NCsoft has announced that public test servers for the North American and European versions of Aion will launch this Thursday, April 29th!

Public test servers are a fairly common feature of many MMOs and the launch of Aion's PTS this week should help stamp out bugs or imbalances in future patches that may have been missed by the internal QA team.

NCsoft stresses that the PTS is not meant to be a home for permanent characters, as the server may be wiped at any moment. The server will not come equipped with pre-made characters, either, however, NCsoft is looking into configuring the server with a number of settings to significantly boost experience gains, Abyss point gains, crafting/gathering progression and item drop rates.

We should have additional details on how to access the PTS later in the week so stay tuned!

View the original announcement here.

[Thanks Deltor for the tip!]