The whole list of sites that will be doing EU beta keys giveaways has been posted on the official Aion NCSoft page. Do be warned though that some of these sites have already given away all their keys (Eurogamer’s 5000 keys were grabbed in a matter of minutes) and others haven;t started their giveaway still. Godd luck to all trying to get some Aion open beta love.

Fileplanet started their open beta key giveaway promotion but there seems to be some problems. Apparently the first batch of keys they gave away was wrong. NCSOFT German community representative (and later on Lani) said the following:

Fileplanet had wrong keys but will send out NA #Aion Open Beta keys to everyone who received a wrong key again.

In any case – if you are in North America you should go to this Fileplanet page and grab your key asap. I don’t think you need the paid subscription but it is first come first served basis so hurry up. UPDATE: Fileplanet is only giving out keys to paying NA subscribers.

Also, aion_amboss just announced on Twitter the first site that is giving away EU open beta keys – buffed.de (and their new aion site aion.buffed.de). The site is in German but google translated this

All you have to do is an email with the subject “Atreia” to the email address to write gewinnspiel@buffed.de too

Open Beta is only 5 days away. After a flurry of information from Gamescom and the open beta announcements, the official sources have gone pretty silent. I can imagine the NCSOFT offices being busy as a bee hive. But nothing special to report on. Calm before a storm of game playing :).

Things have been interesting on our site though. You probably noticed we launched our Aion giveaway. It was a very busy month preparing all the information and deciding on the format of the site. The giveaway is a pinnacle of months of hard work and we are extremely happy to see 70 people already applying in less then 24 hours. We already put up a Links page that we hope will be populated with all relevant Aion sources.

Although official sources have been fairly silent, the community hasn’t. Swizz the Guru started a great article set on his blog. He’ll be posting a different Aion topic every day for 21 days up until the retail release. The first article can be found here.

Several podcasts have released their latest shows over the weekend. Black Wings of Atreia released Episode #2 – Now Boarding Flight: Aion Airlines, 101! , and Aions World have their 5th episode out with all classes being over-viewed in depth.

For completely Aion non related news we give you the quote of the year (on when will Take Two release GTA 5):

“We’re not going to announce it. We’re not going to announce when we’re going to announce it. And we’re not going to announce the strategy about announcing it or about when we’re going to announce it either, or about the announcement strategy surrounding the announcement of the strategy.

“Any other questions?”