Ahhh Aion, the pain. The agony. The EXCRUCIATING annoyance.

I love my MMOs. Really, I do. I was a WoW head for 2 years before I finally kicked the addiction that was almost as relationship damaging as crack. Well, I assume it is anyway having never gone near the stuff. *chuckle*. I tried Warhammer online and found it a bit dull and lacking in the palette department.

So when Aion Online came out, I was THRILLED. For over 12 months my MMO itch had been screaming for a scratch and I tell you what, was I ever ready to scratch that horrid, festering little bump.

Aion online is a fantasty MMORPG with both PVE and PVP aspects. A large hook is that at a certain level rather than gaining a transport ability (for example the riding ability in WoW) your character is able to sprout wings and fly without changing form. Granted, only for short periods of time and in certain areas, but it's a relatively new feature in MMOs and was well recieved. The game was released in South Korea in 2008, and had a delayed release in China, Taiwan, North America, Australia, and Europe respectively.
For it's release in Australia it was available via Steam in all of its incarnations, the Collectors edition, Limited edition and Standard edition coming with differing bonuses such as in game items, titles and bonuses. It obviously did not come with the model or art release book that the physical Collectors edition came with.

When I realised that I was able to download the Collectors edition via Steam at a considerable cost difference, I decided to download the Collectors edition rather than the Standard edition that I'd intended to buy from my local purvayor of digital entertainment. As the boxed collectors edition was no longer available in Australia (or was selling for $300 + on ebay by enterprising buyers) I was rather happy to find that I could still download the full game without any of that environmentally damaging packaging. *Snort* who am I kidding? I wanted it NOW! After several hours of slooooooow download, I had my very own copy to play along with several in-game bonuses that only the collectors edition could afford.

But by then I was already worried. I had been researching in my time waiting for my slooooooooow download and had found that whilst being released for Oceanic countries there was in fact no Oceanic server! All of the servers for Aion are hosted (at the time of writing) in the US. Shock! Dismay! Horror! Insta-hunt for a ping smoothing service and scrabble to download PuTTy.
Now, not being terribley tech savvy after about 4 hours I managed to set up both services and after my first initial loading of the game to a ping of around 5k (again, horror!) I got my set up going on a respectable ping of 200. And was swiftly informed that proxy IPs had been banned by NCsoft. RAGE!!!

Of course, there was a work around. I found it and applied it. RIGHT after I emailed NCSoft to inform them of my absolute disgust and request a refund. Oh, I know. I should have done my research properly first to check whether or not there were Oceanic servers. I even should have asked someone that was already playing whether or not they even needed a ping smoothing service (especially as most require that you pay a monthly subscription fee).

So after about a month of emailing back and forth demanding my money back, being asked to prove that my system was up to the game (and therefore prove that the server's distance was the issue), coming up with the proof, and getting more and more narky... I finally got my money back.

So where's the review, you ask? Well, simply put, there isn't one. I guess you could say the review is more a "don't do what I did" *chuckle*. Research your MMOs. Find out where there servers are and what their policies are on proxy IPs. And don't buy a new MMO until at least 5 patches have been released!

[For anyone that feels sadly dismayed by the lack of real information in this review, I'll be brief as I can't give a full review. The game looks pretty, plays well on a lower to moderate specced machine and definately showed promise in the area of storyline. If you're an Australian wanting to play you WILL need a ping smoother until they release an Oceanic server which to my knowledge hasn't even yet been discussed. It looks like it has real potential. Sadly, as I never made it out of the starting zone I'll never know for certain!]