Aion's OFFICIAL Oceanic Server: Nezekan!

Well I'm happy as Larry, and if Larry's an oceanic Aion player, he's very happy indeed.

NCSoft has officially labelled Nezekan as an Oceanic server and changed it to an oceanic GMT+10 time zone (that's Eastern Australian time).

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.

The Nezekan forum on AionSource is already abuzz with Americans moving out and sympathisers getting pissed off. They have fair reason to; with the death of Nezekan's NA community, the server will no longer be 24/7 or have the super economy we were expecting. Some people are saying the server will be dead or low population, but indications are that it'll fill up rather quickly. I predicted the [Oceanic] tag while others said no chance, so I guess I am emboldened enough to make another prediction: the server will be filled rapidly to capacity and a second one (at least) will need to be created within the month.

The tag means more Oceanics, which is always a good thing when trying to build a community. The time zone change will mean we have a level playing field with the Americans, with server events happening in our prime time rather than at 5am. The PvP field is effectively leveled, with almost everyone having crap pings.

As for the NA community... due to the delayed server tagging, there will no doubt be a small NA presence on the server. But whether or not it withers and dies would be pure speculation...


Update: I figured I'd include a forum post of mine here instead of repeating myself in 20+ threads xD

Okay, here goes.

I'm sorry that not everyone got what they wanted here. There are reasons why this change is bad as well as good, and I will go further into them. Perhaps you'll skip it over, or just chant 'no no no' while reading it, but on the off chance it soothes some jumpy souls I will make my best attempt to craft a crit-proc post.


This server will die, look at warhammer or AOC

These two games had oceanic servers, which are now dead. The two games also failed horribly and now have 270k and 100k subscriptions respectively.

WoW has twelve healthy Oceanic servers after four years and the global subscriber base is still growing (almost dipped due to the china fiasco but that's fixed now). It is at 11.5 million subscribers.

More to the point, WAR and AOC failed because they are horrible games. Hope and hype fueled them for far longer than they would have gotten on their own. While it is true that Aion's endgame might let the game down in a similar manner, if that was the case then all servers would shrivel and die off. But we wouldn't be playing Aion if it's a shit game, would we?


We cannot support a server on our own

There are no confirmed numbers but multiple reliable sources put Aion's global subscriber base at 3.5 million. Definitive data puts Aion servers at a 7000 capacity, a little less than a WoW realm's capacity but not significantly so. A weak form of comparison then is to cut WoW's subscriber base in three to see how many servers oceania could support: four servers. Since it's a pretty weak way of going about it, we can be conservative and cut in half again, two servers.

A single beta download source in australia recorded 20k hits. I'm not sure if that's unique hits -- it might include failed attempts or download managers. That said it also doesn't register hits from downloaders sharing it amongst their flat or friends, or (obviously) other download sources, including bittorrent. That's just australia; NZ adds roughly another fifth. And it's just the open beta; we all know someone who has skipped the betas entirely. I think everyone's noticed the Nezekan Aionsource forum's population explode in recent days (and it's exploding again in a different way now, heh).

I predict we'll need a second server soon after release.


Great, we don't get a 24/7 server anymore

Very true and this is a truly bad side effect to this development. The server won't have 24/7 action anymore, for those who have hectic schedules or were planning on some early morning pvp. Moreover, the super round-the-clock economy will likely no longer materialise.

The tradeoff however, is three-fold.

One, the tag will attract more oceanics. Hell, in our fear, some of us are spending a little extra effort to spread the Nezekan word. IMHO my fear of losing americans is outweighed by my desire to see a greater oceanic community.

Two, the dreadgion etc. will be scheduled for oceanic prime time. Nothing more really needs to be said. If the server had remained PST, we'd make it to these events maybe once a week, if ever.

Three, there is now a level playing field. We'll be pvping people with 250-700 ping almost exclusively instead of brushing off against americans that can push out seven abilities to our three and a half.