October 21, 2009

Aion Producer Talks about Post-launch Chores
By Michael Lafferty

“…my favorite part was working with a group that was passionate about Aion”

NCsoft released Aion on September 22, but as is the case with most massively multiplayer online games, once the product releases to retail, the work is just beginning. Since this is a post-launch product, we thought it might be interesting to chat with the dev team and find out what actually transpires after the release of the game.

For those who do not know, Aion is a game that features two factions on a fractured world. The game is a faction-based fantasy realm with a strong player-versus-environment quest line but also with player-versus-player combat. There is, of course, much more to it than that, but the focus of this interview is ‘what’s next’ for the Aion team?

For those answers we turned to Brian Knox, Aion producer, who was kind enough to take time to chat with us.

Question: What was the biggest challenge you had leading up to the game going live?

Brian: Prediction. We had a million different variables we had to predict and all of it with data that ‘semi’ related. For example, we had to predict our max concurrency of users based off of beta concurrency as well as based off of our other products. As we are all aware this prediction was a bit off,  which has lead to some of our queuing issues. The good news is that we were off because our players wanted to play that much more, nearly double than what we had seen in the betas.

Was there any last minute issues you suddenly had to address?

Brian: Our Web site and its game integration features came down to the wire. We had a team of a 100+ all working around the clock to ensure its successful launch. This made me quite nervous.

Once a game goes live, how much of a relief is that juxtaposed to the amount of time you put into the development? How much of a break does the dev team get before working on expansions?

Brian: What is a break?? With MMO’s there is no stopping. You need to take a breather once it’s out the door, but there are so many issues that are happening that you need to handle because you’re not providing a one-off service for the customers, you are providing a world to invest in for months and months. We need to ensure our game and services are in top form to keep users coming back. The development team is supporting the western launch right now and fixing issues as they come up but also working on future patches. I am hoping that come mid-November some of us can have a little bit of a break.

It’s been several weeks since the game has launched – what has been the biggest surprise you have had in regards to the reception of the game?

Brian: The amount of time players are playing. Our players are playing at a very high rate around the clock. Right now much of our issues are centered around our service not so much the game, which is a good thing. We can fix and improve our service but if the game wasn’t fun or our users didn’t want to play, we’d have a larger issue. We really think the game is solid and users are enjoying it so our primary focus right now is making sure the service around the game is solid.

Was there anything that you had to address after the launch that might have been triggered by server load?

Brian: We were able to do most of our load testing on the game level during our beta’s and through key learning’s from other territories such as Korea. The billing system we use here was specific to our territory so it took the biggest beating for our launch. Our team was working around the clock making sure it held up. It bent but didn’t completely break and held up quite well; we are very proud of our team being able to handle the massive load of that first week.

How will you address the issue of gold farming?

Brian: Gold farming is a battle that we will continue to fight every day. The fact is RMT companies are criminals, they steal accounts, they steal credit cards, and they go after us through denial of services attacks. As long as there is a market and they are making money they will not go away. We do our best to stay one step ahead and minimize the effect it has on the players by shielding them from the criminals. We have many methods but most of them we cannot talk about. We have whole teams dedicated and a ton of tools in place. For me personally, I just want the community to know two things: 1) These are organized criminals not just gamers trying to make a buck with RMT, and 2) we work every day to prevent and ban them from our games.

Your baby has flown the coop (pun intended), what was your favorite aspect of the design process in taking this from conception to launch?

Brian: I always laugh whenever we have another news article that mentions ‘taking flight’ or ‘soaring’ so I appreciate the pun. For me my favorite part was working with a group that was passionate about Aion. We all love the game and were all working to see it succeed. Being able to bounce ideas back and forth at a global level and see the results unfold was very rewarding.

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