you die, and becomes very expensive over time, so you must be careful. You don’t have to worry about soul healing when it comes to PvP. If you are killed by the opposite faction, soul healing only costs 1 gold and you do not lose any experience. You do, however, lose Abyss Points (discussed later).

At level 9, you receive an “ascension” quest, which will allow you to become a “Daeva” (advanced humans who have tapped into the power of the Aether to gain new abilities and strengths that put them far beyond the power levels of any mortal human) and choose your subclass. The subclasses are:

• For Warrior – Gladiator or Templar.
• For Scout – Assassin or Ranger
• For Priest – Chanter or Cleric
• For Mage – Sorcerer or Spirit Master

I started as a Priest, so I chose to evolve into a Chanter. I won’t go into too much detail about the classes/subclasses, as that would take entirely too much time, but each one has its positives and negatives. I like being a Chanter, because we can adapt to pretty much any situation (I.E – we can heal, have buffs, have decent DPS – Damage per Second, and are needed in many group situations).

Shortly after you have completed your ascension quest, you receive a quest to earn your wings. Yes, you can fly in this game, which is something I hear is much different from any MMO out there. The flight ability in this game is so much fun and adds a new and interesting aspect to PvP. You will find that pre-abyss (lvls 1-24), you will use your wings mostly to glide down long hills to make your trips a little faster. There are a few designated areas where you are free to fly, otherwise you can only glide.

If you are interested in PvP before level 25, there are opportunities for this. There are temporary openings from one world to another (Elysea to Asmodae and vice versa) that allow you to go to the opposite factions world and hunt the enemy. These are known as Rifts. However, you have little chance to stay alive, unless you are grouped with other people. I found this annoying at times, because I would be trying to complete a quest in my world, and out of nowhere, comes a group of enemies and of course, I get killed. When the shoe is on the other foot however, it’s fun. Yeah Yeah, I can dish it but can’t take it. Enemies of the opposing faction show up on your radar as red diamonds. You will have to worry more about this in the Abyss.

The good thing is that rifts close after a certain number of people enter them, so they do not last forever. There are even spy quests that you can acquire that require you to go to the enemy’s world and complete a mission. They are very hard, but offer great rewards. I have yet to complete them… like I said, very hard.

Throughout your leveling experience, you will occasionally need to learn new skills/abilities. These are learned from your class trainer, and are in designated areas in the game. As you level, the price of learning your abilities goes up and can become quite costly. (At level 28 I paid over 70,000 gold for my new abilities).

Once you have bought your skill manual, it will appear as a book in your inventory (Hit I to access your inventory). Double click the book, and that skill will be learned. You can then press the letter K on your keyboard, and it will bring up a list of all of your skills. You can find your new skills and drag and drop them into your skill bar at the bottom of your screen:

Don’t worry, gold is plentiful in this game, and easily acquired. If you manage your gold right, you will have no trouble. If you do find yourself needing more, there are options to receive gold through the in-game mailing system. All you have to do is ask a friend for gold and they can attach it to mail and send it to your in-game mailbox (found at most major cities, in game). Gold is not hard to acquire through Grinding (Killing NPC enemies), either. There are also other options like selling items you have acquired via the Trade Broker (also found in major cities), or general goods merchants.

Like with many other games of this type, you can learn professions. Along with the professions, you can also Gather, which eventually evolves into Extraction. You begin gathering different plants/herbs. As you level, you receive the ability to extract the essence of an item, rather than the item itself, called Extract Vitality. After that comes Aether extraction, which is extracting from the sky (you must fly and risk falling to your death if you are not careful). I suggest leveling these things as you go. Many people say that it is not important, so I did not bother with it at first. When I reached level 20 I realized that many of the NPC’s gave quests to gather/extract an item and bring it to them. I skipped many quests and they add up! I spent many hours going back to level my gathering/extraction. Major setback, but I’m glad I did it. Definitely do this as you go.

Leveling solo is very do-able until level 20+. You will begin receiving quests that require a group. They will have the [group] prefix, letting you know to not even attempt to do the quest without more people to help. These are the most fun for me. You get to interact with other players and become an important part of the other players success. Very few of the quests you acquire are [group] quests, however they offer such great rewards, that they can’t afford to be skipped. Aion offers a LFG (Looking for Group) chat channel, which makes it easy to find people to group with.

Grouping is used for [Group] quests and instances. You can join the “LFG” Chat channel and ask for more people to help with your quest. Usually typed in this format: “Level 31 Chanter LFG Legendary Amethysts. PST (please send tell, which is just a whisper.). You will hopefully get some responses and from there, can invite people to your group (right click their name and select “invite to group”).. rinse and repeat.

One of the most menacing problems for MMO’s are the gold spammers (Those who want to sell you gold – it’s illegal, but people do buy so it keeps the gold spammers running rampant). They spam the chat with their links and make it hard for you to read any conversation going on between your legion or group. One easy fix to this is to create a new chat tab, and customize the options to allow only chat from your legion or group. To do this, open chat and right click on one of the tabs. From there you can choose “Add Tab”. Name it, and customize tab options. Voila!

At level 20. you can acquire “Stigmas”, which are basically extra abilities that you can receive that can separate one of the same class from the other. There are many stigmas that one class can choose, and that’s what makes me (one chanter) different from another. You must complete a quest to enable you to equip stigmas, but after that as you level, you will acquire more stigma slots. To view your current stigma slots, press “P” and select the Stigma tab.

Stigmas can be acquired from quests, NPC drops, or bought from the trade broker. Some are more rare than others. Each stigma requires stigma shards (can be acquired in the abyss from NPC enemies) to equip, and can only be equipped by a stigma master.

The next milestone is level 25. This is when you receive your “Abyss Entry Quest”, which is quite long, but very easy. Once you complete this quest, you gain entry access into the Abyss – the main PvP area. During the quest, you have to pick which area of your world you will access the Abyss from. Once you pick, you can enter the abyss by flying to the portal in the sky only in that area.

The Abyss offers many things, and has beautiful graphics. It offers many high experience/pay/item reward quests, and of course, it offers PvP. The Abyss can be very overwhelming at first. When you enter the Abyss, you are in a safe zone. There is an Aetheric Field around this area that prevents any enemy from penetrating. Once you venture out, you can collect quests, grind abyss enemies for high experience and abyss points (Points collected in the Abyss that when enough are acquired, you can get special items), and PvP.

Venturing out into the abyss requires flight. You can teleport to some areas, but you will have to fly a lot. There are flight rings that you will find between certain areas that you can fly through to gain flight time. You can refer to the bar at the bottom right of your screen to monitor your flight time drain. If you strafe through the rings, you can refill your bar quickly. There are also potions that increase flight time, along with equipment perks.

The ultimate goal of the Abyss is to capture fortresses from the opposing faction. I have no experience in this, but a month into the game, people are already doing it. You can see which fortresses are owned by which faction by pressing “M” to bring up the map and refer to the color key.

PvP is the most exciting feature for some MMO players. I like a little bit of both PvP and PvE. As I said before, when venturing out into the Abyss, you will run into an enemy from the opposing faction. They will appear on your radar as red diamonds, and when you are close enough to them to actually see them, their name will appear in red. They will have a rank (ie Rank 7 soldier), which is in reference to their abyss points. The lower their rank the more abyss experience they have, so beware of going against anyone too much lower than you. You are also unable to see the opposing faction’s level. Some like it this way, some don’t. Personally, I think it adds an interesting twist and requires a bit more strategy when approaching an enemy. To view your Abyss points/ranking press “P” and hit the “Abyss” tab:

As I continue to level, I learn more and more about the game. I do not have anything to compare the game to (first RPG), but I not only experience nothing but good things, I also hear good things, for the most part. The graphics are probably the best part of this game. They are absolutely beautiful. The storyline is interesting to follow, and it isn’t a total grind-fest to level. The pace is good, and the Abyss is fun.

Aion, like any other MMO (from what I’m told) has it’s problems. There are gold spammers and bots. The game has been out for a month in the US, and so far the development team has been working hard to keep them at bay. I’m not sure they will ever be totally rid of them, but I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

There are many guides for Aion out there, all of this content was written by me. All screen shots were taken in – game by me. Some sources were used for the storyline.

Very, VERY well-written and detailed guide, Becca! Thanks so much for sending this in. I have a feeling several of our gamer Geeks are now salivating to get their hands on Aion!

• Mithraic Relief Representing a Youthful Divinity, Perhaps Aion Art Giclee Poster Print by Roman, 18×24
• DEAD CAN DANCE Aion – Custom Framed Original Ad – Framed Music Poster/Print
• Mithraic Relief Representing a Youthful Divinity, Perhaps Aion Giclee Poster Print by Roman, 18×24
• SteelSeries QcK Limited Edition 63325 Aion Mouse Pad
• SteelSeries 68020 Aion Keyset
• AION PRESELL BOX (WIN XP,VISTA/DVD SOFTWARE)
• Aion The Tower of Eternity Warrior T-Shirt
• Aion The Tower of Eternity Dragon T-Shirt
• Aion The Tower of Eternity Daeva Women’s T-Shirt
• ORANGE NEON Underglow Undercar Light Kit WARRANTY! WIRELESS REMOTE! BRAND NEW!
• Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 2)
• The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)
• Lectures on Jung’s Aion (Polarities in the Psyche)
• Aion: The Tower of Eternity Steelbook Edition
• Aion: The Tower of Eternity Collector Edition
• Aion Wings Guild Wars Emote
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• Aion [Re-Mastered]

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During our latest GoToMeeting, we were viewing Connor’s desktop. Connor wanted to show all of us a way to get free things by playing the same games you’re already playing every day!

Eamonn is JACTs gamer reward software that supports more than 300 different games. Eamonn simply rewards active game play and does not interfere with the game itself. Eamonn is 100% free of any adware, spyware or malware.

You play your favorite games and JACT’s software client, Eamonn, rewards you with “BUX” for active game play. These “BUX” accumulate in your account and can be redeemed for prizes from the JACT Mall. Think of it as a frequent flyer rewards program but for gamers.

You’re playing games anyway, so you might as well get some stuff out of it!

We do the GoToMeeting thing regularly, and it’s such an easy way to share desktops. There’s a VOiP function as well, which is how I pull in the presenter each week. Using GoToMeeting is just so much better than having to drive across town, or fly across the country (or the World!).

Email me your ideas for our next meeting!

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• An Insider’s Look at the New Game Aion
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• Is This the Ultimate Game Controller?
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Ok, so maybe they don’t – but they sure are fun! We do live calls on the stream a few nights a week, provided I get enough sponsors. I used to foot the bill for the calls myself on the toll free number. However, in one month alone the bill came up to just over $500.00! That’s crazy, but there you have it.

We get a lot of interesting calls, and a lot of weirdos. I guess people feel that it’s their “fifteen minutes of fame” if they call in and scream obscenities. No matter, I still enjoy doing them for the most part. A lot of great content ends up coming out this way, and you’ll be able to see some of what we recorded through the coming days right here in my blog.

Sparking conversation and thoughts is what I love to do the most. It’s so great to be able to foster the Geeks and Lockergnome communities, where excellent topics are being posted each and every day!

• How do you easily run Linux on Windows?
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• What flavor of Linux do you recommend?
• Make money playing World of Warcraft!
• Do you ever have enough hard drive space?
• Should Google buy Twitter?
• The case of the exploding computer – what happened?!
• Are Mac users being driven back to PCs?

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One of the live callers the other night is a professional World of Warcraft player. He and his team travel around the country playing in tournaments. In just one that they won first place, each team member won $5000.00!! I’m serious – five grand for winning a WoW tournament!

Since the team has no official name and are playing again at the upcoming BlizzCon, they wanted to know if they could name themselves after our Geeks site! Heck yeah they can!! Apparently the tournament will be broadcast live, with thousands of people watching.

Speaking of Geeks and WoW… we do have a group especially for WoW players and fanatics! There are 280 members of it at this point in time, and quite a lot of discussion, tips and tricks being shared in there. Be sure to stop by there if you’re a WoW player!

Good luck to you guys at Blizzcon. Sadly, I won’t be able to actually watch the tournament live, as it’s the same weekend as my Gnomedex convention. However, we’ll be pulling for you guys!

• World of Warcraft: TOURNAMENT PROMO COIN / TOKEN

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Here are the top five tips for having fun through gold farming, as well as putting your time to good use. These tips apply for most MMORPGs ( Massively Multi Player Role Playing Games ).

• Bring Friends Along Most people tend to gold farm by themselves. People do this because they don’t want to have to share their revenue or loot. But by doing this, you won’t gold farm for long periods of time. When you’re alone, all you do is farm, farm, farm, and farm. Bring some friends along. Don’t be selfish… and share some loot and profit. By doing this, you can make some new friends and even gold farming buddies. You can even give some money to the lower levels or beginners of the game. You will also be able to take down mobs much quicker.
• Bring The Best You Can Bring Another mistake that people make is bringing random armors or weapons to their gold farming trips. You should take some time to get good armors and food so that you can stay farming for long periods of time, possibly leading to large amounts of profit.
• Create A Strategy And Route Before you go farming, make sure to map out a strategy and route for the location. Make sure to tell this to your farming mates or group. You can’t make good profit by just farming blindly through an area. If you have a route, you can make much more profit than if you would have just gone through at random. Another thing you have to keep in mind is your strategy. Look at your route, and look at what you’re playing as or what you’re best at. Develop a strategy to take down enemies in much less time, which again leads to more profit.
• Choose The Best Location Before farming, most people think of what way may be easiest for them. If you approach farming this way, then you’ve made another mistake. Always choose they best location… I repeat the best location. By doing this, you can have better loot which again means more profit. Don’t go to a beginner area to gold farm when you can go to a pro area and make 100x more profit.
• Come Prepared Go farming with everything you need. For example, I play world of warcraft and I have to make sure I bring my skinning knife, food, water, armor, pet food, weapons, and bags. By doing this I’m keeping myself from wasting time making trips back and forth, thus wasting time that I could’ve used to make some good profit. So keep in mind to bring everything you’ll need to make the most profit.
• Bonus Tip! Please everyone. Don’t sell your profit for real-world money. First of all, you’re wasting all the time it took you to make that money for just a couple of dollars. You’re also making it hard for beginners to buy what they want, since most MMOs have a large money buying community that increases prices on items all around the game. This makes it hard for beginners to buy items that they really need. So please… use your profit for in-game purposes only.

• Guildhelpers Mmorpg Guild Creation/Team Player Guide.
• Unofficial World Of Warcraft Underground.

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Ben Metcalfe turned the camera around to interview Molly at Gnomedex 2007.

Molly joined us at Gnomedex on behalf of MacMost.com. MacMost is a video podcast and Web site for Mac users. Their tagline is: “MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone”. There is a lot of excellent content on this site, to help people with any of their Apple products.

Molly is also known as THE woman behind WomenofWarcraftPodcast.com. She produces podcasts that surround her play of the World of Warcraft game.

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