North American players have been experiencing almost unbearable amounts of lag/latency during day one and most of day 2 of Aion open beta. There have been various attempts by the community to pinpoint the exact problem, but I didn’t want to post anything until some official news were announced. Unofficially, Level3 and some other ISPs have had bottlenecks. I’d say there are a number of factors that were causing this. Lack of any updates for a very long time makes me think people at NCSoft scrambled real hard to find a solution and it may be in sight.

Sebastian “Ayase” Streiffert announced that:

NA servers will be brought down for maintenance at approximately 12.30 p.m. PDT (2.30 p.m. CDT, 8.30 p.m. BST)

This is one of the stages in our insistent work of sorting out the latency problems many have been experiencing. We will be using this maintenance to apply a number of tweaks and updates to our game servers.

We do not have an estimated length for the maintenance, but will do our best to get the game back up and running as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

PDT = Pacific Daylight Time (Seattle, WA)
CDT = Central Daylight Time (Dallas, TX)
BST = British Summer Time (London)

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As far as open betas go this one has everything. There is servers running away hiding in corners from the rush of players. There’s lag issues once servers decide to let some people in. There are bugs caused by remnants of code the programmers forgot to comment out. There are frustrated people lighting torches and heading to NCSoft headquarters. There are those that are having great fun and no issues whatsoever, completely oblivious of all the problems others are having. It ranks among better behaving open betas for me tho. The game is playable for most part and we have made 150 sreenshots for ~30 quests so far (being uploaded/updated right now).

Here’s a summation of things discovered so far:

– The game is prone to crashing because of GameGuard for some people (let me get on the bandwagon and say that GG sux)
– game decides to disconnect from the selected server and close the client afterwards (this is normal behaviour – when you are disconnected from a server you get booted from the client. Whether this happens at server select screen or while you are questing it dosn;t matter. I am not saying this behavior is pleasant – I’m just saying this is the way things are)

Here are some of the steps that can help you with open beta issues

The internetz is ablaze. MMO players of the world are impatiently waiting to log into Aion and sink their teeth into this new world. As you can imagine the machines can’t really keep up with all that pressure and there are numerous problems being reported. There is a “you have not made a payment” error for some and that is being looked into. The official beta forums have been put up and buckled under the rush of players right away, or as Aion_Ayase said on Twitter:

If you cannot access the beta forums, that’s because the equivalent of a smaller nation is trying to do the same at the same time.

We are only waiting to make #Aion the trending topic on Twitter and we have taken over the internetz. While you wait for the initial rush to calm down take a peek at our Elyos leveling guide that is surely going to shorten your time in Poeta. (Loved saving Tutty and going into that cave at the end). Also, make sure you keep our Aion quest database open at all times to speed up your leveling. We will be updating it as we play and create screenshots and information for the quests. The data you are seeing right now is from the latest patch but we will further enhance it with screenshots and custom information. Make sure you leave comments as well to help other people with difficult quests. Now if only the server hamsters were not on strike …