Sweet, heres to hoping! I already have SoM, but the lifetime sub would be great.

Grenth please!

I have changed my payment option several times (including removing it while I was still using the free retail time) and I still have all my characters. Don't know what happened to Doc, but it sounds like something went wrong.

The other starting areas still exist and can still be accessed, they are just funneling everyone into the same starter area so that pop isn't as spread out. Regardless of whether this was a good idea or not, they are not "distilling down their new-player/alt-player experience to a SINGLE location" as youc an still play the elf or dwarf zones if you so please.

Its actually for a quest; you ride the flaming harpoon back into town from a cliff above, and it is unfortunately not a mount.

I'm sure if Apple really wanted the gamers they could make a stab at it and try and fix some of the problems. But I think they realize that, at this point in the game given that Microsoft will most likely never port DirectX and OpenGL will never be used by major games over DirectX, its a better use of money and resources to concentrate on what they can offer over the competition.

Mac support will continue to be an issue with any game released using DirectX instead of OpenGL. If Microsoft developed a version of DirectX for OSX, or facilitated its development in solutions like WINE (CrossOver, etc) then this would'nt be as big of an issue. There IS still the issue of the completely underwhelming support for a range of video cards by Apple. This is alleviated somewhat by the OSx86 community and some of its custom drivers, but from first hand experience I doubt given the opportunity they would hold up well in intense native game environments.

Not trying to defend them too much, but we dont really know how much control the "devs" for the NA Aion have over the source code of the game. It seems like a simple operation from our standpoint, but in a multi-national company I'm sure decisions like this have absolutely -nothing- to do with the devs, and are wrapped around many boardroom meetings and politics.

So you played (and paid for) a game for almost a year that you hated everything about?

+1 for listening to the Oceanic community and delivering, but
-1 for choosing one of the most popular and competitive NA servers. They completely threw a monkey wrench in a lot of plans by converting Nez to Oceanic time. Good intentions, but really poor implementation.