Hello Everyone,

I'd like to thank you for your patience while I collected feedback, comments and suggestions from various Aion communities' across Europe and North America. I used this information to create a list of questions that I felt needed to be addressed right away by our development team. This list does not cover all of your questions, I realize this, but I wanted to provide what information is available at present. The rest I am still working on.

I have spent the last week discussing the current state of morale within the community and the general excitement for the game with our production team and after reviewing the community report, one member in particular wanted to address you all directly. I would like to introduce you to Lance Stites, Executive Producer of NCsoft West's Game Production Studio.

Greetings to all,
As Executive Producer, my responsibilities include preparing and supporting the launch and ongoing operations of product for the "Western" market—including North America and Europe. I've worked with NCsoft since 2001, including 5 years in the Austin office and after a brief time away from the company I returned to spend almost a year in the European office. I've worked to launch or support multiple products or expansions, including the Lineage and City of Heroes franchises.

As you've probably seen, NCsoft West is undergoing restructuring which involves the relocation of certain key staff. We're building a dedicated production studio to support titles like Aion gold and the Lineage franchise. We've added Lani "Liv" Blazier as our Aion gold Community Manager recently and she is already taking an extremely active role within the community. Within the MMO community, this role is of vital importance and great to have someone who understands the importance of the player base and will be a tireless advocate of the community needs. Liv has spent the past several days gathering information and answers that are important to the community. We want to continue this open dialogue with the players and look forward to more as we move toward and past our Aion gold launch.

We really have an exciting time ahead of us in regards to ongoing updates to existing products, new releases on the horizon, and closer cooperation and coordination between the European and North American territories.

Cordially yours,

Lance Stites