Find yourself sitting in a seven hour queue recently? You can thank your fellow community members for that. Many players have been abusing the player shop system in Aion, which lets players set up shop anywhere in the world and hawk their wares, in order to avoid queue times.

Gotta break for dinner? Don't want to come back and deal with a queue? Set up shop! Up until today, being in shop mode protected you from the idle out timer. This practice has compounded the issue of already crowded servers by causing queue times to shoot up as more and more people catch on and set up shop to avoid idling out.

Well this morning Aion went down for maintenance, and returned with a newly implemented 30 minute limit on player shops. Now, if only they added some more servers!

The original announcement can be viewed here.

I believe they would be less afk shops if they up'd the server caps and added one or two new servers to lighten the load some. They allowed to many people on the servers instead of just capping the faction pop limits at a certain amount and lock the server from going over the limits.

Having 24 hours shops is not the problem. The problem is the easy fo setting up a shop.

Ideally they should of allowed 24h shops only in the two capitals as the server queues are generally not bad enough to waste time traveling to a captial and back. AFK shopping in a questing zone or the abyss is the problem imo.

Well, it wasn't much of a problem in the other regions, since they pay to play by the hour. That wasn't the case in EU & US though.

Hah ..awesome keyboard ;o)

Originally posted by dominia

Having 24 hours shops is not the problem. The problem is the easy fo setting up a shop.

Ideally they should of allowed 24h shops only in the two capitals as the server queues are generally not bad enough to waste time traveling to a captial and back. AFK shopping in a questing zone or the abyss is the problem imo.

The whole point of the shops is that you set them in a convenient for others spot so they'll buy from you instead of traveling to the capital city. If they have to travel to the capital city, they might as well use the auction house instead.

It really did help a lot. The queues are seriously down by roughly 50% !!

And above all. The capital city looks a lot cleaner and less laggy now, without all the spam / afk shops.

There is an auction system in the game and both capital city as zone quest hubs have brokers. So people should learn to use that instead.

These private shops are so outdated! It's just an old system from Asian MMO's in wich companies tried to lure players to keep their shops open and so their client running, as in many Asian countries you pay by the hour!

We don't pay per hour here in the west and just have our monthly fees. That's why pretty much all western MMO's have an Auction system instead. Much better imho!

Cheers

Originally posted by Guillermo197

There is an auction system in the game and both capital city as zone quest hubs have brokers. So people should learn to use that instead.

lol, if I was a different person I'd insult you. They are different things and provide different services. Shops put the power into the hands of the seller, ah is for buyer.

Besides the fact that one can put up a shop and strategically sell goods. People are in an area hunting for mats? you can sell them so that they can get what they need quickly.

And at some point I imagine nc will make the buy shops which will be a great boon to crafters.

So sorry, I think I'll use the AH at some times and the personal shops at others.

I'm going to have to go with Sovrath here. The AH has a purpose and so do personal shops. I just bought spices at a personal shop setup by the quest giver in the middle of bung nowhere. Saved me the trouble of running back to city, finding seller, running back just to complete a simple quest. I agree the personal shops were being major abused, glad to see it stop. I will continue to use both for their intended purposes.

More than happy to dl this newest patch for this change. Hopefully they'll be able to lift the timer soon enough once the servers balance themselves out.

Private shops are a pain for the eyes whereever they pop up. You can block goldsellers whispering you to death, why can't you set up /don't show shops as well? Those gold sellers ping you once and are gone, but those pesty shops hinder your normal view everywhere. Brokers are more than enough. Kick them completely or at least let us /ignore them like gold sellers and spammers. For me, it is just the same stuff.

thumbs up!

Originally posted by DevilXaphan

I believe they would be less afk shops if they up'd the server caps and added one or two new servers to lighten the load some. They allowed to many people on the servers instead of just capping the faction pop limits at a certain amount and lock the server from going over the limits.

They did up the server caps recently, and also are going to add two more servers.. Read the aion main page.

Why are people blaming those that setup shot instead of the producers failure to see this happening, and their failure to have enough server capacity?

Many other games in the past have had similar setups, going back at least to EQ1, and all of them managed to figure out simple solutions that work. EQ2 for example has "brokers" - which list 10's of thousands of items from thousands of players - stationed in most cities.

Originally posted by Xasapis

Originally posted by dominia

Having 24 hours shops is not the problem. The problem is the easy fo setting up a shop.

Ideally they should of allowed 24h shops only in the two capitals as the server queues are generally not bad enough to waste time traveling to a captial and back. AFK shopping in a questing zone or the abyss is the problem imo.

The whole point of the shops is that you set them in a convenient for others spot so they'll buy from you instead of traveling to the capital city. If they have to travel to the capital city, they might as well use the auction house instead.

Yes....they might as well use the auction house instead. THAT is how North American gamers have come to do business, for the most part, because all those fooking damn shops all over are ANNOYING. North American MMO players are used to using auction houses. We use them in almost every single MMO that we play. Hint Hint.

You want to see "private shops" run amok, and have a peek at the future of AION's stupid "private shop" system? Log into Perfect World - Malaysia (or any OTHER Asian game, for that matter) go to ANY city (true, most of the MMOs that do this, only allow shops to be set up in the city).....but.....see how long it takes you to go from one side of the city to the other, and how RIDICULOUS all those thousands of shops are. You can't even see the names above each one, it's just a SEA of garbage.

These "private shops" are one of the many reasons that I have quit every single Asian MMO that I started playing. This is just NOT the ideal way to sell things.  It may work in the Asian market, but as people have stated over and over and over....North Americans do not appreciate the same things that our Asian gaming counterparts do. This is not Korea.  You can't cross cultural boundaries using the exact same systems and always expect it to work.  Sometimes it may, but often....it may not.  Private shops are going to be one of the things that does not work in NA.  Why?  We do NOT take kindly to having to "babysit" popsicle stands. We want ACTION. North Americans are notoriously IMPATIENT.

Good luck with the stupid "private shop" ordeal, NCSoft.  It's yet another reason that I think I'm still glad that I canceled my pre-order during CBT.

If you're moving into cross cultural markets, your gameplay, and the way things are implemented within the game, are going to have to sometimes....EVOLVE.

 As Aion has an ingame auction system you have to ask yourself the question "WHY DO THEY NEED PRIVATE STORES AS WELL"?

It is a nightmare flying or teleporting to an area only to be lag/swamped by a hundred people sitting around with text floating above there heads AFK describing their wares.

Just get rid of private stores and have people use the already ingame auction system. Problem solved

Look...even the "weekend" I got to play showed me that....as usual....the AFK'ers would just set up some bogus shop while they ate, drank, or spanked. They had nothing to sell. And not because it was bought out. Most items were drops from the area that you easily got if you played at all. Or things like apples.....wtf?

Now....having said that.

If you are gonna make a game where you can set up shop by pulling up a chair in game.....don't make rules or bitch about AFK'ers. You made the bed, let the AFK'ers sleep in it dammit!!!

Private shops are just another completely stupid design decision, this game is loaded with them.  Cluttering cities with shops is dumb when you can sell through the auction house.  Soon as I saw that in Beta I knew they were going to have problems with it.

MikeB, I have never seen anything on here tha has caught my eye before in regards to forum talks with developer's and games (as of yet) but I tell you what that keyboard there caught my attention.

I think that is a keyboard half the idiots on all forums are using nowadays "qq" Keyboard.

I am glad that they did this.  Myself and a friend of mine, who also plays, have waited about 2 hours before to get on to a server.  I am happy this has been taken care of.  Thank you for your quick response to this problem NCSoft.  Thank you very much.