Aion has been launched in both the North America and Europe. The head start people and the early buyers have now joined the game. Only … tens of thousands haven’t been able to join the game right away because there are 2+ hour queues on all servers in all regions. We have seen release of several new servers over the weekend and this seems to have done little to alleviate the problems. We have seen the release of the new patch that restricted private stores to 30 minutes before automatic log-out. Queues are still there. There are more problems people are complaining about, but let me just go over the queue thing first.
Aionic Thoughts has a very good blog post about what NCSoft has done and what are the repercussions. What they are saying is that, for a “PvP-centric” MMO, Aion has done what none of the other MMOs out there ever managed – created balanced servers where no one faction has the upper hand over the other. This will bring great competitions and experiences in the later stages of the game. For this we have to go through “queue hell” as they call it. I agree 100% with this.
What about the current stage of the game. In the first 6 days of the game 2/3 of people are in their first 20 levels. The rest are ~level 25. By the end of first month most people will be level 40 – not even close to end game where all that balance will kick in and create a great experience. Will we endure the queues for a month. Most people won’t, they won’t even renew their subscription.
I bet NCSoft people are well aware of this and I am sure that some solutions will be coming our way this week. And I hope this is true for Aion’s sake.
I remember the first days in WoW. We had the same problem on the most popular servers (and most others as well). Within the first months we got dozens of new servers. WoW is not balanced at all and this is not the way we want to see Aion go, but the point is that solutions were provided within the first few weeks and that is what we are looking for here.
The thing to remember here is that all of this is caused by a much larger number of players than NCSoft anticipated. Which means the game is good and people want to play it. Judging by the comments on Twitter, people that do get pass the queues are enjoying the game very much. Looking at our own visit numbers (that exceeded everything we were anticipating) the game is a success. But things are far from “money in the bank” stage.
I need to point out several other things that the Aion community is looking to get fixed almost right away. Most of these come from following Twitter, ironically the social network of choice of Aion community managers.
- There is no 24 hour in-game support
- There are no official ways for getting/passing information (Twitter is NOT used by everyone -the game has official forums that officials are NOT using “because of a bug”)
- There is a call for free days to reimburse time spent in queues
I hope NCSoft decides to be very generous with the free days – wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
This weekend, I was in queues for only ~1 hour in total. The server I’m playing on is Spatalos[EU]. I think the queues are getting smaller, day by day or I was just lucky.
In EU zone is getting worse. Friday I got 30-40min queues, saturday 90-120min. Today hell got loose: first 30min I was unable to get into the damn queue then i got a whooping 160min queue. WTF NCSoft fix this mess or after first month you will have ghost servers because of the huge wave of canceled subscriptions! They will have to realize that thay can have an epic fail burring the game. You know: huge queues -> huge numbers of canceled subs -> ghost servers -> canceled subs because ghost server -> server merge -> huge queue and so on until 0 players.
currently over 3hrs to get on Spatalos, this is after the new EU servers?! Its not a good impression, never had to wait during the open beta?
2hrs on Castor 🙁
4½ hours of waiting to get into Perento server, This was around 20:00 GMT +1 Time, I remember back in the day WoW had simillar system with queues, but that was just when they added queue system and the wait time was not over 2 hours, ever. This really need to be fixed…
I’m french, and playing on french server.
I usually come back home late after work.
I only have a few hours to spend on Aion every day and I can’t even play it.
This is ridiculous, I try to log at 9 pm and see that I have to wait 2 or 3 hours of queues.
I don’t think their people realize that most people work and they can’t afford to play at 0.00 am or 1 am because they have to wait.
I’ve played some MMO, and I never had such a bad feedback…
Right, the game is excellent but they offer a ridiculous service for a monthly paying game.
Finally I’m not changing to “new servers” if they ever add some more. My friends and legion are here, why do they annoy the communauty?
The channel system is nice found but totally useless if not implanted to every zone.
I would rather increase server capacity and mob respawn than that system