Aion’s head start event has ended and the game has launched in Europe! Hurray!
Now it would be nice if NCSoft were to allow us to actually play the game. It’s been suffering from horrendous server queues all week long and many gamers have barely been able to play at all. In fact, the only time I got to play my pre-select main character (on the Perento server) was for 5 minutes at 6 AM before going to work…
That’s not exactly the best of introductions to a new MMORPG, but NCSoft promised to work things out. Today we’d see a new server and a fix that would boot idling players. But neither solution has worked out quite as planned…
This elusive new server has yet to be launched. It may still come, but for now there’s no sign of it anywhere. Even the twitter feeds have gone silent on the European front. This means all new launch-day players are stuck on the exact same servers as the head start players, further exacerbating the queue problem, especially now that it’s weekend.
This might not be so bad, had NCSoft’s solution to the idling problem worked. It turns out that while players can no longer sit AFK in their shop for more than 30 minutes, they can dance, run into a wall, or hit a training dummy to stay logged in. Result? No fix. Queues still massive.
I created my main character on Perento in the pre-select event, but have only gotten to play him once, at 6 AM in the morning. Every night when I got home from work I was greeted by 4+ hour queues, if I even got into the queue at all.
I did manage to create a character on another server when I got lucky and got onto Gorgos when the server had just rebooted. But that server, as the second lowest population server, now has similar queues. So I have yet to get even that character past level 6 (2-3 hours of play).
Many other European players have had a similar head start experience. Namely no head start at all.
The reason for these ridiculous queues is simple: there aren’t enough English language European servers. The Germans and French are doing fine, because they each have 5 servers. But the rest of Europe (a rough 70% of the European Aion community) has just 5 servers as well. You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that that just isn’t going to work.
Okay, so it’s been a bit better today. I just tried logging in and Castor only had about 500 people in queue. My servers of Gorgos and Perento each had 1200 or more. Not a lot compared to previous days, but that still amounts to about an hour of waiting. But it gets worse: this reduction is merely temporary.
The reduced queues are not due to anything intentional on NCSoft’s part, but due to copies arriving late for a lot of head start players. This means that we’re still seeing major queues going in spite of a large portion of the head start crowd not entering their retail keys (and therefore playing) yet. It also implies that Monday will be far, far, worse unless NCSoft does something substantial – like launching a new server – soon.
But all we’ve heard from NCSoft has been that they intentionally launched with too few servers. They want servers with fairly equal populations, which I have to admit, did work. And they do not want to have server merges six months down the road. That seems like a reasonable argument, at first glance.
Oh, but why is it that they’re not worried about the message they’re sending with that statement in the current situation? They might as well come out and say: Thanks for your money. We don’t think you’ll be playing past the first month or two. We launched with insufficient servers so that you’ll barely get to play at all. We think this might keep you around for another month or so.
That is the message they’re sending right now by launching with too few servers, which they clearly knew beforehand. NCSoft spent plenty of time promoting it’s 400.000 pre-orders, but didn’t bother to think how they could make a good first impression on all of those players.
A number of players will be quitting the game over this, and a lot more will be telling their friends not to buy it, because Aion just isn’t properly playable at the moment.
I think that the damage they’d cause by launching with too many servers now and consolidating them six months down the line pales in comparison to the damage they’ve caused by launching with too few servers. They say first impressions are everything. Well, my first impression wouldn’t exactly be positive had I not already played this game in beta.
Alright, I’m off to hop in a queue and maybe, finally, get some play time in. I’m going to wait it out this time, but only because I just finished Majesty 2’s campaign mode.
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I think I’ll wait some time before buying, considering precisely that; the server chaos at the moment.
But they do have high cards to counter the criticism: They SAY they’re fixing it and that they know what they’re doing. They’re one of the most experienced companies when it comes to MMOs. Their game is the most significant MMORPG this year, unless GW2 throws some unexpected fireworks and actually announces to release sometime in the near future.
So, my recommendation: Don’t blame NCsoft. Yet. Give them a couple of months for them to get their act together.
If they don’t, THEN blame them. Really hard. In the face.
Hmm, not blaming them yet: the game has launched, I paid to play it and I’m hardly getting any actual playing done with all these queues. I’d say that my complaints are warranted. They’ve already had a week to sort things out and the only improvement thus far is a brand new server that looks about ready to burst into queues of it’s own and queues on the other servers that are worse than they were on friday!
I’m sure it’ll be better three months down the road. But what about now? They need to make a good impression on the first batch, those 400.000 pre-order players, and they’re not doing it.
I understand they don’t want to add too many server too quickly, especially if they don’t know how many players will leave by the end of the month. But if they don’t add more servers soon, then they’re actually going to drive people away with this situation.
It’s already clear that the one new server isn’t going to cut it. It’s fast approaching server queues of it’s own, while the queues of the other servers have barely lessened. So where’s the next new English server? Because one will be needed, sooner rather than later.
Balancing server loads is fine and all. But the five original servers are about as balanced as they’re going to get. And judging by the way the new server is being hammered, I think it likely that they can add another server or two and see zero low-population servers emerge in the end.
I’m not sure how many players will leave by the end of this month, or the next, but neither is NCSoft. They’ll have their predictions, but for all we know they’ll be as off-the-mark as Blizzard was with WoW. (e.g.: Aion might actually grow over these next three months, rather than shrink as WAR/AoC did)
Before release their official news said something about player counts “having exceeded all expectations”, at which point it becomes very difficult or impossible to predict anything. The beta and headstart events were very crowded.
Because of these, I felt it was pretty clear that their servers would be faced with a flash-flood of players at release.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems they were caught completely unprepared and they’re unwilling to admit it. I don’t HAVE to play the game RIGHT NOW, although I very much would like to. But because they’re not doing it on purpose, I’m willing to give them a grace period before I send in the grenadiers to shred their capitalist buttocks.
Yes, but they also made that announcement nearly a month prior to the actual release. Surely that is enough time to come up with ways to counter the flooding of the initial servers beyond ‘just wait it out’?
Anyway, the new server (Kahrun) still doesn’t have any queues. I seem to have overestimated the existing player-base’s willingness to start over on a new server. Kahrun is hitting high pop more frequently, but I’ve yet to see an actual queue.
Meanwhile the other servers have seen growing queues. Last night Perento, Telemachus and Spatalos were all ranking in at 3000 players in queue. I’m not sure what NCSoft can do at this point besides offer server transfers and adding another server. Just adding a new server clearly won’t work, because too few players are willing to start anew.
Kahrun is pretty cool though. I’m definitely making that my main server. My level 10 Elyos Chanter is doing good and I’m finally getting some play time in
Character transfers will solve all that, when they implement it. :p
Is it possible to create two characters with the same name on different servers?
That will take a few months (according to NCSoft) so it’s not going to be of use anytime soon
And yes, you can create two characters with the same name on different servers. I actually have two characters with the same name on different servers.