Aion opens two new European servers

NCsoft has made its first move towards addressing the overcrowding on its freshly-launch MMO Aion in Europe: opening two new servers.

One, Deltras, is for French-language players and the second, Kahrun, is an English server. NCsoft said it would open up character transfers between servers in "a couple of months".

In scenes reminiscent of World of Warcraft's launch five years ago, Aion's debut has been beset by long waits to get online as hundreds of thousands of players try to squeeze onto the limited number of servers set up by NCsoft.

The situation has been worst in Europe, where Kotaku reports that some players can't even join the hours-long queues, and Gamers Daily News reckons that NCsoft's servers can only handle some 10 per cent of players who pre-ordered the game, never mind those picking it up on spec now.

NCsoft put the situation down to an initial rush to play the game, said the problem wouldn't last, and argued that it was trying to avoid opening too many servers which would then be underpopulated.

The company is presumably trying to avoid a repeat of Warhammer Online's boom-and-bust launch last year, where large numbers of players leaving the game after its first months left ghost-town servers that had to be merged, and remain underpopulated to this day.

NCsoft has a delicate balancing act ahead of it between satisfying frustrated new customers in the short term, and providing subscribers with healthy player populations in the long term - but it would probably argue that too many players is a good problem to have.