Things got a little slow for me in Aion around level 18 or so, so I for one welcome the introduction of regular double experience weekends, giving me good reason to hop online for a few hours and kill what little free time I have killing virtual things. The experience point boost counts towards crafting experience as well, so those of you who'd rather sit in one spot clicking things for hours are covered as well.

The only limitation here is that only levels 1-35 can take advantage of the extra experience. You've already surpassed level 35? That's what you get for out-leveling me. Take that.

Every weekend until the end of the year will bring double the experience points, with regular double XP weekends planned for once or twice a month thereafter. This is only a temporary fix, however, and NCsoft continues to study the progression process in order to find ways to make it less painful.

Speaking of less painful, this week's patch will also bring with it a reduction in the cost of Soul Healing, for those of you who keep dying for some silly reason. Silly Daevas.

Upcoming Double Experience Weekends [Aion]

Called simply "AION Vision", it shows sweeping visual upgrades to the game, along with a battle sequence that MMO fans could only dream of. There's even a Shadow of the Colossus cameo.

It's obviously hinting at the direction NCSoft hope the MMO will be taking in the near future, but question is, when - if ever - will this stuff be implemented? And when it is, will anyone on Earth have a PC that can actually run it?

And that's not even 16,000 globally. It's just from the game's American and European servers. Causes for the bannings range from the use of bots to gold farming to spamming advertisements to other players. NCSoft's Community Manager, Andrew Beegle, says "We are taking a very hard stance on this issue", and if anyone tries to cry "innocent", adds they "have sophisticated processes and procedures in place that help us keep unwarranted banning to a minimum".

Oh, if only the internet let us see literal rivers of blood.

Massive Ban Across All NA/EU Servers [Aion]

It's not a preorder bonus, as the game is already out, so should we simply call it an order bonus? Either way, folks who purchase Aion at participating retailers during the holiday season will find themselves in possession of the Aion Holiday Ascension Pack. What's inside? The pack contains a code that gives players 20 Lesser Life Potions, 15 Lesser Running Scrolls, 15 uses of the experience point-enhancing Lodas's Amulet, and armor dyes that vary in color depending on where you purchase it.

Amazon – Hot Orange Dye
Best Buy – Mustard Dye
Game Stop – True Black Dye
Target – True Red Dye
Walmart – True White Dye

Perhaps not the most enticing purchase bonus we've seen, but certainly one of the more colorful ones? Bonus points for anyone who gets the song reference in my choice of colors used in the image above.

The J!NX Aion line follows the company's recent journeys into the universe of EVE Online, and while those shirts are certainly attractive enough, they make me think of mining ore and falling asleep at my desk. The Aion shirts, on the other hand, make me want to give up my habit of wearing a button-up shirt over a t-shirt in order to show off my plumage. I have always wanted plumage.

Check out the full J!NX Aion line at the company's website, and be sure to check out the Dungeons & Dragons page as well, because there is nothing as beautiful as a t-shirt that says "Rock Me Asmodeus."

Well, Batman: Arkham Asylum slips into the top 20 at least, taking a respectable number 16 position. The two MMO titles more or less storm the charts, with Cryptic's Champions Online snagging number 3, and Aion pulling a double as the normal version rocks number 1 and the limited edition takes the 5-spot. This means near domination of the top 5 for MMOs this month, with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King at number 4 while The Sims 3 slips down to 2.

Not a bad start for two of the most eagerly anticipated MMO titles of the season. Check out the full chart below to see if your favorite made the cut this month.

NCsoft is operating six games at once? Yes they are, and Halloween is coming to each one of them. The Mad King Thorn returns to Guild Wars, Scarecrow Jack visits Lineage II, the original Lineage has a costume party, the City of Heroes faces a Halloween Apocalypse, and Exteel's Mechnaughts get painted orange and purple.

Yes, the festivities abound, but by far my favorite is what's going on in NCsoft's latest release, Aion. Since the world is split into two halves, there are two different celebrations! The Asmodians, otherwise known as the best faction, celebrate by going on a Wild Hunt, cooking special dishes and having a good time. The lowly Elyos, on the other hand, get plagued by zombies. They totally deserve it too.

Check out the full list of NCsoft's Halloween celebrations below!

Aion – Harvest Revel

During the Fall harvest, the people of Atreia have always celebrated the bounty of the land. Years ago, the joy of the annual revels was troubled by an eclipse-a peculiar and magical eclipse that brought darkness to Asmodae and Elysea. Ever since, for days during Harvest Revel, the sky goes dark and the people of Atreia join in the hunt.

Asmodians celebrate the bounty through the Wild Hunt, racing after the Wild Kurthanir hunt leader and cooking special dishes made from the meat. On the other side of Atreia, the Elyos encounter undead creatures pulled back into a semblance of life by the power of the eclipse. Elyos must join roving Dark Night bands to hunt and destroy the undead before they invade Elyos villages.

Each day during Harvest Revel players will be rewarded for their investment with new lore and tasty treats including a Halloween Hat and candy that will transform players into in game creatures!

· Starts: Sunday, October 25, 2009

· Ends: Saturday, October 31, 2009

Visit www.aiononline.com for more Aion-specific information.

Guild Wars – The Return of Mad King Thorn

It's Halloween in Tyria, and that means one thing: the return of Mad King Thorn ! Similar to years past, the maniacal monarch has come to play, and he's got a bag full of tricks and treats to delight and dismay. But non-tricksters fear not, there are plenty of ways to celebrate Halloween – participate in several special events (a new series of quests and a costume PvP brawl) or explore the decorated cities/towns adorned with Halloween décor.

· Starts: Friday, October 23, 2009

· Ends: Monday, November 2, 2009

Visit www.guildwars.com for more Guild Wars information.

City of Heroes – Triumph over the New Deadly Halloween Apocalypse

Players brace themselves for a new apocalypse as City of Heroes' annual Halloween Event returns with legions of Zombies, Werewolves, Jack-o-Lanterns, and other foul denizens descend upon Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. This year they're bringing even more powerful allies! The new apocalypse is deadlier than ever as mysterious monstrosities join forces with the Eidolons, Shivans, and others. Paragon City and the Rogue Isles are in terrible peril, and only the greatest Heroes and Villains can turn back the tide. The greater the challenge, the greater the reward!

· Starts: Tuesday, October 20, 2009

· Ends: Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Visit www.cityofheroes.com for more City of Heroes information.

Lineage II – "Scarecrow Jack" and Halloween Adena Art Contest

Halloween is just around the corner and players can win in-game prizes by showing off their creative holiday spirit. Players are encouraged to create and share their Halloween and/or autumn themed adena art (visual art created by dropping adena on the ground in-game to create an image seen from above.) For those just looking to have fun this Halloween, players can don a "Scarecrow Jack" illusion featuring two animated emotes. Along with the illusion, players will receive 5 revita pops to refill their vitality bars while in game.

· Starts: Wednesday, October 28, 2009

· Ends: Thursday, November 19, 2009

· Deadline for art submissions is Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 11:59pm CDT

Visit www.lineage2.com for more Lineage II information.

Lineage – " Cavern of Chaos" Costume Party

The Lineage team is hosting the in-game party of all parties this Halloween – costumes not required, but highly encouraged! In addition to free polymorph "costumes," most monsters will drop pumpkin seed, which is redeemable for prizes like a Pinewand to spawn monsters of choice, accessories, and Stat t-shirts from NPCs. No tricks about it, as an added bonus, players will be treated to increased item drops from Bosses. See you at the "Cavern of Chaos!"

· Starts: Wednesday, October 28, 2009

· Ends: Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Visit www.lineage.com for more Lineage information.

Exteel – Halloween Event
Smashing pumpkins and bag snatching is easy! Try picking on a Mechanaught your own size, even if it is painted Orange and Purple! Exteel players are encouraged to celebrate this Halloween colorfully with free Orange and Purple paint. But that's not all! Players will receive +50% bonus credits during the week-long Exteel Halloween celebration!

· Starts: Wednesday, October 28, 2009

· Ends: Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Visit www.exteel.com for more Exteel information.

During the weekend several tipsters emailed us with horror stories about the European launch of NCsoft's new MMORPG Aion. Like North America, many citizens of the UK and Europe found themselves waiting in line for hours at t time to get into the game. Others didn't even get that far. Kotakuite Andrew pointed us to a set of screens like the one seen here, telling players that there were simply too many people connected to the servers to join a queue.

NCsoft responded in much the same way they responded to initial queues with the much the same response they did the North American version, though today they announced the opening of two new servers, one for English and one for the French. Hopefully those two will help ease the pain of eager players across the European continent.

The shopkeeper system has been abused terribly since the North American launch of Aion. Here's how it was supposed to work: a player turns on the private store option, putting items up for sale into special slots, assigning prices. They then become a clickable shop that players can browse.

The problem that arose is that becoming a shop acted as an anti-idle, allowing players to remain connected for long periods of time with no input on their part. A player would slip into store mode, set one item at a ridiculously high price, and then wander off to eat dinner or run to the store, without fear of coming back disconnected and having to wait in line again. This contributed greatly to the long lines of people waiting to get into the game during peak playing times. With less people disconnecting, the wait time only grew.

This morning Aion's servers went down for maintenance, and came back up with a 30 minute timer on personal shops, which should go great lengths towards cutting down wait time. At least until everyone figures out my special method of anti-idle, the pecking bird egg timer on the W key.

Server Maintenance [Aion - Thanks Alex!]

Forcing customers to wait upwards of several hours during peak game-playing time is not the sort of first impression you want to give the player base, but Aion associate producer Lani Blazier says that this sort of bottlenecking is something that they had anticipated.

"Aion's Head Start period and today's launch (note interview took place late yesterday) are strong, and we are happy to see huge numbers of players diving into the game. The excitement that has impelled players into the game is obvious. We see it in the high numbers of concurrent players online in the game's servers. This is the only time that every single player who wants to play Aion is online at the same time, so many players online have an expected impact on the world servers."

Of course, anticipating is one thing, and fixing it is another thing entirely. The team is apparently looking at each server on a case-by-case basis to determine the best course of action to help alleviate the wait times.

"Some servers will have intermittent queues for a period of time, although these are dependent on each of the specific world servers. We are monitoring and tracking the server statistics in real time to ensure optimal experiences for players, and we have planned steps for each server to manage periods of high player demand."

This goes against the general practice with new MMO launches, which is to simply throw new servers at the problem until players stop complaining. Lani explains that the Aion team is taking a more cautious route in expanding the number of game servers Aion makes available.

"The roll out of the original servers and each additional server has been planned with an eye toward a sustainable and stable release of each new world server. We have plans to build, test, and roll out each new server, to set them to appropriate time zone settings based on the whole community's needs, and to balance each of them appropriately as to faction. We are managing the roll out of game servers at a steady and deliberate pace. We want to give players the gameplay they deserve in the long term, as well during the expansive burst phase of Head Start and the short-term post-launch period."

So what about immediate steps? According to NCsoft West's PR director Ryan James, who spoke to us during our communications with Lani, relief is coming as early as this weekend.

"Since the opening of Head Start this past weekend, we've have been heavily focused on striking the delicate balance between managing busy servers with queue times versus overcompensating by adding new servers too quickly that are then under populated and don't deliver a fun experience for players. We did indeed see an initial rush on the first days of Head Start which resulted in longer than desired queue times for some of our servers, and we are working around the clock to alleviate this. In fact, we are happy to confirm we have increased our server caps and are adding an additional server in both North America and Europe by this weekend, and we will continue to evaluate adding additional servers."

Once again, there's that emphasis on using caution. It's a bit of juggling act, really. If they just opened up ten new servers right away, a year from now we might be posting news about server consolidation, which reflects badly on an MMO no matter what the reasons behind it might be.

We'll see if caution is the way to go this weekend, when the players who missed out on the Sunday launch and don't have time to play during the week hit the servers en masse. Fingers crossed!

Speaking of long queue times, last night was simply amazing. I spent 40 minutes in the queue at first, and then my power flickered due to these Atlanta storms. Then I waited 1 hour, 45 minutes, and my PC locked up switching the window into Aion. Finally, after 2 hours, 45 minutes, I got in, killed two creatures, and decided I was too tired and went to bed. Good times.

Still, Lani is pretty damn awesome, even if she does share the first name of the ex-girlfriend who left me for another woman. Again, good times.

If you look closely, you can see my chanter-to-be Caliban, lost amidst a sea of people acting how they normally do when gathered in large groups via the internet. The server is Azphael; the side Asmodian. For the next five hours I would randomly crash three times, say the word "fuck" on at least 120 separate occasions, and eventually make it to level 9, at which point I left the newbie hubbub behind in favor of the more subdued, higher-level hubbub.

Yesterday we talked about queues a upwards of seven hours long, and while I certainly commiserate with those left waiting, it almost seemed as if the servers remembered who was online in case of a crash, letting them slip right back in as soon as they returned. At least this was my experience. I'm almost positive that at one point my server went down completely, and there were a few instances of severe server-wide rubber-banding (running the length of a road and finding yourself snapped back to the beginning), but otherwise things seemed rather smooth considering the huge influx of players.

My main problem was due to the initial rush. With that many people in your starting zone, quest items will be camped, and quest monsters will be slaughtered mercilessly. At first NCsoft had 10 instances of the newbie area available for players to freely switch between, but each one was packed, causing severe quest bottlenecks, especially when the quest required players to click on one item that spawned every two minutes. It was chaotic.

Later in the day I went back through and completed some of the quests I skipped, and things seemed to have calmed down a bit. I suspect the full launch tomorrow will experience similar problems. My suggestion? Skip quests and grind, or simply wait a bit to start leveling up.

I've managed to make it to level 12 so far myself, with Caliban the chanter kicking ass and taking names left and right while searching for a guild that's a little more about roleplay than most. I know, good luck with that, right? Either way, I hope to see some of you in game. If I don't respond, I'm asleep with my face on the keyboard.

"There are more people waiting in cues to start the game than there are in the game itself," writes one tipster. "and this is just the people with pre-orders. This will be a nightmare when the game actually launches."

In that screen above, you see one poor guy is facing down a 7 hour, 30 minute wait at position 2994 out of 3188 in the queue. Others have sent in screenshots showing much shorter wait times. But wait times nonetheless. It seems fair to say NCsoft wasn't prepared for its Head Start campaign to get this much buy-in. I'm sure many are hoping that day one of the full release will open up some sort of extra server capacity, but unfortunately, I have no information. I'll update if I hear anything. Aion players, please do share your experiences in the comments.

Update: This is from Fahey, I'll quote him directly: "Might be worth noting that even with 10 instances of each starting area mobs are camped all over the place, and there's some horrible quest bottlenecking as dozens of players wait for quest objects to spawn."

It certainly says something about nProtect GameGuard when a major MMO developer out of Korea decides that removing it is the best course of action. Commonly used in Asian MMO titles as an anti-cheating device, GameGuard seems to cause more problems than it solves, crashing programs, not playing nice with Windows 7, and just generally behaving like a root kit, which no one enjoys. Odds are if you've had trouble running Aion, this little bastard is the cause. NCsoft recognizes this.

After analyzing our open beta test results Aion will not feature GameGuard at launch. We will however continue to pursue ways to effectively utilize GameGuard within Aion in the future. Right now we're focused on providing players with the best possible Aion experience.

Now the skeptic in me reads that as "right now we're focused on providing players with the best possible Aion experience, and we'll screw that up with GameGuard later," but hopefully NCsoft will step into the light eventually and just drop it altogether.

Aion Launch Version! [Official Website - Thanks Carlos!]

For an Eastern import, Aion has been making quite a lot of noise among MMO circles, taking the beauty of a Korean game and marrying it with a design meant to appeal to Western gamers. Judging from the preorder numbers NCsoft is definitely doing something right, though calling it the "biggest MMO launch of the year" isn't really saying much, considering the only real competition it has had is Champions Online, a superhero MMO from the same company that created the other superhero MMO currently on the market for NCsoft.

Each of the nearly 400,000 preorder customers gain access to server pre-selection tomorrow, as well as an early jump start that kicks off on Sunday, two days in advance of the official release. I have several different groups of friends who plan on playing, so I currently have no earthly clue which server or side I'll wind up on.

This is really where Aion sets itself apart from other Korean MMO titles translated for the Western world. Rather than simply change the language and call it a day, NCsoft has worked actively to create a different experience for Western gamers.

Though technically more of an open beta launch party, NCsoft's soirée held atop Seattle's landmark Space Needle was full of good food, a bit of excitement, and a bit of science. The excitement came when someone who works for Kotaku but wasn't attending the show on official business walked away with a Razer gaming keyboard during the raffle. I won't say who it was, but I completely envy her.

The science came by way of the two drink tickets I received at the door. It takes a heavy application of scientific principles generally formant following high school in order to figure out how best to get drunk using only two drinks. Thanks to my extremely low alcohol tolerance and the doctorate in beverage science that I do not possess, I succeeded readily.

On the way out of the party I was handed a lovely nylon gift bag, which would have been cool enough on its own, but this one had stuff in it! Glorious stuff.

Behold the bag.

Oh look, another Aion preorder disc. One can never have too many.

The best of the bunch right here. This is an iron-finished version of the Aiva figure that is being included in the collector's edition of Aion when it's released later this month. It's covered in a plastic bag, but it's still lovely.

Aion gives the Space Needle wings! Hooray for t-shirts!

PB&J Gamer Grub. It's actually not that bad, though my taste buds can hardly be trusted at this point. Perhaps they should rebrand it as 'You'll Eat Anything When You're Slightly Drunk".
<img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/kotaku/2009/09/010.jpg" width="563" height="1000"
Remember the limited WildStorm Aion comic book we mentioned earlier this week? Here it is.

And a Mana Potion energy shot. This is exactly what you do not need before returning to your hotel to go to sleep.

"Aiva's Story" tells the story of a young Asmodian warrior named Aiva, which seems completely appropriate given the name of the issue. Aiva has vowed vengeance against the Elyos who killed her family during a raid, and the comic tells the story of this quest for revenge through the artwork of Neil Googe and the words of David Noonan and Ricardo Sanchez.

The limited-edition comic will be given away free to folks who purchase the game at GameStop later this month, with a limited number of copies also available to visitors to NCsoft's booth at PAX 09 this weekend.

I like the idea of delving more into the fiction of Aion via a comic, but a limited-edition one-shot? That will never do. Full series please.

Up until now the closed beta events for Aion have all been weekend-only affairs, giving fans a brief taste of gameplay before shutting things down again, so the week-long open beta event NCsoft has planned should be a real treat. It runs from September 6th to the 13th, and will give players in North America and Europe a taste of the Western enhancements made to the title, including new skills and more Westernized character creation options. NCsoft will be maintaining a level cap of 30 throughout the event, so players will still have something to do when the game comes out.

After the open beta closes, players who preordered the game will be able to login on the 18th to pre-select their character name and server, reserving them in advance of the headstart program, which kicks off 2 days later on the 20th.

And that's how any free time I had at the end of September was completely ruined by NCsoft. Hope to see some of you in game!

Players who purchase copies of the Aion Collector's Edition or a first run Aion Steelbook Edition will be treated to a code that unlocks a special Aion wings emote in the free-to-play massively multiplayer game Guild Wars. The wing emote will be bonded to the player's Guild Wars account, meaning that any GW character on said account will be able to break out a pair of wings that Aion players will have to struggle weeks if not months to acquire.

The promotion will only last as long as the first run of the Steelbook Edition of Aion, so if you're interested you might want to get that preorder in now. Aion will be released on September 23rd in North America.