I do hate sounding like I’m whining or complaining, although there are times when there’s just not much else you can do, other than air out your gripes, vent your feelings, whatever. So, this is kind of long, too.

Aeria launched the Closed Beta “sometime” this week. I put “sometime” in quotes, because it’s not quite clear exactly when it started. On August 28, they sent mail to people saying something to the effect of “Next week, you’ll get mail”. That’s really vague, and to me, I’d rather NOT get mail than something that says “we’re not telling when you might not receive mail”.

The launch appears to have started either late Sunday August 30, or Monday August 31. They were sending mail to people, but it appears that the mail was not sent everyone at the same time. Some people got their mail early, some people didn’t get their mail until late. I know people had already downloaded and were playing the game before I even received my mail.

The interesting thing there is that the Aeria forums were already flagged if you were a beta tester or not. If your account could see the “Beta” forums, you were. If you could not see the “Beta” forums, you were not. So they enabled all our accounts at once, but sent out mail onesy-twosy?

You can’t use the example of “download bandwidth”, because the client is distributed via a BitTorrent protocol (DNA) , which is the type of thing where “the more, the merrier” applies. Unless they don’t allow seeds other than the official tracker; I don’t know, didn’t play attention to that.

So anyways, the beta is launched, and it seems most people are playing. They have three GMs, but right now, they’re in PAX in LA, so you don’t see the GMs too often. I guess for a closed beta that is Ok, but I hope they’ll add more GMs.

And speaking of GMs, I’m guessing we probably won’t see our favorite Sanrio GMs anymore. Which is a shame. I’ve posted a comment on Miyaws blog that we miss her, and I sent Abby a “miss you” e-card but I don’t know she received it. Well, if they ever do pop in, either in GM guise or incognito, my farm is always open to visits from them.

Secret crushes (and not-so-secret crushes) aside, one last thing I am concerned about with regards to Aeria, is their portfolio. It seems that many of Aeria’s games are hardcore PVP, so a lot of the membership draw is going to be geared towards those kind of players. How well does HKO fit in to Aeria’s portfolio? They do have other “casual” and “social” games, so I guess we’ll just have to see.

They also have too many forums, at least a dozen. There’s just too many, I’m not really paying attention. So why not post this over there, rather then here? Well, “here”, SanrioTown, is for everything Hello Kitty related. Unless the forums here die from stagnation, I will consider this the hub.

And not entirely Aeria related, it appears that the NA version is what we’ll see in commercial release. Paris and Beijing are open, and I’ve actually started on the Paris quests. I did go to Beijing just to see, but that was tough, cause at level 17, the mobs were close to one-shotting me.

Oh, and devs, if you happen to stumble on this, could you please reconsider auto-attack? And re-analyze vendor buying prices? The only quest I have left in London is the hamburger one, and I can’t afford a level 4 farm. I just never seem to be able to “break that barrier”.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 7:48 am and is filed under HKO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.