New items in the Allods Shop

Today they added new items to the item shop in Allods Online.

New items are now available in the Allods Online Item Shop!  Items added include the Dragon Hide Backpack, Large Bag of Crystal Chips, Waters of Life and Death, Elixirs and Rune Removal Picks!

Complete List of New Items and Prices

Dragon Hide Backpack – 1200 GP

Medium Deposit Box – 1500 GP

Large Bag of Crystal Chips – 600 GP

Water of Life – 1500 GP

Water of Death – 750 GP

Mithril Chest – 300 GP

Agility Elixir – 400 GP

Endurance Elixir – 400 GP

Stamina Elixir – 400 GP

Intelligence Elixir – 400 GP

Perception Elixir – 400 GP

Wisdom Elixir – 400 GP

Faith Elixir – 400 GP

Expertise Elixir – 400 GP

Finesse Elixir – 400 GP

Strength Elixir – 400 GP

Rage Elixir – 400 GP

Luck Elixir – 400 GP

Willpower Elixir – 400 GP

Conviction Elixir – 400 GP

Improved Rune Removal Pick – 500 GP

Professional Rune Removal Pick – 3000 GP

Please remember that Elixirs come in stacks of 5.  Rune Removal Picks, Backpacks and Deposit Boxes are non-tradeable. All other items may be traded, mailed or put on the auction house.

Have feedback about the new items? Let us know in the official thread! Please remember to keep all feedback constructive!

Am I the only one to find most of the items on the list expensive ? 15$ to reset my stats, 12$ for a 30 slot bag, 15$ for 48 storage slot (48 is not very much in my opinion). At those price I’ll just play a pay to play game, it’ll cost me 15$ a month and I’ll be satisfied with only paying in game gold or even farming for some items. The game is fun and all, but the cash shop is still a turn off for me, and it seems like I’m not the only one thinking that. I guess I’ll be playing until it becomes unplayable without the cash shop, and then move to another game or return to an old love.

Aion – State of the Game

A couple days ago, Lance Stites posted a State of the Game adress on the official Aion website. He talks about the incredible demands they get and the great launch with high number of players playing at the same time. He also talks about the server queues and what they plan on doing about it. Here’s the letter:

Greetings,

A lot has happened since I last addressed our community. We’ve launched our long awaited product Aion and have been pleased and challenged with keeping up with the massive player demand.

There’s no doubt that we’ve done some things very well with Aion: the product is polished and incredibly fun. We managed to deploy to North America and Europe within the same week and have experienced strong demand. As most of you are aware, this has come at a cost in the form of queue times. This is by far our biggest challenge and has led to some frustration as players wait to enter their server of choice.

In preparation for Aion’s launch, we ran calculations of our presale numbers with historical conversion ratios and expected concurrency numbers, which led to our determination of launch day server needs. In addition, we had a 25 percent additional capacity in hardware reserve and the ability to increase server population. We’ve further responded to the overwhelming demand by adding additional server worlds in all languages, and still we are working around the clock to address the incredible demand. For example, we’re seeing timeframes where 60 percent or more of our players are playing at any given time. This is a significant event by any MMO standard. Another surprising development is how long players are staying in game—I think that’s a testament to the enjoyable nature of the product.

I’m sure many of you are thinking, “That’s all fine-but how does that help me get in and play the game? What is NCsoft doing for me?” Fair question. First, we have already and will continue to increase server capacity to ensure that we have server space for every user. The reality of the situation is that some servers quickly become very popular servers, with lines queued up to enter, but other servers have plenty of space to accommodate players. Obviously, adding servers won’t help in this case. If you’re waiting to enter a full server, 100 extra servers won’t help.

So the next question may be “What about my character I’ve already spent time on?” Another good question.  I’m excited to confirm that we are currently working on implementing a server transfer service beginning next month. Specifically, we will offer every player a free one-time server transfer for a limited time to select servers. You can rest assured that addressing the demand for Aion is our biggest priority. And I know a big question is “Why did you not deploy more servers?” Most of you are savvy enough to realize that a healthy MMO server needs a robust population. We have to calculate our reasonable concurrency numbers in a week and in a month and beyond. The last thing we want to do to our players is spread them out so that the “massively” in “massively multiplayer” gets lost..

I read an interesting conversation about a safari hunter, and the question was posed to him: “Why don’t you take an Olympic sharpshooter that could hit a bulls-eye at 300 meters?” His response was: “I don’t care what he can do at 300 meters, what can he do at two meters?” And that’s definitely where we are now: the rhino is upon us. We’ve spent months planning and have researched multiple MMO launches, hoping to learn from previous success and failures. It is imperative to your long term enjoyment of Aion that we carefully manage the health of the servers. We’re looking at making sure the Abyss is alive with conflict and legions fighting for control in an EPIC war.

At this point,I would like to stress that you, our players, are our number one priority and that we are doing everything we can to ensure that Aion exceeds your expectations.

The community team and I will continue to provide you with progress updates as we receive them, and you can always continue to monitor issues, check on server status, etc. at http://www.aiononline.com.

In closing I’d like to say thank you to the worldwide Aion community. I am really excited about the response to Aion and I look forward to providing you with the best possible play experience for years to come.

Best regards,

Lance Stites

Executive Producer, Game Production Studio
NCsoft West

You can read it on the official site right here: http://na.aiononline.com/board/notices/view?articleID=121&page=

Altgard

As you may have realized by now I did in fact ascend on that evening. A couple days later I decided to go visit Altgard. So after going to Pandaemonium to visit my good old friend Balder and to ascend I went to altgard to start a new adventure, now that I have wings I can do everything!

Thank you Heimdal

As soon as I get to Altgard I start flying away. I flew around a bit to visit the place and get the thousands quests waiting for me there. Then, off I went, a new adventure was waiting for me!

Resting in high places

I flew all around Altgard to gather some Aether because I would start crafting soon and needed a lot of it. I decided to land on the back of one of those giant elephant-like things. Great view up there. I went to the Moslan forest after only to discover a Striped Gumi I was wondering if he tasted good, but the color wasn’t really appealing.

Does it taste good ?

Then I decided to go to Impetisium to see what it looked like. I was really surprise, it looks great! And the way to get there looks great too. But once I got by Black Claw Outpost I got killed pretty badly, so I decided to stop there and come back when I’ll be stronger. Now I’m level 17, almost 18 and I intend to go back and kick the Mau who killed me back then. My vengeance is going to be terrible!

Aion – Journey into Asmodae

*while waiting for my queue to finish I’m going to write my first adventure*

It all started yesterday, September 20th. Head start was upon us and everyone was excited to start. Then 3 o’clock PM showed up. All hell broke loose. Everybody was trying to login at the same time and the servers couldn’t handle the huge load of traffic at all once, so the Queue Line showed up too.

Hello Queue

After a long hours of waiting I finally got in, oh joy! My friend was already playing since he got luckier and managed to get in before me… He already had the time to get to level 4 and I was still a little level 1 human. I had to start leveling soon or else I wouldn’t be able to get to ascend before the end of the head start.

Yep, I speak french too...

As soon as I started leveling, I also started getting my gathering skill up a bit, I’m an Adventurous Crafter after all.

Gathering the hell out of that Azpha plant!

While on my journey I got a message from the NCsoft team telling me how to activate my pre-order items, which I won’t be doing for a while, so I rapidly ignore the message and got back on my quest to become a Daeva. Here’s a photo of myself while I’m still a low level priest, I’ll keep that one for future uses. (Did you see, I have line on my face… just like Ulquiorra.)

Ulquiorra Khyzar

Back to my adventure! As I was leveling my way through the first levels, I got to the Where’s Rae quest… That’s when things got bad. How the hell am I suppose to talk to Rae when there’s 12371592635 people trying to do the exact same thing as me at the exact same time ?!

Rae sure is popular!

When I finally managed to do the quest I was ready to look at what it is to be a Daeva and fly.

LORD Ulquiorra Khyzar

After that half my levels were done, I couldn’t wait to be a Daeva, level 10 seemed so far away, almost unreachable. So I decided to go take a walk by the cemetery and  pray to get level 10 by the end of the night.

Do you see something strange here ?

While praying I decided to start and finish a quest, might as well try to get as much exp as I can… Up until now everything was going fine and my levels were doing their best to come and go as fast as they could. But I got tired and decided to relax by the Odella Plantation, they have a nice view over there, too bad they don’t seem to like us, Asmodians, very much…

Relaxing with the enemy

After my little break it was time to go back to my journey and ascend to Daevahood! I got up on my feet and started walking and running again, doing quests after quests…

Did I reach my goal ? That’s for another story, because right now my queue line is done and I have to go adventure a little more into the world of Atreia.

Today is the day!

Less than 5 hours before we can play! I don’t know for you but I know I’m really excited! If you see Khyzar on Triniel don’t be shy to say hello!

I now present you…

Khyzar the Priest and Essia the Mage. I was a little impatient yesterday, but when I got up this morning everything was fine and I could create my 2 new Asmodian characters. Now I can’t wait to login. I gave myself a couple goals for the headstart:

1. Reach a level between 10 & 15
2. Get my 2 main crafting professions
3. Adventure throughout the world

I know there’s only 3 goal, but I can’t play much so I try to give myself something I can achieve in the little time I have to play.

Khyzar the Priest

Essia the Mage

This is the start of a great journey on which I intend to make a lot of friends, and kill a lot of Elyos! (on Triniel…)

Asmo on Triniel

Edit: Well, now it seems Triniel is full, I couldn’t create my character today, I guess I’ll have to wait until headstart. At least I know no one will steal my name since it was basically created by me hitting my keyboard I overreacted a bit there with my Elyos thing. Anyway, I can’t wait until Sunday now, I’ll have to play some NHL and watch Heroes. (btw, Hiro Nakamura > all)

Will this be the event that will turn me Elyos ?

More details on pre-selection

Today the guys over at the officil site posted a new articles giving more details about the pre-selection. Here’s the post:

Aion’s release is right around the corner, and our anticipation is running high! The beards and hairstyles of the character creator are groomed and lined up, jostling against each other in eagerness to be picked for your characters in this coming weekend’s Preselection and Head Start Programs.

Preselection is a benefit available to anyone who preordered Aion. If you are not sure whether or not you are eligible, simply log in to your NCsoft Master Account to verify that your game account is listed and your account type is notdesignated as “Beta”.

Starting 12:00 p.m. PDT (more) on September 18, 2009, eligible players will be able to start their game clients and log in to create a total of two characters ahead of everyone else. You can name and create these two characters through the standard character creator and be ready to play with these characters right when the game Head Start Program begins (but not beforehand). Preselection will end 9:00 a.m. PDT on September 20, 2009 (more).

Don’t miss this great opportunity to claim your character’s name before anyone else does. It isn’t too late to preorder, even if you have been holding out.

I’m surprised, I didn’t know we could create two characters. I just found my name for my chanter, and now I have to find another one. So make sure you’re account is not listed as beta on your NCsoft master account, if so you won’t be able to log in on the 18th and on the 20th for the headstart.

It’s been decided!

I will be playing on the Kaisinel server as a Chanter.

I will be playing a Chanter on Triniel

Asmodian or Elyos ? I still don’t know, I’m still getting the feel of both race. But for now all I know is that I’m going to play on Kaisinel as a Chanter, I won’t tell my name just yet, because I want to reserve it on the 18th.

Edit:

Well, it seems NCsoft decided to switch everything. Now Kaisinel is a west coast server. So we thought about it a little, and it seems we’ll probably be going on Triniel as it was our original choice. I’ve also decided about my alt class, it will be a Sorcerer. I know sorcerer are going to be overplayed, but in all my years of gaming, everytimes there was a magician or a sorcerer class it would be my first choice. I might as well continue like that

East coast servers

Today I read on massively that the servers for Aion will be on the east coast, wich i a good new for me since I’m on the east coast. But then I started thinking about those on the west coast, and especially everyone else from Australia, New Zealand, etc. That’s a hell of a long way to go for some digital data. I can only wish them the game is made well enough for them to play without huge constant lag.

Ayase tries to convince everyone that everything’s going to be okay. I trully wish everything will be, more people = more fun!

It is correct that our North American servers are located on the US east coast, and the game servers for many of our other games have been for a long time as well. If any Oceanic players present here have participated in our closed beta stages, I do however think that most of you will be able to vouch for that this added distance does not constitute a major problem when it comes to latency.

Our servers are well-optimized and Aion is in its very core designed to tackle challenging client-server distances. Aion might not be launching with explicitly designated Oceanic Aion servers from day one, but we will carefully monitor the situation and if we see a large number of players experiencing issues as a result from their distance to our game servers we’ll make sure to take action; to do our best to prevent any such issues from continuing.

You can read the full article on Massively.