AION headstart floods servers

By Robert Purchese Published 21 September, 2009

Queues lasting several hours.

AION servers are already overcrowded as hundreds of thousands of pre-order customers are given headstart access to the MMO, according to widespread reports.

Doors opened yesterday, welcoming an enthusiastic 400,000 fans who have already put their money where their mouths are.

The crush, however, has resulted in queue times of several hours to gain access to the limited number of available servers. One poor chap faced a wait of over seven hours, which left him plenty of time to take a screenshot and mail it to Kotaku. Queue size has bulged to over 3000.

Queues are not the only problem - the flood of newcomers means starting areas are overcrowded and quest-specific monsters are in high demand, resulting in crowded spawns.

AION goes public proper on Tuesday in the US and on Friday here in Europe. Let's hope NCsoft can cope. We're contacting the MMO publisher for comment on the weekend troubles.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (24) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Dizzy #1 2 years ago

    In before the "worst launch ever" crybabies.

    This always happens when an MMO launches.... I am now a big fan of the instanced one big virtual server architecture for MMOs.

  • blender #2 2 years ago

    nerdy games

  • Freek #3 2 years ago

    Strange, especially since this always happens. At a certain point somebody must see the pre-order count, compare that to the amount of players the servers can handel and go "this isn't going to work".

  • Gaol #4 2 years ago

    The queue times shown are estimates; I was given 4 hrs last night but got on in 90 min. Server performance once you do get on is generally excellent.

    Same problem all MMOs launching face - everyone playing all at once. They could probably do with another couple of English language servers however you don't want to put too many up and then when congestion eases you get a WAR situation with servers too quiet.

  • spudsbuckley #5 2 years ago

    you get a WAR situation with servers too quiet

    Give it a month or two and they'll be deserted like every other new MMO anyway.

  • Zeali #6 2 years ago

    This happens always on MMO launch. On the good side. AION didn't crash and the servers kept going.

    When you try to remember WoW or WAR launch the server crashed constantly and it was rare if you could play more than 2 hours before new server crash.

  • Bearintraining #7 2 years ago

    I had no queues and got in 15mins after the servers went up. Played smoothly, no lag no server crashes. Awesome launch.

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #8 2 years ago

    sadly i'm agreeing with spud here - the core problem is that players only really want to play the 'next/current big thing' on the market as somehow many beleave it gives them some 'cred' in real life - but seeing as players either burn thru the content to cap out or just refuse to beleave you can't getv a perfect product with mmos first year out the games sadly fizzle out within the year.

    Although with games like WAR and AoC there are flaws in the title, games like LOTRO and DDO get hurt the same as people are madly expecting a launch title to hold and have the same qualitly as the 'big dogs' out there, people are unwilling to see a MMO is a long term investment - it's like wine it gets better over time.

    THATS the problem these days ppl are unwilling to wait for anything and has to have it now now now - hence this is the core reason why Blizzard are doing so well with WoW, by time your burnt out with one title, blizzard have already nabbed the good ideas from them ready for you to come back to them, so you get everything you wanted from the 'dead' title in WoW...

    As long as people don't commit long term to a MMO - thats going to be the cycle
    Edited by 1 at 21/09/09 @ 10:45

  • Gaol #9 2 years ago

    Rubbish, why should be put up with a shitty game in the hope it might get better? Games should be launched with a fair amount of content ready, and it's here Aion does well because it's a localization of a Korean game that's several months in.

    And I don't consider LoTRO as having done too badly, it's only struggled if you compare it to WoW - which is exceptional in the marketplace. The other games you mentioned all deserve their respective diminished numbers.

  • ZuluHero #10 2 years ago

    @Kremlik

    The thing that makes Aion so different is that its been live for over a year and already has 3.5 million subs. We are also launching on a year of extra content and patches. And there is another one on the way. The thing about all the other games you mentioned is that the developer burns out getting the intial content patch out leaving months of little fixes and barreness until the next big patch.

    NC soft are already planning the 1.6 patch and the game isn't even 'live' here yet. I think they will probably follow Blizzards model of drip releasing new content every couple of months and major expansions every year or so. Which is proven to work.

  • Chufty #11 2 years ago

    MMO players should not put up with half finished game at launch. You wouldn't expect it from any other genre. I pretty much stopped playing MMORPGs after the Age of Conan fiasco and I've yet to be tempted back into the genre by any trial or beta that I've played in since.

    I tried the Aion beta and it was so utterly generic it beggars belief. It was like playing the statistical average of every other MMORPG. I don't expect these player numbers to last, outside of Korea.

  • Chufty #12 2 years ago

    @ZuluHero:

    3.5 million Korean subs? What does that show? Korean players will flock to whatever bland grind-fest is flavour of the month.

  • Hypercube #13 2 years ago

    It took me 2.5 hours to get in last night, and the starter areas were rammed. I'd hoped head start would have let me get the first few levels out of the way before the spawn camping and racism in general chat started - I was wrong.

    I think I'll savour the early levels - I'm in no rush.

  • Azzuri #14 2 years ago

    I was fairly lucky, I logged on at 8.05 and was 266/266 in the queue. Within about a minute I was 250/2000 and I was in the game in a few minutes. A friend of mine who logged out by mistake after creating a charcter ended up in a 3000 person long queue and didn't get in until I was logging off at 11pm.

    Edit: One of the starting areas, even though there were 10 instanced versions available it was still packed.

    [link url=ht tp://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5440/aion0005yf.jpg
    ]http://im g6.imageshack.us/img6/5440/aion...[/link]

    Still didn't take too long to get through the starter quests
    Edited by 2 at 21/09/09 @ 13:22

  • Mellissa #15 2 years ago

    They knew in advance how much server resources were needed because this was the head start for pre-orders.
    But they were NOT prepared at all.
    .

  • Tyranix #16 2 years ago

    Interesting, my server (Gorgos) had a queue of over 2000 last night and I didn't have any trouble with finding quest mobs in the starter zone, and amazingly no lag or disconnects.

    Smoothest mmo launch i've ever had the pleasure of playing in.

    EDIT: And I did have to wait an hour and a bit to log in, and didn't mind at all. I wasn't even expecting the servers to be up last night as scheduled.
    Edited by 1 at 21/09/09 @ 13:11

  • Hypercube #17 2 years ago

    I didn't have any trouble with finding quest mobs

    There were quite a few people waiting for the Bigfoot Keruba to pop - as soon as they did, they were zerged! But, around the back of the farmhouse, there's a little 'canyon' type place with a bunch of them wandering around. I nipped in there and slaughtered them!

  • YenRug #18 2 years ago

    My friend and I both managed to get on after a couple of false starts, first login failed and second took about 3 minutes to finally bring up the EULA screen to accept, on Castor. My friend found she needed to reboot, seems her laptop had been up and running a bit too long so memory was a bit fragged, but she got in straight away afterwards. We got up to about level 3~4 each and she decided she wanted to go make some more characters, to grab names, only to find she was about 1250 in the queue for the server we've made Asmo characters on (Gorgos) and then took about half an hour to queue to get back into Castor.

    I had no major problems with mob numbers, just with some items for Q's, one a resource harvest and the other some wine barrels in one specific area, beyond launch madness I can't see it being bad in the long run.

    All in all, I managed to pass lv 8 and was trying to puch for 9, so I could make the quick quest jump to 10, but it was getting too late; just means I'll probably be playing catch up with my friend, as she's had today to push on whilst I'm at work.

  • Kerome #19 2 years ago

    Meh... it was not so bad. I got on with 5 minutes of the servers going up, quested up to level 7, then called it a night... no lag, no crashes, no server restarts, and although some quest items/mobs were hard to find, the largest player mob I saw in town was considerably less crowded than Dalaran on an average evening at primetime.

  • trjp #20 2 years ago

    Given that Aion has been running in Asia for a while, you'd expect a smooth launch (on time and no crashes) - the queues will disappear as they open-up the populations as players spread-out in level (and the channelling system they have reduces a lot of the problems of competing for mobs/items etc.)

    What will REALLY change things is when players reach 20ish, wander out to quest and get flattened by an invading army. At that point you need buddies and some tactics so expect considerable wailing and a tail-off in the queues then too :)

  • Hypercube #21 2 years ago

    They've just posted a list of 'community choice' servers. Guess what? Every non-German or French speaking country is now directed to come to the English speaking servers. Fantastic.

    I've got no gripe against anyone from a different country, I'm just wondering whether they could have shared it among the servers - surely Lithuanians, Turkish and Hungarians would be just as happy on a German speaking server as on an English one? The population issues are, as far as I can see, only going to get worse.

  • Groggen #22 2 years ago

    Maybe because Lithuanians, Turkish and Hungarians etc etc etc probably understand English better than German/French?? And if they by any chance prefer German I am quite sure they will go there...

  • pieface09 #23 2 years ago

    The queues are now 7 hours every night ...game is unplayable if you arent prepared to abandon where you started.

    Its the worst launch I've ever seen

  • YenRug #24 2 years ago

    @Hypercube

    I think you've kind of missed the point, "community choice" is meant quite literally, that's where the various language communities have voted they would prefere to be based and NCsoft have simply published those results. It doesn't stop someone from Turkey rolling on a German server, it's just the majority of people said they would prefer to be on English servers.