I was an Aion governor, and here's my take on why it didn't do so well.

1. System requirements. The game required a much more powerful machine to play on decent settings then WoW did. So there were less possible customers, which goes into my 2nd reason.

2. Fort system. Great idea, poorly done. Due to game's fairly high system requirements and game engine, when too many players were on screen, performance dropped to the point of barely playable. Combined with hitching from characters going in and out of max view distance, on a fort raid with 100's of players in the same spot, many people were unable to really play one of the most important parts of the game smoothly, in turn, unsubbing.

3. Forced PvP. The majority of MMORPG players enjoy PvE games over PvP games. Since Aion didn't have a "PVE Server" option, the game appealed to PvP oriented players, further reducing their possible player base.

4. PvP punishment for being killed. If you died in any way, even ganked by 10+ people, you were stripped of earned points. This made people avoid general pvp, in turn making pvp scarce for people wanted to find it. PvErs felt harassed, and PvPers found the lack of action very boring. Due to the ranking system, it was kind of needed to lose AP (To give other players a chance at climbing ranks) but at the same time, no one likes losing things due to pvp. So the system promoted avoiding pvp or at the very least, staying in large groups so you had a lower chance of dying. (Personally I would have preferred a pvp system where you were rewarded for winning, but not punished for dying, in turn promoting lots of pvp, but I'm not a dev, and I don't know how you could make that work with the Ranking / transformation system.)

5. PvE Gear grind fest. In aion, gear was extremely important for PvP, but getting the gear was extremely hard for the average player. You could go 5 or 6 dungeon runs and only see 1 gold. People felt PvEing was more like a punishment, because you could go dozens of runs and not even get a single gold for yourself. This also caused people to spend the majority of their time hiding in PVE instances, desprately trying to get gear, in turn making PvP even harder to find (Most of the server was either avoiding PvP or spending the bulk of their time doing PVE trying to get gear to be better at PvP lol)

6. PvE level grind-fest (I personally didn't feel it was that bad, but I'm an original 1999 EQ player, so anything seems "fast" to me haha), but I know many people felt leveling up took way too long.

I personally enjoyed the game a lot (obviously). I loved doing fort raids and I thought the transformation idea was pretty cool. Combined with much better graphics and animations when compared to other MMOs at the time, and the RvR system, I really liked the game.

But looking back it's easy to see why it didn't do so well with the general MMO community.

All u had to do in aion was roll glad and u win at everything :)

Tera is gonna be the game until Everquest Next releases then all mmos fail including Tera sadly

LOL, have any of you actually played Aion in the last 6 months?