NCsoft addresses Aion server issues

By Robert Purchese Published 5 October, 2009

"The rhino is upon us," says top dog.

NCsoft West executive producer Lance Stites has written an open letter to the Aion community addressing queue times and server over-population.

Despite a lengthy address, however, he made no mention of waiving subscription fees temporarily - necessary compensation, the Aion community reckons, for a product some have literally not been able to play.

"There's no doubt that we've done some things very well with Aion: the product is polished and incredibly fun. We managed to deploy to North America and Europe within the same week and have experienced strong demand. As most of you are aware, this has come at a cost in the form of queue times. This is by far our biggest challenge and has led to some frustration as players wait to enter their server of choice," wrote Stites.

He pointed out that NCsoft has upped server capacity, but that this will not solve a thing should everyone continue trying to access the popular worlds. Stites hopes that the free, one-time character transfer next month will rectify this.

He even attempted to explain why NCsoft, a massive company experienced at handling popular MMOs, was apparently caught off guard by the surge to play Aion.

"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," he offered.

"I read an interesting conversation about a safari hunter, and the question was posed to him: 'Why don't you take an Olympic sharpshooter that could hit a bulls-eye at 300 meters?' His response was: 'I don't care what he can do at 300 meters, what can he do at two meters?' And that's definitely where we are now: the rhino is upon us."

Stites added reassurance that you are NCsoft's "number one priority" and that he is doing all he can to "exceed your expectations".

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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 (22) Latest comment 2 years ago

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

  • Toothball #1 2 years ago

    As a non-Aion player I have been enjoying the opportunity to mock my Aion playing friends about this. Sadly that only lasts a few hours at most. Then it sounds like they're having lots of fun without me.

  • Eraysor #2 2 years ago

    Loving the safari analogy, even if it is incredibly random.

  • George-Roper #3 2 years ago

    What he's essentially saying is that they weren't prepared to put the right hardware in place, to begin with. They're happy for paying customers to suffer whilst they take their sweet time to 'get it right'.

    Bunch of cunts.

  • Zeali #4 2 years ago

    Yeah. Lets all do Warhammer. Add lots and lots of servers at start. No query. Nicely done.

    Now lets look at Warhammer 6 months after release. 75% servers are low or with no pop. Nicely done!

  • mkreku #5 2 years ago

    "what can he do at two meters", hehe. Good one.

  • davisorle #6 2 years ago

    They are just thinknig that it will be wiser for them to wait till the ones that only buy-play-leave after the first month without renewal will be worth avoiding the expences of more servers and staying high and dry with them afterwards. The excuse of high demmand in servers and yet they dont give you newer ones to not spread the community into more of them when they cant play is plain stupid. Im sure they just are waiting for the non persistant MMO gamers to make their way out after the first month is over or I cant get how dumb they could be to not add evenn more servers if its not what they expect.

  • George-Roper #7 2 years ago

    What? Why not put more powerful servers in place then? Why not invest in a proper infrastructure to begin with?

    Also, why are you saying that like it's my problem how they're supposed to manage their side of things? They're asking me to pay them for a service. They're clearly not handling that service correctly. Since when did the onus fall on customers to be 'patient' and put up with bullshit public analogies like this?

    Finally, why not do a Warhammer? Do they not have sufficient confidence in their product? Should that worry people?

    Do us all favour and fuck off with your obviously biased fanboi'ism.

  • Olemak #8 2 years ago

    Maybe the game is just designed for a certain server population? Maybe they've actually thought about this, and said that somewhere between 3000 and 5000 players per server is about the right population for the world, the way it is designed? As you'd probably have people hanging out in certain hotspots, allowing the hardware to come with, say, 20.000 players per server, would not really solve the problem, as you'd then have 20 times the comfortable number of players hanging out in a hotspot like a capital or quest hub.

    Adding more servers sounds about right, but maybe people just dont want to play on the new ervers, because the friends they were reccomended the game by are now playing on the number one congested server...

    I can see them having problems. I don't think theres actually an easy fix to this, as the problem is more one of player behavious (seeking out the popular servers) and of game/world design.

    WoW is a good example of good world design, I think, each server only has something like 5000 active players, which is not a lot, but the game never feels empty; there's always a few other guys running around in the zone you're visiting, and there's always a throng in the capitols. Well, there used to be, anyway, back when I played the game a long time ago.

  • George-Roper #9 2 years ago

    Olemak, what you're saying probably has a ring of truth to it but where does it state, before you buy the game, that you'll have to queue for 2 hours in order to play with friends?

    Maybe if they'd been up front about it and set expectations ahead of people buying the game, players would have gone into it knowing full well what they'd have to cope with. As it stands, i'd imagine that a lot of people are frankly baffled that they've bought the game and now have to put up with hours of queues, all because NCSoft want to use the 'small gun' approach on customers who've laid down their day-one money.

    What's even more staggering is how NCSoft see their reputation on this. Who's going to knowingly buy this game, until they've sorted the queues out?
    Edited by 1 at 05/10/09 @ 13:54

  • Olemak #10 2 years ago

    That is why I don't play MMORPGS on launch any more. Come to think of it, I don't play MMORPGS at all anymore.

    The entire gangre is indeed borked on so many levels, I just can't be bothered. Launch bugs, ques and the whole "paid beta" issue is actually one of the smaller problems this sort of games have to deal with.

    Have NCsoft handled the Aion launch very badly? Yup!
    Is there a better vay to handle MMORPG launches? .... uh, no, not really.

    The only thing they could do, is limit the access to the game while they wait for population load to even out - like what Darkfall did. That has it's own set of problems tho, and is not neccecarily a more successful way to do it.

  • glottis0 #11 2 years ago

    I guess it's to Aion's credit that despite my growing anger with NCSoft over queues and their general arrogance, I'm still playing and loving it.

    It's a weird game - there's almost no innovation, and it's almost a big step backwards for the genre in terms of the raw mechanics. But the atmosphere created by the writing and the art style are enough to keep me interested, for now at least. I also like how (despite being pretty emo) the game takes itself fairly seriously, and isn't just a mixing pot of in-jokes and pop culture pastiches.

  • Hypercube #12 2 years ago

    lol @ the people who don't understand who much NCSoft have pissed off their community.

    After what happened to WAR, any MMO producer should have char transfer tools in place at launch.
    Yes, they're making new servers, but I'm not starting another char. Being able to open new servers as demand swells and make transfers available would have reduced the amount of frustration immensely.

    And as for "whats the point of buying 3x as many servers as you need for the first month?" - duh, because they needed them? Seriously, if they'd had maybe 3 or 4 more servers at launch, it would have been so much better. And if they know what they're doing they can merge servers if they get empty.

    I was in a server merge in WAR and it was a painless and easy process. Dynamically managing your population should be the norm for MMOs these days.

    Edit: Before I suffer a fan backlash, it's worth pointing out that I've been playing Aion since the closed betas, and I was in the head start when the queues were really fucking ridiculous. They have improved the situation (for example, I logged in at lunchtime with no queue) but the people who want to get on at peak times is just beyond the capacity. I expect about a 2 hour queue tonight.
    It's a fun game and I'm enjoying it - I just can't get to play the goddamned thing when I want to.
    Edited by 1 at 05/10/09 @ 15:38

  • George-Roper #13 2 years ago

    Umm, I don't know, perhaps to accommodate the players who've bought the fucking game so they don't lose half the evening queuing? Maybe?

    Also, what's your definition of 'need'? How do you know that they don't 'need' 3x the number of servers for the first month?

    Someone made a good point above, about individual server pop caps and that's what's most likely happening here. If so, how are they going to address queuing? If the server pops are capped, nothing will change unless players move off the server or players leave the game. Pretty fucked up situation, don't you think? OR, they might buy new hardware in and up the server pop caps. But if they do that, all the launch customers will know they got fucked over as paying performance testers, whilst other players come in 3-6 months down the line, paying less for the game and playing on queue-less, servers.

    So what does that tell you about NCSoft and their attitude towards customers?

  • Hypercube #14 2 years ago

    If so, how are they going to address queuing? If the server pops are capped, nothing will change unless players move off the server or players leave the game.

    New servers and one-time free character transfers should be here at the beginning of next month. With any luck, if the population spreads out a bit more it won't be so bad. I don't want to start my Templar again, but if I and my legion-mates can all go to a new server together - well, I may consider that.

  • George-Roper #15 2 years ago

    I hear ya Hyper, but that's only going to work if players are prepared to move. And that will no doubt be based on whether all their friends and Guilds are prepared to move, too.

  • Hypercube #16 2 years ago

    I hear ya Hyper, but that's only going to work if players are prepared to move. And that will no doubt be based on whether all their friends and Guilds are prepared to move, too.

    If the move was free and they were open about stats (e.g. I don't want to go to a server that's just going to be over-populated again) I think a lot of people would take that option. There aren't any other people I've managed to make friends with yet on Spatalos outside my legion, so the move would be a problem. As long as we can move the legion at the same time, with the legion warehouse content too.

  • actionfitz #17 2 years ago

    "Stites added reassurance that you are NCsoft's "number one priority" and that he is doing all he can to "exceed your expectations".

    doubtful. certainly doesn't feel that way as a player.
    The Community management staff have posted a total of twice on the official EU forum. They post tidbits on Twitter - of all places O.o
    There is no GM support after 5pm (though no one ive spoken to has ever had a response to an in-game ticket).
    :/

  • whizzedout #18 2 years ago

    be alright in a couple of weeks when most of the people stop loggin in.

  • swisstony #19 2 years ago

    "Maybe the game is just designed for a certain server population? Maybe they've actually thought about this, and said that somewhere between 3000 and 5000 players per server is about the right population for the world, the way it is designed?"

    Thing is, they did Guild Wars. In server events around festival times they would simply up the number of instances of the quest hubs aka towns where these events took place. The result was no overcrowding. Then they ramped these down again as required. Somewhow they layered the heaviest areas with extra shards, and you could flip shards to find what you needed. You could then, on the fly, comission and decomission shards as the population dictated.

    Caveat with this post is I'm not sure how Aion is structured.

  • manveruppd #20 2 years ago

    I'm confused... is he talking about the rhinos you got as a mount with Age of Conan preorders?

  • MaxiSleep #21 2 years ago

    They needed 2 more english servers at launch to meet demand. I have rerolled on a new server and am enjoying it, but as a poster has said, not having character transfer available at launch is loolah.

    The game so far though is quite lovely. And it is the first MMO since WoW that I can play for extended periods without headaches/finger cramps. Like bliz they seam to have put a lot of thought into the UI in terms of speed of update, rate of skill click etc.

    And there are some seriously nice touches like sell all "greys"

    And at least they have owned up to a screw up. Took some of their competitors quite a while to admit to failings.

  • skullstorm #22 2 years ago

    It wouldnt be AS bad if they just banned all the bot accounts that get reported and not just the bot's character. I realise this is ncsoft and an asian game were talking about so bots are bound to be plentiful, they really need to get rid of them to lighten the load and keep their REAL players happy.
    Edited by 1 at 06/10/09 @ 02:21