Hero image: AION 2. Image: NC
NC’s free-to-play MMORPG went live worldwide at midnight AEDT. Before you pick a server, check how the faction pairings work and what changed overnight.
AION 2 launched on time at 6am PDT on 5 October. That was midnight AEDT, 11pm in Brisbane and 9pm in Perth. It is free to play and PC only, on Steam.
The team says AION 2 hit 300,000 active players within hours. Every player gets a thank-you gift of 15 Artisan’s Roasted Fogus (Bound). The next target the team has set is 400,000.
Choosing a server works in three steps: Region first, then Faction, then a server in that region. Each server houses only one faction, so Elyos and Asmodians never share a home.
They still meet. Each Elyos server is paired with an Asmodian server for a limited time, and the server and matchmaking notice says the opposing faction in the Abyss and Spacetime Rifts comes from the paired server. Pairings will be updated periodically to keep the factions balanced.
The notice lists five regions for the launch servers: Europe, NA East, NA West, Latin America and Asia. There is no Oceania region on the list, so read it before committing a character. For a change of heart later, NC has posted information on server transfers.
Deleting a character is also easier now. The launch maintenance cut the deletion wait from 168 hours to 24 hours. You can now delete from Level 1 rather than Level 10. The idle timer before the game returns to server select went from 30 minutes to 3 hours.
Some bosses also got tougher. NC said their stats were “currently set too low for the intended difficulty of a five-player party”, so expect early dungeon runs to hit harder than Advanced Access did.
One last thing before farming starts. Buying Kinah or Quna from unauthorised sellers breaks the Terms of Service, and the team’s warning on illicit currency ends bluntly: “Consider this your first and only warning.”
Source: The AION 2 Team (Steam) – AION 2 Will Launch On Time, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – Thank you for 300,000 Active Players, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – New Server and Matchmaking Information, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – Scheduled Maintenance Sun Oct 4 / Mon Oct 5, The AION 2 Team (Steam) – Warning About Purchasing Illicit Currency, Steam – AION 2