Oh I have GW as well.  I've had it for maybe 3 years now.  It's amazing!  I love how you quickly reach max armor and level yet it's still engaging and has tons of things to do beyond leveling.  That's the only problem I find in MMO's.  They all have a 10+ slot skill bar and you don't have to be creative with what you put in it (compared to GW i think)  Anyways, thank you for enlightening me about Tabula Rasa.  Maybe I'll see you in GW 2

From my experience in the closed betas so far in the simplest manner:

"Aion is a GREAT alternative to WoW for those that are burned out, and has a much more compelling PvP aspect to it."

Delving any further would simply be my own opinion of the game. So there ya have it.

I agree here with ya man.  The lore of that game is truly fantastic.  So if your a Lore head and don't have nay interests in LoTRO, give Aion a try.

I was really looking forward to playing this game, but since I heard that their software uses GameGuard, I'm afraid I'll have to pass--not because I want to cheat, but because I'm not willing to part with some of the popular programs that GameGuard renders unusable, such as Daemon Tools, Filezilla, Google Chrome, VMWare, and F-Secure. It even somehow breaks Steam right now, according to the Wikipedia entry.

If GameGuard can get its act together, I may be on board, but until then, count me out.

My friend owns an internet cafe and I see a lot of chinese people playing it on their chinese account.  Okay, as far as the graphics goes, this is what i have to say.  The character is very well done, even very detailed drawn.  But...even if you have a very high end PC, the background as in everything on the screen that is not related to the character, that looks like Morrowind graphics.  Yes, it is better than WoW, but don't expect Oblivion or Fallout 3 graphics for environment.  For the hero classes, the fighting animation looks cool and very flashy. As for character facial animations, well they all look very asian.  you can have a character with blonde hair, but if you look at the facial features closely, you can tell it looks very asian.

As for gameplay, the  only interesting thing for me is that you can fly around. the entire game mechanics is not that different from World of Warcraft.  You go kill x number of monsters to complete a quest, or collect y number of body parts from certain type of monsters, etc, etc.  You can only fly in certain regions and only for certain period of time, other than that, most of the time, you walk/run around.  And you can not fly until level 10.  Means..you are stuck doing WoW style gameplay until level 10, but even with level 10 afterwards, the game play does not feel that much different.  Because if you played WoW, you will definitely feel at home in this game.  As for the story, well..it is just a variation of WoW, you pick a side and you go to war against the other side, and there is common enemies to both sides that you have to deal with. 

Is the game good, well if you are looking for something different than WoW in terms of variety, then by all means try  it.

Stop talking sense Annatar11 ffs!  This is DRM we are talking about!  Splitter!

The PvPvE mechanic is quite new, as well. For example, take a look at this:

http://www.aionsource.com/forum/general-discussion/20946-patch-notes-v1-5-update-shadow-balaur.html#post518431

There's actually an instanced dungeon where an Elyos group and an Asmodean group can enter at the same time and compete to get to the end boss, while trying to screw each other over.

Well, there is some pretty good gear from the Abyss PvP with unique stats (reduced damage from players, increased damage to players), but all the PvP is using the Abyss Point system so regardless of what kind of PvP you do you can eventually get it. AFAIK, the blue and gold gear needs silver and gold medals that you get from sieging the Balaur castles in lower and upper Abyss (lower give silver, upper give gold). But in essence, there's just one PvP reward system, and a few ways to play within it

As someone still looking for a worthy replacement for EQ1 and has been casually following Aion, are beta testers permitted to discuss just how integral PVP is to Aion? Personally, I just hate PVP, but in games like WoW you can play perfectly well on a PvE server and ignore consensual PvP (though I ended up hating WoW for other reasons). However, I tried Warhammer earlier this year and, though I liked many aspects of the game, quit after a couple of months since there was little to do at max level except PvP, which was also integral to gear advancement, since many items (even those obtained in PvE) had a PvP exp requirment to wear. My fault really--although I knew the game was heavy on PvP, I was not aware that that the game centered on it so much that PvE was almost an afterthought. (And since, for both gameplay and community reasons, I still advocate the original hardcore EQ model of death penalties, forced grouping, and relatively long leveling time, I though it was absurdly ridiculous that I could hit max level in Warhammer in under a month of PvE solo play.) So, can you play Aion and progress in level/gear while ignoring PvP or is it essential to the game?

Well, I got into a serious launch legion so yeah, I'm going to.

I can't really answer this fully. There's a GDC video where the developer showing off the game says the PvE end-game is meant to be balanced with PvP, and they've been adding new gear and recipes and new dungeons (see the 1.5 pach link I posted above, the North American release will be the 1.5 version). Since the beta windows are only 3 days every few weeks and level capped (going up to 30 in this upcoming test this Fri-Mon) we can't really see the endgame and how it compares to the PvP.

There are some Chinese Aion endgame boss videos floating around on youtube that you can take a look at.

I doubt its going to have that. Very few people still want to make games with that design after Vanguard crashed and burned so badly that it left an impact crater. Outside of the hardcore EQ crowd, basically nobody likes that model. From what I've seen, Aion has a lot of soloing while levelling, with some group stuff tossed in. I'm nowhere near the beta level cap though.

I know after having a night where we kept wiping in Ulduar due to Comcast being awful and disconnecting our tanks, a game that gave me some steep penalty to grind back isn't something I would stick with for very long.