Oh and one more thing
September 21, 2009 13 Comments
In case you can't read that, yes, it's a 7hr 30 min wait.
Aion launched this weekend, and I just wanted to point out that it has been having some problems apparently.
But hey, at least one counter-point.
I hope all you players were able to get in timely and enjoy the game as much as you hoped for. Best of luck and may your servers never crash.
About Shadow
Shadow-war 
The queues were pretty bad last night, though I have not seen one yet today. They are slowly ramping up the server cap, just like they slowly ramped up the servers during pre-select. In the short term it sucks, in the long term it is resulting in nearly completely balanced servers. Asmodian and Elyos pops don’t differ by more than 4-6% right now and each server is pretty balanced total population wise.
They are doing their damndest to avoid all the mishaps WAR had with bad balance and dead servers. I am all for it.
My problems have nothing to do with the game. They’re a mix of AT&T and NCsoft’s routing.
Yeah, I read through that, and the crazy amounts of phone time you had to spend trying to get it all sorted out. Nothing is worse than playing middle man between two companies, both saying the other is wrong.
By the by, Keen finally got the problem sorted out. It was caused by At&t all along. They finally had someone look at it and discovered it was on their end.
Nice, it’s not often a company that size will admit their terrible, terrible mistakes.
They never came out and admitted it, but once they gave me an actual PET Ticket # for their networking department and had them look at it there was only a 2 hour delay before suddenly… it worked. 😉
The only true admission of guilt came from a T2 tech who said “Oh… that’s OUR IP declaring host unreachable… let me get you a ticket sent in to our networking guys”.
So Aion didnt have a flawless launch after all…… shame 🙂
what MMO hasn’t?
I will say, no MMO has had a flawless launch. However, if I had been an early adaptor to a game, and found myself with a 7 and a half our wait on the outside, or even a 3 hour wait just to start playing that’s rough. I will say, the advantages of having one world sharded the way CO is seems to be continually presenting greater positives than I had at first realized.
If you planned your timing right (like getting in queue when you get home to be able to play later) it really wasn’t to bad. I had a three hour queue once, and was disconnect from the server once. When the DC happened, I was able to get back in game within 10 minutes.
If having a login queue was the worst part about this launch, then I’d say it’s gone off better than most MMO releases. When in game it ran smoother than WAR ever did for me escpecially considering the sheer number of people I was in zones with.
NC West announced that they will be adding one server by the end of the week and raising the population cap on the existing ones. They’re doing everything right as far as I can see.
I read the article where they talked about the staged population cap increases to stagger the population and increase playability of different areas. It makes since logically, but logic doesn’t matter to the person sitting behind a multi-hour queue to. I’m GLAD that they did, because it’s healthier for the game in the long run, and their approach is, in my opinion, going to prove to be the better way to handle the situation than WAR did. I think that in this regard, NCSoft learned a lot from Mythic.
That said, when you have a problem like this, even if it is one introduced somewhat on purpose, it’s still a problem, it still leads to frustration of the player base (though gamer capital is at an all-time high at launch, so they have plenty to spend). I read somewhere else (Syncaine maybe?) that the way that AAA MMOs are currently launched is obviously proving to be the wrong way to do it, and a paradigm shift really needs to occur in the industry to get it right.
@shadowwar
The one server instanced world is great for a PvE game like Champions but would be absolute trash for a world PvP game like Aion.
I am glad they are adding another server. I just hope they are as tough on server balance with it as they were with the current servers. Nothing ruins a PvP-centric game like an unbalanced faction population. WAR, I’m looking at you!
Sort of true. It depends on what you’re going for. I prefer to have multiple servers with smaller numbers of people for my PvP. Particularly in an MMO where it’s going to be a group of people that I play against all the time, and we can all evolve, develop a tight-knit community, and grow to recognize groups and individuals. However, if those things aren’t important, then a one-shard type of game would work great. Or if the game community overall is smaller, take EvE for instance. It’s a sandbox game, PvP is a LARGE part of it’s existence, and it has only one server, the caveat being that it IS a sandbox, and the factions are what the players make, not some pre-imposed arbitrary one chosen at character select.