"There is currently a wait of about five days from the time you sent your request. We will continue to do all we can to reduce the wait time." So says a portion of the support email we received from NCsoft over the weekend while preparing the notes for this week's issue of Community Detective. This week we're changing up our format just a bit to focus on a single MMORPG. Think of the reports as individual instances that could (and did) happen to any newish player at any given time. Some games will come out smelling like roses; others will look less professional than they probably are (everyone has bad days).
This one-shot weekly format is why we will be returning to each and every game on the list on multiple occasions and, over time, building up that exhaustive body of research and examining clearly observable trends. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's quickly examine our methodology as we tackle Aion.

As mentioned, we've decided to examine one game per week, mainly due to space and attention span considerations. Last week's pairing was heavily edited to ensure that it remained readable and relevant; there was an abundance of research and both EVE and Darkfall provided more than enough material to be the sole focus of the column. For this reason, we've decided to narrow our focus to a single title, at the expense of having a second title for comparison. That said, comparisons can be drawn with similar titles covered earlier. For example, Aion is quite similar in design and execution to both EverQuest II and Age of Conan, which we examined in our first issue.