Originally Posted by Tentorax
Hi Ayase,

Thank you for your awesome work with Aion.

I think you're an excellent community manager, while twitter is kind of a simple tool to use as a communication device with the customers.... I can't deny that it works. I only wish NCSoft would grant you an entire site of your own :P

The headstart has been somewhat smooth. While you are managing the server load thanks to the queues - it is causing a lot of damage as well.

The AFK Shops for example - people seem to abuse it to a great extent - my suggestion is to give everyone a fair chance - please DISABLE that feature until the headstart / launch has passed.

I for one do not need an afk shop this early on in the game.

While useful, it could damage the launch a great deal.

I have had plenty of MMO launch experiences and know there isn't much you can do about the queues...but it's kind of bad with 4 hour queues for us regular people that works eight to five and looks forward to playing all day - only to find out that we won't be able to due to full servers.

Another suggestion could be to make temporary "launch" servers - characters from all servers can be moved to these servers - and only back to the server you originally came from once the real launch and the stream of people has ended.

I mean, why not? That way I can at least progress with my character together with my friends.

How are you going to repay us for lost time with the headstart?

Guess I'll have to remote control my PC from work - put myself in queue and use the AFK Shop feature like everyone else...

Would really appreciate a reply - even though I know you're a busy guy.

Thanks,

- Tent.

This is a very sensible post and I think you're bringing up two solutions that would help alleviate some of the initial load.

I have suggested to disable Private Stores temporarily, but as I've replied in other threads I don't know if this is something we can do. The idea is taken in and considered.

Regarding temporary servers, I know this is something we discussed at one point, but it would lead to extreme complications and take a very long time to implement not only functionality-wise but also in terms of character/legion naming and at such an early stage. It's a reasonable idea and I strongly believe it would help, but it would also imply that we'd build up an entire infrastructure around a population spike that occurs for a very short time.

The end-all answer is that we can't put the busiest one under more load by increasing player cap (it is already a bit higher than we'd like it to be) and that we don't want to put out too many servers. If we put out too many servers right now, we risk a scenario where people roll characters on servers that after the launch spike get a much lower pop than the players first expected. And then the players on there get bored from playing with nothing but Braxes and Shugos. We are doing this because we want servers to be healthy in the long run, and designing this around a spike is not going to get you a great gaming experience. It might give you less queues and more play-time at this precise moment, but it won't ensure that you get to experience Aion the way it's meant to be, with healthily populated servers across the board for a long time to come.

That said I've spoken more to the production team today (I'm constantly bringing up your concerns), and we're looking at how the server traffic is doing. We're looking at this minute-by-minute, but also keeping a focus on every "stage". That is - we're looking at what it looked like after Preselection started, after Head Start started and will make another evaluation tomorrow after "Release". We will then see how many preorders stay through to retail (all won't) and how many new ones pick the game up from stores.

Above from Ayase.