Gameforge, Europe’s leading developer and publisher of online games, today revealed details about the account model for fantasy MMO Aion. With Aion’s relaunch at the beginning of February, the game will switch from a subscription-based model to a free one, in which payments are optional: the model known throughout the industry as free-to-play.
Volker Boenigk, Executive Product Director for Aion at Gameforge said:
“We’re looking forward to transforming Aion, one of the leading MMOs into a free-to-play model and thus giving lots more players the chance to enter this fantastic world. We chose our model very carefully to make sure that all valuable game content is available to all users for free. By adopting this approach, we are convinced that we are giving current players as well as new players a fair model and are very excited to hear about the community’s reaction.”
Therefore, here are the available ‘classes’:
Aion for everyone: each user, regardless of whether they are Starters or Veterans, will also receive full access to the item shop. Players are given the opportunity to pay real money to create their own individual character by purchasing, for example, unique pieces of clothing, rare pets or a new hairstyle. In addition, there is the Gold Pack option, which removes all the account’s functional restrictions and grants additional bonuses to the player for a limited time, which can increase the amount of experience points gained or reduce the cooldown time after instance completion.
Beginners: new players, called Starters, can simply start playing and will get free access to Aion’s entire game content right away. This includes, for example, races, classes, instances, equipment items, player versus player content and handcrafting jobs. The only limitations starters will have is reduced access to functions such as the chat and the auction house. These measures have been introduced to prevent the use of automated programmes (BOTs) and trading with real money.
Aion Veterans: active and former Aion players will be classified as Veterans and will enjoy free access to all game functions. These accounts benefit from bonuses such as reduced cooldown times for instances as well as increased PvP coin rewards. Following approval in the user settings of NCSoft‘s PlayNC account management, the account will be switched to the free-to-play model, meaning that Veterans can continue playing the game as usual, but that it will be free of charge from February.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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