Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Aion's Perfect Storm

As you have no doubt heard, the login queues during the Aion Head Start are crazy. Anywhere close to prime-time and you are looking at a multi-hour wait. Besides the obvious reasons, too many people and too little servers, there are other factors.

One of Aion's features is the private store. You basically turn yourself into a stationary vendor selling your wares. When in store mode, the activity timer is disabled. So unless a networking hiccup disconnects you, you'll stay logged in.

As broadband is the norm and most do not have hourly charges... a lot of people have the ability to leave Aion running. Combined with no activity timer you can guess what happens. There are loads of people using the private store to stay logged in around the clock. This is legitimate but it just contributes to the large queues we have been seeing.

So far, I am not a fan of the private store. Due to the benefit of never logging off, they are everywhere. Most just use a default text or come right and say they are AFK. They must be contributing to the lag too. The concept sounds interesting, but at this point in the games life it is pretty annoying.