There are many free to play games out there on the internet and the quality varies, tremendously. However as of March 19th, Runes of Magic, published by Frogster, was released and surprised many people with it’s quality.

You do not need an initial purchase like Guild Wars, just download the client, patch it up and begin playing. The download process will vary depending on where you are in the world. Some U.S. mirror sites take forever while other download at a decent rate. So try a few and attempt to get something reasonable. You may have some success attempting to torrent a version of the client for a better speed.
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GamereactorTV filmed a video of the presentation for Aion. Very good demonstration of the Abyss and a few tidbits on stats. One thing that we learned was that depending on which way you’re moving you get a buff. Move forward you get an offensive buff, backward a blocking buff etc.

Check it out:

Today NCsoft announced an update that reflects the Aion Community Team.

NCsoft West is proud to announce that Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert and Martin “Amboss” Rabl have both agreed to make the hop across the pond to Seattle, Washington, where they will join Community Manager Liv on the Aion Community Team.

For the last few years Ayase and Amboss have been leading the community from Europe, so needless to say they are no strangers to the Aion community. Both will bring a tremendous amount of game knowledge and understanding of the MMO market to Seattle – their experience is invaluable and they will be a fundamental part of growing our community.

But what about Loic “Atreid” Claveau? Loic has decided to make the switch from Community to Marketing, and while he won’t be working directly with the community, he will still be very much involved with the community team.

To hear more about the path to their decisions, they’ve each written a blog to address you personally.

Check them out here:

Ayase

Amboss

Atreid

Also today a new zone tour was posted! This time the zone is called Poeta.

Poeta, a lush island in Elysea, is home to farmers and villagers who attempt to live in peace beside the beautiful Cliona Lake. They cull their wood carefully from among the trees of Daminu Forest, in accordance with the ancient agreement they have with the Elim, the tree-people who live there.

However, their peace has been disrupted of late by an influx of Krall, a violent species of sentient humanoids who have harried the Elyos for centuries on behalf of their draconic masters. Now, they are commanding their Kobold slaves to cut down trees and dig up huge swaths of ground in the Kabarah Strip Mine in search of the mysterious ore Odium.

The Kalion Mercenaries are out of their depth, but perhaps there is someone else who can help-a secretive hermit by the name of Pernos, who lives on Agaric Spore Road with only the strange mushroom people for company.

Lastly, this week Aion CM Liv confirmed rumors that the Friends & Family beta test would shortly begin. The following quote was posted over at AionSource.com.

A lot has been happening internally. Like knite said, I’ve been in a plethora of meetings trying to get the ball rolling on a bunch of projects (all related to community). I’m hoping to make an announcement this week regarding our EU CM, the website, newsletter and upcoming contests.

Regarding Livvy’s question – yes, I can confirm that we are planning to have an internal test limited to friends & family of NCsoft employees commencing very shortly.