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Tabula Rasa server merge to affect US servers only
We've mentioned in the past that NCsoft plans to merge all four Tabula Rasa servers into one, before the final shutdown on February 28th. Their plan has changed somewhat, as only the three U.S. servers (Pegasus; Orion; Cassiopeia) will be merged into a consolidated server called Hydra. NCsoft will perform a data capture on Monday, and it may take up to 48 hours beyond that before Hydra is active. NCsoft says, "This means that characters will appear to 'time warp' back to Monday at 12:01 AM on the new server. We do not recommend doing anything irreversible to your character after Monday's data capture, as we are not absolutely confirming the server merge at this time. We will release more details, as well as a final conformation of the server merge, early next week." Tabula Rasa's European server, Centarus, is not being included in the server merge, and as such will have a separate 'sunset' event for European time zones.
Tabula Rasa to merge all servers into one
NCsoft has just announced during today's Feedback Friday that they will be merging all four Tabula Rasa servers into one main server, in preparation for the final shutdown next month. This server merge will basically combine all characters and items onto one main server, located on the East Coast of the US.In a situation like this, many factors are to be considered. What about duplicate character or clan names? Will all characters on one account be combined onto the same character selection screen? These questions, and more, are answered by a handy FAQ set up on the main TR website. They also mention a release of Deployment 16 coming during or shortly after the merge itself, which will introduce all the goodies we've been hearing about for awhile.
SWG character transfer starts tomorrow
As we mentioned a few months ago when the announcements were being made, Star Wars Galaxies' character transfer and server merges will begin tomorrow. As a reminder for the merger and a helpful guide to the procedure, we wanted to run by all helpful info into one, easy-to-use post for your convenience.First, there's the step-by-step guide to the free character transfer as well as a handy FAQ for anyone with unanswered questions. The GM team also took the time to post up some notes on the transfer over at the SWG forums. Finally, we can't forget the post-transfer server list! The state of the game may change somewhat after tomorrow, but at least you'll be prepared.
List of post-merger servers for Age of Conan released
We've known for some time now that Age of Conan's server list would be shrinking. After some fits and starts, the successful merger of Bloodspire and Hyperborea has set the stage for the wholesale conglomeration of the Age of Conan server farm. The official forums are carrying the final list of post-merger servers, and the US list stands at a svelte six remaining gameworlds. That's down from an initial list of about twenty-five, and the post-merger list for the EU side will stand at just twelve gameworlds. Here's the final list of the post-merger US servers: Set (PvE) * Damballah * Bardisattva * Dagoth * Derketo * Hanuman Wiccana (PvE) * Mannanan * Ajujo * Thog * Zug * Omm Gwahlur (PvE - Oceaninc) Tyranny (PvP) * Scourge * Bluesteel * Stormrage * Deathwhisper * Doomsayer * Shadowblade Cimmeria (PvP-RP) * Bane Bloodspire (PvP - Oceanic) - already merged * Hyperborea All of these mergers are slated to happen next week, and actual downtime and scheduled mergers will be announced sometime soon. You can read up on the official forums for player reaction, or continue on below the cut for a full list of the final international servers.
First Age of Conan server merge successful
When news of impending server merges in Age of Conan broke in December, it caused a bit of a stir -- particularly in the post's comments. Age of Conan Producer Craig Morrison later said the merges would take place in stages, but then technical issues arose, postponing these changes for roughly a month before Funcom was confident it could go off without a hitch. Earlier today, one month after the initial plan, the first set of servers were merged in Age of Conan: Bloodspire and Hyperborea have now merged into Bloodspire. Apparently AoC's virtual realm did not implode as the worlds were spliced together. Glen 'Famine' Swan, Age of Conan's US Community Manager, jokes, "I'm currently on Bloodspire now watching the global spam." Well there you go, business as usual in Hyborea. For the Age of Conan players among our readership, did the server merge affect you in any way -- be it positive or negative?
EverQuest cleaning house with server merges and character changes
Sony Online Entertainment has sent out a customer service notification to EverQuest players, dealing with some changes that will potentially affect your account(s). Perhaps the biggest news is an impending server merge -- "The Combine" and "Druzzil Ro (Xev)" servers will merge on January 21 at 3 a.m. PST, a process which is expected to last roughly five hours. The new server will retain the name "Druzzil Ro." While server merges tend to be portents of doom and gloom by some players, EverQuest will also add a new server in March. Players will be able to vote on which type of server it will be later this month. The server merge will bring with it some additional changes, however. Priority for character names will be based on when that character was first created, the same follows for guild names. Characters can change names by typing "/changename" in a chat window, while guilds must kick off the process with the "/petition" command. Also, inactive characters (of six months or more) who are below level 10 will be deleted. Players with more than eight characters will only be able to log into one of those first eight, which will be listed in alphabetical order. Characters that don't make the top eight, alphabetically, won't be deleted but will be inaccessible until space is made in the top eight... by deleting one of those characters. The EverQuest announcement also details changes to shared banks, UI and character settings, and server transfers.
US Age of Conan servers down for the merger of Bloodspire and Hyperborea
Server mergers have finally come to Age of Conan. Today Tomorrow the US servers will be down starting around 7:00 a.m. EST (or 12 p.m. GMT) for about six hours so that Bloodspire and Hyperborea can be merged. Originally planned for early December, the mergers had been postponed when a data problem was identified that might have caused certain items to disappear in the process. Additional details around how the mergers will be done are available on the AoC FAQ forum threads. If you have characters on these servers (or really anyone playing), it's definitely worth having a look to determine how you might be impacted. Information on further merges has not yet been released.Update: Servers will be down tomorrow, January 7th.
Age of Conan's Producer announces server mergers postponed
We noted just a few days ago that server merges would soon be coming to Funcom's Age of Conan. Producer Craig Morrison spoke up about the company's plans to merge servers in stages, with only two server mergers announced in his first note. After a few days of testing the team apparently made ready to do their first live server merge ... only to find there were issues that hadn't been caught in testing. If they'd gone forward with server merges at that point, Morrison writes in a new letter from this past Friday, player items may have been deleted. From the sound of things this is a minor issue involving some legacy code that would only show up in a few cases out of a large group of players. Still, the team is being very cautious and wants no hiccups as they move forward with tightening the AoC community. As a result, it sounds as though merges are going to be delayed a bit as the team does further groundwork to resolve these issues. Morrison says to expect merges to be happening well into January at this point, which is when they expect Update 4 to go live as well. Read into the full producer's letter for all the details.
Age of Conan server merge information released
We've been following the efforts of Age of Conan director Craig Morrison to keep the player community more 'in the loop' since he took on the role a few months ago. Now the community team is laying out the details of one of the projects he headlined when he first stepped up: server merges. Community Manager Famine has put up a post in the official forums laying out details on the procedure. Which is good, because it's a little complicated.Here are the highlights: All servers will not be merged at once. Instead, they'll be staged with "Hyberborea" and "Bloodspire" seeing a merger during this week's patching. During downtimes when servers are merged, all servers from that region will be unavailable. So this week, all US servers will be down while the two above are fused. Funcom is going to provide compensatory playtime to users affected by these outages. After the servers are merged, all players on the resulting server will be given a free one-time-use character transfer if they want to move their primary character to another server. They're doing this to ensure players like where they end up. This is obviously a difficult time for the playerbase, and not something any MMO developer likes to do. Just the same, hats off to Funcom for obviously trying to do right by the playerbase, and for adequately compensating players for the inconvenience. For another 'just the FAQs' look at this issue, the AoC site has up an F-A-Q already.
The Daily Grind: Queuing or merging?
Provisioning an MMO launch is hard. All kinds of hard, actually. For starters it involves making guesses about how many of us -- you know, the gamers -- are actually going to stump up for the game and get in on launch day, and how many of us will be there over, say, the several weeks. There are just so many factors to consider. How will the reviews come out? What about word of mouth? What about an unexpected major bug? What if some aspect sucks badly and needs an overhaul? And what if we all actually love the game as much as the developers hope, and we pile on like mad? So, the game operators do their best to set up the right number of servers and provision them with bandwidth. Each server setup costs money, even if that server isn't actually even switched on at launch, and it keeps costing money, whether or not it ever gets turned on until the operator gets rid of it. Also populations for a server can be too high or too low for the game design. If the operator picks too low you have login queues, or overloaded servers. If they pick too high, then down the track we'll have some awkward server merges later on. Oftentimes both of these are considered to indicate a 'failed launch'. Which would you (as a gamer) prefer, considering it is likely to be impossible to actually get the number exactly right: Too many servers, with server merges to come later on? Or too few and potential congestion and login queues?
The Daily Grind: What will the server merge mean for Age of Conan?
You may have heard that some Age of Conan servers will soon be merged in both the North American and European regions. New game director Craig Morrison made the announcement in a letter to the community just over a week ago. That revelation was a tacit admission that the game is not performing as expected, but Morrison has made it clear that he wants Funcom to brush the dirt off its shoulders and move on.Will the mergers encourage you to jump ship, or do you take them as a sign that Funcom is aware of the situation and ready to take decisive action to improve the game? Morrison claimed that the decision was made in response to player demand; were you demanding it? And regardless of whether you plan to stick with AoC (or return, if you've already left), do you believe the game has recovery and a positive future ahead of it? Having fun in Conan's homeland? Make sure to check out all of our previous Age of Conan coverage, and stick with Massively for more news from the Hyborian Age!
Age of Conan server merger was requested by the players?
Early last week we discussed the upcoming server merge coming to Funcom's Age of Conan. Announced by new game Director Craig Morrison, the merge will combine a few of the lower population servers and (hopefully) will give players a more vibrant play experience. Jørgen Tharaldsen, Product Director for the game, has now stated publicly that they went ahead with plans for the merge only because of a vocal outcry from the playerbase in that direction.Speaking with the site Strategy Informer, Tharaldsen stated "I think that people who are playing Conan are actually very happy about the news, and indeed it's been one of the most requested things from our playerbase. The essence of any MMO is the social experience, and right now people are spread out a bit too thin across the servers." He goes on to note that server merges only primarily help players that are already in the game. Convincing new players to try out the title is the next step, one they're currently working on behind the scenes at the company. We'll follow the story of AoC's server merge as it moves forward.[Via 1up] Having fun in Conan's homeland? Make sure to check out all of our previous Age of Conan coverage, and stick with Massively for more news from the Hyborian Age!
Age of Conan servers merging, stock hits 2-year low
An MMOG's health is indicated by its server numbers, which means Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is currently ailing. Funcom's new Game Director for AoC, Craig Morrison, writes on the game's forums that server merging, in both Europe and North America, will soon occur.At one point Funcom announced that AoC had 700,000 players, but that was when the game first shipped and players had a free trial month with the purchase. It's not just the players leaving -- Funcom investors also seem to be looking for the nearest exit. The company's stock is currently trading at $5, which is $20 down from when we checked in late July and $50 down from before AoC shipped.**The downward trend was already occuring prior to the current global economic crisis.
AoC Game Director declares server merge, previews coming changes
Age of Conan players have been curious to see what new Game Director Craig Morrison will bring to the table. He's already proven willing to wade in to the forums and give players clear answers to their questions, and today he's provided a lengthy and frank letter about what will be coming to AoC in the future. There's a lot of information to digest.Although it's low down on the list, the news of coming server merges caught our eye immediately: 'we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America.' While this can (and no doubt will) be interpreted as an admission that the population is low on certain servers, it is also indicative of a willngness to do something decisive about the situation, so that the players can have the best experience. That gets points from us.In addition to explaining Power Points and Kingship, which were announced some time ago but not really mentioned much since, Craig also provides some very interesting new information about the PvP consequence system, which adds more detail and game world immersion than had previously been announced. Having fun in Conan's homeland? Make sure to check out all of our previous Age of Conan coverage, and stick with Massively for more news from the Hyborian Age!
Lineage II NA server merge coming July 8th
Ever since Linage II began allowing server transfers there has been a shift in server populations that was leaving some communities worried. This has prompted NCsoft to announce the merging of a few servers on July 8th to bolster their overall population and ease the growing fears some players were beginning to have about the future of their digital homelands. Population is of course an important issue for any MMO and server merges can sometimes be seen as a bad thing by onlookers. However, NCsoft is assuring everyone that this choice was made purely to maintain healthy communities, something that is arguably one of the most important aspects to an online game.We're also happy to see that NCsoft is covering all their bases and has made an official forum post covering all the important topics about the server merges. If your concerns aren't met by the current forum post don't worry too much. NCsoft has vowed to answer any concerns or inquiries regarding the merges over the coming weeks.[via WarCry]
The peril and promise of interdependent MMO systems
The closure of many Pirates of the Burning Sea servers last week is regrettable, but not terribly surprising. In the Next Generation article exploring that event, CEO Russell Williams explains that the interdependence of their ambitious MMO's systems made them difficult to test. Veteran MMO developer Raph Koster picks up that thread and carries it forward in a blog post to his personal site. Using his experience on past titles (especially Star Wars Galaxies) Koster describes the enormous complexity of getting different systems in MMOs to work. The challenge is that while interdependent elements are complicated to test, they're also some of the most important pieces of any online game. Interwoven systems encourage player community and allow for overlapping groups to form. Independent (or 'silo'd') systems are also easy to cut, something he notes from the days of SWG's development. "This, for the SWG followers, is why stuff like vehicles, cities, and mounts, were more easily pushed off than dancing. Design interdependence. Vehicles improved the game, but they weren't required for it to function."It's a really interesting look behind the scenes at Star Wars Galaxies, and a peak behind the curtain of a current MMO's troubles. Something to think about as new Massive titles hit the marketplace this year.
Will merging servers help low pop realms?
When the subject of low population realms comes up, some people suggest the ultimate way to fix the problem is to merge servers. On the surface it looks like the perfect solution. If you have two servers struggling with low populations, mixing them together would create one medium population server. Problem solved. Not really.Coriel on Blessing of Kings mentions that the real problem isn't simply the low population, it's also player retention. Hardcore gamers leave the low population realms to go where they can achieve their goals, namely raiding end-game content (I would also add high -level PvP to this.) Simply having more bodies to a server won't keep that player there. Coriel's analogy of server buckets with holes is a valid one. The only thing that keeps a hardcore player on a server is a guild (or arena team) that can get them where they need to go. The guild is the plug that keeps the leaky bucket full.
