The Aion Experience

Warning: This is a very passion filled ranty post. If you can’t handle it, stop reading now and go play with a ball of yarn…

A frustration that very few people will share with me is reading comments along the lines of, “zomg!! I have 200 ping and can’t even play, this is insane!!!”

Why does this bug me? Well, being in Australia and connecting to US servers, a good day for me is 600 ms. On average, at prime playing times, I still consider 1500 ok and playable. By 2000 I might consider finding something else to do…

No, there are no Aussie servers to connect to. And no, we can’t connect to Asian servers because guess what, I can’t speak Chinese!!

What also bugs me is reading comments such as:

I don’t understand why people waste KE on things like dash attack or ambush. If you ambush you have loads of time to cast KE. If you’re lagging too much you need to fix that up because this game isn’t for the slow to react.

Or when someone replied to my video ages ago with “Why are u so slow at using skills, or chainskill” …

Um… why? WHY?! Because we have a near constant 1 – 2 second delay on everything we do and NO, there is nothing we can do to fix it!! If I had $1 for every comment along the lines of ping, slowness or the like, I’d have enough money to move overseas and bask in the unplayableness that is 200 ping.

*takes a deep breath…*

Fortunately, some aussies have it a bit better than us – for us personally, we not only have the “Aussie connecting to an overseas server lag“, we also have the “Telstra f—king suck b—ls and won’t do right by customers“, tripled by the “we moved to one of the fastest expanding areas in the state and the backhaul (rim) can’t cope with the influx of use…. and Telsta won’t f—king do anything to fix it“. For those unaware, Telstra holds a monopoly on pretty much all internet connections in the country and is also now a private run  company, which means their number one priorities are their shareholders. Speak to any online gamer who is rim-blocked by them and you’ll get pretty much the same response you read here.

For this week’s “Screenshot Sunday”, I thought I would share my various ping levels, captured anywhere from 8am to 11pm over the past week…

My Lag over the past 2 weeks...

Aion Producer Brian Knox speaks out on the issues of long queues to get in the game during “head start” and now the official launch of Aion. According to Knox the average wait time in the queues has been about 3 hours on the popular servers, and NCsoft’s suggestion is to go to the low pop / recommended servers.

Why were queue times necessary at all. As this event was for pre-order customers only, why wasn’t it easy to predict exactly how many servers would be necessary to make sure that players weren’t waiting in line?

Brian Knox: There are numbers and stats that help us predict servers. We know what our average percentage of users is per active accounts at a peak time based off our beta events and our other products. We know how many users our servers can handle at capacity, and we know how many users makes for an ideal game play experience in Aion. Most importantly we know that there will never be a time when every single Aion customer wants to log in and play all at once than when we first turn on the servers. All of these go into picking the correct server count and the right time to spin up new servers.

We had to keep max server capacity low at first because everyone was crammed at the starting area. Had we opened it up to everyone, no one could have progressed. As the day went on, we opened up the servers more and more. We want to ensure that our servers are healthy during Head Start, but also once a retail code is applied. These next few days we will be calculating data and weighing the ideal time to open more servers. I think that the community will understand that in a game with PvPvE how important a healthy populated server is and that we do not want to go down the low pop server path…

Source: VE3D

Aion also posted an official statement regarding Server Queues and Course of Action:

At NCsoft our commitment is to making the MMO player experience the best it can be. And while Aion has seen a very successful launch that has exceeded our expectations in many ways, we are aware of the longer than usual queue times that players have experienced on some of the servers. This is due to the initial rush of players that we’ve seen in the early days of the game’s launch in Europe and North America.

Since the opening of Head Start this past weekend, we’ve have been heavily focused on striking the delicate balance between managing busy servers with queue times versus overcompensating by adding new servers too quickly that are then underpopulated and don’t deliver a fun experience for players. We did indeed see an initial rush on the first days of Head Start which resulted in longer than desired queue times for some of our servers, and we are working around the clock to alleviate this. In fact, we are happy to confirm we have increased our server caps and are adding an additional server in both North America and Europe by this weekend, and we will continue to evaluate adding additional servers.

That said, we do have alternate servers where players are experiencing lower queue times. People can get a real-time update and select that choice on our website at: http://na.aiononline.com/livestatus/server/

We continue to monitor issues closely and strive to address player feedback quickly to ensure the best possible experience.

Source: Aion Online

@israphel on Twitter told me today that they had to wait in a nine hour queue! That’s insane!!

That’s the claim being made by GDN apparently.

AION Online Drops the Ball on Launch – Massive Queues to Play

NCsoft has dropped the ball on their launch of AION Online? It sure seems like it. Reports are coming in that there are queues of 2,500 people and more as well as three hour waits just to get into the game. It seems that their 18 server strategy will never be able to hold up to the 400,000 plus pre-order gamers that are already trying to get into the game. 18 X 2,000 (player caps on servers) = 36,000 = less than 10% of gamers will be able to play at once. Not a very smart strategy if you ask me.

This just seems to be a case of poor planning on the part of Ncsoft. When pre-orders began to soar they should have thought about opening new servers for the launch. To only be able to hold less than 10% of the games sold just seems ridiculous.

GDN has contacted NCSoft about the issue and is awaiting reply.

Of course, we can only assume that they know NCsoft only has 18 servers for Aion players. And even if that is the case, I can’t imagine setting up 18 servers would be that cheap – so imagine setting up the required 200 servers needed if you use the maths of 400,000 ple-orders divided by 2,000 server caps.

That said, I have to feel sorry for people like who ever took the following image. 7 hour wait? Ouch!

The following official news post makes me very happy indeed. I’ve put no thought into what server I would play on at this point, but being in Australia, and having played on US based servers with predominately US based players before (EQ and WoW), I know the hassle that can come from wandering the world alone while everyone else sleeps.

WoW showed me the glory that can be Oceanic servers and how wonderful it is to be able to raid at 7:30pm, not 7:30am. No decisions yet on if I will join Nezekan or not, if it’s been announced as the only one, then I think the Aion staff have underestimated the Oz gaming population and I’m not about to jump a server likely to crash from influx of players…

The key to launching an MMORPG of Aion’s magnitude is communication. We been keeping everyone following the game aware of what our plans are and listened to your feedback, creating a dialog with you. We’ve also kept an eye on the various Aion communities, talked to Aion community members, and compared what they have said and requested with our beta test data. Based on all this input, we have decided to launch Aion with an Oceanic server set to GMT+10.

Our Oceanic communities have already masterfully executed unofficial polls indicating their server desires. To honor these community efforts, the North American server Nezekan will be adjusted to an Oceanic time zone and event schedule immediately. The server will however not be labeled as an Oceanic server right away, but we plan on changing that in a patch within the first two weeks after launch. We are doing everything we can until then to let everyone know about the plans for Nezekan’s future time zone schedule to allow players to make informed decisions.

We experienced some frustrating technical difficulties with the surveys we launched early this week meant to help roleplayers and language-specific communities choose their unofficial game servers. Many Aion communities saw a need to coordinate their members and were much quicker than we were to organize surveys. We have decided to honor their hard work by permanently taking our own survey down, since we have no desire to interfere with what our great communities accomplish or cause confusion. We will continue to work with the fansites in our Fansite Program to promote their community survey results.

Souce: Aion Online Official news post