I thought the article quoted below was interesting. I am looking forward to seeing the same types of numbers for North America/Europe and hope that the survey system is in place for us. It would be nice to see NCsoft step into the NA/EU market with a game that really contends from out of the gates.

Guild Wars did alright, for NCsoft, but lacked the financial power (on both ends) of recurring subscription mmo's for companies and therefore can't really be a solid source of information about NCsoft progress with MMO's in NA/EU. L2 lacked initial press and, for those of you still around to remember it, beta was a pretty crappy experience where it felt like we were being brought home a bag of cold leftovers and then given a broken microwave with no ketchup handy. When half your game is misspelled, quests are broken, and there are plenty of bugs, it is hard to get NA/EU to spend its money coming out of your beta.

AoC is the most recent testament to beta failure with many buying in anyways and being bitten by the jaws of Funcom again and again. WAR has been doing a decent job at shooting itself in the foot with its bug riddled and 'broken content' release, one that came with a content cut from what was originally promised and. While more impressive than a certain company's response time at getting problems fixed (*cough* Funcom *cough*), the WAR team still made some hefty mistakes that still are highly disheartening for players, unfixed still, and seems to like to talk about change while being slow to implement it considering the open wounds many of its users still carry from WoW and AoC.

WoW is far from the beta days but they seem to be regressing, making content easier and easier (biggest raid boss for WotLK downed within a half week from release which included time to level from 70-80 ), appearing to push seasoned MMO'ers away in favor of attracting new blood to MMO's... blood that coincidentally is unfamiliar with how WoW is lacking for at least their first few months of paid play. It is smart financially as newcomers to MMO's tend to complain a whole lot less and are less likely to leave as quickly. Star struck MMO young-lings are easily enchanted by the initial experience and don't have the scars of other MMO's for WoW to poke at with what appears to be their disregard for letting their game fall from being a real game to being just a money machine. Who can really blame them though... I mean would you trade a loyal fanbase of seasoned gamers for a profit growth to €107 million from €23 million in a single year's time?

Maybe my views on this are skewed or un-based but I feel that so far, MMO companies have disappointed time and time again, some in favor of more income, others just being irresponsible in the attention that they give to quality or their fanbase. I have hope for Aion however as L2's failure to pull in high numbers in NA/EU seemed to be because NCsoft didn't take the market seriously enough to give us a chance. WoW has obviously changed everyone's ideas of NA/EU market potentials. If they give us a real shot this time around, maybe they will learn enough to make Aion a decent game and gain the experience they need with the NA/EU to learn how to make Lineage 3 a juggernaut in the MMO world from day 1, outside of the highly limited player base that is Korea.


Quote:
Originally Posted by AionSource.com
Aion Races to 200k Concurrent Users

First day breaks 100k mark; 200k reached in 5 days
80% of players are finding the game 'fun'
91% of players are 20+

After setting a record reaching 100k concurrent OBT users in the shortest amount of time in Korea, NCsoft's Aion has reached 200k concurrent users on the 5th day - November 15th around 8pm. Also impressive is the fact that the numbers hardly fluctuated throughout the weekend, maintaining a growing user rate right until the end of Sunday.

Aion is currently drawing a slightly older crowd, with 79% at ages 20~30 and 12% at 40+, showing that the gamer base has aged since the launch of NCsoft's past products.

In an in-game survey (pops up in game every 10 levels) that more than 300k players replied to, 79.9% reported that the game was 'very fun' or 'fun'.

Survey Results*: How fun is the game so far?

* Very Fun: 36.4%
* Fun: 43.5%
* Average: 18.1%
* Not Fun: 1%
* Extremely Not Fun: 1%

*note: majority of these numbers would have come from players within levels 10-20

Aion is also topping the charts as the number one game in netcafes since the beginning of OBT. (Meanwhile the user numbers of NCsoft's other games Lineage and Lineage2 haven't been much affected so far.)

Based on the numbers, Jaesung Lee an employee at NCsoft suggested that a large number of players that had stopped playing MMOs altogether have been revitalized by Aion.

But can Aion beat WoW? (In Korea)

At the current rate? It's more than possible.
Comparing Aion's user numbers to WoW's launch 4 years ago, there's no doubt that Aion is growing at a comparable rate. Back in 2004 when WoW conducted their OBT, they reached maximum concurrent user numbers of 240k, including the users in queue. Currently Aion's presumed to have 220k users when taking the queued users into account.

WoW has Aion beat in the speed new servers were set up (Aion is currently at 31 servers), but considering that WoW had a lot of server stability issues throughout OBT, the numbers were necessary as a buffer for downtimes.

WoW's OBT Timeline in Korea

* November 12th 2004: WoW starts kOBT with 12 servers. Servers are bombed with users and their website goes down. All servers experience heavy lag.
* November 15th 2004: 24 more servers added in 3 days, reaching a total of 36 servers. Servers are still bombed. At this point it's announced that concurrent user numbers in Korea had broken NA records. Blizzard is stumped.
* November 16th 2004: 8 more servers added. Total 44 servers.
* November 25th 2004: 11 more servers added. Blizzard Korea announces that they'd reached maximum capacity and stops accepting sign ups.
* December 25th 2004: 600k copies of World of Warcraft are pre-ordered. OBT maintains 200k concurrent users.
* January 16th 2005: Open beta ends. 65 total servers at this point. Maximum concurrent users recorded at 240k.
* January 18th 2005: WoW launches with 65 servers.
* January 20th 2005: WoW reaches 100k concurrent subscribed users.


The real race begins after launch

WoW had a very short beta period of 2 months before launching, and it seems that Aion will follow suit. Much of the content held off for after OBT, including the Abyss area, is ready for release so there is no real reason for NCsoft to continue the beta for too long.
There's very little doubt that Aion will reach the 240k OBT concurrent user record that WoW had set 4 years ago. The real question that remains is whether the subscribed user numbers will be equally as impressive.

Aion is rated as the second most anticipated game release on mmorpg.com, falling just .01 point behind Star Wars: The Old Republic, making it a highly anticipated game for NA/EU at this time. What do you think will be the outcome of Aion in NA/EU?
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