What will you do until Aion comes out of the closet?

Don't say "play L2" or I'll rape you with my French accent!

From A Letter to Our Fans:

Hello Everyone,

I'd like to thank you for your patience while I collected feedback, comments and suggestions from various Aion communities' across Europe and North America. I used this information to create a list of questions that I felt needed to be addressed right away by our development team. This list does not cover all of your questions, I realize this, but I wanted to provide what information is available at present. The rest I am still working on.

I have spent the last week discussing the current state of morale within the community and the general excitement for the game with our production team and after reviewing the community report, one member in particular wanted to address you all directly. I would like to introduce you to Lance Stites, Executive Producer of NCsoft West's Game Production Studio.

Greetings to all,

As Executive Producer, my responsibilities include preparing and supporting the launch and ongoing operations of product for the "Western" market—including North America and Europe. I've worked with NCsoft since 2001, including 5 years in the Austin office and after a brief time away from the company I returned to spend almost a year in the European office. I've worked to launch or support multiple products or expansions, including the Lineage and City of Heroes franchises.

As you've probably seen, NCsoft West is undergoing restructuring which involves the relocation of certain key staff. We're building a dedicated production studio to support titles like Aion and the Lineage franchise. We've added Lani "Liv" Blazier as our Aion Community Manager recently and she is already taking an extremely active role within the community. Within the MMO community, this role is of vital importance and great to have someone who understands the importance of the player base and will be a tireless advocate of the community needs. Liv has spent the past several days gathering information and answers that are important to the community. We want to continue this open dialogue with the players and look forward to more as we move toward and past our Aion launch.

We really have an exciting time ahead of us in regards to ongoing updates to existing products, new releases on the horizon, and closer cooperation and coordination between the European and North American territories.

Cordially yours,

Lance Stites

Executive Producer, Game Production Studio
NCsoft West


The Community Team is committed to listening and responding to your needs. Please find below the answers to 5 questions that I wanted to make you had answers to sooner, rather than later.

1) When will Aion be released in North America/Europe?

We expect to ship Aion in NCsoft West territories in the fall of 2009.

2) Why is localization taking so long?

The localization effort is enormous, with a vast amount of content. Aion is not simply being translated, a team of dedicated content writers are re-creating the written dialogue and content to provide AAA quality and to ensure that it is culturally relevant for our audience. We are going to do this launch "right" rather than fast.

3) Has a date been set for our Preview Event?

While we are not ready to release specific details regarding the Preview Event, we can tell you that participants will include those who signed up at last year at FJV, PAX and Leipzig. We will also be extending invites to long time NCsoft customers and dedicated legions. As we get closer, we will be offering more opportunities for fans to get signed up for this exclusive event.

4) Will there be community support for Europe?

Absolutely. We realize that many in the community were surprised with our announcement regarding the consolidation of the North American and European operations. We are deeply committed to our European community and will have native speaking Community Coordinators for our supported languages (English, German & French).

5) Will there be servers for each region?

We will have servers physically located both in Europe and North America for launch.

We know you have more questions and they are being addressed. My goal is to have another update for your within the next few weeks.

Thank you,

Liv
Community Manager, Aion

EDIT: copied entire letter to accommodate those at work.

GAH! Can't open that letter here at work. Assuming that's Liv's address to the community. However, I am playing L2 private server, CS:S, Wc3, Starcraft, Guild Wars, occasionally WoW for 2v2 arena, and watching lots of movies and tv series.

GOOD TIMES.

I'm having a kid. My time is limited anyways at present. I'm also getting out of the USAF and starting my own business.

My hopes are to be as powerful IRL as I am in the virtual world, lol.

In the meantime, I will hang out and play some games casually with all of you. Aion will be a game that I go into with a bit more discipline. Truth be told I will be busy IRL possibly at release, so I am happy this is going to be a bit more casual in terms of grind.

Grats on the kid.

Why thanks, Oriax.

How about you? What are you going to be doing? That's the question.

Fall 2009 is a bit of a wait.

Tyr-Deland wrote:

Why thanks, Oriax.

How about you? What are you going to be doing? That's the question.

Fall 2009 is a bit of a wait.

When they say Fall, I think of mid-October so yes, it will be quite the wait. Thus, I was thinking of sticking with AoC at least until my sub runs out. I have about another 4 months pre-paid on it, I think. After that, I can either renew or play something else, while helping maintaining this forum, etc...

zomg, another kid? how far along?

3 months. I am pumping out alts, IRL.

Gratz D. As for me, Not too sure, i deleted something in the l2 private server system folder that showed up as a trojan, and now i can't run the client anymore. And i'm way too lazy to reinstall it, so i think i'm done with the private server haha. So i don't know what I'm gonna do, but i'm open for ideas.

AoC's graphics really are amazing. If it had more content, a better support/QA department, it would be completely awesome.

cross platfrom penis fighting guild, imo.

AoCs dev team is pretty awsome, even tho they focus too much on dx10 sht for that game. Considering the content they have been adding in, without making the playerbase buy expansions its great.