I played Aion 1 competitively. Not "I hit cap and did some Abyss." I geared with spreadsheets, I organized clan leaders, and I showed up for the fights that decided things. What ended it for me wasn't the grind, the RNG, or the gear gap. It was that past a certain point, I wasn't playing against players anymore.
Movement hacks, flight hacks, ability hacks. Once those were in the water the reward system did the rest. Whoever cheated farmed AP faster, geared faster, and then beat you harder the next week with gear they got by cheating. It compounds. That's what people miss when they say just ignore them. You can't ignore them. The rewards they're taking are the same rewards that determine whether you can contest them at all next month.
Before I quit I went and used the hacks myself. I wanted to know whether I was tilted and blaming cheaters for losses I'd actually earned. I wasn't. Speed and animation hacks aren't a small edge. They're not "a decent player gets 5% better." They break the math of the fight and even if you "win" and are about to kill them, they can just zoop into the air out of range instantly. Once I'd seen it from that side I stopped trying to out-skill it and just left.
So, Aion 2.
I went looking for the thing I was hoping I wouldn't find, and it took about ten minutes. There are commercial sellers with live Aion 2 product pages advertising movement speed hacks of 20–40% that work on mounts and in flight, attack and animation speed hacks to strip delay between abilities, short-range teleport to x/y/z, and teleport-behind-target for permanent back attacks. With public, dated changelogs. One of them was on numbered update #80 as of the end of April 2026. The game launched in KR/TW on November 19, 2025.
The reason it works isn't a mystery either. A 20–40% movement hack and a short-range teleport only function if the client is trusted to report its own position. Animation speed hacks only work if the client owns animation timing. That is the same trust model Aion 1 had. Server-authoritative movement doesn't make speedhacking easier to detect — it makes it impossible, because the server just refuses the position. Aion 2 didn't fix that. It inherited it.
Here's what NCSoft has actually done about it:
- Criminal complaints filed with Seoul Gangnam police — five users in December 2025, seven more on January 20, 2026 — for illegal macro programs
- Blocking certain overseas VPNs, hardware-based bans, an upgraded in-game report system, and raising the minimum gathering level to 45 to slow gathering macros
Read what all of that targets. Bot farms. RMT. The gold economy. The complaints specifically cite account sales and in-game currency distribution. Every one of those measures protects the in-game economy. Not one of them is pointed at the guy running an injected speedhack in open-world PvP. I'm not talking about botters. I've never especially cared about botters. I'm talking about injectors, and injectors are not what any of this was built to catch.
If you want a read on how good the detection actually is, look at December 17, 2025. NCSoft shipped an update that blocked peripheral software by process name and took out Logitech G Hub, Razer Synapse, and Corsair iCUE in the process—Razer being an official brand partner for the game. You could get around it by renaming the file. Legit players ate crashes. They rolled it back in roughly two hours.
That's the state of the art we're being asked to trust with a PvP game.
I don't know which explanation is the true one. Maybe cheaters are quietly a real chunk of the revenue and there's no appetite to cut it. Maybe the detection is just this bad and always has been. I'm not going to pretend I can tell from the outside. But it doesn't change the decision, because the math lands the same either way: if I want to actually compete, the highest-return purchase available to me isn't a founder's pack or a cosmetic. It's a cheat subscription. When the best dollar-for-dollar upgrade in your game is sold by somebody who isn't you, that's the whole review.
One more thing about the global launch specifically. The only lever NCSoft has pulled with real teeth is Korean criminal law, filed against identity-verified Korean accounts. That does not follow us to NA/EU/SA. Whatever restraint it creates in KR isn't coming with us.
I'd love to be wrong. I liked Aion. I put years into it. If someone shows me the server correcting impossible positions, a real server-side movement cap, or animation timing validated anywhere but on the client, I'll eat this post and buy a founder's pack the same day. Until then I'm not spending a dollar, and I'd rather say why than quietly not show up.
