An Important Announcement about Server Population

[Quarion]

We have some very important news for our players regarding Dungeons and Dragons Online™: Stormreach™ (DDO).

Dungeons & Dragons® has always been about having a good time with a party of your friends. With DDO, we bring that experience to life online for the first time, and appreciate all the time you, the players, spend inside Stormreach fulfilling the promise of D&D®.

Over the last few months we have seen an increase in the number of players asking us to make it easier to find groups. Since grouping is such a core part of the DDO experience we looked at a variety of ways to make the grouping process easier for players of all levels. Various options were considered, but the best way to make a change that improves the situation for everyone is to concentrate active players on a smaller number of servers.

To this end we have developed a plan to merge the game’s servers which will greatly improve player experience across the board while also improving the performance of the game by upgrading to a stronger infrastructure on the back end.

We want to thank you for all of your patience as we implement these changes to the game.

New Server Details

We'll be combining the source servers on the left into the destination servers on the right.

•  Mabar becomes Argonnessen
•  Fernia becomes Ghallanda
•  Lhazaar becomes Ghallanda
•  Aerenal becomes Sarlona
•  Adar becomes Sarlona
•  Aundair becomes Khyber
•  Riedra becomes Khyber
•  Xoriat becomes Thelanis
•  Tharashk becomes Thelanis

Before we get started with the complete server merge, we are planning to run a public preview on Risia. On Wednesday, July 25th, we will be bringing Risia up with the Mabar/Argonnessen server merge and we'd love it if you'd hop onto Risia and help us confirm everything is operating as expected. Any players that have created a character on Mabar or Argonnessen before July 23rd are invited to participate in the merge preview.

Once we have completed the merge preview and evaluated the results we expect to begin merging the main servers starting the following week.

The process of merging the servers will be divided into two downtimes.

• Khyber, Aundair, Riedra, Thelanis, Xoriat, and Tharashk will be offline on Thursday, August 2nd, between 2am and 7pm EDT. Around 7pm, Khyber and Thelanis will come back online and contain all of the merged characters and data from their respective servers.

• On Monday, August 6th, Fernia, Ghallanda, Argonnessen, Lhazaar, Adar, Sarlona, Aerenal, and Mabar will be offline from 2am until approximately 7pm EDT. At about 7pm, Argonnessen, Ghallanda and Sarlona will come back online and will contain all of the merged characters and data from their respective servers.

When all service resumes on August 6th, the DDO servers will be: Argonnessen, Ghallanda, Sarlona, Khyber, and Thelanis.

On August 13th, all servers will be offline from approximately 7am until 1pm EDT, for server maintenance and optimization after the merge.

For the latest information on this topic please click here

[Tanka]

Well, sonofa...

[Bladedge]

Bye Fernia it was nice knowing you

[Ciel]

*does the ciel happy dance*

[Shecky]

GAH! More lag! I need a Greater Lag Resistance processor!

[Mirta]

*waits for the naysayers to come post their "told you so" speeches*

This sucks and blows at the same time.

[Tanka]

GAH! More lag! I need a Greater Lag Resistance processor!

I hear ya man. I was about to crank down the settings for a higher resolution, now I have to crank them down more.

[Coldin]

I'm a-scared!

[Aeneas]

about time. even if it does seem like doom. I can't wait to have a group to join. exciting stuff.

although i must admit, the 3 to 1 is a bit scary. 2 to 1 might have been a bit less jarring.

We welcome you aundairians and riedrans to khyber!

[Ciel]

sounds like it's gonna rock. Lets just hope there aren't any.... complications with the trancefer.

[Krennel]

Not so fun to watch DDO circle the drain but this is what happens when you put out a half-a** updates to content. I have been completely bored with the game for the last month and a half and what do I get to keep me interested? New Adventures for level 2-7? are you kidding me? Its the amount of time between utterly useless updates that is driving server populations way down....am I the only one that sees this? Its like me owning three restaurants that serve total **** food and, when I realize that no one is eating at my place anymore, instead of changing the menu, I close two of the restaurants and continue to serve the same **** food! That is pure genius!!!!!!! Ah well...it was fun while it lasted. I'm just sorry to see a good idea get completely wasted...thanks Turbine

[Fahkrin]

GOOD:
It's too bad that our servers are going over to LOTRO, but at least we'll be able to group up easier.

but wait...

BAD!:
Crud! These are the same tech people that caused massive server crashes after putting in a nice update, during a bonus weekend?

I want a place to store my characters for when all my stuff disappears.

[TEK]

great, i just got used to pugs on my server, now i have to deal with more from another

[Gengulphus]

about time. even if it does seem like doom. I can't wait to have a group to join. exciting stuff.

although i must admit, the 3 to 1 is a bit scary. 2 to 1 might have been a bit less jarring.

We welcome you aundairians and riedrans to khyber!

Thanks for the welcome - I'm sure it will all be fine in the end.

But I'm still in shock and I'm saddened - having been on Aundair since headstart.

[Elsbet]

Performance on Argonnessen is already horrible, even after the last "optimization/hardware upgrade." At least 80% of the time, the Gianthold is too laggy to move easily and a fair chunk of that time, you can't move at all. The thresh hold for creating new instances is way too high. The market place and harbor are nearly as bad.

And the solution to this is to add more users to Argonnessen? Please tell me there is a brand new, HUGE server in a box on someone's desk just waiting to be hooked up for this merge.

[LokPik]

We have some very important news for our players regarding Dungeons and Dragons Online™: Stormreach™ (DDO).

New Server Details

We'll be combining the source servers on the left into the destination servers on the right.

•  Mabar becomes Argonnessen
•  Fernia becomes Ghallanda
•  Lhazaar becomes Ghallanda
•  Aerenal becomes Sarlona
•  Adar becomes Sarlona
•  Aundair becomes Khyber
•  Riedra becomes Khyber
•  Xoriat becomes Thelanis
•  Tharashk becomes Thelanis

For the latest information on this topic please click here

I'm courious to know what will happen if a person has the max number of characters on the two servers being merged? Does that mean the total number of characters allowed per account be increased??

[WestiesMA]

Why are you nuking Adar, the second most populous server?

[Riekan]

So what happens if you already had maxed characters on one server and then started a few characters on one of the servers that will be merged together? Are they now allowing more than 7 character slots? For everyone? Just for the people who have characters on other servers? Will characters be lost?

[Renegade66]

If you have 8 players on Xoriat Tharask and Thelanas, how many will disappear once the server merge takes place?

[Lorien_the_First_One]

So what happens if you already had maxed characters on one server and then started a few characters on one of the servers that will be merged together? Are they now allowing more than 7 character slots? For everyone? Just for the people who have characters on other servers? Will characters be lost?

Check out the Forum they set up to discuss this, there is a FAQ page that says you will lose nothing (yes, you could have 14 chars) and it also gives a lot more details.