Lance
Stites Talks About the State of Aion Today on the Aion Website discusses the
ups and downs of the launch of
Aion, NCsoft's MMORPG (thanks
IncGamers). The good news according to the NCsoft West executive producer is
the fact that the game is "polished and incredibly fun," and the bad news is the
server queues where players are spending too much of their time. He explains how
they so badly miscalculated demand for the game, and what they are doing to cut
down on waiting time going forward:
I’m sure many of you are thinking,
“That’s all fine-but how does that help me get in and play the game? What is
NCsoft doing for me?” Fair question. First, we have already and will continue to
increase server capacity to ensure that we have server space for every user. The
reality of the situation is that some servers quickly become very popular
servers, with lines queued up to enter, but other servers have plenty of space
to accommodate players. Obviously, adding servers won’t help in this case. If
you’re waiting to enter a full server, 100 extra servers won’t help.
So the next question may be “What about my character I’ve already spent time
on?” Another good question. I’m excited to confirm that we are currently working
on implementing a server transfer service beginning next month. Specifically, we
will offer every player a free one-time server transfer for a limited time to
select servers. You can rest assured that addressing the demand for Aion is our
biggest priority. And I know a big question is “Why did you not deploy more
servers?” Most of you are savvy enough to realize that a healthy MMO server
needs a robust population. We have to calculate our reasonable concurrency
numbers in a week and in a month and beyond. The last thing we want to do to our
players is spread them out so that the “massively” in “massively multiplayer”
gets lost..