Aion - Any Good? Worth Playing?

[Enjolras]

Hey guys, I've been thinking about starting afresh on an MMORPG of some kind. I played WoW for a couple of years, but I'm looking for something a bit different.
One game that looks interesting is Aion; I'm wondering if there are any current/former players around that have an opinion on this game, and whether they would recommend it or discourage people from spending money on it.
If there's a free trial I might download it and have a look, but I'm interested in the opinions of anyone who has one.

Thanks!

[Rostum]

Aion was great for the first 25-30 levels, but then it turns into an absolute grind fest and the PvP is completely ruined by all the people who buy kinah. There's also pretty much no interesting PvE after level 30, especially in end-game.

Honestly, I'd give it a miss and maybe give MMO's a further break and wait for the ones coming out (Tera, FFXIV, Star Wars, etc.).

[Enjolras]

Good advice, I'm guessing kinah is the currency? If that's buyable with real cash thats a real turn off for me, as well as a lack of PvE content.

The Star Wars MMO coming out looks like it might be good, but of course that a while away yet.

[Loony BoB]

I personally always wonder if the best way to manage it is how it was managed in Eve - you could use outworld money to buy MMO money - sort of. What you could do, basically, is sell vouchers for subscription time in-game. So if it was done in FFXI, for example, it would end up with people buying one-month subscription vouchers and you would be able to sell that voucher (or whatever it was) to another player in-game and they could then use their gil mountain to extend the amount of time they can play the game - effectively, if you play the game long enough and thus keep up a good supply of gil, you won't even have to pay for the game with offline money at all. I really liked that system, because the only way it made money was helping out people who would otherwise be leaving the game due to not being able to afford carrying on playing. I never played Eve long enough to be able to do that sort of thing, mind you, but it still seemed to me to be a great idea.