One of the many innovations in NCSoft's Aion: Tower of Eternity is the ability to set up shop. Sure, it's been done before in different ways, but most other MMORPGs keep trading limited to Auction Houses and spamming the chat channels. In Aion, all an entrepreneur needs to do is hit "Y" and choose prices, dropping down a pole and marking themselves as a vendor. It's wonderfully simplistic, and should help keep Aion's in-game economy bustling. It also has a second function: tricking the game into thinking you're not idle.

See, one of the less innovative features in Aion is the fact that the publisher is having issues with long wait times to get into a game. Because of the popularity and attempts to keep things balanced, lines of over two hours aren't that uncommon, which makes playing the newly released MMORPG an issue. This means, once you're logged in, it's hard to justify logging off, so every city in the game was filled with savvy gamers exploiting the vendor system. I'll admit, more than once you might have seen my character, Woman, sitting on a hill with the message of "Pooping!" so that I might actually get to play for a few hours late at night.

NCSoft hopes to solve the lines by removing this abuse of their good nature. In a patch today, they've set a 30 minute marker on idle players, which should stop the huge amount of people using the shops as a way to avoid getting kicked offline. It's only a problem if it doesn't help, but so far it looks like it might have. Last night my wait was an hour and forty-five minutes. Today I clicked on the game's icon in fear, wondering how long I'd need to wait on the first Friday after launch. There was no line. Awesome.

They've also added another West Coast server to the game, which will be followed by another East Coast and European server. These additions should help the issue even more. We'll update if is any more info, but it looks like NCSoft might have found a way to help their MMO's growing pains. Good for them.