From aiononline.com

We are bringing the servers down at 6:00AM PST (more), September 25th, for maintenance. The purpose of this downtime is to tweak the way Private Stores work. A timer of 30 minutes will be implemented to prevent these shops from being abused as a means to prevent disconnection and alleviate queues.

The maintenance is expected to run no longer than 1 hour.

Thank you for your patience!

From www.AionOnline.com

At NCsoft our commitment is to making the MMO player experience the best it can be. And while Aion has seen a very successful launch that has exceeded our expectations in many ways, we are aware of the longer than usual queue times that players have experienced on some of the servers. This is due to the initial rush of players that we?ve seen in the early days of the game?s launch in Europe and North America.

From www.mmorpg.com:

MMORPG.com: Players experienced what were described by some of extremely long queue times to take part in Aion's head start on Sunday. Can you speak to this?

Brian Knox: With [Sunday]'s launch, we saw a massive influx into the game when we opened the servers for Head Start. It's important to remember that this initial rush is due to everyone trying to get into the game at the same time - this isn't a scenario that's likely to be repeated regularly since it's really just about that initial rush of players trying to gain access to the game. That being said, we are actively monitoring and tracking the stats to ensure optimal experiences for players. As you well know, it's a delicate balance between keep our servers healthy and maintaining a optimal experience for players.

Source: Aiononline.com

Finding friends to play with is not always easy. Sometimes it is more fun to playing when you know that you are playing with others in your vicinity or with a similar play-style. In order to help those of you left in a quandary over what server to play on we devised a list of servers and player preferences based on polls and community research.

From www.AionOnline.com

Greetings!

As we draw closer to tomorrow I wanted to give everyone a brief update on the progress of our live version. We are excited to announce that we will be serving out the final update for you to patch within the next few hours. You will be able to use this version for both our Preselection and our Head Start. We are very excited with our final product and think that you will be as well! Below are the release notes for the patch you will see later today:

From www.Curse.com

This shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the game since its Korean release late last year, or those of you who frequent AionSource -- the leading English-speaking Aion fansite in the world -- but Aion has broken records for preorders, and now looks to be the biggest MMO release in North America and Europe of 2009.

Aiononline reports:

The key to launching an MMORPG of Aion's magnitude is communication. We been keeping everyone following the game aware of what our plans are and listened to your feedback, creating a dialog with you. We've also kept an eye on the various Aion communities, talked to Aion community members, and compared what they have said and requested with our beta test data. Based on all this input, we have decided to launch Aion with an Oceanic server set to GMT+10.

Aiononline reports:

The release of Aion marks the beginning of a long anticipated story--your own. We are introducing a wide array of new functions in our website to provide more player-focused information for Aion.

This just in from aiononline.com:

A SurveyMonkey survey has been brewing in our laboratory over the past few days and is now ready to escape its hidden away cove and face daylight.

The poll is directed to both North American and European users. Its purpose is to help you choose which server to play on, whether you're an EU roleplayer who wants to find people communicating in your own language or an Oceanic player who wants to play with your peers. We will not provide official support based on the outcome of this poll, but we hope the results will make it easier for you to find a future Aion home.

We will summarize and post the results on Friday September 18, 2009 before our Preselection program begins.

This just in from aiononline.com:

Aion's release is right around the corner, and our anticipation is running high! The beards and hairstyles of the character creator are groomed and lined up, jostling against each other in eagerness to be picked for your characters in this coming weekend's Preselection and Head Start Programs.