Hello to whoever has stumbled upon this forum, and consequentially this post. I go by DimmerMeerkat in most online spaces. In Aion 1, I was more commonly known as Isceroth, so I’ve chosen that name again for now. I think I played from 2009 to 2012, or thereabouts. I was an avid RPer, and I still am to this day in different mediums, though I’ve had some trouble finding MMORPGs which reliably hold my interest to do that in. I used to be a moderator for the old Aion RP forums as well, and quite active on NC’s Aion forums, where I used to do some lore-sleuthing.
MMO-RP History
My experience with RP inside of MMORPGs is… lengthy, but not impressively varied by any means. My first MMO-RP experience was in Final Fantasy XI when I was a teenager. I quit in 2005 as I was transitioning from high school to college, and didn’t have a game-of-choice for a few years. I was then made aware of Aion around 2008, and it sucked me in from beta and thereafter.
In Aion, I never intended to take up a leadership position, but I ended up falling into it because MMO-RP was something I was really passionate about. I didn’t want to see my first legion dissolve when our leadership lost interest in the game, so I volunteered to carry the mantle. I inherited the Asmodian legion, Symphony of Storms, on Israphel. We hosted a few community RP events, and tried to do a bit of cross-faction RP as best we could as well. I have stayed in contact with very few from that old legion and the wider community around it, with life ever being lifey, and lost contact with entirely too many.
The next MMO I moved onto was ArcheAge. I ended up founding the unofficial RP forums at the time (which still exist but I haven’t renewed the domain). There, I was known as Wanderer (AKA Vahn), where I again accidentally fell into leadership after the pseudo-dissolution of another RP guild, and went on to co-found the Haranyan RP guild, Devigard, on Tahyang. ArcheAge was my next big MMO where I was involved for years–so you can imagine I’m panicking a little about the close releases of Aion 2 and ArcheAge Chronicles.
I also briefly RPed on Final Fantasy XIV, though it didn’t hold my attention very long. I wasn’t involved enough for likely anyone to recall who I was there, but I was on Balmung at the time of ARR’s release.
Then, I eventually co-founded a guild for Ashes of Creation called Horizon, after bouncing around in a few different RP guilds. That game went awry before it could be completed, but I’m still involved in that community, still looking for something we can all enjoy together, and still doing Discord RP in our own little homebrew Ashes of Creation campaign. I’m hoping to get a few to join Aion 2 and see if it fills the void the untimely death of Ashes of Creation left a lot of us with.
The Plan for Aion 2
I’ve played a bit of Aion 2 on Taiwanese servers, and I’ve enjoyed the solo experience. I haven’t joined a legion nor have I played with other players yet. For RP, I’m hoping that NC will add the ability to toggle walking. I can live without /em or /me, as I got on fine in Aion and ArcheAge without that function, but the ability to simply walk is surprisingly more important than I realized it would be. I’ve got early access, though life is a bit busy, so I likely won’t be going full throttle from Wednesday morning onward as I might’ve done back in the day.
I have no idea how dialed-in I’ll be, but I hope the game will capture my attention like its predecessor. MMO-RP as a sort of subculture within the wider MMORPG gaming community has changed quite a bit, and I’m bordering on “old man” status now, so I might be a little curmudgeonly and old-fashioned about it, but I’ll hopefully adapt.
I am trying to make sense of Aion 2’s lore, especially since it contradicts quite a bit of Aion 1’s lore. With my current understanding of it, I am thinking of approaching Aion 2 as though it is an alternate timeline. The events of the Cataclysm this time around set us on a different path than they did in the OG game. My ‘main’ was alive at the time of the cataclysm in the OG, so I may end up playing him again, but not as a continuation of his Aion 1 self. Anyway, his story had a very final ending, and I am satisfied with that. For now, I’m loosely rolling with that idea. Same guy, but different fate.
If I can get at least a few members of Horizon to join me in Aion 2, then I might start recruiting and hosting events. If not, I will probably just seek to join someone else’s RP or RP-adjacent legion or guild. Either way, I want to be connected with the larger RP community, making plans to do things together that might not always be simply grinding through content. I am very much the kind of RPer that is content to stand around and RP. I am one of those “tavern RPers” you might have heard about, but I also am prone to setting up big community events and the occasional table top-esque campaign or storyline.
On the Lore and RP
I am going to do a bit more lore sleuthing eventually, and hopefully post what I manage to puzzle out here. I haven’t put anything together yet, as I’m not positive that the English text in the Taiwanese version of the game will be exactly the same as the official localization. But, suffice to say, the lore in Aion 2 makes a notable departure from the lore of Aion 1. I’ve struggled to make sense of it, so I can only imagine others have as well, but we’ll figure it out. Until then, I’m trying to go into it with an open mind.
In recent MMOs, I’ve found that the old stereotypes about RPers are still alive and well, but the RPers themselves are a little scattered. Furthermore, people who are curious about RP, in my somewhat insular experience, have been a bit too shy to try. This time around, I’d love to try to appeal to those folks who haven’t tried yet, and encourage them to give it a shot. At the same time, I know the landscape has changed, so I’m still sort of trying to navigate it myself, as a relic of decades past… possibly a bit cemented in my ways.
Content, and Such…
I used to be… sort of a content creator, if you could call it that. Moreso, I just enjoyed slapping videos together to some music and calling it a day. I participated in some video contests for both Aion and ArcheAge and came out with some stuff, but I never really had the charisma or confidence to be a streamer, or anything of the sort. (If you find my Twitch, it’s almost completely unused.)
If you’re at all curious or interested, I have a YouTube. There, I have an Aion Playlist and an ArcheAge Playlist. It’s mostly all music videos and assorted collections of clips. I’ve put together just one Aion 2 video so far, which was me trying very hard to recreate Isceroth to the best of my ability, sped up 28x because it’s not very fun to watch anyone poke around making extremely minor adjustments in the CC for an hour and a half. Making videos going forward might be a touch difficult as I now play on an ultra widescreen display and uploading in that aspect ratio looks real bad on most other displays. I suppose I can always do some cropping.
I don’t do it to try to make money. I just do it for fun. I don’t quite have the discipline to turn it into a hustle, and I’m not sure I’d want to.
And the Rest
Outside of gaming, who I am is something I’m inclined to only share with friends, and I’m less inclined to get too personal on a widely open forum. Hopefully, if Aion 2 goes well and the RP community grows with it, friendships will be born and develop in time.
I’m a bit long-winded as you can prolly tell… except in RP. I kind of shy away from purple prose in favor of keeping the pace of RP steady and not muddying it up with meta details and too-flowery language.
Thank you again for taking on the mantle of SoS back in the day.