Aion: The Tower of Eternity Launch Issues Interview

MMORPG.com fired off a set of questions to Aion: The Tower of Eternity producer Brian Knox about the hour-long queues and other issues that plagued the fantasy MMORPG's launch.
Why were queue times necessary at all? As this event was for pre-order customers only, why wasn't it easy to predict exactly how many servers would be necessary to make sure that players weren't waiting in line?

Brian Knox: There are numbers and stats that help us predict servers. We know what our average percentage of users is per active accounts at a peak time based off our beta events and our other products. We know how many users our servers can handle at capacity, and we know how many users makes for an ideal game play experience in Aion. Most importantly we know that there will never be a time when every single Aion customer wants to log in and play all at once than when we first turn on the servers. All of these go into picking the correct server count and the right time to spin up new servers.

We had to keep max server capacity low at first because everyone was crammed at the starting area. Had we opened it up to everyone, no one could have progressed. As the day went on, we opened up the servers more and more. We want to ensure that our servers are healthy during Head Start, but also once a retail code is applied. These next few days we will be calculating data and weighing the ideal time to open more servers. I think that the community will understand that in a game with PvPvE how important a healthy populated server is and that we do not want to go down the low pop server path...