Aion Early Start

I’ve been quite “busy” having fun in various games and other activities over the summer, and as a result I suspect I didn’t get around to posting things, will see if that can change a bit now though …

I honestly didn’t think I would have the time to post anything at present, as I decided to give Aion a try, after pre-ordering it to get into the beta way back when … it released for pre-orders this sunday, and I’m usually quite occupied when it comes to new MMOs being released, it triggers a rather competitive must-level-asap gene…

Now, the reason for me actually writing here now, is the way NCSoft is handling this lovely launch! Sure, people claim most MMOs are off to a rocky start, but really, the previous two big title MMOs in my book (Warhammer/AoC) both had a fairly decent actual launch, and seeing how Aion already has been running for a year in Asia, there shouldn’t really be any reason for it being dodgy.

The current issue is the fact that servers have insanely long queues to actually get into the game, I came home from work today and immediately queued for login, and found that there was a 4hour 30minute wait ahead of me. I sighed and went around doing other stuff for a while, checking in every now and then to see how things were coming along, then at 5minutes remaining, position 50ish in the queue, the client decided enough was enough, and just froze. Back out and in, why hello there, another 4 hours for you!

I tend to be quite favorable towards developers/gamecompanies when it comes to pretty much any software title. Being a developer myself, I know how messy things can get, and how extremely hard it is to predict issues/bugs and so on, yet, on this occasion I can’t seem to figure out why NCSoft hasn’t launched this smoother.

First off, they knew the amount of people pre-ordering, so they should definitely be able to scale servers accordingly. If that’s not enough, they’re employing the zone-instance approach in-game, which basically lets them have a lot more people on the servers at the same time in the “same” area than most other MMOs, again, if it’s a capacity issue, just spawn more instances! Then, the final straw has to be the fact that they let people pre-register 3 days before actually being able to play. Even if they blatantly ignore the amount of people who have pre-ordered, surely this should be a VERY GOOD indication of how many people would actually want to play the during the early start period!

Now, 2hours and 39minutes remaining, with the launcher still thanking me for my patience, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when the game is officially launched, and the rest of the population who wants to play decides to start playing… also, I can’t help but wonder if any anti-afk type tools are frowned upon, as it’d be quite tempting to just leave the character logged in while at work, to avoid having to spend 80% of the evening in a login queue.

For the record, I’ve managed to play the game for roughly 3 hours in total now, while spending 15 hours in queues!

Oh, and I’ll give the review at a later point, need to hopefully let this slide and give a relatively unbiased review based on the actual in-game features!