New official Notice about Server Maintenance

We are bringing the servers down at 3 a.m. PDT (more), September 30, 2009 for maintenance. During this maintenance, we will apply the latest patch 1.5.0.8 across all North American and European servers.

The maintenance is expected to take roughly 2 hours.

Aion will during the next maintenance period receive a new update addressing a couple of common game and localization issues. They are right now focusing on getting rid of critical game bugs and will later during the day roll out polishing touches for our French and German versions of the game. Keep reporting issues and bugs as you encounter them through the appropriate channels, and they will track them down and squash them as quickly as possible.

The patch is available for download via the NCsoft Launcher, and the patch size is at 5.3 MB. Head on over to the Patch page if you want to get the complete rundown of improvements and fixes.

Note: The French and German parts will not be patched during the same maintenance window as the rest of the patch items, but rather in a separate batch.

We have recently noticed that Aion Trade brokers are stealing from us! Our items have been sold but we don’t get any money. This is really frustrating when you realize that the item was blue one. If you have encountered this issue please go to help.ncsoft.com, create an account, and submit a ticket. Also, make sure to provide any info you have when contacting Customer Support. This is currently a high priority bug.

If you want to help Aion team to keep the servers bots-free keep them reporting. Aion GM team has been very busy lately and working on becoming quicker and more responsive. To report a bot just use /AutoHuntingReport.

Also if you are tired of spammers and want to avoid their whispers type /anon in chat.

Another problem are hackers. If you get any e-mail with message like this one delete the email and not fall for this:

Someone at 211.115.185.42 has reset your Aion Game Account password. To confirm this change please login and verify the changes here….

You should know that NCSoft will never ask you for your user account directly. In this case everything is a bit more confusing since they’re actually copying NCSoft login interface. Make sure that “secure.ncsoft.com” ALWAYS is the domain present up in the address bar when you’re logging into your user controls.

Monday has brought two new European Aion servers to life – [ENG] Kahrun and [FRA] Deltras. Along with the announcement of new servers there was an interesting addition to the news:

The ability to transfer your characters from one server to another is a feature we are working on, but it is not ready for implementation yet. We are hoping to introduce character transfers in a couple of months’ time.

Character transfer is than incoming… Another piece of news for our European Aion players, especially the German speaking ones … Aion Powerwiki site has been released in German as well. You can find a whole lot of information and your character and server stats on the German version of the site now as well. The address is:

http://powerwiki.de.aiononline.com/aion/

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.

Dear member of the Aion community,

Do you have a need to share your experiences in Atreia? Do you want to tell the world about your Abyss experience from last night? You have an inexplicable urge to share your thoughts with thousands of readers? We’ll help you spread your wings. Join aion.mmorpg-life.com, by becoming one of our site’s contributors, and your articles will become available to tens of thousands of visitors daily.

Find out more …

Just a quick note:

New server [GER]Nerthus is going live in a bit. NA East Coast, English European and French servers are coming.

Aion_ayase

Celebrating yesterday’s retail release of Aion in Europe, we’re proud to announce that we have made available our quest database in German as well. You can see the quests in German at http://aion.mmorpg-life.com/category/quest/de/. You can also use our advanced quest search in the sidebar in German if you click on the little flag there. Regular search should also find German articles as well.

We have just started our internationalization of the quest database, but we thought we better provide you with these even with some English left, rather than leave you with no help in German whatsoever. We will be trying to introduce the French version of our quest database as well in the upcoming days.

Here’s our official announcement to the German community:

Liebe deutsche Aion-Spieler!

Obwohl wir wissen, dass wir mit Aionsource.com keine Konkurrenz machen können, möchten wir Euch mitteilen, Datenbankquests auf Deutsch gemacht zu haben, mit Bildern und eingehenden Erklärungen dazu. Die Internationalisierung der Site ist noch im Werden. Wir hoffen jedoch, unsere Site wird Euch auch in jetziger Form beim Spielen behilflich sein.

Freundlicher Gruss von,

Aion Life