Aion open beta is a con

So, the open beta for the new Aion mmo from NCsoft launched today and I was excited to give it a whirl. What a terrible experience. To begin, the website instructs you to download the open beta client. No problem. You also have to create a master account with NCsoft. Again, no problem. After a lengthy download, install, update, patch, etc. process, I’m ready to play. I click launch. I notice a small window pop up in the upper left corner of my screen that reads “nProtect GameGuard”. I don’t remember reading anything about that but figure I’ll look it up later. After GameGuard finished updating I’m at the login screen. I enter my username and password. No luck. I try a few different times. Nada. I check the support page of the website and learn everything is case sensitive. Annoying but not big deal. I get a message saying invalid ID. Back to the support page. Then I read that you have to add a game account to your master account. Again annoying, but not too unreasonable. I go to the Game Accounts page and find that no accounts are listed. All right, how do I add a game? After some searching I find one page that allows you to input a serial number to activate a game account. However, nowhere on the site does it list how to activate the game for the open beta event. I finally decide to ditch the company’s unhelpful site and use my google-fu. I soon discovered that you do indeed need a serial key to participate in the open beta. Funny how the company’s own website doesn’t list that fact (that I found anyway). How does one acquire a beta key? That took some more googling. Finally, I run across a website selling beta keys. That’s right, selling…for an open beta. Surfing some more it seems only a limited number of keys were given away to different sites. It seems some sites operate on a first-come-first-serve registration basis, and others on a key-purchasing basis, such as seen here at mmogarden.com. It costs $5 to for a beta key that will last 1 week. For an unfinished beta. And if the finalized per-month subscription fee breaks down to $5/week, that’s $20/month. Yeah, I don’t think so. I decided to forget playing Aion, or any other NCsoft game after the overly-complex nightmare of trying to play the Aion beta, and just delete my account. Guess what? No info on the website on how to accomplish that–surprise, surprise. I used my google-fu skills, but to no avail. It seems there is no way to deactivate or cancel your account, just to let it linger in limbo for eternity. Lovely. And the final kicker? The GameGuard software is an invasive rootkit-like piece of software that “hides the game application process, monitors the entire memory range, terminates applications defined by the game vendor and INCA Internet to be cheats (QIP for example), blocks certain calls to DirectX functions and Windows APIs, and auto-updates itself to change as new threats surface.” (via Wikipedia) Here’s the rest:

“Because of its method of actuation (very similar to a rootkit^[4]), it is criticized for being extremely invasive, often without knowledge of the end user. The software installs a device driver which is difficult to uninstall; even uninstalling the game will still leave some files hidden on the system^[5], but it stays inactive without the game. Most anti-virus vendors currently exclude nProtect GameGuard from their detection databases due to it being commercial software, however this was initially not the case, leading to system crashes as both the Antivirus and GameGuard attempted to override each other. When installing a game that utilizes GameGuard, this program may be installed onto the client machine without the user’s authorization or permission.”

Screw Aion and screw NCsoft.

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~ by Drysk on September 6, 2009.