First thing first – it is called football and not soccer! Second, NCSoft launched a great site with an awesome flash game to commemorate the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It is called Atreia Summer World Cup and you control a cute little winged Shugo attempting to reach as high as possible while picking up wings, points and time extensions. The game will be available only up to June 25, 2010 and there are cool prizes to be won if you submit your score. Up for grabs are Alienware M11x laptop and gaming gear from SteelSeries and there are also daily prizes available including Tutty ‘N’ Beans! For the full list visit the prizes page. Make sure you check it out because the game is really well executed and fun. Read the official announcement here or

(!go Serbia go!)

It’s been more than a week since patch 1.9 hit the official servers and I feel its time to draw the line and see where we stand atm. The patch seems to be well received by the community. I am seeing a lot more activity on my server. The PTS server feels all but deserted, which is good since people returned to their mains. We are working diligently on updating all of our database with the new stuff from the patch. In the meantime here are some stats that you might find interesting:

There are 208459293 experience points more in 1.9 when compared to 1.5.x patch. 704 quests have had their XP reward increased (and 146 have had their XP reduced!). That is ~296106 EXP points more per quest on average. There are at least 200 quests more than before, out of which 52 are the new daily quests. The quest with the most XP increase is For the BuBu Tribe (2470590 XP increase). There are also 1167 new items (weapons/armor/accessories). I am hoping to update the item database today with the new stuff.

On the official news front we can report that you can download the full 1.9 client from the following locations:

NCsoft Torrent:
ftp://ftp.ncsoft.com/Aion/Client/Torrent/Aion1.9.0.1_FullInstaller.zip.torrent

FilePlanet Direct Download:
http://www.fileplanet.com/204286/200000/fileinfo/Aion-Client-v1.9

GamersHell Direct Download:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_59678.shtml

As a celebration of the successful launch of the new patch NCSoft is treating us with a double XP weekend which starts tomorrow, June 11. 2010, at 8pm server time. HEre’s a snippet from the official news:

This weekend is the perfect chance to check out 1.9 with your main, or create an alternate character to experience what 1.9 has to offer lower level characters.