Aion : July Community Address
NCSoft West Executive Vice President Lance Stites has penned the July Community Address to all Aion players. In it, he reveals that producer Chris Hager is unavoidably out for a few weeks and then goes on to talk about the Aion team's work over the summer.
The letter starts off talking about the positive improvements to the game with the release of v1.9 and the recent server merges. He goes into quite a bit of detail about the reasons why NCSoft chose to halt free character transfers:
In plain terms, it is our duty and obligation to provide a fun and fair environment for players. I know this wasn't a popular decision, but the alternative would be servers with one faction totally dominating the other and a self-perpetuating situation of player discouragement and abandonment for the minority faction or no challenge at all for the dominating faction. Right now, all the associated Aion teams are working on a solution to allow character transfers to resume with appropriate limits in place to prevent radically unbalanced servers. In the interim, we will be selectively disabling new character creation for specific races on specific servers temporarily as another tool to help balance the factions in each server. For instance, if you're playing on a predominantly Elyos server, Asmodian creation will be the only race available for new characters. While we intend to enact this change only temporary, we hope that this limited selection process will have positive server balance effects in the long term.
From there Stites talks about the upcoming expansion, Assault on Balaurea (be sure to read Carolyn Koh's preview) and how NCSoft is strengthening its ties with the Aion development team with specific regard to 'subjective feedback'.
Head to the Aion forums to read the letter in its entirety.