Midterms, Project & Aion
Ok, midterms over. No idea how they went, however with how groggy I am from the flu / meds I think the results will be... interesting.
So, I don't work til Saturday, which means I'm going to be spending the rest of the week sleeping & recovering, right? Yeah, I wish. Sadly, Project is rearing it's ugly head and there's a ton of work I need to get done (and see that gets done from other people) as we need to have an ass load of things done by Monday or we're basically fucked. And no, not proper fucked (ah, Snatch, one of the best movies ever).
Also started playing Aion recently. It's... ok. It reminds me of Lineage 2 (minus the panty shots) in terms of game play. The game, compared to WoW, is a grind. Yes, there's quests, but some some have very low drop rates (low enough that they make Murloc heads seem common). I'm not even lvl 20 yet, so I can't speak for the dungeons or pvp (first dungeon is at lvl 25 I'm told, and pvp starts around that lvl too). Bots are common enough that people talk in global chat about different techniques they use to kill them. Gold farmer spam isn't as bad as it was before NCSoft kicked in the last patch, but the farmers have been working around it and are coming back. And omfg crafting ANYTHING takes forever and a day in that game.
The good stuff? The lore is good. It seems like the devs put a lot of thought and work into it and the quests (However, there is very little humor at all). Flying is awesome, though you can't do it in all zones (or only in some parts of some zones). Lore reason is it has to do with magical energy in a specific area. Technical reason is the devs say it was too difficult to pull off in some places due to object collision factors. However, even in the places you can't fly, you can at least speed up a bit by gliding from a higher point to a lower point. One thing NCSoft did do right is try and balance races on servers. If a server is high in population of Elyos, then a new person can only make Asmodians on that server and vice versa. According to the stats on Aion's site, my server has a balance of 49% Elyos (my race) and 51% Asmodians. Pretty damn good. Hopefully other MMOs to come will learn from this. Oh, and clerics get chain armor and a shield (and according to those higher level than myself, clerics can actually hold their own in pvp. I look forward to seeing if there's truth in this).
Honestly, the games alright. WoW has some stuff that's better, Aion has other things I prefer. Will it be worth $20 / mo? Eh, we'll see. It is nice to be playing an MMO that isn't the same one I've been playing for the last 5 years, but so far it doesn't grip me as much as WoW did in the first few days I played that. Oh, and sadly, rangers don't get pets :(