Everything was set! Beta testing begins at 9am PDT. Can you guess whether we were able to log on at 9am? Of course we couldn't. That's par for the course, though.

So, shortly before 10am, after several different kinds of errors, I was finally able to get into the character creation screen and begin my very first Aion beta character. I chose a male priest, and they are not lying when they say you have a LOT of character customization options! My priest looks kinda like a Latin Don Juan and in the starting area there was a tall, skinny black guy with a big fro. You can make pretty much whatever you want.

I teamed up with Dustin's warrior and we began questing. The beginning quests are kind of boring, as would be expected. There was a huge server load with everybody logging in at once, so you'll be happy to know that the beginning areas are instanced so you can actually get quest mobs and items. If your buddy is on another channel, switching is easy. We teamed up and blew through levels 1-5. 6 and 7 were a bit longer, and my priest is currently sitting at level 8. During that time, we really didn't run into any bugs except for a couple of quest item nodes that didn't work.

Then I decided it was time to create a mage. I customized another character and began the intro quests again. After awhile, I noticed that I wasn't getting any drops from killing mobs. Then I'd try to loot quest nodes, and nothing from those either. After about 12 different tries, combined with complaining in general chat, I knew that something was majorly screwed up. That was about 3pm PDT and I'm taking a break from leveling until I can loot things.

Stay tuned.