Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Age of Conan - First server merges arrive

As noted on the forums by Famine, the changes are starting this week for the server merges.

They will be starting with the small servers it seems. Two low populated servers will be merged together. As well, this merger calls for complete shutdown of access for all players for all servers.
So, all US servers will be offline for the two servers being merged.

The first out of the gate are the US servers ‘Bloodspire’ and ‘Hyperborea’. It has even been noted to be an "extended" downtime.
Finally a free transfer will take place if anyone is not happy with the final server selection from these servers only.
I see this option being used heavily.

The oddest part of this notice is the news of opening "fresh" servers.

"Also after the merges are complete we will be opening up new ‘fresh start’ servers in both the US and EU territories. One each for PVE and PVP rulesets. Transfer will not be allowed to these servers after the merges. These new servers are designed to allow players to start afresh in a totally new environment should they wish to do so and forge a new community instead of joining one of the newly merged ones."

I do not comprehend the reasoning of this last notice, as the reason we have server merges is due to lower populations on some servers, so why create new servers to be empty of players?

Anyways, as more news comes of this, I will update this post..

Cheers.

2 comments:

knightblaster said...

It's good that mergers are coming, they are badly needed. I do think that once Funcom set the four active servers to "recommended" status a while ago, this helped move the population to them, but there are so many dead weight servers, it makes sense to merge them.

Although I doubt this will be the outcome, what I think would be best would be for the game to have the four recommended servers (Set and Dagoth PvE, Tyranny PvP and Cimmeria RP-PvP) plus a server or two for people who really want a fresh start (very odd idea in my opinion, but some people prefer it apparently) and that's that -- so around 6 servers total. I don't expect Funcom to shrink it that much, but honestly I don't think the game realistically needs more than 6 servers at this time given the population.

Warhammer will be next with the server mergers (already happened in practice with the voluntary transfers, so mergers is really an eventual reality for that game as well).

Developers are learning the hard way, it seems, that you can't make games that are based on WoW with some different features and get a huge audience like WoW has.

Elementalistly said...

Agreed. I am iffy on the 2 PvE servers, as I know very few were full. Set was the busiest with Wiccana being the unofficial RP server being second.
But, they may not need that many, unless the PvE content keeps coming...ala EQ2.
The PvP servers though were slammed for sure.
If anything, this is the right move, and should be good to go once complete, that it will finally be time for me to go back (of course, the other requirement is DX 10)
They definitely have a higher pop than TR, so I do not expect them to die for a while.
Especially if they offer that free time soon.
Hope they can pull this off with no issues.