Today was the head start for those who had bought pre orders for Aion. Wednesday the game will officially launch in North America and Friday it will launch in Europe. Aion also launched their new official game site.

I have been playing for a while and it has been running smoothly, apparently I ended up on one of the most popular European servers even though I hoped to avoid that. The only annoying thing was people who complained and said WoW was better every 5 minutes. And then there are always morons in game, maybe on school days the atmosphere will be a bit better, and I assume many of these people are such that will get tired in a few weeks. There where many online at the same time, that's something I had counted with, it's always a bit annoying to have to wait for spawns but things spawned quicker than in many other mmorpgs.

There was some lag, I didn't notice much though. And I ran the game on middle settings. Apparently a lot of people got stuck in queues before login. I just saw on twitter that they are increasing server caps though.

That the preorder and collector's edition items where not available at start was a bit of a disappointment. However it isn't such a big deal. Levelling is still fast and easy the first levels.

Playing this few levels you can't really say much about the game itself. I've been playing a priest on Perento(EU) and will choose Cleric(Healer) at level 10. It has nice quests so far. The learning curve is quite normal. Something I think they have done very well in implementing has been the balancing of factions. It's always annoying in PvP when one faction is much larger than the other. I hope I will see the results of the balancing soon enough.

There are no real "safe zones" and no non-PvP servers as I understand. I've never played on a PvP server in any game and I hope I won't mind this. There is a 40 player limit to all "legions" (That would be guild in some games), I'm not sure if that is good or bad.

I had a bit of problems in the Beta with lag in the main city and the flight was a bit hard to learn. I had an older computer then so I assume there won't be as much lag in the city. There will probably be lag the first few weeks though when many will be in the same zones at once.

I think they have handled this launch very well, no major problems, and they have been communicating using twitter which has been very easy and practical to follow.

I decided to quit when the server kicked me out, I assume it was lag, but it's bed time anyway.

Has anyone else tried this and have any opinions?

Good night!