As of now, Steam says I’ve played AION 2 for about 15 hours. It’s been my go-to game this past week, so I guess the answer to the question posed in my previous post is “yes, I am enjoying AION 2”.

I am, of course, a simple man. I like games when I’m in that honeymoon phase where the game is new to me, even if the game mechanics are tried and true. I like to fire up a game and be entertained. If I can be entertained for free, so much the better, but I’m also an established adult and can afford to pay subscriptions. As an adult, I can decide if paying a subscription to a free-to-play game is worthwhile for me. I don’t feel like I “need it all” or complain that “everything is behind a paywall”. As a dyed in the wool PvE player, I have no concern if other people are paying real money to advance faster or look sharper, so traditional whining about “pay to win” in PvE modes falls on deaf ears in my house.

AION 2 is checking these boxes for me, it seems. I’m certainly seeing progress. I rolled a second character — which I don’t usually do — and have already almost gotten to the same level as my first character. Because of the density of the map, the mobs, the gathering nodes, and the destinations, progression is swift and unrelenting; I can’t not be pleased with my momentum. I don’t log in because I’m enraptured with the stories, but because when I’m looking for something to do, I know I can feel accomplished with AION 2.

As a result, I’m considering picking up a month of the optional $14.99 subscription. On one hand this is “giving back” a little for the as-of-right-now 15 hours I’ve enjoyed myself. That’s $1 per hour, a relatively inconsequential fee for time spent, in my opinion. I’m not considering it because I’m salty about “falling behind” — falling behind who, exactly? — or because I feel like I’m missing something. My decision whether or not to subscribe is simply to extend my enjoyment of a game I’m perfectly content playing without paying a cent.

The portions of the subscription that I might be interested in are the marketplace, which allows player-to-player selling, and the Kina-to-Quna exchange, which allows players to “sell” premium currency (Quna) for in-game currency (Kina). I don’t know what the transaction rates are looking like right now; player exchanges can either be sensible so that everyone benefits, or see one side trying to gouge the other. These things usually take time to shake out and since AION 2 has only been widely available in the West for less than a week, I suspect that we still have time before things normalize.

Because of the way the game is structured, I’m not sure if picking up a subscription now, at my character’s current level, is going to be worthwhile. Eastern games (in this case, Korean) have a tendency to compartmentalize features by level, and while a subscription would allow me access to the player market, I’m thinking that none of my characters are in a place where I could take advantage of the Kina2Quna exchange; don’t quote me on that, I have no idea how it works in practice, and this is just a feeling.

That means that if I don’t subscribe now, I might never. I am enjoying my time with AION 2 at the moment, but who knows how long that will last? Haters on various forums are already calling for the game’s demise on account of WoW Forever’s impending release next month, and they might be entirely correct that the retread will siphon off AION 2 players who are merely there biding their time. Without players, a marketplace loses value. If I hold off a month and see if I’m still playing, and if there are still enough people playing to keep the marketplaces humming, I might subscribe for a month and see how it goes.