Hero image: AION 2. Image: NC
I will be honest with you, I love it when a global launch lands at a sensible hour for us, and AION 2 going live at midnight on the east coast is about as kind as these things ever get. I was ready to write something warm about that, because it so rarely happens. Then I read the server list, and the warmth drained out of me pretty quickly, because there is no Oceania on it at all.
The list has five regions: Europe, two for North America, Latin America and Asia, and that is the whole thing. If you are in Sydney or Perth or anywhere in between, you pick one of those and you live with it. I’m not going to pretend I know what that will feel like in a five-player dungeon, because I don’t, and the notice doesn’t say. But I know exactly what it feels like to be left off the list, and I suspect you do too.
Here is the part that really got under my skin. Around launch the team also opened a graphics card giveaway, a proper one, with extra entries for anyone who played for an hour, and the rules name residents of the United States, Canada and Europe. Even Europe comes with a list of countries carved out of it, and Australia is not carved out, because Australia was never in. It’s a small thing, I know, and nobody owes me a graphics card. But it is the same shape as the server list, isn’t it? We’re welcome to play, we’re just not who the launch was planned around.
And I mean, people clearly turned up anyway, because the team’s own thank-you post has gone from 300,000 to 400,000 active users since it first went up. If any of those players are Australian, they stayed up until midnight, picked a region that was not built for them and got on with it. That’s what we do. It feels like we have been doing it for as long as online games have had a server list, and I don’t think we should have to keep being such good sports about it.
So what would I actually ask for? I’m not asking for a data centre in Melbourne by Friday. I am asking for the list to say something, anything, about the people on the other side of the equator who are logging in at midnight. Tell us which region you would suggest for Oceania, tell us whether one is coming, or tell us it was considered and ruled out, if that is the truth. Silence reads as forgetting, and forgetting stings more than a straight no.
Would you have picked AION 2 up at midnight if you had read that list first? I think I still would have, if I am being honest with myself, because a free launch at midnight is a hard thing to resist. I would just like, for once, to be on the list before I have to go looking for myself.
Source: The AION 2 Team (Steam) – New Server and Matchmaking Information, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – AION 2 Will Launch On Time, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – Graphics Card Giveaway, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – Thank you for 400,000 Active Players