Official comment on Gameguard.

heartless

Well, sort of official anyway.

"GameGuard is currently set to be used for Aion here in the west, although I couldn't say whether this will or can change at some point. We are well aware of your opinions on the matter and as with everything - we do what we can to satisfy as many as possible while weighing in alternatives/possibilities.

GameGuard is not our only means of fighting game abuse; there will of course be active staff looking after the game as well. This is of uttermost importance as we will have a very intolerant policy against EULA-breaking behaviour. We also have reporting tools in the game and are always looking into ways of improving those, so feel free to shoot if you have ideas on this. The community is surely the strongest support weapon in the war against bots/hacking, so we will also ask anyone playing the game to point out when they encounter exploits or botting or what it may be." -Ayase (NCsoft West Community Representative)

www.aionsource.com/forum/397975-post.html

Full thread (the comment is on page 10):

www.aionsource.com/forum/general-discussion/15715-nprotect-gameguard-na-eu-beta.html

Edit: made hyperlinks.

dstar.

Really all it will come down to is how they manually manage to keep it clean, how often they update and ban offenders.  People are going to get past anti cheat software if they really want to.  All it really serves is to deter some that might think about using cheats/hacks.  It's really up to the people in charge to take their data of offenders and ban them, like Blizzard does, or how FPS communities keep punkbuster ban lists up to date at least once a week.

I hope for their sake they do have good tools in the background that are reporting cheaters and they act fast.  Letting bots and hackers build up for a few months before banning will hurt this game and possbily kill its potential in my opinion.