Oceanic servers for Aion

Mike Bantick
Thursday, 17 September 2009 09:42

Your IT - Entertainment

Flying around in a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game is hard enough at the best of times.  But the experience becomes excruciating when lag interferes with your playing experience.  The extremely-popular-in-Asia MMO Aion is about to be launched in the west, and for Australian and New Zealand players there is good news.

Aion, the new (in the west at least) MMO from NCsoft (makers of the Lineage series) is about to go online.

For those who have been following the development and beta testing this is an exciting time.  But it is usually excitement tempered by that nagging feeling of doubt at the back of an excited brain.  Will the online experience be dulled by poor server response times?

Not usually an issue for our friends in places such as North America or Europe, but definitely a consideration for those living in more antipodeans locales.

News today that NCsoft has had some consideration for those stuck far from the server super highway.

NCsoft West and the Aion team are happy to announce that, due to popular demand, Aion will have an Oceanic server for players in Australia and New Zealand! Effective immediately, the Nezekan server will cater to an Oceanic audience. The Aion service will be identical, but the Nezekan server will host in-game events during times more convenient for players in that region.

Nezekan will not have the Oceanic label on launch day (it will say "West" temporarily), but NCsoft will change the label within the first two weeks after launch to "Oceanic." The Aion community team will do everything possible to make clear that Nezekan is an Oceanic server until the label change is made on the game's server list.

Starting with pre-selection the Nezekan server is for the Oceanic region.

What is this mysterious “pre-selection” term that NCsoft are alluding to?  All is revealed in their next statement on Page 2.