Anyone who's been playing Aion will have noticed that the servers have been a little crowded since it launched

With over 400,000 players having pre-ordered the game, it’s been plagued by massive overcrowding on the limited number of servers that NCsoft initially provided. It got so bad that players ended up waiting in queues hours long to play the game. Even once they finally got in their problems weren’t over, as players faced crowded spawns in starting areas and high demand for quest-specific monsters. Hopefully some of those problems will be alleviated now that NCsoft has opened up two more servers for the game in Europe.

The Kahrun and Deltras servers are for English and French speakers respectively, and NCsoft said it will open up character transfers between servers ‘in a couple of months’. Whether just two new servers, and only one in English, will be enough to ease demand remains to be seen. NCsoft initially put the problem down to ’simply an early rush’ saying it didn’t want to run the risk of having under-populated servers. We suspect they were worried about being in a similar position to Warhammer Online, which had a strong launch but ended up with multiple servers that had to be merged as player numbers dropped off.

That strategy may now cause NCsoft some short-term problems as it faces the difficult task of mollifying angry customers, to ensure Aion’s reputation doesn’t suffer and  those ensuing population numbers stay high.