Ragbag & Naming Policy

Maybe i missed it, but so far i did not read any official confirmation about how exactly the naming conventions will be for characters and legion/guild names for our retail version. I stumbled over an interview from Gamescom by the German fansite onlinewelten, that shows a video interview (ger) with Amboss (German CM). He confirms that character names can be up to 16 chars and have to start with a capital letter. Legion names can be up to 32 chars with the 1.5 patch. Special characters and numbers are not allowed, spaces are only allowed in legion names. So there you have it, hope that infos helps some legions to plan better.

Some might have noticed, but i added a few useful Aion resources to my link list:

Aion DevTracker
Tracks Aionsource and OnlineWelten (ger) so far, very clean & lean interface.
Me likes.

Manastone Simulator
For the number crunchers, a Manastone simulator to plan your
high-end gear properly.

Terhix' Stigma Calculator
I don't really need this one, since IMO the 8 slots i can plan in my head with the help of a few gfx, but i know people like stuff to play with.

Did you check out the new item sets within patch 1.5? Some of the set bonuses are really good. Especially the ones from the Daevanion Quests, which you can only do ONCE per character - ergo you need to level five chars and do this quest to get the set for one character. Tho i hear rumours the lvl 50 set can be obtained by a single character. Looks like there are several sets you can obtain in the 40+ levels. Some plate ones for warriors feature the new BoostHate stat. You can also see the new Dragon Flame Plate Set (available for other classes as well) - afaik recipes for this are obtained in the Steelrake pirate ship dungeon - that will gives additional fire resistance (supposed to help for the final boss in the Dark Poeta dungeon).

Talking about 1.5 and dungeons: Saw a damn nice HD video about some 1.5 boss fights and instances. Check it here.

Ragbag with Coffee Break

For those that did not follow my WAR blog: Ragbag tagged posts are a collection of brief information bits and pieces that don't qualify for a longer post themselves or just links i feel to share. On a sidenote, seems NCsoft has been to tied up with Gamecon to answer the question/problem the Baltic States have. From a PR POV this is really poor - how can it take them weeks to get our friends in Eastern Europe an official answer about of IP blocks will be enforced or not? *shakes head* From the threads it looks like Croatia will be able to play on the EU servers just fine. Here is another post about it.

There has been a mod for Aion that improved some of the blurry environment textures (which are created due to stretching the texture too much) by replacing .pak files with ones that handle the textures differently, but the thread has been deleted at aionsource it seems. The result looked much better, providing your computer could handle RAM for the textures.

Did you know there is a village hidden under Sanctum (Elyos capitol)? You can find the thread about this exploration adventure with pics here.

Have you seen the XP boost talisman (you get with preorder) yet? Seems it will be the Lodas's Amulet, which means you can reuse it for the XP boost.

Looks like there is already an Aion rip-off browser based game in Asia called Eternal World. LOL They really stole many graphics from Aion and it seems everything else is a rip-off as well. Some more screenshots here and here.

I saw a nice video of some large scale Abyss raiding here: part 1 & part 2.

Also wanted to give a shout out to the folks over at Aion Hungary. Right before the last closed beta ended i ran into a few of them and we exchanged some pleasantries. I could not really understand what they were saying, but think i read something about blogger, so maybe someone recognized me. If you did not know it btw, seems you can talk between factions by using the player shop signs, as the others can read them as well. Emotes you do can be understood by the other faction as well.

On a blog related note: A friend suggested i add a button to the navigation on the right so readers can "buy me a coffee", since he thinks long posts and detailed maps (like pandaemonium) are always done by me while i drink coffee and he wants more of those. So if you own a paypal account and one of my posts saved you a lot of time, now you can buy me coffee if you feel like it.